The United Front serves two functions. It unites the workers, at their base, against their immediate enemies, and, secondly, it serves to expose the inadequate politics of the reformist and centrist parties, and their leaders, thereby facilitating the winning over of the workers that still have illusions in those parties. The prerequisite for this is the continued independence politically and organisationally of the revolutionaries, and so their ability to distance themselves from the political consequences of the inadequate politics and betrayals of the reformists and centrists. Centrists, here, refers to those parties that waver between reform and revolution. It was symbolised by the so called Three and a Half International, and by parties such as the ILP in Britain, the POUM in Spain etc.
It is this function of the United Front that also provides the basis for the revolutionaries use of the demand for a Workers Government. The demand for a Workers Government is found, for example, in the Bolshevik demand in 1917, for “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”. In other words, it was a demand that the reformist and centrist parties take power themselves, and separate themselves from the representatives of the bourgeoisie. It was a demand to collapse the Provisional Government, which existed as a Popular Front, and replace it with a Workers' Government whose role would be to defend the interests of workers at the expense of the bourgeoisie.
This demand was raised, because the Bolsheviks knew that the reformist and centrist politicians would never take power into their hands, and separate themselves from the bourgeoisie, just as in the United Front, they would not do so, and would inevitably act to betray the interests of the workers in action. Trotsky describes it thus, in The Transitional Programme,
“When the Comintern of the epigones tried to revive the formula buried by history of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” it gave to the formula of the “workers’ and peasants’ government” a completely different, purely “democratic,” i.e., bourgeois content, counterposing it to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik-Leninists resolutely rejected the slogan of the “workers’ and peasants’ government” in the bourgeois-democratic version. They affirmed then and affirm now that. when the party of the proletariat refuses to step beyond bourgeois democratic limits, its alliance with the peasantry is simply turned into a support for capital, as was the case with the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries in 1917, with the Chinese Communist Party in 1925-27, and as is now the ease with the “People’s Front” in Spain, France and other countries.
From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the SRs and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. Under this provision the Bolshevik Party promised the Mensheviks and the SRs, as the petty bourgeois representatives of the worker and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie categorically refusing, however, either to enter into the government of the Mensheviks and SRs or to carry political responsibility for it. If the Mensheviks and SRs had actually broke with the Cadets (liberals) and with foreign imperialism, then the “workers’ and peasants’ government” created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it was exactly because of this that the leadership of petty bourgeois democracy resisted with all possible strength the establishment of its own government. The experience of Russia demonstrated, and the experience of Spain and France once again confirms, that even under very favourable conditions the parties of petty bourgeois democracy (SRs, Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists) are incapable of creating a government of workers and peasants, that is, a government independent of the bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, the demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the SRs: “Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands!” had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and SRs to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks.”
But, as Trotsky describes, revolutionaries can only implement the United Front in conditions where the labour movement is split fairly evenly between them and the centrists and reformists. In conditions where the reformist parties have the overwhelming support of workers, calls for a United Front fall on deaf ears. The revolutionaries can make appeals to any sizeable centrist forces to abide by the principles of the United Front, and to reject the Popular Front, as they did in France and Spain, but this amounts to being limited to only propagandist activity. In terms of practical activity, the revolutionaries have to apply the principles of the United Front, whilst accepting the inevitability of having to play a subordinate role to the reformists and centrists. Hence the decision of the revolutionaries in France, in the 1930's to enter the Socialist Party, in order to work alongside the rank and file Socialist workers, and, thereby, gain their ear, in the same way that Marx, Engels and their comrades did in 1848, in joining the German Democrats.
In conditions where the large majority of workers already support the revolutionaries there is no point in the United Front, as the revolutionaries provide the lead for the workers, drawing in the reformist sections of workers behind them.
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