In the last article in this series we were concerned with
the strategic split between communists and socialists. In this article we have
to address the problem of unity which the split posed.
With the creation of the Comintern the national split
which the 1914-18 war had caused in the broad, united socialist movement was
replaced by an organisational-ideological split which affected the
workers’ parties in most countries. But with this split the problem of working
class political unity in action did not go away, because it is deeply rooted in
the nature of the movement. The policy or ‘tactic’ of the united class front was
the Comintern’s effort to tackle this problem.
Down to 1920 the Comintern’s leaders were struggling for a
clear and unambiguous split in the workers’ movement. This split was necessary
in order to escape the domination of the movement by the right and the fudges
of the centre, which supported the domination of the right. But as soon as the
split came about the working class’s objective need for unity reasserted
itself. The Comintern was now forced to try to find a way of addressing that
need for unity without again subordinating the movement to the right.
The starting point of the united front policy, before it was
even expressed as such, was the Comintern’s advice to the British communists on
the Labour Party. The groups which formed the CPGB were divided on the
question, some favouring and some opposing affiliation to Labour. The 1920 2nd
Congress of the Comintern debated the question and resolved that the Communist
Party then in process of formation should affiliate. The proposal was
quite clearly made on the basis that communists would have full freedom of
agitation and organisation within the Labour Party.
Lenin argued that “... the Labour Party has let the British
Socialist Party into its ranks, permitting it to have its own press organs, in
which members of the selfsame Labour Party can freely and openly declare that
the party leaders are social-traitors ... This shows that a party affiliated to
the Labour Party is able not only to severely criticise but openly and
specifically to mention the old leaders by name, and call them social-traitors.
This is a very original situation ...
“In a private talk, comrade Pankhurst said to me: ‘If we are
real revolutionaries and join the Labour Party, these gentlemen will expel us.’
But that would not be bad at all. Our resolution says that we favour
affiliation insofar as the Labour Party permits sufficient freedom of
criticism. On that point we are absolutely consistent.”1
As a matter of judgment of the evolution of the Labour
Party, these arguments are problematic. From its 1918 conference, the Labour
Party was in process of transforming itself from a loose confederation into a
party which combined affiliations with individual membership based on a
political platform. In reality, the CP was not allowed to affiliate and
individual communists’ membership in the Labour Party was from a very early
stage semi-legal.
The argument nonetheless shows that even at a time that the
Comintern’s leadership was still mainly concerned to complete the split with
the centrists, they were willing to fight for participation of communists in a
broader unity of the workers’ movement - provided that the communists
retained liberty of agitation.
The united front turn more generally was animated by the fact
that over the course of 1921 it became clear that the split had not purged the
movement, but, on the contrary, the social democrats of the right and centre
retained mass support in the working class.
In Italy the January 1921 split of the left from the right
and centre of the Partito Socialista Italiano - urged on by the Comintern
leadership - left the communists as a small minority.
In March 1921 the German United Communist Party (VKPD) had
endeavoured to trigger the revolution artificially in the ‘March action’. The
attempt was a categorical failure and only emphasised the fact that the
right-dominated SPD had majority support in the German working class.
At the Tours Congress in December 1920 the SFIO (French
Section of the Workers’ International, the Socialist Party) split. A
three-quarters majority accepted the ‘21 conditions’ and adhered to the
Comintern as the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). A minority split to
reconstitute the SFIO.
But of the SFIO’s 69 parliamentary deputies only 13 joined
the PCF, 56 going with the SFIO, and the SFIO also took the large majority of
the local councillors. Over 1921 it also became clear that the SFIO had
majority support in the trade unions, which expelled a communist-supported
minority in December. By late 1921 it was evident that in spite of the numbers
at Tours the SFIO actually had the majority in the broader workers’ movement;
and the SFIO was engaged in constructing the Cartel des Gauches left electoral
bloc with the left bourgeois Radical Party (for the May 1922 local and 1924
general elections). This policy allowed them to present the communists as
splitters of the unity of the left.
In this context the executive committee of the Comintern in
December 1921 adopted the ‘Theses on the united front’.2 They begin (theses 1-2) with the
reassertion of the ‘actuality of the revolution’ in the form of a foreshortened
perspective of economic crisis and war.
They then assert (theses 3-4) that, while a section of the
most advanced workers had been won to place confidence in the communists, the
advance of the class struggle had brought more backward layers into activity,
and these were the source of the instinctive demand for unity.
This analysis makes the problem correspond to the situation
in Russia in February 1917: the Bolsheviks had obtained a majority of the
existing organised workers, but the outbreak of revolution brought onto the
stage broad masses for whom Menshevik ideas were more attractive. The same
dynamic was visible in Portugal in 1974-75: the Communist Party had been
the majority in the repressed workers’ movement under the Salazar-Caetano
dictatorship, but the advance of the mass movement allowed rapid and dramatic
growth of the Socialist Party.
However, as an analysis of the situation in 1921 it was
false: neither in Germany nor in Italy had the communists won a majority in the
existing organised movement, and 1921 showed that in France the apparent
majority of the existing organised movement won at Tours was in fact illusory.
The theses then assert that the split was necessary in order
that the communists should “win freedom of agitation and propaganda” (thesis
5); that the communists are now fighting for unity of the workers in action,
which the reformists reject (thesis 6); and that the reformists are using the
slogan of unity to draw the workers into support for class collaboration
(thesis 7). Hence the conclusion: “The overall interests of the communist
movement require that the communist parties and the Communist International as
a whole support the slogan of a united workers’ front and take the
initiative on this question into their own hands” (thesis 8).
Theses 9-16 attempt to concretise the idea in a series of
individual countries, while thesis 17 calls on other communist parties to do
likewise. Thesis 18 asserts a fundamental point:
“The executive committee of the Communist International
considers that the chief and categorical condition, the same for all communist
parties, is: the absolute autonomy and complete independence of every Communist
Party entering into any agreement with the parties of the Second and
Two-and-a-Half Internationals, and its freedom to present its own views and its
criticisms of those who oppose the communists. While accepting the need for
discipline in action, communists must at the same time retain both the right
and the opportunity to voice, not only before and after but if necessary during
actions, their opinion on the politics of all the organisations of the working
class without exception. The waiving of this condition is not permissible in
any circumstances. Whilst supporting the slogan of maximum unity of all
workers’ organisations in every practical action against the capitalist
front, communists cannot in any circumstances refrain from putting forward
their views, which are the only consistent expression of the interests of the
working class as a whole.”
The remaining theses discuss a series of discrete points
(the Bolshevik experience, initiatives of the Comintern as a whole, problems of
centrism within the communist parties, that unity in action of the working
class must include the anarchists and syndicalists).
The Comintern returned to the question at its 4th Congress
in December 1922. Thesis 10 of the ‘Theses on Comintern tactics’3 reaffirmed the executive committee’s
December 1921 theses, although the compression of the argument makes the text
less fully transparent:
“At present the reformists need a split, while the
communists are interested in uniting all the forces of the working class
against capital. Using the united front tactic means that the communist
vanguard is at the forefront of the day-to-day struggle of the broad masses for
their most vital interests. For the sake of this struggle communists are even
prepared to negotiate with the scab leaders of the social democrats and the
Amsterdam International. Any attempt by the Second International to interpret
the united front as an organisational fusion of all the ‘workers’ parties’ must
of course be categorically repudiated ...
“The existence of independent communist parties and their
complete freedom of action in relation to the bourgeoisie and
counterrevolutionary social democracy is the most important historical
achievement of the proletariat, and one which the communists will in no
circumstances renounce. Only the communist parties stand for the overall
interests of the whole proletariat.
“In the same way the united front tactic has nothing to do
with the so-called ‘electoral combinations’ of leaders in pursuit of one or
another parliamentary aim.”
And:
“The main aim of the united front tactic is to unify the
working masses through agitation and organisation. The real success of the
united front tactic depends on a movement ‘from below’, from the rank and file
of the working masses. Nevertheless, there are circumstances in which
communists must not refuse to have talks with the leaders of the hostile
workers’ parties, providing the masses are always kept fully informed of the
course of these talks. During negotiations with these leaders the independence
of the Communist Party and its agitation must not be circumscribed.”
We can draw from these texts (and others, such as Trotsky’s
March 1922 report, ‘On the united front’, in specific relation to France4 ) a clear understanding of the
Comintern leadership’s conception of the united front idea.
(1) The question is posed because the right wing still lead
broad masses. The united front is not a permanent concept, but a road to a
higher form of unity, in which the unity of the class is expressed in the
Communist Party and Comintern.
(2) The idea is of the workers’ united front. This
has two aspects: (a) It is for the unity of the working class as a whole, in
action for elementary common interests - ie, including the anarchists, etc; it
is not merely an electoral or parliamentary combination of communists and
socialists (ECCI thesis 23). (b) It is counterposed to the ‘left unity’ that
includes liberal parties of the Cartel des Gauches and to the SPD’s post-war
coalition policy.
(3) It is the “chief and categorical condition” that the
Communist Party must retain autonomy and independence and “its freedom to
present its own views and its criticisms of those who oppose the communists”
(emphasis added).
(4) It is a precondition for the application of this policy
that the Communists should have a party (theses 5-6). The EC theses warn
of the danger that the united front policy will be used as a basis for a
reversion to an unorganised left in a broader fudged unity (theses 21-22).
Equally, as Trotsky put it, “In cases where the Communist Party still remains
an organisation of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its
conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and
organisational significance. In such conditions, mass actions remain under the
leadership of the old organisations which by reason of their still powerful
traditions continue to play the decisive role” (point 3).
This conception was, in fact, very rapidly abandoned. The socialists,
including their lefts, proved unwilling to enter into agreements for common
action with the communists on these terms. The initial result was the creation
of unity with elements of the left socialists and trade unionists on the basis
of self-censorship of the communists in order to fudge the political
differences between them.
The clearest instance was the case of the relationship
between the British communists and the trade union ‘official lefts,’ and that
between the Soviet trade unionists and the general council of the TUC, in the
run-up to and during the 1926 General Strike.5 Criticism of the official lefts
which would have been sufficiently sharp to warn their followers of the role
they would play in the 1926 General Strike would have broken the bloc; so the
criticism was not forthcoming. A range of similar failures at the same period
are discussed in Trotsky’s The Third International after Lenin (1928).
The late 1920s saw an abrupt shift to the ‘left’ in the
Soviet Union (the turn to ‘class struggle in the countryside’ and forced
collectivisation) and in the Comintern: in place of the united front policy,
the task of the communist parties was now mainly to fight against the
socialists. Trotsky called it the “third period of the Comintern’s errors”, and
the expression, “third period”, as a description of dead-end sectarian
isolationism has stuck. The new policy continued until, in 1933, it met with
the utter disaster of the Nazi coup in Germany.
In response to the Nazi coup, the Comintern shifted again
onto the terrain of unity through self-censorship. Dimitrov’s speech to the
1935 7th Congress of the Comintern introducing the new perspective contains a
striking passage:
“‘The communists attack us,’ say others. But listen,
we have repeatedly declared: We shall not attack anyone, whether persons,
organisations or parties, standing for the united front of the working class
against the class enemy. But at the same time it is our duty, in the interests
of the proletariat and its cause, to criticise those persons, organisations and
parties that hinder unity of action by the workers.”6
In fact, the Comintern went beyond unity through
self-censorship and fudges to the concept of the ‘anti-fascist people’s
front’. In doing so, they had decisively abandoned the early Comintern’s
concept in which the united workers front was opposed to the
coalitionism of the German SPD and the French Cartel des Gauches. They had,
indeed, begun to situate themselves on the terrain of the coalitionist strategy
of the old right wing of the Second International. They had, indeed, begun to
abandon the whole strategic line of Marxism as such: that is, that the
only road to socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class as a
class.
Why?
In retrospect, Trotsky and the Trotskyists analysed these
shifts as driven by the evolution of the policy - in particularly foreign
policy - of the Soviet bureaucracy and carried into effect by top-down
bureaucratic control in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Comintern.
However, since 1945, we have seen repeated examples of Trotskyist organisations
performing the same flip-flops between unity on the basis of self-censorship,
followed by a sudden ‘leftist’ shift into ‘third period’ denunciations of the
right wing of the workers’ movement as purely bourgeois and sectarian
isolation. Sectarian isolation can equally be followed by a sudden shift into
fudged unity on the basis of self-censorship: the evolution of the British
Socialist Workers Party since 2000 has been a striking example.
The truth is that the dynamic was not driven by the Soviet
bureaucracy and Stalinism as a particular caste-political form, but by
internal contradictions in the early Comintern policy. The key contradiction is
between the ‘united front’ struggle for unity on the basis of freedom of
criticism and of party/factional organisation in the class movement as a
whole, and the 1921 rejection of unity on the basis of freedom of criticism
and of factions in the Communist Party as such (discussed in more length
in the last article in this series - Weekly Worker May 4). To see why,
it is necessary to go a level deeper into the theoretical grounds for supposing
that the united class front is necessary.
The working class objectively needs united action and
united organisations. This flows from its underlying nature as a class. We saw
this point already in the second article in this series. The proletariat is the
whole class dependent on the wage fund, not the workers who happen to be
currently employed (let alone any particular sector, such as ‘industrial
workers’). Lacking property in the major means of production, workers need to
organise collective action in order to defend their interests. That ‘unity is
strength’ is therefore the elemental and indispensable basis of workers’
organisation.
But this need encounters two contradictions. The first is
that both capital and the working class are international in character.
A central statement in the 1864 ‘Inaugural address’ of the First International
is still unqualifiedly true today: “Past experience has shown how disregard of
that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different
countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles
for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their
incoherent efforts.”7
However, there are within the workers’ movement nationalist
socialists loyal to the existing individual nation-states. The result is that
there is a contradiction between unity of the working class as an international
class and unity in any one country between nationalists and internationalists.
The point is well made in Lenin and Zinoviev’s Socialism and war: “Unity
with the opportunists actually means today subordinating the working
class to ‘its’ national bourgeoisie, alliance with it for the purpose of
oppressing other nations and of fighting for great-power privileges; it means splitting
the revolutionary proletariat in all countries.”8
The second contradiction is a little more difficult to
explain. We can take it at a high level of abstraction or much more concretely.
In abstraction, a workers’ organisation - whether trade union, party or
whatever - is not an unconscious ‘organic unity’ like family, clan or peasant
village. It is a consciously created unity which grows out of and
negates/preserves the individualism of modern capitalist society. In this
aspect it foreshadows the future freely associated producers of
socialism. But to be a consciously created unity it must inherently be a unity
in diversity, an agreement to unite for partial common ends, while recognising
the diverse individual opinions and wills. It is, indeed, the partial
convergence of the individual opinions and wills which forms the basis of the
possibility of consciously created unity.
This dialectic of individual and consciously created
collective necessarily entails the possibility of collectives within the
collective where - as is inevitable - there come to be disagreements within the
larger collective.
At the level of the concrete, a workers’ organisation of any
size and geographical extent cannot run under capitalism on the basis of a pure
distribution of tasks from meeting to meeting among members who do them in
their free time. In the first place, the capitalists simply do not give workers
enough free time, except in the form of pauperising and demoralising
unemployment. In the second place, though we seek to make everyone a
worker-leader, worker-manager or worker-intellectual (synonyms; call it what
you will), in fact our ability under capitalism to overcome the
petty-proprietor intelligentsia’s monopoly of education and managerial and
administrative skills is limited.
In practice we have to have full-timers, and these are
either members of the intelligentsia/managerial middle class (petty proprietors
of intellectual property) by background, or, if they originate as workers,
become intelligentsia by training as full-timers. Full-time office itself can,
moreover, be a type of property in the form of privileged access to
information.
Any workers’ organisation under capitalism therefore inherently
entails a class contradiction between the proletarian ranks and the
pretty-proprietor officials. The anarchist ‘solution’ of dispensing with the
full-timers is no solution at all: it either means no organisation or an
organisation more completely dominated by members of the intelligentsia by
background. The problem - which we already encountered in the third article in
this series as an unsolved problem identified by the anarchists - is to find a
road to subordinating the full-timers to the membership.
There are several potential elements of such a road. But the
main point is that it is utterly indispensable if the working class ranks are
to subordinate the middle class officials to themselves that the ranks must
have freedom to organise without the say-so of the officials. We have already
seen that organisation is indispensable to the working class pursuing its interests;
this is just as true within the organisations that the working class itself
creates, as it is in the larger society.
This leads to the same conclusion as the first and more
abstract point. To retain its character as an effective instrument of the proletariat
as a class, a workers’ organisation must have freedom to organise
factions within its ranks. Indeed, the struggle of trends, platforms and
factions is a normal and essential means by which its differences are
collectivised and a unity created out of them. It must be a unity in
diversity.
Unity in diversity can be denied to the movement in three
ways. Bureaucratic suppression or exclusion of dissenting factions is an
obvious one. Equally obvious is ultimatist refusal of unity for limited common
action where that is possible, on the basis that there is insufficient
agreement on other tasks.
The third and less obvious, but equally common, way is to
fudge differences by diplomatic agreement to windy generalities, or to
self-censor and thereby pretend that there is more agreement than there
actually is. It was this last course of action which Marx and Engels attacked
in their critiques of the 1875 Gotha programme.
Any of these courses of action denies the ranks of the
workers’ movement the possibility of choosing between opposing views, and is
therefore antithetical to a real, effective unity of the movement.
Bureaucratic centralism versus the united front
In effect, the policy of the united front was a struggle for unity in diversity.
But a deep grasp of this character eluded the Comintern: both the history of
the split and the 1921 adoption of the ban on factions precluded it.
The history of the split meant that half the justification
offered for the split was to ‘purge’ the workers’ movement of opportunism: this
justification is obviously opposed to any form of unity, even partial, and
found its true expression in the ‘third period’.
The ban on factions was itself a direct denial of the need
for unity in diversity in the communist parties and Comintern. The
effect of this ban was that the communist parties came to replicate the secret
Bakuninist dictatorial conspiracy of 1870-71. This character was perfectly
visible to left socialists - some of them ex-communists like Paul Levi - from
1921 onwards.
The Comintern leaders had quite properly asserted that the
united front was not a permanent policy, but a road to the reunification
of the workers’ movement on a higher level, represented by the communist
parties and International. But the character of the communist parties under the
post-1921 regime meant that they could not express the proletariat’s
class need for unity in diversity. On the contrary, the bureaucratic
dictatorship of the socialist right was now paralleled by a more ferocious
bureaucratic dictatorship of the Communist Party apparatuses with its head in
Moscow.
Once the communist parties had taken this form, the natural
inference was that real unity in diversity was actually impossible.
Unity in the party could not be unity in diversity: therefore, neither
could broader unity. This left the only choices available as radical separation
(‘third period’) or ‘fudging’ or diplomatic unity, in which the communists
self-censored to conceal the actual differences between themselves and the left
socialist or trade unionist leaders.
Taking diplomatic unity with the right of the workers’
movement seriously meant, necessarily, fudging over the difference between, on
the one hand, the right’s coalitionist politics and, on the other, the politics
of class independence. When the Comintern leadership fully accepted this, the
result was the politics of the people’s front.
Trotsky was intimately involved in the creation of the
Comintern policy of the united front. A great deal of his political struggle
after he lost out in the battle for the leadership of the Russian Communist
Party was focussed on it. His writings on Britain and China in the 1920s
attacked the Comintern’s diplomatic unity policy. Between 1928 and 1933 he
battled in print against ‘third period’ sectarianism. In 1934-38 he
counterposed the workers’ united front to the Comintern’s people’s front
policy, and at the same time battled against the diplomatic, fudging unity
approach of the ‘London bureau’ of left socialist parties and of many of his
own co-thinkers in the International Left Opposition and its successor
organisations.
But Trotsky - in spite of participating in the Russian
left’s 1920s criticisms of the party regime - never escaped from the
contradiction between the united front policy and the 1920 and 1921 theses on
the organisational character of the communist parties. He internalised firmly
the idea that before 1917 Lenin was right and he was wrong on the party question,
and clung to the policies of the first four Congresses of the Comintern as an
anchor in the shifting seas of the politics of the grouplets outside the
mainstream of the socialist and communist parties.
The Trotskyists started with micro-groups. When they got
bigger, they tended to ‘Bolshevise’ their parties, creating an overt or covert
dictatorship of their petty bureaucracies. To such organisations a real
commitment to unity in diversity of the workers’ movement was as inconceivable
as it was to the Stalinists. Unity had to be diplomatic: the alternative was
sectarian self-isolation.
But the history of Trotsky’s struggle for the united front
policy meant that even in sectarian self-isolation the Trotskyists tended both
(a) to attach themselves to sections of the mass movement, while self-censoring
and hiding their own banner (as in Labour Party entry and similar tactics), and
(b) to create ‘fronts’ which purported to be ‘united fronts’ of the left, but were
in fact bureaucratically controlled by particular Trotskyist organisations: the
Healyites’ ‘All Trade Union Alliance’, the International Socialists/Socialist
Workers’ Party’s ‘Rank and File Movements’, the Lambertistes’ ‘Parti des
Travailleurs’ (‘Workers’ Party’) and so on and on ...
The Mandelites actually constructed a theory which justifies
diplomatic unity: Bensaid/Jebrac’s dialectique d’unité et débordement
(dialectic of unity and overflowing, or outflanking). This theory was
plagiarised by both John Ross and Tony Cliff and thereby found its way into the
common sense of the British far left.
In this theory, the united front is a tactic and one
applicable by a small group, rather than a policy for the whole of the working
class. (Diplomatic) unity with the reformists, or a section of them, makes it
possible to set the masses in motion in a particular struggle. The Trotskyists
then demonstrate to these masses that they are better fighters for this
particular struggle, and/or that they will not draw back from carrying this
particular struggle to the end. As a result, the mobilised masses then turn
to the Trotskyists.
The theory justifies diplomatic unity because the masses
break with the reformists “in action, not in ideas”: with the implication that
they do so in relation to their particular struggles. Unity with the
reformists is essential to set the masses in motion; and on the particular struggles
it is unnecessary for the Trotskyists to offer sharp criticism of the
reformists, which might prevent unity: the mass struggle will find the
reformists out.
Numerous Trotskyist groups endeavour to practise this
‘theory of the united front’ which has very little in common with the
Comintern’s policy. The SWP, for example, has used it to justify its policies
in the Anti-Nazi League, the Socialist Alliance, the anti-globalisation
movement and Respect.
The underlying problem is that it is a variant of the
sub-Bakuninist mass strike strategy discussed in the third article in this
series. Once the masses, or even quite small layers of newly radicalising
militants, actually begin to enter the political stage, they demand of
the left not ‘good fighters’ on the particular struggle, but an alternative
political authority. At once, this poses the question of a party in
(at least) the Kautskyian sense. This requires addressing the full range of
questions affecting the society as a whole.
Followers of the Bensaid/Jebrac version of the ‘united
front’ are inherently obsessed with ‘action’ as the road to overcoming the
reformists, and therefore debar themselves from offering such answers. They
also hold back militants who wish to go beyond the narrow aims of the
particular struggle. The result is that, far from turning to the Trotskyists,
these militants turn to parties which are prepared to offer broader
policies.
The split between communists, loyal to the working class as
an international class, and coalitionist socialists, loyal to the nation-state,
will never be ‘healed’ as long as communists insist on organising to fight for
their ideas. The policy of the united workers’ front is therefore an essential
element of strategy in the fight for workers’ power.
But this policy can only make sense as part of a larger
struggle for unity in diversity. And this struggle is a struggle against
- among other things - the Trotskyists’ concept of the united front.
Notes
1. Minutes of the 2nd Congress - www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch13.htm.
2. www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/united-front.htm.
3. www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm.
4. www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1924/ffyci-2/08.htm.
5. See texts by Stalin and Trotsky, of various dates,
collected under the 5th Congress heading at www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/index.htm.
6. www.marxists.org.uk/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s6.
7. www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm.
8. original emphasis; Socialism and war chapter 1,
section 14, www.marxists.org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1915/s+w/ch01.htm.
First Published in weekly Worker – May 2006