The communist or Third International was established following the Russian Revolution to coordinate the growth and development of revolutionary socialist parties around the world. It was needed because of the historic failure of the old Second (‘socialist’) International to oppose imperialism and the race to the first world war and to be prepared to break with capitalism.
The newly established communist parties were small and or very small and faced much larger and better resourced reformist socialist, or social democratic, parties At the fourth Congress of the Communist International, the last before its full Stalinist degeneration, the delegates voted through the policy of the ‘United Front’. This policy was largely based on the successful tactics adopted by the Bolshevik party under Lenin and Trotsky.
This tactic was designed as a means to maximise workers’ opposition to reaction and to help the new revolutionary socialist parties to grow. The United Front involved the coordination of mass working-class parties, trade unions and other workers’ organisations to defeat the threat of fascism, which had already risen in Italy and to seek agreement between the parties to work together democratically for the advancement of workers. For the communists, the right to political independence, including full freedom of criticism of other forces, was an essential part of the United Front policy.
The workers’ united front was from the start a tactic of struggle against reaction and also exposed the limits and failures of the policies of the reformist social democrats . It offered revolutionary socialist parties the opportunity to build by challenging reformism, while advancing the workers’ struggle.
Moreover the demand of communist parties for ‘class unity’ was one that was readily accepted by workers who did not understand the refusal of the reformists to work together in a united front. The tactic was successfully deployed in a number of countries and remains of relevance to socialists today.
However the tactic of the workers’ united front was opposed by both the reformist parties’ leaders, who understood it to be a potentially fatal threat, but also by the bureaucrats led by Stalin who had seized control over the communist party of Russia following the death of Lenin. They had no interest in building independent revolutionary socialist parties around the world and world revolution; instead they sought to transform the Third International into a tool for the leverage for the interests of their own bureaucratic power-caste.
The bureaucratically run Third International, created by purging the old revolutionary leaderships and imposing Zinovievist party discipline, still faced the growing challenge of fascism. Over time they brought forward the slogan of the ‘Popular Front’. This consisted not just of the workers’ parties, and trade unions but included so called ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ bourgeois parties or factions. This new tactic was better suited to the ruling bureaucracy in Russia and provided a mechanism for them to engage with the ruling capitalist and reformist parties in the western countries as opposed to advancing class-based politics.
The inclusion of bourgeois parties in the Popular Front was welcomed by the reformist social democratic leaderships. They were in a position to play off the “extremes” and to counter the demands of the workers e.g. agrarian reform, socialisation of the means of production workers, replacing standing armies with workers militia, etc. This was to be fatal for the working class in the case of Spain in the 1930s where the attractiveness of revolutionary socialist politics to working class people was undermined and this undermined the opposition to Franco.
The promotion of the workers’ united front or elements of it remains a key tactic of revolutionary socialists today in building the struggle for working class interests. Here it is more vital than ever because it enables us to build struggles based on class politics, avoiding the poisonous influence of sectarian based politics which are divisive for the working class.