I have referred, on several occasions to the repeat of the errors of China, in Chile, in 1973. In the WW, Mike McNair, in his analysis of its lessons, makes this same error of confusing the nature of the Popular Front, with the United Front. He writes,
“Trotskyist authors place great emphasis on the fact that UP was (as its name tells us) a popular front. But the question posed is: would a united front government, of the SP and CP alone, have been any better? The answer is quite plainly not.”
Given the bourgeois reformist nature of both the Chilean Socialist Party and Communist Party, such a government would not be a United Front, but simply a Popular Front. At best, it would be like the kind of Workers Government that Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisaged, in Russia, in 1917, when they raised the demand “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”. It assumes that standing outside any such government, is an actual revolutionary party, (as was the case with the Bolsheviks in 1917) engaged in a real United Front, in action, at a rank and file level, exposing the contradictions and inadequacies of such a reformist/centrist government, and, thereby, ripping the workers away from it. As Trotsky puts it, in discussing the Workers' Government, 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 case 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.”
Mike McNair, basically adopts the Stalinist interpretation of the United Front, on the basis of form rather than content. On that basis, the Popular Front is an alliance of bourgeois and workers parties (“bloc of four classes”), whereas a United Front is an alliance of reformist workers parties (Socialists) and revolutionaries (Communist Parties). The trouble with that, when looking at Chile in 1973 (and the same applies generally) is that these party labels were themselves meaningless. The Mensheviks, in 1917, were still, nominally a Marxist party whose goal was Socialism. By the 1920's, even, all of these “Socialist” parties had become simply social-democratic parties, or “bourgeois-workers' parties”, as Lenin defined the British Labour Party, whose goal was not Socialism, but simply a more efficiently managed monopoly capitalism. Any formal alliance with such a party, was already, therefore, simply a Popular Front, in content.
And, the same was true of the Communist Parties. They too became simply social-democratic parties. But, more significantly, what presenting a formal alliance of such parties, as a United Front, fails to understand is that the United Front is an alliance, in action, at a grass roots level between revolutionaries and reformist/social-democratic workers. It is an alliance proposed to those workers, by revolutionaries, over the heads of the leaders of the parties representing those other workers.
“Lenin, it is understood, recognized the necessity of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement, but he understood by this, of course, not an alliance with the bourgeois parties, duping and betraying the petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy (the peasants and the small city folk), but an alliance with the organizations and groupings of the masses themselves – against the national bourgeoisie.” (p 267)
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