THE POPULAR FRONT

Cee This was the more blatant in that the personnel turnover reflected a major political one. Socialism was still held to be possible and now, indeed, probably in the single country of Russia. Now, however, the bureaucracy reacted to the lessons of the Bukharin era by prophesying that this was to be supplemented by revolutions elsewhere. Coalitions with the bourgeoisie were no longer necessary. Communist parties were to be built to fight alone. In Ireland, this meant breaking with Larkin and his Irish Worker league in favour of building revolutionary workers’ groups as nuclei for anew Communist Party. But the new line did not abandon class collaboration only.

The new Third Period was held to mean greater class division and also treachery in the workers’ ranks. So the United Front was scrapped. No alliance was allowed between Communist and Social Democratic Parties. The latter were again denounced as Social Fascist. This was developed, albeit in different ways, to prove that no common ground was possible. In many countries this was extended to the trade union movement; in America, the admittedly corrupt leaders of the craft unions in the American Federation of Labour were condemned as Fascist and an attempt was made to found an alternative trade union 32 movement. It failed; the Congress of Industrial Organization developed independently. The climatic disaster of the Third Period (after those of post-war revolution and of 1920s stabilization) occurred in Germany where what was, by 1933, the world’s largest Communist Party outside the U.S.S.R. was outlawed by the victorious Nazi dictatorship. This had been prepared by a consistent refusal to accept the reality of the Fascist danger or to act with the Social Democrats for the common defence of the working class, except eventually and under pressure, at rank and file level (United Fronts From Below). On one notorious occasion, the German Communists even supported a Nazi-initiated Referendum against the Social Democratic Government of Prussia (the Red Referendum). Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Nazi leader, was dismissed as no worse than the Right-wing capitalist democrats who preceded him and as likely to be a purely temporary prelude to the Communists seizing power. Instead, when he did become German Chancellor, they were smashed with little resistance. This event convinced Trotsky that the Comintern was incorrigible and he set to work to build a Fourth International.

THE POPULAR FRONT

This is not the end of the story of the Third International as an organization. Stalin as well as Trotsky was shocked by the establishment of Fascist rule over the strong imperialist State of Germany. Over the eighteen months after Hitler became Chancellor he moved away from the Third Period politics, though he never abandoned them formally.

Officially the German defeat was blamed, like that of the Chinese before it, on the national section’s leadership. Those of it who escaped to Russia would find themselves eventually in the same circumstances as those whom the Nazis had captured. At the head of the Comintem, Manuilsky was downgraded in 1934 by the appointment as Executive Secretary of the Bulgarian Georgei Dimitrov (1882-1949). He had distinguished himself in the previous year by his courage and intelligence (particularly compared to his German comrades) as one of the accused in the Nazis first (and because of him abortive) major show trial, the Reichstag fire trial.

Dimitrov’s policy was formulated at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress in 1935. Itrepresented areturn to Bukharin’s class-collaboration only schematized and carried to new extremes inthe name of the People’s 33 Front Against Fascism. In the U.S.A, the Communist Party Secretary, Earle Browder (1891-1973), was to run in the 1936 Presidential election only to emphasize the respectability of President Franklyn D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). After this the Party gave up running its own Presidential candidates until 1968. In Britain not just trade union bureaucrats but the Liberal Party and, on occasion, ‘progressive’ Conservatives such as Winston Churchill (1874-1965) were offered Stalinite support, to little effect. In Ireland, though the Communist Party there was not liquidated again, it wasted its resources by maintaining its Popular Front embryo, the Republican Congress long after it was clear that it was supported only by itself and a group of sympathizers and Socialist Republicans.

But the Popular Front was a disaster in those countries where United Front work with the Social Democrats was a real option, where the Communist Party had acertain mass support. In France, the Party was allied with the Socialists but insisted on the coalition being extended to the Radical Socialists. This was a party that had broken with Social Democracy shortly after Millerand but for the same class-collabora-

tionist reasons, surviving (unlike him) by becoming the party of the anti-clerical capitalists : it was like Fianna Fail with the positive virtue of anti-clericalism and the vice of commitment to imperialism. The Popular Front thus founded won the general election of 1936. Although itnationalized the Banque de France and the arms producers, it could not get votes for women. After several changes of Government posts it collapsed in 1938 when its Radical Socialist members formed a coalition with other bourgeois parties to try to appease the demands of Nazi Germany. In 1940, after the invasion of France, the Popular Front Parliament voted overwhelmingly to surrender its authority to a Collaborationist non-parliamentary regime based in Vichy. Even in its most successful period, the French Popular Front hesitated to break with Britain in the latter’s refusal to help the Popular Front Government in Spain. Here, where there had been no successful bourgeois revolution, the contradictions were producing a permanent revolutionary development which the Popular Front could not withstand.

A counter-revolutionary putsch of Army officers nearly won overnight but for the opposition of the workers. Due to the latter’s organizational weakness (the Anarchists were particularly strong), the Popular Front was able to divert the energies of many to defend the Spanish Republic in a purely military struggle against Fascism and then, led particularly by the Communist Party, to massacre the Left-wing. Because of these manoeuvres, much of Spain was lost to the counter-revolution either because of its opponents’ diversions (or non-recognition of either side in the Civil War) which was followed by France but ignored by the Fascist States, the Republic was defeated in 1939. Stalin made his agents in Spain, including his State’s Consul, scapegoats for the failure of his political line.

Three further points must be noted.

Another reason for the Spanish Republic’s defeat was the fact that the shock troops of the regime were colonial levies from Spanish-occupied Morocco. The Popular Front could have neutralized these by granting the colony self-determination. It refused to do so, partly because French control of the rest of Morocco would thereby be jeopardized and because the French Popular Front, mainly through its Radical Socialist members, was committed to holding its State’s colonial empire. In 1939 this practice was formalized by the Comintern Executive : it was no longer in favour of immediate self-determination forall colonies; only for those few under actual Fascist control. It renounced one of the more essential differences between itself and its predecessor. On the other hand, one country where 34 the Popular Front strategy was not the disaster it might have been was China, partly because the Communist Party there had learnt empirically from the massacres of the 1920s. From 1935 the Party sought to ally with their comrades’ murderers against the pro-Fascist Japanese who had invaded the country.

However, it had already fought successfully to establish a base in the north-west where the Kuomintang had no presence. The latter was also under pressure from Japan.

When, in 1937, the two organizations did come to an alliance agreement, the Communist Party’s concessions were mainly formal rather than real. The most important, the official merger of the Chinese armies, was negated by Kuomintang weakness, The Communist Party of China did grow in the Popular Front period and did so without the disasters that affected Parties elsewhere.

It was still the exception to the rule.

Another apparent exception was Chile, which elected a Popular Front Governmentin 1938. Unlike France and Spain this broke up without catastrophe. However, its comparative success led to its revival (Unidad Popular) in 1970. After some-initial reforms it was paralyzed by its self-imposed limitations and fell to a military coup in 1973. Meanwhile by 1939 it was clear that the People’s Front strategy was not stopping Fascism in Europe. To protect Russia (since 1936 officially 35 ‘a Socialist society’ and with millions of framed trial victims to prove it), Stalin made a pact with Nazi Germany in August. The subsequent partition of Poland between the two powers was the beginning of the Second World War, though only Germany was involved immediately. The Communist Parties outside Russia divided. Those in the countries opposing Fascist States and their allies (the Chinese Party was an exception because Japan did not enter the War until 1941) preached revolutionary defeatism in the most formal Leninist fashion. Those existing under Fascism began, as Trotsky remarked, to make Social Fascism a reality. Many Stalinists were demoralized but the leaderships remained firm. The Comintern’s next and final policy change was less traumatic. In June 1941 Germany invaded Russia. Once again the Popular Front was the order of the day. The only national casualty was the Communist Party of Ireland. It liquidated the remains of its twenty-six county branches into the Labour Party rather than advocating Irish alliance with Britain against the Fascist invaders of the ‘Socialist Society’. In Northem Ireland the Stalinist militants became, as the Communist Party of Northern Ireland, upholders of the status quo. There was one other casualty. In the new war conditions, the U.S.S.R was allied to the ‘democratic’ impeee NE ee ee a en