The Popular Front has to be distinguished from the United Front. The United Front, is an alliance of the working-class, at its base, in action, uniting workers whether they give their support to reformist or revolutionary parties. The Popular Front is a parliamentary/electoral alliance, at the top, which unites the representatives of workers' parties with the representatives of the parties of the liberal-bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, on the basis of a common – and so, invariably, bourgeois – programme.
The Popular Front was a formation forced upon the working-class, and its representatives, in the 19th century, at a time before the working-class was a sizeable socio-economic force, and before it developed its own mass parties. When Marx and Engels joined the German Democrats in 1848, that was a popular front, although, even then, as Engels makes clear, they continued to maintain their own political and organisational independence, acting as a wing of that party. One of the lessons they learned from the Revolutions of 1848, was the danger of such popular fronts, and need for the workers to create and maintain their own parties, and to ensure the independence of them from the bourgeoisie. That importance has been demonstrated time and again ever since.
The alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie stems from the process of historical development. As Lenin says, so long as “the people” existed as an undifferentiated mass, in opposition to the feudal landed aristocracy, there is no contradiction between socialism and democracy. Socialism takes the form of populist socialism, of Peasant or Petty-bourgeois Socialism. But, the historical process is one in which “the people”, the peasantry and the independent commodity producers, become differentiated into a bourgeoisie, and proletariat, with a large mass of petty-bourgeois producers and peasants still forming a transitional class, in the process of such differentiation, so that to talk of “the people”, as populists, such as the Narodniks, do, becomes meaningless, even though they continue to have a shared interest in opposition to the old feudal ruling class.
The interests of these differentiating classes, also, thereby, diverge, and, along with it, its reflection in the ideas of socialism and of democracy. The socialism of the populists, peasant socialism and petty-bourgeois socialism, now becomes reactionary. It stands for holding back the process of development required for the development of the productive forces by capital, and the creation of a large, organised industrial proletariat on the basis of it. The shared interest, in opposition to feudalism, provides the basis for the continued alliance between the evolving bourgeoisie and proletariat, and, so long as the proletariat has not yet formed itself into a class for itself, and created mass parties to that end, it is led to act as a tail of the bourgeoisie and its parties.
The Popular Front. or People's Front, is then a product of this populist conception of an undifferentiated people against an elite. Its corollary is the idea of a “People's State”, as a class neutral state of “the people”, as against the Marxist conception of the state as a class state, a state of the ruling class. It goes hand in hand with the confusion of the state with governmental office, and so emphasises the importance of the role of the unity of “the people” in order to secure governmental office. This is the case whether the popular front takes the form of the electoral alliance of separate parties, or the form of an alliance within a single party of the political representatives of the proletariat and bourgeoisie.
In Russia, in the 1890's, Lenin welcomed the development of such bourgeois parties that argued clearly for the advancement of bourgeois interests, and bourgeois-democracy, as against the populists, because it clarified matters, as well as providing a clear basis upon which the bourgeoisie formulated its opposition to feudalism. That was better than the Narodniks, he argued, who continued to push the illusion that there was still some “people” with the old shared interests, and which, thereby, denied the different interests of the bourgeoisie and proletariat that were becoming ever sharper. But, it was precisely for this reason, Lenin said, that the socialists could not join the new bourgeois parties that made their main focus the demand for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a demand which no longer went far enough to meet the needs of the industrial proletariat.
“... one cannot but admit that the formation of the Narodnoye Pravo party is a step forward, a step towards the complete abandonment of the illusions and dreams about “different paths for the fatherland,” towards the fearless recognition of the real paths, and towards the search on their basis for elements for a revolutionary struggle. Here we clearly see a striving to form a democratic party.” However, “They still talk of amalgamation and alliance with the socialists, refusing to realise that to draw the workers into mere political radicalism would only mean severing the worker intellectuals from the mass of the workers and condemning the working-class movement to impotence; for it can be strong only by defending the interests of the working class completely and in every way, by engaging in economic struggle against capital, a struggle inseparably bound up with a political struggle against the servants of capital. They refuse to realise that the “amalgamation” of all the revolutionary elements can be much better achieved by the separate organisation of the representatives of the different interests and by the joint action of the two parties in particular cases... It must, therefore, be admitted that they are taking a step forward by basing an exclusively political struggle—unrelated to socialism—on an exclusively political programme. The Social-Democrats whole-heartedly wish the Narodopravtsi success, wish that their party may grow and develop, that they may form closer ties with those social elements which take their stand by the present economic system and whose everyday interests really are most intimately bound up with democracy.”
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