Summary
The Popular Front has to be distinguished from the United Front.
The United Front is an alliance in action, at the base, of the working-class, across workers' parties, the Popular Front is an electoral alliance between the political representatives of the workers, the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie, and liberal bourgeoisie.
The United Front starts from the premise of Permanent Revolution that to achieve even the aims of bourgeois-democracy the working-class has to proceed on the basis of class struggle, and an awareness that the liberal bourgeoisie will turn against it. The Popular Front starts from the premise of the stages theory that Socialism is only possible after a period of stable bourgeois democracy, and so the interests of workers must always be subordinated to those of the bourgeoisie. It is the foundation of social-democracy.
The Popular Front is usually marked by the fact that the workers' parties enable the representatives of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie to obtain legitimacy and to enter parliament as supporters of the Popular Front, thereby, obtaining the votes of workers who would otherwise have voted for workers' parties. However, in nearly all these cases, the most obvious being Spain in the 1930's, the bourgeoisie and reactionary petty-bourgeoisie itself has already gone over to the forces of reaction, in fear of the working-class. The political representatives of these classes are then mere cyphers representing only a ghost class, as Trotsky described them.
Various cross class organisations and movements are described as Popular Fronts, but this description is, thereby, not technically correct. Organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League of the 1970's, or the Stop The War Coalition, are described as Popular Fronts, whereas they are just cross-class alliances. They involve individuals from a number of classes, as well as political organisations representing these classes. They are Popular Frontist in nature, because, invariably, in order to retain their broad base, and support from these liberal bourgeois sections, including the faith groups, the workers' representatives are led to tone down, and limit the platform and propaganda of the organisation to the liberal-bourgeois platitudes that those organisations will accept.
Without exception, whenever the representatives of the bourgeoisie see no further use of the Popular Front, they dissolve it, and turn on the working-class that has been demobilised and misled by it in the preceding period.
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