Trotsky goes on to flesh out exactly what such temporary alliances are, and look like.
“It goes without saying that we cannot renounce in advance such rigidly delimited and rigidly practical agreements as serve each time a quite definite aim. For example, such cases as involve agreements with the student youth of the Kuomintang for the organization of an anti-imperialist demonstration, or of obtaining assistance from the Chinese merchants for strikers in a foreign concession, etc. Such cases are not at all excluded in the future, even in China... The sole “condition” for every agreement with the bourgeoisie, for each separate, practical, and expedient agreement adapted to each given case, consists in not allowing either the organizations or the banners to become mixed directly or indirectly for a single day or a single hour; it consists in distinguishing between the Red and the Blue, and in not believing for an instant in the capacity or readiness of the bourgeoisie either to lead a genuine struggle against imperialism or not to obstruct the workers and peasants.”
The USC, not only mix their banners with those of the Ukrainian and NATO bourgeoisie, but drape themselves in those banners of the class enemy!
The line set out by Trotsky, flows also from Marx's concept of permanent revolution, and what such temporary alliances consist of as set out in his 1850 Address to the Communist League. He sets out why they should avoid unity with bourgeois forces.
“Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence.”
This was at a time when Marx and Engels and their supporters were actually members of the German bourgeois Democrat Party, as its “Left-wing”, as Engels described it, so as to gain the ear of the workers still aligned with it. In other words it was an “entryist” tactic. Engels made clear that the condition of it was that they continued to operate openly, and to advance their own programme, and criticism of the Democrats, as the basis of gathering the forces required for an independent workers' party. The bourgeois democrats were already arguing against workers forming such independent organisations. Marx continues,
“In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory.”
But, the bourgeoisie would not only hesitate, whilst seizing any victory for themselves, they would also turn on the workers.
“... and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this; but it does lie within their power to make it as difficult as possible for the petty bourgeoisie to use its power against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier.”
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