At the time of the 1848 revolutions, Marx and Engels were themselves, with their followers, members of the German Democrats, a bourgeois-liberal party, and later, Engels, writing to US socialists defended that position. The reason they joined the Democrats was that the German workers looked to it for answers, much as, today, workers in Britain look to the bourgeois Labour Party, and in the US the Democrats.
Engels explains that it was the means of gaining the ear of these workers, but, also, they were able to do so, whilst openly retaining their organisational and political independence. In other words, it was an entryist tactic, forced on them by weakness. It was not seen as some long-term strategy, or, as with some of those that adopted such a strategy with the LP, as a means of taking control of the party. It was a tactic to develop their forces to the point of being able to forge a truly independent workers party. The Labour Party, like the Democrats is ideologically a bourgeois party, but it is also, in its composition, a Popular Front, comprising elements of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The entryist tactic involves Marxists forming an undeclared United Front with the latter.
Again, in his 1850 Address, Marx makes this clear, spelling out the need to create such an independent workers' party, but also to forge all those elements of workers' self-government that enables it to be independent of the bourgeoisie and its state. In other words, Marx objects to workers being subordinated within a “People's Militia”, i.e. to a militia controlled by the bourgeoisie, and demands they form workers' militia etc.
The proletariat stand alongside the bourgeoisie, against the old feudal ruling-class, to carry through the bourgeois-revolution, but, from the start, they form up in their own ranks, cognisant of the fact that their interests are not the same as those of the bourgeoisie, who are merely temporary allies, but future enemies. The workers fight for the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but only as a stepping stone to their actual goal, which is the proletarian revolution. If they could by-pass it, they should. They fight for the former, but with the methods of the latter. In the process, the idea is that the majority of workers lose their illusions in that bourgeois-democracy, and, having established the forms of proletarian democracy, quickly step-over the period of parliamentarism.
The same principle is applied in opposing attempts by fascists to overthrow bourgeois-democracy. The workers fight against the fascists attempts to do that, not by defending or supporting bourgeois-democracy itself, or its institutions, the sham nature of which they continue to expose, but by utilising the methods of proletarian revolution, the formation of workers' militia, factory committees, workers and peasants soviets etc., as Trotsky describes in The Action Programme For France.
In fact, as Trotsky describes, in his writings on the Spanish Revolution, there is no such thing as “anti-fascism”, because the bourgeoisie are only “anti-fascist” so far as it is against their immediate interests, and would resort to it, as soon as they needed it. It is why the idea of an “anti-fascist war” is nonsense.
“The very concepts of “anti-fascism” and “anti-fascist” are fictions and lies. Marxism approaches all phenomena from a class standpoint. Azaña is “anti-fascist” only to the extent that fascism hinders bourgeois intellectuals from carving out parliamentary or other careers. Confronted with the necessity of choosing between fascism and the proletarian revolution, Azaña will always prove to be on the side of the fascists. His entire policy during the seven years of revolution proves this.
On the other hand, the slogan “Against fascism, for democracy!” cannot attract millions and tens of millions of the populace if only because during wartime there was not and is not any democracy in the camp of the republicans. Both with Franco and with Azaña there have been military dictatorship, censorship, forced mobilization, hunger, blood, and death. The abstract slogan “For democracy!” suffices for liberal journalists but not for the oppressed workers and peasants. They have nothing to defend except slavery and poverty. They will direct all their forces to smashing fascism only if, at the same time, they are able to realize new and better conditions of existence. In consequence, the struggle of the proletariat and the poorest peasants against fascism cannot in the social sense be defensive but only offensive. That is why León goes wide of the mark when, following the more “authoritative” philistines, he lectures us that Marxism rejects utopias, and the idea of a socialist revolution during a struggle against fascism is utopian. In point of fact, the worst and most reactionary form of utopianism is the idea that it is possible to struggle against fascism without overthrowing the capitalist economy”.
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