The United Front was a tactic devised by revolutionaries in the early 1920's, as a direct response to the conditions created by the split of the international workers' movement into reformist and revolutionary sections, represented by the Second and Third Internationals. It was approved at the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern in 1922. Trotsky describes the requirement for it thus:
“The task of the Communist Party is to lead the proletarian revolution. In order to summon the proletariat for the direct conquest of power and to achieve it the Communist Party must base itself on the overwhelming majority of the working class.
So long as it does not hold this majority, the party must fight to win it.
The party can achieve this only by remaining an absolutely independent organization with a clear program and strict internal discipline. That is the reason why the party was bound to break ideologically and organizationally with the reformists and the centrists who do not strive for the proletarian revolution, who possess neither the capacity nor the desire to prepare the masses for revolution, and who by their entire conduct thwart this work.
Any members of the Communist Party who bemoan the split with the centrists in the name of “unity of forces” or “unity of front” thereby demonstrate that they do not understand the ABC of Communism and that they themselves happen to be in the Communist Party only by accident.”
But, prior to any such revolutionary period, the life of workers continues, with all of the regular distributional struggles over wages, clashes with the capitalist state, struggles over rights and freedoms and so on. In all of these day to day struggles, the workers, the majority of whom, in most countries, retained their attachment to the reformist parties that had developed in the previous thirty years, did not understand why they could not wage a united struggle against capital and its state, in all these instances. The revolutionaries, therefore, took the lead in offering such a united struggle, in action, on all these issues, but only on condition of retaining their political and organisational independence and ability to criticise and highlight the inadequate politics of the reformist political leaders.
“In these clashes – insofar as they involve the vital interests of the entire working class, or its majority, or this or that section – the working masses sense the need of unity in action, of unity in resisting the onslaught of capitalism or unity in taking the offensive against it. Any party which mechanically counterposes itself to this need of the working class for unity in action will unfailingly be condemned in the minds of the workers.”
This unity in action – March separately strike together – is the distinguishing feature of the United Front as against the Popular Front.
“Consequently the question of the united front is not at all, either in point of origin or substance, a question of the reciprocal relations between the Communist parliamentary fraction and that of the Socialists, or between the Central Committee of the two parties, or between l’Humanité and Le Populaire. The problem of the united front – despite the fact that a split is inevitable in this epoch between the various political organizations basing themselves on the working class – grows out of the urgent need to secure for the working class the possibility of a united front in the struggle against capitalism.”
No comments:
Post a Comment