Revolutionaries, hegemony and the united front

The working class is fragmented in its politics, including its support for different parties or no party at all.1 The existence of these divisions is not an accident of history that can be wished away. It reflects ideological currents rooted in the unevenness of workers’ consciousness and experiences. In non-revolutionary periods, those who stand for reform while articulating elements of the dominant forms of consciousness tend to predominate over those who stand for revolution. The goal of a revolutionary socialist party is to win a majority of workers to its project and, basing itself on democratic organs of workers power from below, to lead it in a successful challenge to the ruling class and the capitalist state. However, the degree of rootedness and influence any would-be revolutionary party possesses ahead of a revolutionary situation will largely condition its chances of success. This means that, even in non-revolutionary situations, revolutionary parties must seek to expand their influence within the workers’ movement.

In its daily life, the working class confronts opportunities for conquering new rights, while others won long ago are undermined, creating the potential for resistance. It is primarily in the resulting struggles that the fragmentation of the working class can be addressed. Workers’ potential power rests on both their numerical strength and the position they occupy within capitalist relations of production, but this power can only be exercised collectively, placing a premium on unity in action.

The class’s fragmentation into support for different parties can present itself as a barrier to such unity. One response is to see parties themselves as the problem. Another response involves presenting one’s own “party” (even if, as is often the case with revolutionary groups, it remains a tiny organisation) as the vehicle for action to which others must submit. A more fruitful response is the tactic of the united front, pioneered by the Bolsheviks in Russia and then theorised by the leading Marxists of the inter-war period. This tactic continues to inform the approach of revolutionary organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain today.

This article looks at the theory of the united front, aiming to cast light on how a fighting working-class unity can develop over key issues facing the movement today and addressing the related question of how revolutionary socialists can extend their influence amongst workers in a period of gathering crisis. It looks at the origins of the united front policy within the Communist International or Comintern, paying particular attention to experiences in Italy and Germany. It then examines how the united front was abandoned by the official Stalinist leadership of the Communist movement, not without counterpressure or opposition from key figures of the revolutionary movement, such as Clara Zetkin, Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky. It considers the alternative approach to unity represented by the “popular front”, adopted by Stalinist parties after the triumph of Nazism in Germany and which still enjoys some support today. Finally, the article looks at some contemporary examples of how the united front tactic has been deployed by revolutionaries to promote unity in action and draws conclusions for its application today.

Origins of the policy of the united front

The fate of the Russian Revolution of 1917 rested on it spreading into the advanced industrialised economies of the European countries, which had far larger working classes and more advanced means of production than Russia. This was not an outlandish prospect, given the turmoil that came with the end of the First World War. In March 1919, the leaders of the Bolsheviks took the initiative to launch the Communist International (Comintern), an international organisation that sought to generalise the lessons of 1917. Lenin had called for a new international, firmly based on revolutionary principles as early as 1914, when the broad mass socialist parties of the Second International capitulated to imperialist war. The capitulation revealed the strength of reformism within these parties. The urgency of a break with social democracy was reinforced as a wave of revolt, drawing in millions of workers, spread across Europe at the end of the war, but was held back by the reformist leadership that predominated in most countries. Defeats in Germany and Italy, discussed below, became key lessons. By 1921, there were growing signs that the revolutionary crisis in Europe had been, at least momentarily, contained and that the ruling class was regaining confidence, going on the offensive to roll back the rights won by workers in the preceding years.2

During the revolutionary wave, many parties within the Comintern had grown to become large organisations, with tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of members, but they were now operating on a terrain where revolution was not an immediate prospect. Additionally, the new communist parties had not the supplanted reformist organisations of the Second International. Instead, in most countries, they coexisted with bigger reformist parties, typically with the allegiance of the bulk of workers. This fragmented working class now faced the threat of rising unemployment, attacks on wages and the first signs of fascist mobilisations directed against workers’ organisations and the left. In his history of the Comintern, due to appear in English for the first time, Pierre Broué explains what this meant:

For the Russian Communists, the prospect of revolution had not vanished, even if it was perhaps now a matter of years. But that meant new demands. To conquer the majority of the proletariat and win the broad sympathy of oppressed social layers (indispensable for the victory of the revolution), what was plainly needed, as a first step, was that revolutionary ideas and organisations should decisively win out over their reformist equivalents. This conquest could not result from a change of heart though argument and lessons drawn from history, philosophy, education, agitation or propaganda. It depended on the capacity of revolutionaries to convince the masses in action and through their own experience.3

The Russian revolutionary leaders Lenin and Leon Trotsky threw themselves into the resulting debates.4 To win a majority of the working class, they argued, revolutionaries must learn to operate not just in conditions of rising struggle, but also in situations of retreat, in which workers had to engage in defensive battles. This was a lesson the Bolsheviks had learned after the first Russian revolution of 1905 was crushed and a period of state repression followed. The long years of painstaking defensive struggles and local strikes steeled their members in how to intervene in and lead a multiplicity of struggles.

For Broué, the crux of the problem was that “workers only go into action if they think they have a reasonable chance of winning”. The split in the Second International created a situation where it was “obvious nearly universally that no concrete chance of winning existed unless the struggles were united—unless, in other words, reformist and revolutionary organisations came together in the pursuit of the same objective”.5 Here, the Bolshevik leaders could also draw on their own experiences from summer 1917, during a right-wing attempt to overthrow the provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky, which had been installed after the overthrow of the Tsar in the February 1917 revolution.6 Faced with a threatened coup by General Kornilov, who wanted to dismantle the revolution and reverse the gains made by workers and the oppressed, the Bolsheviks’ focus shifted from agitation for a left-wing overthrow of the provisional government to organising a defensive struggle against the coup. Bolsheviks everywhere took the initiative of setting up committees for revolutionary defence, in which they were a minority. Their push for united action received a tremendous response but not without some confusion in their ranks.

Trotsky recalled being visited by Bolshevik sailors from the cruiser Aurora, dispatched to defend Kerensky, who asked if they could not have better used the chaos ensuing from the coup attempt to arrest the government. Trotsky responded: “No, not yet. Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward we will settle with Kerensky”.7 The significance of the experience was two-fold. First, the Bolsheviks’ initiation of united struggle against Kornilov succeeded in defeating the general where a fragmented workers’ movement would have failed—the coup was neutralised in four days. Second, the Bolsheviks’ popularity among workers, many of whom had previously supported other parties, grew, leading to a situation in which they were able to win a majority in the soviets in the run-up to the October insurrection. Trotsky said of the Aurora sailors: “at the end of August, the trusted defenders of the Winter Palace against Kornilovists, at the end of October, they will be shooting at the Winter Palace with the guns of the Aurora”.8

Trotsky set out most clearly what became known as the policy of the united front in debates within the Comintern.9 Here he insists that revolutionaries are not neutral on the question of workers’ unity: “Any party which mechanically counterposes itself to this need of the working class for unity in action will unfailingly be condemned in the minds of the workers”.10 Revolutionaries should try to forge unity in action, overcoming divisions of party affiliation. This is the best guarantee of struggles winning, and in the process raising the level of combativity and class consciousness of workers­—so as to create more favourable conditions for revolutionaries:

the greater is the mass drawn into the movement, the higher its self-confidence rises, all the more self-confident will that mass movement be and all the more resolutely will it be capable of marching forward… And this means that the growth of the mass aspects of the movement tends to radicalise it, and creates much more favourable conditions for the slogans, methods of struggle and, in general, the leading role of the Communist Party.11

A party that failed to understand the need to build unity in action would “degenerate into a communist propaganda society but never develop into a party for the conquest of power”.12 Trotsky likened those revolutionaries who feared mass united struggle to “a swimmer who has approved the theses on the best method of swimming but dares not plunge into the water”.13

Being serious about unity in action implies two things. First, it means that calls for unity must be made in good faith, setting objectives common to both revolutionaries and reformists. This could mean, for instance, limiting a call for action to a resolute fight against unemployment, without insisting that the goals of the united action include the forcible overthrow of the capitalist state—even though this is the revolutionaries’ ultimate ambition. Consequently, temporary alliances between revolutionaries and reformists should revolve around specific issues or ends, rather than requiring wholesale programmatic agreements. Second, this implies that the call for unity should extend to the leaders of the reformist parties, not just their rank and file. The whole point of the tactic is that many workers look to the reformist organisations and leaders and are hence far more likely to be mobilised in struggle if encouraged by them.14

Trotsky recognised that, sometimes, the sincere attempts by revolutionaries at initiating united fronts would only result in partial agreements or be snubbed altogether. Even in such cases, the approach mattered because it was “necessary that the struggling masses should always be given the opportunity of convincing themselves that the non-achievement of unity in action was…due to the lack of real will to struggle on the part of the reformists”.15 If the reformist leaders refused the calls for unity, it would still create a better terrain for revolutionaries to draw their rank and file into activity than if no such call had been made.

The drive to forge unity is subordinated to the revolutionary party’s overarching project of becoming hegemonic within the working class. Any united front presupposes the existence of a revolutionary party that is sufficiently large, organisationally cohesive and ideologically clear. This is why Trotsky insisted that revolutionaries should always maintain their political independence even while allying with other forces, that they should reject any “organisational agreement that restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation”, that they should “participate in a united front but…not for a single moment become dissolved in it”, and that they should “function in the united front as an independent detachment”.16

This insistence mattered for two reasons. First, revolutionaries could only become a pole of attraction for the reformist workers with whom they were fighting if they maintained their identity. Trotsky was emphatic: the party “must clearly and specifically declare at every given moment just what its wishes are, just what it is striving for, and it must comment authoritatively, before the eyes of the masses, on its own steps and proposals”.17 Second, the sharpening of the struggle made possible by the united front could itself test these alliances. Reformist leaders could support the development of the struggle up to a certain point but then feel threatened by it and react by “putting brakes” on the struggle. Just as revolutionaries should show their “readiness, within certain limits and on specific issues, to correlate in practice our actions with those of reformist organisations”, they should “always reserve the right to lead the struggle to the end”, that is, to act independently if the alliance with reformists became an obstacle rather than a stimulus for advancing the struggle.18

Lenin and Trotsky’s fight to reorientate the movement had won out by 1922, at least in terms of the new policy’s formal adoption by the Comintern. Where applied consistently, the tactic proved fruitful, but it continued to be a source of contention among the new communist parties. The experiences in Italy and Germany provide some examples, both positive and negative.

The experience in Italy

The Biennio Rosso, the two “red years” of 1919-20 in Italy, culminated in factory occupations that spread across the country, particularly in the metal industry in the north. This combined with unrest in the more rural south and mutinies among soldiers. The possibility of a workers’ insurrection against the Italian state was posed. The Italian Socialist Party (the PSI) was a “broad church” party, encompassing socialists ranging from revolutionaries, such as Antonio Gramsci, to out-and-out reformists, such as Filippo Turati. It was the non-revolutionaries that dominated the PSI, and they decided that the fate of the factory occupations was the responsibility of the trade unions, not them. In turn, the trade union federation held a vote and rejected the calls for revolution, instead reaching an agreement with employers for wage rises and other reforms.19

Years later, in one of Benito Mussolini’s prisons, Gramsci recalled the exemplary advice Lenin had given Italian revolutionaries: “Separate yourselves from Turati, and then make an alliance with him”.20 This apparently contradictory message encapsulated the dual nature of the united front, involving both the necessity for revolutionaries forming a distinct and separate current in the workers’ movement, in the form of a cohesive and principled party, while striving to forge unity with others outside it. The Italian revolutionaries had ignored the first part of Lenin’s advice, and the price they paid was high. When the Italian Communist Party (PCI) finally emerged as an independent force, resentment towards the PSI meant a reluctance to pursue the second part of Lenin’s advice. The PCI found itself under the ultraleft leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, who rejected the united front and was opposed to compromises with reformism, even on a tactical basis. This was particularly dangerous because the defeat of the factory occupations created a context in which Benito Mussolini’s fascists could gain strength—and offer themselves as a tool to the ruling class to eradicate the threat from workers. As Broué notes:

In the first six months of 1921, the tally of destruction came to 19 printing presses and workers’ print-shops, 59 People’s Houses, 119 Chambers of Labour; 83 peasant leagues, 151 Socialist circles and everything that went with them, and 151 cultural circles. We omit here the number of people who died or were wounded, of men and women crushed by violence, fear, humiliation, ruin, and feelings of powerlessness.21

The PCI refused to give a lead and the PSI, on the receiving end of the worst violence, signed a “pacification pact” with Mussolini. Despite this miserable leadership, the possibility of united resistance by Italian workers emerged in the form of the Arditi del Popolo, an organisation set up by a group of ex-officers who wished to resist fascism. The Arditi were broad anti-fascist defence organisations:

The initial group also included a few anarchists…and possibly a few adventurers. But those joining were men from very diverse backgrounds who wanted to fight. They included not only young Socialists…but also Communists and people without party affiliation, who were simply democrats. In several localities, these groups were already beginning to stand up to the aggressors, put them to flight, and thus open up a perspective for confronting the terror.22

Tom Behan describes the momentous beginnings of the Arditi:

3,000 Arditi met for their first…national rally at the Botanical Gardens in Rome… Their message was simple—they were a military organisation formed to defeat fascist violence. But this was far from being a small group engaging in individual acts of terrorism against fascists. It was a movement that had the potential to become very big, and which organised public events and published a newspaper sporadically… The rally…was called as part of a national demonstration against fascist violence…more than 50,000 attended… Two days later the Rome chief of police wrote in a report that the size and nature of the demonstration “shocked the leader of the local fascist movement, who began to worry about the new situation emerging within the Roman working class”.23

However, “[t]he Communist Party forbade its members to join the Arditi del Popolo, the creation of which, it said, was a ‘manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie’”.24 Bordiga’s newspaper declared that “Communists…cannot and must not take part in activities organised by other parties, or which in any event arise outside the party”, and set about creating its own “pure” communist squads in competition with the Arditi.25 At a local level, many PCI members rejected this sectarian approach, becoming involved in the Arditi, sometimes in prominent roles. In many areas, the Arditi proved it was possible to push back fascism. The best example came from Parma, where 20,000 armed fascists marching on the city were repelled by the local Arditi. However, such examples remained localised, with no national organisation seeking to generalise from them. Mussolini later told a biographer: “If the Parma model had been used elsewhere, and was successful, the right of war veterans [fascists] to gain control over public life would have been called into question”.26

Through its sectarian attitude, the PCI had failed to build a united front against fascism. It had also missed the opportunity to win PSI workers to its ranks by providing an alternative to the socialist leaders who had given up the fight against Mussolini. Even the Comintern’s president Gregory Zinoviev, who certainly lacked Lenin and Trotsky’s clarity on the theory of the united front, and later led some of the arguments against it, was scathing of the PCI’s performance:

[The PCI] said: “Should we really get involved with such confused people? They have not even read the third volume of Marx’s Capital.” That is very true. Perhaps they had not even seen the first volume, let alone read it. But, nonetheless, these were people who were ready to fight against Fascism.27

The experience in Germany

Much initial debate around the united front tactic centred on the “Open Letter”, written by Paul Levi, then a leading member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and published in the party’s paper, Die Rote Fahne The Red Flag), in January 1921.28 This mass organisation, with over 300,000 members, had emerged from a recent fusion of two groups. The first was the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD), an organisation that had broken from the Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) during the First World War and contained a confusing mixture of revolutionaries, reformists and “centrists” who vacillated between the two. Under pressure from the Russian Revolution and the outbreak of revolution in Germany at the end of the First World War, the USPD leaders felt forced to call a conference, at Halle, to debate affiliation to the Comintern, a condition of which would be the expulsion of the party’s most notorious reformist leaders. The second group was the original KPD, launched in January 1919, based on revolutionaries organised autonomously within the USPD in Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacus Group and other currents. This early KPD had contained strong leftist currents, which had been driven out, largely at Levi’s initiative, and went on to form their own Communist Workers Party of Germany.29

Levi’s response to the ruling class’s offensive drew on the experiences of Communist militants in the Stuttgart metalworkers’ union, who won an argument in the local trade union movement that they should campaign together to demand lower prices for food, higher unemployment benefit, lower taxes on wages, disarmament of the fascist militias and a host of other concrete demands. They then instructed the metalworkers’ union and the German trade union federation to initiate united struggle around these issues to resist an offensive by the ruling class and protect workers. The KPD printed these demands in Die Rote Fahne, alongside the Open Letter, which was also sent directly to the major workers’ organisations, proposing united action. The KPD explained that it was not renouncing its revolutionary aims but was genuinely proposing joint activity around these partial objectives. At a national level, none of the organisations that received the letter responded positively, but in workplaces and union branches, the letter met tremendous support, sparking debate on the necessity for united action.30

Unfortunately, the highly effective approach announced by the Open Letter would not persist. Levi would soon be marginalised within the KPD leadership. Ostensibly, this followed his attendance at a congress of the Italian PSI, where he criticised the tactical clumsiness of the Comintern’s representatives. This led to a vote by the KPD to endorse the Comintern’s position, in the wake of which Levi and several of his key allies stepped down from the party’s leadership, leaving a far more doctrinaire “left” group in charge. However, these positions were reinforced by an influx into the newly unified KPD of former USPD members, who had just broken with the reformist and centrist elements in their own organisation, creating powerful ultraleft currents. They were also buttressed by sections of the Comintern who lacked the tactical sensibilities of Lenin or Trotsky.31

The new KPD leadership heralded the ascendancy of the “theory of the offensive”. In contrast to Levi, the proponents of this theory argued that the actions of a radical minority could artificially create the circumstances necessary for a revolutionary insurrection. These ideas were put to the test in the 1921 “March Action”, when the KPD sought to launch an armed insurrection without mass support from workers. The results were catastrophic, alienating much of the working class, instead of drawing them closer to the revolutionaries, resulting in the loss or demoralisation of tens of thousands of members of the KPD and providing the basis for widespread suppression of revolutionary militants.

Following the March Action, Lenin would defend the Open Letter from attacks: “The Open Letter is exemplary as the opening act of the practical method to effectively win over the majority of the working class”. It was too late for Levi, who was expelled from the KPD in April 1921.32 The KPD did, however, seek to learn from its mistakes and, by the summer of 1921, it had embraced the united front. This allowed the KPD to recover from disaster, growing to 218,000 members by late 1922.33 At a local level, members threw themselves into what Broué calls “united-front organs, that is, bodies that existed on a permanent basis and brought together all the workers in a factory or a locality regardless of their political affiliation”.34 The KPD’s proposals in the trade unions also earned the communists a reputation as “champions of unity”.35

An opportunity to test the tactic at a national level came in June 1922, when members of a far-right terrorist group assassinated Walther Rathenau, a Jewish politician and businessman. This was the latest episode in an intensifying campaign of violence by the right, which official state forces had shown little interest in quelling. Broué notes:

The KPD leapt at the opportunity. Two hours after the assassination, it wrote to the two Social-Democratic parties, proposing a meeting to decide on the measures that needed taking… So tense was the situation that the Social-Democratic Party accepted the proposed meeting and, without even waiting, called a mass demonstration for 25 June. Meanwhile, the German Trade Union Confederation…decided on a half-day strike.36

The trade union federation and the social democrat leaders felt compelled to join the initiative by the KPD, in part because the central demands proposed by the revolutionaries were acceptable to them: they included purging the army, the civil service and the courts of far-right elements, a general amnesty of political prisoners and suppression of the fascist squads. There was, though, still tension within this united front. Broué describes the negotiations:

The other parties were opposed to an unlimited general strike, to control committees and to the perspective of a workers’ government. The [German union confederation (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterbund, ADGB)] asked for the demands not to be the object of a bidding war, which the KPD accepted on condition that the minimum demands that remained should be won by any available means—to which there was agreement. The representatives of the SPD used a poster they judged abusive as a pretext for demanding a commitment from the KPD not to launch attacks on either the republic or on their current allies. The refusal by the Communists brought the meeting to the brink of collapse.37

United demonstrations went ahead, and the government felt under enough pressure to enter negotiations to introduce legislation conceding to these demands. Within two weeks, the SPD leaders broke with the united front to become part of a right-wing government coalition. This did not vindicate those within the KPD who opposed a united front with reformists. For the many thousands in the SPD ranks who had joined the protests against the far-right, the events showed which of the two parties was serious about combatting the growing threat. The approach enabled the KPD to extend its influence within the workers’ movement and to raise the combativity of workers.

Learning how to engage in defensive actions does not guarantee that a party will seize the initiative when the chance presents itself to take to the offensive. A year later, the KPD would waste its new influence, as the revolutionary process in Germany reached a climax in autumn 1923. It let slip an opportunity to seek to make a revolutionary challenge to the state.38 Nonetheless, its experience shows how a mass revolutionary party can begin to challenge social democracy for hegemony within the workers’ movement.

Anti-fascist united fronts: Zetkin, Gramsci and Trotsky

Following the defeat of the German revolution, and with it the possibility of revolution in Europe, the bureaucratisation of the Soviet state would accelerate, culminating in counter-revolution and the emergence of a new ruling class headed by Stalin. This process was reflected within the Comintern, which degenerated into an arm of Russian foreign policy.39 The united front approach would be abandoned by the world’s Communist parties.

This took place in several stages. After Stalin consolidated his power in 1928, he announced the advent of a new revolutionary upsurge in which the main enemy of workers was not fascism but social democracy, making any alliance impossible. Later, following the crushing of the German workers’ movement by Nazism in 1933, Communist Parties turned back to unity-building. However, instead of the united front envisaged by the Comintern in its revolutionary phase, this now meant the construction of “popular fronts”, which in practice meant revolutionaries contributed to stabilising capitalism by allying themselves with right-wing parties. The most important contemporary Marxists continued to defend the genuine united front. Trotsky is the figure most closely associated with these arguments, but interventions by the German revolutionary Clara Zetkin and by Gramsci are also worthy of consideration.

The claim that fascism was simply another form of bourgeois rule, and the related confusion between its class base and the one of social democracy, was not invented by Stalin—although through him, it acquired the status of the official line of the Communist movement. Already in 1923, Zetkin defended a much more sophisticated understanding of fascism against those who downplayed its threat. In many respects, Zetkin’s writings anticipate the core of Trotsky’s more well-known arguments a decade later—and are all the more powerful because the experience of fascist movements was as yet more limited.

Zetkin wanted to learn from the defeat of the Italian workers’ movement and avoid the same mistakes being repeated in Germany. Her analysis of fascism linked its emergence as a mass movement to the deep crisis of capitalist society, which was threatening to push sections of the middle classes into the proletariat. Fascism deployed a fake anti-capitalist rhetoric to appeal to such layers, but the core of fascism’s ideology was to substitute identification with the nation for class. Because of this, racism, organised violence to crush the left and a drive to war were built into the movement. Although she identified the middle classes as the core of fascism’s social base, Zetkin recognised the potential for sections of the ruling class to support the movement. To secure their rule, they needed “extralegal and nonstate instruments of force”, which were offered by fascist stormtroopers. Less convincingly, Zetkin argued that, once in power, these class contradictions would lead to a resurgence of class struggle. However, she insisted that he point of analysing these contradictions was not to predict the inevitable downfall of fascism, “to fall into the role of clever and refined observers of this process of decay”.40

Instead, the Italian experience showed that fascism presented an urgent threat to the whole workers’ movement. Fascism didn’t care if workers were influenced by reformism, revolutionary socialism, or even the Catholic trade unions: “All that matters to fascism is that they encounter a class-conscious proletariat, and then they club him to the ground”. Her conclusion was that “workers must come together for struggle without distinction of party or trade-union affiliation”. A resolution written by Zetkin and adopted by the Comintern in June 1923 stressed that Communists should take up the struggle against fascism, and that this involved setting up a “special structure to lead the struggle…made up of workers’ parties and organisations of every viewpoint”.41

In 1924, when the Comintern began to turn its back on the united front policy, Zetkin continued to argue that negotiations with reformists should not be rejected as a point of principle. They could be a way to increase “pressure on them towards action”, and win “an even broader range of their supporters to our banner”.42

In Italy itself, Gramsci had been one of the outstanding leaders of the emerging communist movement. He was critical both of the reformist leaders that had doomed the factory occupation movement and the sectarianism that dominated Bordiga’s PCI leadership. During the factory occupations, his newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) identified the dynamic of dual power and the potential for workers’ organisations forged within them to form the basis for a workers’ state.43 L’Ordine Nuovo interviewed the leader of the Arditi, and Gramsci argued the revolutionaries should support them and build a united anti-fascist resistance.44

However, while providing convincing arguments, Gramsci did not consistently criticise Bordiga’s ultra-left faction. It was only in the years after Mussolini’s victory in autumn 1922 that Gramsci began to build a side capable of forging a new leadership for the PCI, turning it away from its ultra-left mistakes.45 In 1926, Bordiga still saw fascism as little different from “normal” bourgeois role and argued against any united front with social democracy. These arguments were even less compelling when voiced at the PCI’s Lyon Congress—held in France because the PCI and all opposition parties had been outlawed by the fascists. Yet, for Bordiga, “political coalitions, whether permanent or temporary, along with committees which include representatives of different political parties as a means of directing the struggle”, should all be rejected, as well as “negotiations, proposals for common action and open letters to other parties from the communist party”.46

Gramsci would present a set of theses diametrically opposed to this approach. He wrote that “uniting the forces of the proletariat…on a terrain of struggle” was not just correct but “the party’s fundamental task” under the circumstances. Workers’ unity in action was “a concrete, real result to be achieved”, and it involved communists becoming “capable of drawing close to the workers of other parties and those without a party, overcoming unwarranted hostility and incomprehension”. The united front should “aim at being organised…ie, at being based on bodies around which the masses as a whole can regroup and find a form” and “without fetishisation of any particular form of organisation, bearing in mind that our fundamental purpose is to achieve an ever-increasing mobilisation and organic unity of forces”. Contrary to Bordiga’s claims that this amounted to sacrificing revolutionaries’ independence, the theses insisted the united front tactic was “closely linked with the problem of how the Communist Party is to lead the masses and how it is to win a majority”.47

Tragically, while Gramsci’s arguments were supported by the congress, by the end of the year, he would be imprisoned by Mussolini. The line the Stalinised Comintern soon imposed on Communists was much closer to that associated with Bordiga. It was left to Trotsky, particularly in his writings on Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, to challenge this. In 1928, the sixth congress of the Comintern announced what became known as the “third period”, asserting that social democracy, not fascism, was the main enemy. This precluded any alliance with reformist parties or the trade unions influenced by them. The notion that parties such as the SPD were “social fascists” soon became the official Communist position. This implied that a form of fascism was already dominant in Germany. Worse still, the slogan “After Hitler, Us!” became the refrain of the KPD. If in 1922-3, the KPD had credibly appeared as the most enthusiastic fighters for workers’ unity, now they were perceived by many workers to be hopelessly sectarian. The Communist parties “isolated themselves, then shouted furiously from the sidelines”.48

In his writings from exile, Trotsky pursued a Marxist analysis of fascism similar to that pioneered by Zetkin. The growth of a fascist mass movement centred around fantasies of “national revival” and was not a conspiracy orchestrated by the capitalists. Instead, faced with a deep enough crisis, the ruling class might enter an alliance with the leaders of the fascist movement to unleash their murderous violence on workers and destroy every bastion of democracy and organisation. This analysis recognised that both Communist and social democratic organisations, as well as the trade unions, cooperatives and so on, faced total annihilation. In the German context, this meant the KPD had to again pursue a united front struggle to defend workers against the fascists.

Trotsky criticised the “ultimatism” of the KPD, which issued half-hearted proposals for unity, accompanied with all sorts of conditions and threats, that were withdrawn as fast as they were made. Trotsky likened this attitude to that of Alexander Bogdanov—the Bolshevik who, faced with the emergence of the first workers’ councils in the 1905 Russian Revolution, demanded at the Petrograd Soviet that the workers place themselves under the leadership of the Bolsheviks or else he would walk out. In the same vein, the KPD acted as if it could “demand outright obedience from the proletariat”.49 Trotsky spelled out the stupidity of this attitude in a satirical comment:

Every united front that doesn’t first place itself under the leadership of the Communist Party…is directed against the interests of the proletariat. Whoever doesn’t recognise the leadership of the Communist Party is himself a “counter-revolutionary”. The worker is obliged to trust the Communist organisation in advance, on its own word of honour.50

The refusal to pursue a united front against fascism amounted to abandoning the project of winning over a majority of the working class:

The very historical problem which the Communist Party is yet to solve—that of uniting the overwhelming majority of the workers under its banner—is turned by the bureaucrat into an ultimatum, into a pistol which he holds against the temple of the working class.51

The leaders of the SPD and the ADGB trade union federation did not want to lead a militant fight against the Nazis that involved unleashing the power of workers and held also illusions that the capitalist state and constitution would stop Hitler. However, increasing numbers of their supporters recognised the Nazi threat and could have been drawn into unitary initiatives. This would have required the KPD repeatedly proposing unity to their leaders, like it had in 1922. Instead, the KPD leaders put forward the idea of a “red united front” or a “united front from below”, which Trotsky joked was a KPD united front “with its own self”.52 The KPD’s sectarian attitude provided the SPD leaders with excuses for their inaction. The victory of the Nazis over the German workers’ movement, which had been the strongest in the world, and the horrors of the concentration camps and the Second World War were the bloody price paid for the failure to strive for united resistance.

The popular front

The shockwaves of Hitler’s victory, quickly followed by the obliteration of the workers’ parties and trade unions, made the continuation of the “third period” untenable, particularly in the context of fascist movements growing elsewhere in Europe. The new turn to unity by the Comintern and Communist Parties coincided with the Russian state’s diplomatic manoeuvres to secure alliances with Britain and France, two leading imperialist powers, in preparation for a new war that Hitler’s takeover had made more likely. The alliances the Communists were instructed to pursue, between workers’ parties and sections of the domestic liberal bourgeoisie, were designed to not undermine these diplomatic efforts. This unity saw Communists taking it upon themselves to contain struggle, while compromising on issues such as support for national liberation movements when they clashed with the imperialist powers to which the Soviet Union sought to ally itself. As Hallas argues, this shift saw the Communists move “to a position well to the right of the social democratic parties, to a position of class collaboration—precisely the position…against which the founders of the Comintern had revolted”.53

In France, an attempt by the right to force out the liberal Radical government of Edouard Daladier sparked mass resistance. A general strike saw grassroots pressure for unity on the leaders of both the French socialist and Communist parties. They agreed on an electoral coalition, the Popular Front, which included not just the two workers’ parties but also, at the insistence of the Communists, Daladier’s Radicals, an establishment party through and through. The electoral victory of the Popular Front in June 1936 precipitated mass strikes and factory occupations. This frightened the ruling class, so the Popular Front government took measures to settle the strikes. Trade union leaders and employers negotiated concessions for workers, while the Communists sought to persuade strikers to accept the limited offers. This disorientated the workers’ movement and, as the crisis of French capitalism sharpened, the concessions were soon eroded by economic hardship. The “left” government would be consumed by contradictions. From being a supposed ally in an anti-fascist coalition, Daladier returned to form an authoritarian regime, banning the Communist Party, and pushing a virulent antisemitic discourse. Following the German offensive of May-June 1940 and the Nazi occupation of France, Radical and Socialist parliamentarians voted for the Nazi-collaborationist regime headed by Philippe Petain.54

In Spain, the first Popular Front government, elected in February 1936, was even more moderate. However, the new Spanish republic would polarise between a combative working class and an increasingly aggressive far right. In July that year, Francisco Franco attempted a coup with the support of fascists, the Catholic church, sections of the ruling class—and even figures in the Popular Front government. Although the parties in the Popular Front were paralysed by the coup attempt, across large parts of the country, workers and peasants rose up, stormed army barracks to seize weapons and used them to stop the far right. This marked the beginning of the Spanish Revolution. In the liberated areas, the traditional institutions of the state ceased functioning and control effectively passed over to workers’ militias. Peasants collectivised the land; workers’ committees sprang up to organise transport, food supplies and healthcare; the position of women advanced beyond that of any country in the world at the time.55 The workers’ offensive posed a question. Should the revolutionary process be put on hold until Franco’s advance was halted or was deepening the social revolution the best guarantee for defeating Franco, turning the anti-fascist struggle into an all-out revolutionary war and unleashing workers’ power against the capitalist state? The former was the position of all the main workers’ and liberal republican organisations in the Popular Front. Again, the Communists, with guidance from Moscow, led the way in taking this to its logical conclusions. This meant using force to disarm the workers’ militias, asking workers to give up the gains they had conquered, returning collectivised land to the landlords, murdering anarchists and revolutionary socialists and reconstructing the republican state with its regular army. This paved the way for Franco’s victory in 1939 and a four-decades dictatorship.56

These examples show the chasm that divides the policy of the united front from the popular front. Despite this, popular frontism continues to influence anti-fascist thinking today. In response to the storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021, Labour’s Paul Mason advocated a return to the popular front as a “temporary alliance of the centre and the left”.57 In France, the left-wing coalition led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose stated aim is to halt the rise of the fascist Rassemblement National, is explicitly called the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front).58 A similar approach to combatting Reform UK’s far-right racism has been encouraged by Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, who in late April convened a “gathering on democracy and respect” with the leaders of all other parliamentary parties and sections of civil society, inviting the Tories to participate despite their role in fostering the anti-migration climate in which Farage’s party is thriving.59 As Alex Callinicos has noted in response to Mason’s arguments, the record of the popular front in the 1930s:

hardly suggests that “a temporary alliance of the centre and the left” is the way to beat fascism. The centre not only did not hold: it betrayed. This historical judgement is reinforced when we consider the nature of the contemporary “extreme centre”… These are the managers of the contemporary neoliberal order. Their failure is the very source of the present crisis. To ally oneself with their likes is to make it easier than it already is for the far-right to present itself as the real challenger to the status quo.60

Reinventing the united front

Britain was one of the places where, in the post-war period, revolutionaries sought to apply the tactic of the united front to new problems. This became possible after a new phase of international workers’ struggle, inaugurated by the French general strike of May 1968, began to loosen the Stalinist hold on the workers’ movement, allowing the revolutionary left to amass new forces of its own, albeit on a far smaller scale than in the inter-war years.

A new book by Geoff Brown, A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League, due to appear in summer 2025, will describe in detail how the SWP, one of the far-left organisations gaining a base of working-class militants following the 1968 uprising, was able to work with others to construct a mass united front against the rising threat of the fascist National Front (NF) in the late 1970s.

At the local level, the fascists were often met with opposition but systematic and united resistance at a national scale had remained elusive. Brown quotes the journalist Martin Walker, writing at the end of 1977, who argued: “the old ideological divisions still made it almost impossible for the far left and moderate anti-fascists to compose their differences in a disciplined common front”. An open letter by the leadership of the SWP to the Communist Party, then still the largest organisation to the left of Labour, proposing “joint meetings of the committees of our two parties responsible for anti-racialist activities, with a view to launching a joint campaign within the Labour movement to drive the fascists off the streets”, was met with rejection by the Communists.61

The Battle of Lewisham in August 1977 was a turning point. The NF planned to march through a multicultural area in south-east London. The SWP argued that it was necessary to physically stop the fascists, and this struck a chord with local black youth and others who shared this more radical approach. On the day, the NF found its planned route occupied by thousands of black and white protesters. Anti-fascists broke up the NF gathering, while the police were unable to clear the way for the march. The official response to these events was of almost unanimous condemnation of the SWP and those who had participated in the action, using phrases such as “red fascists”. Brown cites the Daily Mail, the Times, the Guardian, the Morning Star, Labour’s frontbenchers and the then deputy leader Michael Foot, and trade union leaders among those criticising the actions of the SWP.62 On the ground, the mood was very different. Paul Holborow, an SWP member, recalls:

When I went into the national office of the SWP on the Monday morning, the phone rang incessantly and the message was identical from all parts of London and parts of the country. They said that what you did on Saturday was completely brilliant and we fully support you, but we don’t agree with the wider policies of the SWP.63

Holborow was one of the two key figures in the establishment of the Anti Nazi League (ANL), the other being Labour’s Peter Hain, then a well-known campaigner against South African apartheid. A founding statement for the ANL sought “to unite all those who oppose the growth of the Nazis in Britain, irrespective of other political differences”. The ANL went on, along with Rock Against Racism (RAR), to provide the basis for one of the most impactful mass movements in post-war Britain, attracting hundreds of thousands to counter-demonstrations and mass cultural carnivals against the Nazis. It transformed the political atmosphere and drove anti-fascist and anti-racist arguments deep into workplaces and communities. The book provides countless examples of mass activity and creativity unleashed by the ANL and RAR, focused on election campaigns, trade union conferences, workplace activities, music and the wider cultural scene, work around football stadiums and much more. This approach had decisively undermined the NF, which was, by the late 1970s, in retreat. The achievement was possible because the SWP had succeeded in constructing a genuine united front able to operate independently of it:

The accusation that the ANL was an SWP front insulted the intelligence of the tens of thousands who were involved. The ANL’s supporters included 50 local Labour branches, 25 trades councils, 13 shop steward committees, 11 NUM [National Union of Mineworkers] lodges. Thirty union branches of engineering workers were affiliated to the ANL. There were also affiliated branches organising railway workers, civil servants, textile workers, local government staff, print workers, journalists, TV and radio technicians, post workers and firefighters. 26 union executive committees voted to support the ANL.64

The success of the ANL belonged to all of them, but the theoretical understanding of the united front, developed by Trotsky and others, and creatively applied, was an inspiration for revolutionaries. The same approach informed successor organisations to the ANL, such as Unite Against Fascism, or campaigning organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition founded to oppose the War on Terror of the early 2000s. These experiences encouraged revolutionaries elsewhere to adopt similar approaches, including the highly successful Greek anti-racist and anti-fascist United Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat (KEERFA), which played a pivotal role in opposing the Nazi organisation Golden Dawn.

The same understanding underpins Stand Up to Racism (SUTR), which developed out of UAF and, while retaining its role in mobilising against fascism, seeks also to confront non-fascist far-right formations, such as Reform UK, and the state racism that fuels their growth. The SWP contributes its efforts to constructing this united front, working with others who identify racism as a threat and agree on the need to combat it in a united fashion.65 Other recent initiatives, such as the We Demand Change campaign, launched in London in March 2025 at a 2,000-strong event, offers another arena where revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries can unite, in this case, to seek to build opposition to Keir Starmer’s attacks on working-class people, while debating and testing different ideas and approaches in practice.

The united front today

The forces of the revolutionary left in countries such as Britain today number at best a few thousands. The balance of forces is much more decisively tilted towards reformism than in the inter-war years, even if social democracy has also experienced a long period of decline. Two things continue to make the united front a relevant tactic for revolutionaries despite the profound changes the workers’ movement has undergone. First, reformist consciousness continues to dominate, a reality revolutionaries confront each day. Second, the project of winning a majority of workers to revolution remains the only viable strategy for those wanting to overcome capitalism, and this cannot be achieved simply through the abstract discussion of ideas. The united front continues to play an important role in this context. The experiences surveyed in this article show how defensive struggles can, by raising the confidence of the working class in its own collective power, also create a more favourable terrain for workers to go on the offensive.

This should always involve an assessment of whether and how the united front tactic can be applied, including consideration such as the balance of forces involved. A small party such as the SWP cannot appeal to the whole of the Labour Party, as the KPD could appeal to the SPD in Germany a hundred years ago. It can, however, propose such alliances to sections of the Labour left, to specific trade union leaders, and so on, with an orientation on using those national agreements to foster alliances at a local level, encouraging activists in different parties and none to engage in joint action. Allies in one front of struggle may be adversaries in another, and the basis for alliances may shift. For example, united resistance against austerity will look different under the current Labour government to under its Tory predecessor. Trade union leaders who backed protests over austerity under Tory rule may be much more hesitant to do so when the protests are directed at a Labour government. Equally, those involved in the united front against racism need to consider that, while Reform UK is at the forefront of racist scapegoating, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is now embracing elements of Nigel Farage’s rhetoric and deploying the state machine to ramp up deportations, to the dismay of other sections of Labour.

The balance of forces between revolutionaries and reformists today renders the project of making the revolutionary party a pole of attraction within united front activities a less straightforward proposition. Trotsky’s argument that revolutionaries only stand to gain from united front struggles that raise the combativity of the class is formally correct, but translating this into the numerical growth of revolutionary organisation is far from automatic. In the 1920s, the working class had participated in mass struggles, and levels of class consciousness and self-activity were high. This is far from the case today.

It was Labour that many newly politicised people in the ANL and RAR continued to join, as joining a reformist organisation rather than a revolutionary one appeared to be the next logical step.66 The same could be said of the Stop the War Coalition in the early 2000s, a period that saw the SWP playing a hegemonic role within the British radical left while its membership declined. This underlines the importance of revolutionaries matching their commitment to united action with a conscious and consistent effort to persuade those with whom they work that they should break with reformism and become revolutionaries, arguing and demonstrating the superiority of their tactics. It is also important that revolutionaries do not rely simply on united front activity to grow. Other methods of struggle and organisation, from street propaganda to creating spaces for Marxist ideological discussion, are also important. Just as absorbing theory in isolation from involvement in real struggle is unlikely to produce a revolutionary cadre that can intervene in the real world, practical activity that is not systematically theorised and incorporated into the body of revolutionary theory will, at best, produce good activists whose time in the ranks of revolutionaries will be brief.

Creating tension with reformist forces within the united front is further complicated by the fact that, due to low levels of struggle and class consciousness in the current period, the onus is often on revolutionaries to fight to preserve the unity of fronts. This can exercise a moderating pressure, discouraging participants from expressing their views or raising sharp disagreements. Navigating these complex waters is an art rather than a science, and those who hope to find readymade formulas for problems posed by the class struggle today in Trotsky’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s will likely go astray. Revolutionaries should be open about their ideas while campaigning alongside others and should openly argue over the methods of struggle, even when they know they are in a minority. Revolutionaries should always aspire to be the left pole within the united front, pushing for militant action and radical arguments.

Following from this, the bigger the revolutionary left builds in the coming years, the greater the possibility of pressurising reformists into joint actions that can draw many more workers into activity. Building a revolutionary left requires active engagement with the struggles in the class. In achieving this, the united front will continue to be a fruitful approach as long as revolutionaries remain a minority in the working class.

Héctor Sierra is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers party and is based in Glasgow. He is also the secretary of Stand Up to Racism Scotland and an activist in Stop the War Scotland.

Notes