Rummaging in the toolbox
Socialist groups and popular front “theory” today
Faced with a sharp rise in far right and anti-migrant groups across Europe, socialist groups have reached into the toolbox of working class history to search for ways to resist.
The majority of groups have scrabbled in the bottom of the box and come up with a theory called popular frontism. A minority have objected and proposed a United Front approach.
Understanding these different positions is really quite simple. The Popular Front theory simply says that the danger posed by fascists is so great that we should unite with democratic elements of the capitalist class to hold it at bay, organizing around a moderate programme defending democracy. This almost always rests on parliamentary alliances that can’t hold back a genuine fascist mobilisation.
Alternatively the United Front approach is to call for a unity only of working class and socialist forces, advancing a socialist programme to prepare the workers for the necessity to take power. The argument is that a fascist threat is the capitalists final card in an intense class struggle and the workers will be forced to counter this with a plan for a socialist society.
The United Front proposal is almost always derided as ultra-leftist. The Popular Front proposal is advanced over and over again, always failing and leading to defeat.
Why does it keep coming back?
The thing is that Social Democratic and Trade Union leaders are almost always reformist and live in an environment of collaboration and negotiation with capitalism. Popular Frontism is built in and can only be dislodged by a large, active and independent working class movement.
Clearly one of the key elements of the current situation, following decades of retreat, is the absence of radical working class parties or of independent working class movements. Workers do mobilise, but it is largely behind trade union leaders who want to do a limited deal and are able to quickly demobilise. Otherwise the workers organise electorally around social-democratic or reformist groups with a very restrictive electoral and parliamentary agendas.
The socialist groups themselves have been subject to the collapse of class consciousness involved in a long retreat. They align closely with the trade union bosses and tend to focus more on parliamentarianism and a gradualist reformism and give up on active confrontation with the state in favour of mild protest.
There is, however, still grounds for a focus on a revolutionary approach. We can provide an analysis of the situation and propose first steps for a renewed workers movement in the expectation that the workers will find that they have no choice but to stand by themselves and act in their own interests. It also allows new entrants to the socialist movements to gauge the difficulty of the task ahead and the skills needed, instead of a six-month flirtation with reformism followed by a retreat from politics.
Today many socialist groups justify the Popular Front by comparing the current situation to the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Then there was a mass armed offensive on the streets against the working class, the Fascists planned abolition of all democratic and workers rights and the institutions of democracy. Liberals expressed their horror and the urgency seemed to justify a broad unity, though the Popular Front government of France under León Blum refused to come to the aid of the Popular Front government of Spain and adopted the same position of “neutrality” of Britain and the USA.
The situation is quite different today. The offensive against worker’s standards of living, the demonization of refugees, the removal of democratic rights, the militarisation of society, support for genocide in Gaza and the drive to global war are all led by the capitalist states. The far right have moved away from a full fascist programme and are trailing behind the capitalists. An example of this is Meloni in Italy who took power and immediately swung behind the NATO club in support of unity with NATO. While not ignoring the threat of the Fascists, we must alert people to the main enemy, which is the capitalist state itself.