Mapping The United Front Debate with Brandon Lightly

What happens when “march separately, strike together” meets real history? We dive into the tangled story of the United Front—where it came from, how it changed, and why its results ranged from lifeline to dead end. Starting with Marx and the First International and running through the Second International’s fights over ministerialism, we track Trotsky’s 1921 thesis, the KPD’s open letter strategy, and the Comintern’s hard pivot from Third Period sectarianism to Popular Front coalitions. 

The stakes become real in the case studies. Austria’s disciplined but defensive Red Vienna built its own workers’ defense corps and still fell in 1934. Germany’s left split on the eve of catastrophe, as “social fascist” rhetoric blocked a united response to Hitler. France and Spain saw Popular Fronts assemble fast and fracture faster, with internal purges and competing chains of command that drained class power. In the United States, Third Period organizing from below helped seed CIO militancy, then the Popular Front swelled reach under Roosevelt—only to leave unions exposed to loyalty oaths, purges, and Taft–Hartley. Popularity rose; leverage did not.

China breaks the pattern by changing the rules. The first KMT–CCP alliance ended in massacre; the second, forged under Japanese invasion, preserved independent command, territory, and institutions. That structure let the CCP build the mass line across peasant base areas and survive to win. Labels aside, the mechanics mattered most: concrete demands that grow capacity, strict organizational independence, and timing that seizes initiative before reaction hardens. We pull these threads together to ask the live questions: When does unity build power? When does it liquidate it? And what would a front look like today that protects independence while winning real gains?

If this helped sharpen your thinking, follow the show, share it with a comrade, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway or disagreement—we’ll feature the best ones next time.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Setting The Agenda

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmblog. And Brandon Lightly has returned to talk with us today about a lot of history. Brandon is an independent researcher and general socialist history buff, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, you're not. I'd say amateur history buff, but yeah, that works.

Defining The United Front

C. Derick Varn 1:15

And today we are getting to the second part of the popular in United Fronts, which is the United Front. Now, Brandon's gonna comment on the second half third of the show, maybe two-thirds, about why this is so confusing. But this is gonna be one of the times where we're actually going to mix a VAR and lecture and an interview together to clarify some things before we dig into the history. Because the history of the United Front is frankly fucking confusing. All right, so first off, what is the United Front? The United Front is a political strategy where different organizations, usually those representing the working class, although also some class collaborationist parties are sometimes allowed to participate. It is a defensive pact and an offensive pact together. It's offensive so that people can disagree on reform a revolution, our minimum demands are transitional program or whatever. So, for example, even sometimes you'll have people who have united fronts with one group that doesn't respect it back, such as defenses Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist parties in the United States.

SPEAKER_03 2:50

Yes.

Levels Of Unity Explained

Precursors In The First And Second Internationals

C. Derick Varn 2:54

But I'm gonna go through the basic history, why it is associated with Trotskyism, even though that's not entirely fair. We'll talk about the precursors first, and we'll talk about the issues with it. With the caveat, also is good luck trying to apply this to a US context, even though people do all the time. Okay. The United Front formally was developed in the Third International in 1921. However, I'm going to go through the history of the stances of communist organizations, such as the Amsterdam Congress in 1904, arguably the first international in 1861, definitely some of the party unity congresses that created the SP Day would actually probably be precursors are where Trotsky, and it was Trotsky in this case, got the articulation from. He didn't pull it out of his butt. Now to get to the core logic of the United Front, you can think of it this way: march separately, strike together. You do not form coalition governments with these groups, or even if you do, you do not sit in the same government like you could be in a coalitionary opposition, but you're not gonna agree to like run the country together. It is a strengthened numbers argument, usually invoked in a crisis. Now, one of the confusing things about this, though, is this applies both in political and in worker context. So you can talk about United Fronts of Unions, and you can talk about United Fronts political parties. It is generally considered a defensive unity to protect workers' organizations from state repression or far-right violence or from assaults from reactionary forces. It is also seen as a way to win necessary reforms to make a revolutionary moment possible, although that element of it is contested even by certain Trotsky's today. There are three levels of unity. The United Front from Below, which is the rank and file, workers of different parties join the same picket line, our defense committee, often ignoring that their leaders hate each other or that they have ideological disagreements. Every union that's ever existed ever is actually organized along these lines. The United Front from Above, which involves contract negotiation between different parties, such as Communist Parties and Socialist Parties signing a co-governing pact without subsuming their identities. Now, some people see the Popular Front as an extended form of the United Front. I don't think it is, and I'll get into why, because when we go into the precursors, there's a clear precursor to the Popular Front in French socialist and France in the 19th century, way before the French reinvented it in 1935. Yeah. And honestly, this distinction is a problem for the precursor organizations, the precursors to the formalization of the United Front, too. I do believe Mike McNair is correct when he says that Trotsky's United Front and the Third International is actually an extension of what we actually saw in the first and second. That he's actually on good grounds when he comes up with it. But there's also a good argument to be made that the at least the Borderist and Third Period Third Period Marxist-Leninist slash Stalinist interpretation of the United Front does have a grounding in Marx, which is gonna and I don't think it's resolvable by pointing to any text. Gonna do a lecture on this, but so there are two problems with this, and this is a problem that you also have with the popular front. The first one one, the the reformist parties generally see the more radical parties in the United Front as trying to poach their members. Two, there are radical elements that fear that working with moderate elements like reformists breed ground with working with bourgeois elements, which they see as a total disaster, and it's hard to justify not being in a coalitional government once you win together if you're willing to do it in the first place. Now, there's some additional arguments to that, and that's Bordergate's argument against the United Front from above, but well, actually, see, Bordergo wasn't against all United Fronts, Jamin's argument was against all united fronts, as was the Council Communist. So we'll we'll get into those distinctions. There's also some confusing things that we're gonna have to get into. Like, is New Democracy a United Front, a popular front class collaborationism, or its own damn thing? And if you don't know what new democracy is, that's a specific movement in China under Mao in the late 50s, early 60s. Yeah. Um, so let's get into the history because this history is long and confusing, and then we'll and then we'll talk about specific readings, and it'll get even more confusing. Yeah. So the United Front was officially codified in 1921. We'll get into that, but there are precursors to it. The biggest is the Marx and the First International in 1864. The International Working Man Association was essentially an attempt at a United Front. All the organizations represented themselves. Now, what's interesting about the International Working Fort International Workers Association is we're not even at a point where you can distinguish unions, parties, and nationalist groups as separate things exactly. Because when you talk about a United Front from above and below, that makes it clear that there's a distinction between those of you who are like trade unionist or perdonist and then state socialists like LaSalle and Blanc, and maybe even Blanqui. Those distinctions aren't clear in 1864. So Marx thought it was best at the time to unite around specific immediate goals, mostly reformist goals, actually, which probably surprises a lot of people today. And he thought this was necessary, not because you shouldn't try to win the reformist goal. In fact, the I am not a Marxist is actually aimed specifically at the French Marxist Gidet, a friend of Paul Fourier, a Marxist son-in-law, that tried to argue that we should push for reforms that would fail and in failure radicalized towards people, towards socialism. And Marx basically said that's stupid, implying that they'll never trust you if you're deliberately pushing reforms that you think will fail. It's that these reforms will have to be fought for tooth and nail and push you further and further into a revolutionary pattern to maintain them. Now, whether or not that's actually true is a completely different argument than whether or not Marx thought it, and that's clearly what Marx thought. He was also critiquing the Miller on affair. Well, the Miller affair is something he was afraid of. So it's he can't say that he was critiquing the Miller on affair, it happens in 1889. Marx is well dead by that point. But what he was afraid of is like LaSalle sitting in a government with Bismarck or socialists sitting in a bourgeois government, there were many times in which Marx threatened to leave being the international representatives of the espay day. I mean, he was he was never truly in the espa day because he was in the international branch, he didn't live in Germany. If Babel and Co. would sit in a coalitionary government in a capitalist state, this does happen explicitly in 1889, and this splits up the French socialist. Alexandre Mitterrand joined a capitalist cabinet in 1889. This triggered a massive debate in the Second International that should socialists join governments they don't control. This led to a distinction with the cooperation from above, which is joining a capitalist government, uh, from a unity from below, which is workers fighting together in the streets, even for liberal reforms that would help capitalists. And the United Front was designed to avoid the Trump of Millerandism by keeping the parties independent of capitalist government. And this was crucially justified in the letters of Marx and Ingalls to Babel and the Elder Libnik. Now, I will admit today this gets a little, I'm gonna critique Lars Lee a little bit because Lars Lee admits this, but also like doesn't really deal with the fact that that some of what we see later on is sitting in capitalist governments, uh particularly in the Ebert regime. So we'll come back to that. This does really, really become important in Russia because in the 1905 Russian Revolution, remember, children, there are two Russian revolutions, there are two competing ideas that emerged that prefigure Trotsky in the United Front. One is the minimum program or programmatic unity, which is socialist agreed on a list of immediate uh demands such as voting rights and labor laws that they could fight for, even if it meant fighting for alongside liberals. And this was the stance of the Russian Social Democratic Party. And then there were the permanent revolutionists, which is a term often misunderstood today, which began arguing that workers should take the lead in democratic struggles because the middle class, which was bourgeois, was too weak to fight the czar, specifically in the Russian context, and thus leading the whole people from the workers' perspective as the vanguard became seen as a prototype for the United Front as a as a way of leadership through action. This is Trotsky, this is Barvos, this is a bunch of people over there in Russia. Permanent revolution does not mean revolution goes on forever. Um, although permanent revolution gets expanded in Trotskyist doctrines in different ways, but this is not about permanent revolution. So our stage theory of revolution, whether or not there's two stages or three, which is an ML debate. So we'll come back to that in 1904. Uh, pre, you know, as this is going on in Russia, there's also the Amsterdam Statement of Unity of Socialists. It's a statement of the Second International International Socialist Conquer Congress, which set up the stage for really all future socialist debate. There is a conflict that comes in play called the Dresden Resolution, and this is really important in France. And the French split into two rival parties, one of which is really promoted by uh Jean Jarret, who is you know basically a believer that socialists should work with liberal democrats to protect the French Republic from right-wing monarchists, and that they should do so in a united government. This is basically the second call for a popular front. And then there's August Babel, who argues that that sitting in a bourgeois government was a suicide pact for the working class because you'd have to answer for what the bourgeois government does, and you fundamentally oppose them.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

I do think Babel makes a very strong point with that, and I think we've seen it play out in many a case study since then. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 16:37

Well, Babel's actually parroting Marx's Marx's work in the letters. Like, I've read the letters around like the letters back and forth between the critique of the critique of the Gotha program. I always mispronounce it, and and all this, and what you see is that Marx is like, do not sit in a bourgeois government, just don't do it. Like, we're doing electoralism, we're pushing for reforms. You can even work with liberals in the streets, but you do not sit in their government. The resolution is that Babel won and uh force unity in France. It mandated that the French Socialists should form into a single party, which led to the creation from the left from the the workers' party in science to the section France uh workers international in 1905, are the and I'm not I'm not even going to try to say that in French. Um, and that but we'll say that is the SFIO. I know people who's like, well, you always pronounce the German letters a German way, but you won't do the French way. I you don't want me to. Uh ministerialism and and and Milarandism is officially rejected, and there's the there's an establishment of one socialist party for per country that'll sit in the comintern. That's gonna be a problem later on, um, a big problem, especially with the 21 points, but yeah. Uh so this is where you get the kind of three basic points that become the foundation of United Frontism. One, unity is a requirement of socialist fragmented socialist movements are seen as a weakness. This is also tied into the uh the centralism that you see in both Marx and LaSalle. Two, you you do not form alliances with with liberals. By liberals, we mean capitalist, that the front should be a strictly worker-based phenomenon. Actually, Bordega and Daimin, and also the council communists are going to insist that this is one of the things the common turn and the second international or the second second international or whatever. There's lots of second internationals, our internationals are confusing.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

I'm having got there's even more fourth internationals and fifths.

C. Derick Varn 19:07

Yeah, there's there's there's there's a bunch of fourth internationals, and I haven't gotten into the black internationals or the anarchist internationals or the other socialist internationals that happen after the second international the second second international dissolves. Oh my god, can we get better naming conventions?

SPEAKER_00 19:26

That's part of our intellectual history to make everything confusing and everything be named the same thing, right? As we'll learn with the United Front.

C. Derick Varn 19:33

But part of the problems is that leads to the United Front strategy is the the the establishment of the SFIO mirroring the SP Day means that you have forced unity between reformists and revolutionaries and even the socialist right. So in the SP Day, you have pro-imperial and anti-imperial factions in the same party, which is why the 21 Front's gonna be a part a problem. You can actually say that in some ways the United Front is also trying to deal with the fact that the Amsterdam Congress resolution don't actually work because these parties actually cannot really stay together on this broad of a socialist platform, at least, not particularly not when you're banning factions. So if you compare 1904 to 1921, 1922, when Trotsky's coming up with the with the with the United Front Strategy, there was no way to do that kind of unity organization. Not only did you have the Mensheviks, and you had but what we can call the red Mensheviks and the white Mensheviks, or the Mensheviks who were willing to go into exercise, but did not oppose the did not fight against our oppose the Bolsheviks, and the white Mensheviks who were willing to fight with reactionaries to overthrow the Bolsheviks. And then you also had the various anarchistic and Narodniki socialist and quasi-socialist factions, such as the social revolutionaries, who are kind of descendants of the Narodniki, and then the various anarchist factions, the platformist, etc. Plus, you had the fact that there was not enough of a working class either in in the Soviet Union in particular. I mean, our in Tsarist Russia and the Russian Empire, excuse me, and the in the what was to become the Soviet Union to establish a mass workers-based party in all the areas of the country. You could do it in St. Petersburg, you could do it in Moscow, but you're not doing it in like Vladivostok.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

So I mean, we do see this even with like how the Ukrainian territory overwhelmingly goes towards like Makhno's forces and like that anarchist branch, while like Moscow and Leningrad and stuff, or St. Petersburg at the time, but like they'll be going towards more the Bolshevik model, the Marxist model.

1905 Russia And Programmatic Unity

Amsterdam Congress And French Divides

KPD’s Open Letter And Trotsky’s Thesis

C. Derick Varn 22:02

Yeah. So you have this setting up. Let's we have then this precursor that isn't just the international and the and the Amsterdam Congress, which I think is actually under just under discussed in socialist history. Like it's actually super damn important. It creates problems later, and I don't hear it talked about enough in the context of like, why is there a problem with the socialist right? It actually is a consequence of the Amsterdam thesis, more than even, you know. accepting the Lesalians into the espé, which is like you know what a lot of like Marxist humanists and left communists will say is the original sin or whatever. So this brings us to the formal united front. So in some ways there's an open letter in the KP Day in 1921 that is happening simultaneously almost convergently with what Trotsky is doing. And that is the first and that is the first hint of something like a United Front being formalized. It was sent in January 8 1921 the KP Day. Often it's considered like really the birth certificate of the United Front even though it's not formalized in any real way until Trotsky does it in 1921. I mean it's the same year. One of the things that is on the the KP day's mind is the crushing of the Spartacus Bund, you know, in 1919 and then the cap punch in 1920 the KPD was a mass party but it was isolated from the majority of the German working class. And in fact if you looked at the statistics there's a there's a strong indication that the German working class that was employed was mostly in the SPD or the US Pede the independent socialists which were the kind of split offs who opposed World War who opposed World War I kinda but not as vigorously as the communists did. And that's where like Kotsky and and good old Bernstein and the people who opposed the Ebert government but you know were they in temporarily they get the they actually go back into it in the 20s this was primarily the work of Paul Levy he he advocated a transitional approach to winning over everyone and he kind of went back to the concrete demands model that you saw in the early second international which is one you hit economic defense first you advocate for workers control you call for the disarmament of of things like the FRICOR and other paramilitary groups so you're not disenfranchising the right yet but you are disarming them and uh cooperating with liberals to do so you also then try to arm workers uh which he called the proletarian hundreds which is kind of funny when I think about the black hundreds but whatever to defend their organization so he's basically saying that unions should have militias as should the party and he calls for an immediate resumption of trade and diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union and that the that we'll kind of work with the US payday and the S payday if they stop fucking with Russia um and this this kind of leads to a twofold strategy the letter has a maneuver which is designed to create a win-win situation for the communist if the leaders agree the workers' conditions will approve and the KP day will get credit for the victory but that does justify the idea that the right wing and the center of social democrats have that they're trying to approach workers that that's you know part of the strategy here and it's like almost explicitly stated in the open letter and then two if the leaders refuse the K Bay day to was going to say look the the the socialists aren't going to defend you they're not going to represent you they refuse to even the fight for for basic demands this caused the beginning of the left opposition left opposition's gonna split into interesting things and this is where things are interesting everyone always associates the left opposition with Trotsky and that's fair the left opposition the workers opposition you like merge together in the USSR when Trotsky's there after Stalin dies but in this time period the left opposition is Bordega because he's one of the people from you get critiques in left communism that's still in the party I mean Borga's like the only person I can think of who's called out by name who remained in you know party unity Zanoviev and Bukharin normally associated with the with the right they said that Levi was being an opportunist and that it would blur the lines between revolution and reform and between the social democrats and the communists Lenin and Trotsky interestingly um actually supported Levi and actually called for that being the model that all communist parties should work on and this is kind of what leads Trotsky to write the the the United Front strategy so the the thing here is we see the United Front normally set up as a defensive tactic here it's an offensive tactic. They see it as it's it's helping either way so this kind of gets us to a couple of different things that happen and we have to talk about parallel history so I guess I should first talk talk about the United Front in the context of the Soviet Union because that's where it's formalized in the Comintern and then I need to go back and talk about the Austrian Marxists and the social democrats and then we're gonna talk about the Chinese and then we'll finally get to me shutting up and letting Brandon talk so Trotsky is instrumental in drafting he's the primary drafter of the thesis on the united front for the for the Comintern he believed that communists should oppose social democratic leaders with specific pro point on proposals for joint action so this is a kind of picking up Paul Levy's point about you can work if you have specific things that you demand if leaders agreed the workers won if leaders disagreed they were exposed as obstacles to the workers' interest and even obstacles to reform so from Trotsky picking up on Paul Levy this is a win-win argument so this is where things stand from 1921 to 1922 this is only rejected in 1927 and what is weird about this is the left communist and the Marxist Leninists even though they do radically different things Border opposes the Bolshevization of the various national communist parties this is something but he actually agrees with Stalin on third periodism even though he would never say that um and I'm gonna get to that when we talk about Border's critique of this in a minute but Stalin moved the common turn to third periodism declaring that social democrats were social fascists and that Trotsky was also a fascist you know fifth columnist and that eventually most of the Bolshevik leadership was too Trotsky was an exile at the time he's actually in Turkey when this happens he's not even made it to Mexico yet he freaks out and says that fascism is a unique threat even though it's socially unstable I think Trotsky's analysis of fascism is actually interesting because I agree with like 70% of it 30% of it I think the actually the Lovestone and Bukar Knights in exile were actually more correct about that it was also closer to Bonapartism. Trotsky was also just concerned about the basic math that the working class the different stratas of it were split between the KP day and the SP Day the US the U the US payday had had liquidated itself back into the S payday and he thought that by refusing to work together that basically Hitler was going to be able to to roll then in 1935 the Comintern goes back to unity but this time adopting basically Millerinism as a basis for the Popular Front Trotsky really opposed this in fact he argued that the Popular Front was essentially a strike breaking alliance and class collaborationist to the point that that as soon as the war was over it was going to be used to crush communists and while audience I know I get accused of being a Trotskyite all the time I'm just gonna say this even most Marxist Leninists today would agree with me. Yeah that that's that's historically panned out that is exactly what happened almost it's like almost like verbatim wet handout now there's problems with Trotsky stance like Trotsky didn't and this and the Fourth International didn't really want to want the allies to fight world war two and you know stuff they don't talk about anymore but nonetheless okay so that's Trotsky and all this and that really like Trotsky being marginalized in this context is really also going to tell you what you need to know about where the Soviet Union's at the Soviet Union actually supports the Popular Front from below what is interesting about that from our standpoint is in a little bit in China definitely in the United States this actually works out but what you see in popular frontism I'm I mean the not I said popular front uh United Front from below from 1927 to 1936 uh formally uh 1935 they allow the French and the Italians to do a popular front it's not till 1936 I think that they formally adopt the the popular front as common turn policy and this is also complicated by the Molotov Ribbentrop pact which we'll get to because that kind of throws a bomb in the both the popular and the united front yep so you have this feeling now Bordega had basically been kicked out of the Communist Party one of the things he helped found Rabgramshi and Agliati whose name I know I'm mispronouncing I also don't speak Italian sorry people in the early 1920s when they split from the socialist party and again you can see this as a result of the fail of the failed Amsterdam Congress strategy they the right and the left of so of social democracy much less the communists after after the 1917 revolution can't really stay together and it isn't this right of social democracy where the leadership of a lot of the fascist movement particularly in Italy but a little bit in Germany comes from that cannot be ignored I know that no one likes it no one really likes to talk about it it is absolutely true that fascism did not have the same class base as as the socialist and the communists did but their leadership did come mostly out of not just I mean what's weird about the fascist leadership coming out of the the socialist party is it came out of the maximalist in Italy and the reformist ring so it came out of the left and the right of the Italian Socialist Party. Yeah the intermixing of uh syndicalism as well I feel like is also been an underdiscussed aspect of specifically Italian fascism right which weirdly is one of those things where Oswald Mosley of all people um actually was the most syndicalist fascist I could think of because the Italians didn't actually do syndicalism except by sectional bargaining which was set up by which is set up by the Italians just like the Vici or the people set up the French welfare system. But you know we we don't talk about that but basically this is this is a return to the democratic blockism and Bortiga and the left communist as well as the council communists hate this and it's a disagreement on tactics I mean interestingly Border was accused of being a Trotskyist which is kind of wild if you think about Borderist and Trotskyist today and how much they kind of hate each other thought Trotsky was too centrist that he was too attached to the flexible tactics of the of the early Comintern where Border believed that he was a real Leninist in the room more Leninist than Lenin even and that he understood Lenin's true true meaning more than Lenin did and that an intransient policy was needed where the party never hides its face never hides its goal its goals never makes any concession to political formations of workers but does make concessions to workers formations so again Border actually supports the United Front from below he does he's like you don't form a democratic bloc yet even to fight fascism like in fact Border argues that fascism is just a particularly nasty form of capitalism but it's basically just capitalism he also argues that for workers democracy he eventually decides that democracy is capitalist like not just capitalist democracy is capitalist but democracy as such as capitalist I mean he hated the word democracy like kind of almost irrationally well there was that like there was like elite theory that was coming out in Italy at that time too like like Mosk Mosca Mosca Mosca Pareto Pareto yeah um there was some weird stuff happening when it came to democracy in Italy right and so Border comes up with dramatic the organic centralism that's a unique to to him thing which is like that basically there would be a technocratic emergence within the party by organic unity just if you focus on the program to the exclusion of everything else because it would be obvious as a scientific truth I mean obviously I think this is bullshit it doesn't work but um I I tried to believe it for a time it's actually the part of Border that I find the most ridiculous and even was when I was more sympathetic to him. But you know it's actually funny I I read this one thing where what's his face everyone's favorite not even a real Stalinist Stalinist apologetic Gorbafer actually misattributes Trotsky calling Stalin the grave of the revolution no bortiger did and he did it to he did it in 1926 to Stalin's face wow so I don't think I knew that actually yeah when he was still in the the the comintern at the at the executive committee because he was the leader he was not the secretary the general secretary of the of the communist party that exists yet but he was the leader of the communist party more or less he he called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution in 1936 at the sixth plenum it's you know man was not was not there and what I find it funny that that fur attributed this to Trotsky what I think is Borderga held against Trotsky and Trotsky didn't join him he expected him to join him and Trotsky did not and in fact Border actually said this was democratic parliamentary caution and thus Trotsky couldn't completely be trusted even though he had defended Trotsky in print in the past wow so people who like Border have beef at Trotsky because he basically called Trotsky a coward um which is funny um but this is something that I think you have to deal with like Border rejects Trotsky's willingness to form United Fronts from above he does not think that you should be like he's basically like we separated from the socialists for a reason we're not going back and we definitely aren't siding with the socialists when they're making deals with bourgeois liberals to fight the fascists so that's where Borga ends up the council communists don't work with anybody um that's not entirely true at all times but it definitely is true in this time so we don't have to talk about them they reject all fronts united and popular and then this brings us to what happens in Germany with the United Fronts and I gotta go to Austria. Maybe I should go to Austria first Germany's depressing let's go to Austria first Austria yeah because Austrian Marxism is actually an attempt to make the United Front work a little better that's kind of it there's two things that are unique to Austrio Marxism one is cultural but not political nationalism so they believe that like you know the various nations should have their own political organizations within the same polity and that makes sense if you think about the Austrian Hungarian Empire like what they're coming out of that's a multinational state anyway but they yeah this is this is the Bauer program essentially yeah so that's one thing about Austrio Mark Marxism and Otto Bauer's program and the other thing that comes out of this is their centrist position so Adler Bauer and then also Hilferting and you know Hilfording they reject Bolshevism's dictatorial methods and they actually say that they tried to force revolution in unprepared countries and thus having the bourgeois and socialist revolutions at the same time thus confusing everything. Ironically for those of you who know American history socialist history Daniel de Leon accused the SPD of the same thing and they also got mad at the ministerialism and the willingness of the Germans to sit in government basically ignoring everything that was agreed on at the Amsterdam Congress. So they proposed the United Front as a path to reunification. So this for them was not just on a defensive tactic as it was in the Proto-United front period a defensive and offensive tactic as it was for Trotsky this for them was a way to get the communists and the socialists back in the same band so if the workers believe they could be united in one massive organization objective conditions in the crisis would force the organization towards revolution thus the reform of revolution is solved organically this leads to the Vienna union which is often called the second and a half international this starts in 1921 where they fart the International Working Union of Socialist Parties or the Vienna Union they wanted to act as a mediator between the second international and the third international in order to form a global united front to fight the fascists and the capitalists at once Radic and Bukharin in specific in the Comintern would not stop attacking the socialist traders I mean it's interesting that Bukharin does this considering he's later on he's basically a social democrat himself but sorry Bukharin stands I know people think of a Bukharan I because I am not an immediate money abolitionist but whatever and then van de Velda and the socialists demanded the Bolsheviks release all the political prisoners including any other socialists first which the the communists would not do because particularly the SAs I mean the SRs excuse me not the SAs the SRs in Russia kept trying to assassinate them. Now I'm not saying that the Bolsheviks imprisonment or exile of most of the other socialists was a good thing. It's not me defending this I'm just saying that the SRs kept trying to kill them so there was a reason why they kind of went a little bit crazy on that. Now you may argue well they were killing a lot of Peasants unnecessarily during the during the Red Terror in the 1920s, which Trotsky oversaw. And I would even agree with you. In fact, Lenin would say they were excessive in that. But nonetheless. So one of the things that the Austrian Marxists did is the German Social Democrats were willing and often did use police against the communists. People forget that one of the reasons why the communists hated the German the SP Day, I mean, particularly the right faction of it when it was in power and the US Pay Day was separate. They would use the German state to attack the communists directly. The Austrian Marxists instead built the Republican Defense Corps, which was a paramilitary group that was designed to defend Web Vienna from fascists. And it allowed all workers, socialist or communists, to join. So they did not use the police to crush. They probably didn't have the power to anyway, but they they did not use the police to crush the communists, and they did not encourage socialists to fight communists in the streets. So what's the problem? Why doesn't this work? Well they argued that the the uh paramilitary groups who were you know defending Web Vienna to run the fascists should only use defensive violence, so they shouldn't attack the fascists first. This meant that they often actually discourage militant workers from taking initiative, fearing that premature conflict would destroy the movement, but that allowed the fascist forces to build up stuff to crush them, which they did. This comes to a climax in 1934, where you have the United Front from below actually happening, and the communists and socialists fall side by side in housing blocks against against the army, and they're and they stand out for a long time. But as Trotsky argued, they had waited too long to do this, and because of that, they were outgunned, outnumbered, and the fascists had support from a lot of other countries by that time. There was no way they're going to be able to resist. So the Austria-Marxists are crushed, and the ones that survive go into exile. So that's the United Front there. Let's go to the real tragedy story of all this. To the United Front in Germany and in the second international. Alright. So we all know about the post-World War I schism. Particularly the 21 points on the 1918 Bolshevik, which is attached to the ABC of Communism, which is a 1918 Bolshevik program, but it's not part of the Bolshevik program, it's technically separate, means that even like Debs' S Socialist Party of America cannot join the Comintern. This also leads to this weird thing where you have multiple, like in the United States, there's multiple communist parties competing to be recognized, and Zanoviev actually, even at one point, plays them off each other. Uh, this also happens in Germany to no good end. And Zanoviev really, you know, it's part of the left opposition, is one of like my villains of history, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

Oh, I was just gonna say, like, the United States is a really good example of how uh that kind of consolidation just led to like a mass exodus of from all the parties. There was a mass exodus from the socialist party, there was a mass exodus from the communist party, and there's like literally millions of people that were once a part of both the SPA and the CPU, like the CPA. Was it the CPUSA at that point? I don't think it's not. Is it the C USA?

C. Derick Varn 48:45

Yeah, maybe it's the CPA. I can't I think it's I think it's always been the CPUSA, actually.

SPEAKER_00 48:49

I think you're right, yeah. But there was a mass exodus of millions of people where it's just and then they they were gone, they were just never part of the socialist movement again.

Third Periodism And The Popular Front Turn

C. Derick Varn 48:58

Yeah. We'll get to the United Front in the United States because that's real damn weird. It doesn't end up mattering at all, but um so there's an attempt at the United Front in 1921, and the right and the United Front from below is actually more or less accepted by both sides. So the communists, however, hope this would expose the treachery of the social democrats. But the social democrats kind of saw right through this, and they started viewing this as a Trojan Horror strategy, which is why they just would not work with the communists at all, even when the communists were dropping some of their hostility to you know tactically. The United Front is really defined in the 1930s, but Hilly takes time in 1933, and I hate to tell you, but we know how this goes. 1933 is the mirror the in the middle of third periodism. Now, fascism is already a real problem in Italy. Fascism and pro, I mean, like the Communist Party in Italy is you know more goes underground and is more or less formally dissolved and reconstituted later on in the 1930s, but in the late 20s, there's still clandestine communist organizing. Go uh, people uh I had a whole issue where people got mad at me for not saying this was like an ongoing thing.

SPEAKER_00 50:27

I think I remember that stream, it was it ended up being like 30 minutes of like, no, I know that they continued existing, but they're they clearly didn't exist in the same form or the same structure or the same leadership.

C. Derick Varn 50:37

Most of their leadership was killed, they were formally banned and they didn't do anything. Like they did stuff, it was all spying for the comintern, but like they weren't a party in the sense that they were anyway. Um they're like, Oh, you think they were liquidated? I'm like, most of them died in the camps, like uh, not all of them, obviously. In 1934 in France, there's a right-wing riot in Paris, and socialist comments workers join together to form a massive general strike, and this leads to an eventual former pact of unity. This actually starts to begin the shift towards the 1935 adoption of the of the of the of the popular front in 1935. Gorgy Dmitryov uh starts to pivot towards the popular front strategy, picking up on the success of what goes on in France, but he calls it an extension of the United Front that needs to include progressive liberal middle class parties in order in a kind of democratic bloc in the set in the Spanish Civil War. There is also a participation of the commentary parties with the uh with the socialist leadership and the and the anarchist, even uh, you know, all republican forces against Franco, but there's all kinds of internal purges, usually a focus on the ones by the communists, they weren't the only ones, to be honest. So, you know, I want to say that you know one of the problems with you with popular fronts is they usually end up with civil wars very quickly, but this didn't even wait till they won to start the internal civil war, which meant that they were kind of easy to cross by the phalange.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

Um it was quite easy, especially with a US with the US like essentially blockading, like US and the UK or UK essentially is blockading it. It's just it turns into internal disputes.

C. Derick Varn 52:38

But there was some these popular fronts really did like lead to like this is how those the SP USA is like rebuilt. Interestingly, though, the most successful period of of communist organizing is during the third periodism in America, and I'll get I'll get to that. But the most successful period of communist party growth is during the popular front during the Roosevelt administration. So the communist party gets gets up to between 80 and 90,000, depending on which numbers you look, which is still smaller than the socialist party. The socialist party was I mean, not at this time, this time the socialist party is small, but during its heyday, the socialist party was probably three times that in formal membership and could control like I think like 11% of the vote. Yeah, maybe it's a little less less than that, but like the communists, even in the popular front period, when even when they were running candidates and during the third period period, could never ever, there's no communist party in the United States that's ever gotten more than two percent of the vote. So, you know, that worked.

SPEAKER_00 53:50

I will say, I think that's actually like an important distinction, like when it talked when we talk about like the popular front, is like the actual like organizing capacity and the effectiveness and the things that the communist party were doing versus membership numbers, especially today, as people are talking about certain socialist parties.

C. Derick Varn 54:07

Um it's not a party, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:10

Oh, we hit 95,000 people. Yes, oh we hit 95,000, and we have a mayor.

C. Derick Varn 54:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:19

That that's a little unfair. I know if there are more DSA electeds, I need to be clear about this. I don't want to get shit on too bad.

C. Derick Varn 54:25

Yeah, you you have a mayor, some city councilmen. How many national electeds had they been able to stay to keep endorsed, though?

SPEAKER_00 54:34

Less, I think less than half uh than the SPA had at like during one year.

C. Derick Varn 54:40

Right. And keep endorsed because they've had to unendorse electeds, like yeah, and you know that's supposed to be discipline, but it obviously doesn't work, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:53

So membership numbers and like effectiveness is not the same thing, right? Which parties continue to learn over and over again.

C. Derick Varn 55:00

Yeah, popularity is not leverage, people. I've said this over and over and over. That's even beyond the membership numbers and effectiveness. Like, just because an idea is popular doesn't mean you can do it.

SPEAKER_02 55:12

Yes.

C. Derick Varn 55:13

Um, anyway, okay, so the United Front mostly gets talk today. If you look this up on the internet, you're mostly actually gonna get stuff about the Communist Party in China because that's where this is really big, but that's also where it's really ugly. So we're gonna go into Chinese history, and then I'm gonna finally let Brandon talk more. All right, so and the United Front wasn't just a strategy and labor strikes because like there weren't that many labor strikes. There was a lot of labor strikes in China, but like industrialized China was mostly the imperial, the most imperial areas. The China was largely a underdeveloped country by early 20th century standards and had fallen during its imperial period quite dramatically towards the end of the empire. Thank you, British. So this leads to a couple of uh problems. The CPC and the Kuamindong are in a political alliance, and this is weird, all right, because the Comintern does not recognize the Chinese Communist Party as a cedar of who sits for them, sits for China in the international, they recognize the Guamedong, which are a national liberation coalition, half of whom are right-wing liberals, and the other half of whom are non-Marxist social democrats who sometimes don't hate Marx. And I mean Sun Yat-sin was kind of sort of a socialist sometimes. So, what is this about? Well, after the disillusion of the first empire and the chaos of World War One, there is the Warlords period, which is really bad for China. Actually, you know, China's century of humiliation. I don't think people really realize how many fucking people died.

SPEAKER_03 57:11

Oh, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 57:12

Like, like, we're talking orders of magnitude larger than anything that ever happened in the United States. We always talk about like the Taiping Rebellion as like five times more people died than the most bloody conflict in the US's history, which is the US Civil War, in something we don't even call a war.

SPEAKER_00 57:31

Yeah, the the idea that we call it a rebellion, and like literally the it's an orders of magnitude side, like larger, like the death toll, the like a massive infrastructure impact, all of it.

Bordiga’s Critique And Left Communist Views

C. Derick Varn 57:43

So, what happens with the United Front? Because this is a political front, this is really not from below, because it kind of can't be. So, in the 1920s, the Soviet Union pressured the CPC to join with forces with Sun Yat-sen's KMT because they were recognizing KMT at the comintern, because the KMT was orders of magnitude larger, the Chinese Communist Party was very small. This led to this creation of a kind of block within strategy, which is actually what the DSA has tried to do today. I'm just gonna say that, except that not really, because the DSA is not an independent party, and the Communist Party was. Um didn't exist yet. Alright, so the CPC members are are expected to join the KMT and basically exist as a faction within the KMT, aligned with the left elements of the KMT itself. This leads into the northern expedition where the C where the where the CPC military force launches a massive military campaign to defeat the northern warlords. This leads to the wampia wampia, I think that's how you say that. I don't speak Chinese either. Kind of speak Korean, but Chinese is not my back. Military school, where Shankai Shek was one of the commandants, but also Zhou and Lai was in the political department of the same school. That's gonna get interesting later on. For those of you know who Zhou Enlai is. Zhou and Lai was Mao's moderator and right and like basically right hand. He was also, I believe he was technically prime minister while Mao was general secretary a lot of the time. As the KMT bang power, though, during the first United Front, Shankai-shek gets gets scared of the communist influence and leads to the Shanghai massacre, which leads to the purging of the communists and the later and the labor unions. And when I say the labor leaders, one of the reasons why the Chinese Communist Party focuses so much on the peasantry is that a lot of the leaders of the bourgeoisie, uh, a lot of the leaders of not the bourgeoisie, a lot of the leaders of the workers are just dead, and they're forced out of the urban areas. This sparks the the Chinese Civil War. This goes on for a decade, and you end up with the Long March. The the CPC is nearly destroyed entirely. I mean, the Long March is what saves it. However, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria really changes things. There's the Xi'an incident in 1936, which Shankai shek is is kidnapped by another member of the of the KMT who refused to fight the CPC, the communists anymore, and demanded that he focus on Japan because they needed to get the Japanese out. This led to a block from without strategy where the CPC is independent, they're not a faction within the KMT, and they have their own armies and they keep their own armies separate and they keep their own territories separate, but they fought under a single national command. So this is a wartime united front, which basically doesn't exist anywhere else. And neither side trusted each other for shit because they've been killing each other for 10 years. Now you can kind of say what the hell was uh was the KMT doing uh as a member of the cometurn in the first place, but Son Ya-sen, while not a particularly Marxist socialist, was a socialist. Shankai Shek was not, so there you go. So what is interesting is the United Front, but this particular form of the United Front is seen as one of the keys to what is specific to the Chinese Communist Party. And remember, Mao did not think the Chinese model was exportable, and I I do need to emphasize that when we talk about Maoism, but where they actually built up enough trust with the peasantry and the non-comparador bourgeoisie to have a true mass line popular front, which is funny because the mass line is explicitly a popular front, but they call it a united front, which is very confusing, and in developing a multi-class alliance to to push out the Japanese, which they didn't use to fight the KMT to Taiwan. And here we are today. Mao causes causes one of the three magic weapons, which is armed struggle and party building that enabled the Chinese Revolution. Other things that the Chinese do that's different is they focus on the peasantry, they focus on national consolidation and liberation, etc. But this is what he sees as enabling them to win over uh millions of non-communists without having to kill them, basically. This later becomes grounds for new democracy. I'm not gonna cover that today. I think we'll cover that in a future episode because it's its own special problem. Yeah, this is also why, at the same time, both China and the common form, because the common turn is actually dissolved during World War II as a as like an effort of good faith that they're not gonna try to expand the revolution to to the to the to the capitalist world at that time. But the common form starts focusing on national liberation as the means to spread communism. This happens in developing countries and in colonialized countries, and basically all the United Front tactics are removed in favor of the popular front, but even the popular front is kind of watered down because its purpose is not even to establish socialism, its immediate purpose is national liberation in the fight against capitalist imperialism. But it, you know, if you don't become capitalist, so be it. So you have all that stuff with the non-aligned movements and with Nasserism and with people playing off the capitalist side versus the communist side in the Cold War and then the Sino-Soviet split. And by this time, the United Front of the Popular Front is just something in the United States and France, anyway, the sectarians argue about. And that brings us roughly to today. Now, I didn't really go through the history of the United Front in America, so I can talk about that if you want me to.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:48

I mean, I feel like specifically like Hammer and Ho, that which was like the book version of Robin D. G. Kelly's thesis, like goes into that really well, specifically about like how the Communist Party was on like a lot of like the formative ground was like of the civil rights movement was laid by the Communist Party. But yeah, I mean, I'd love you to go into that more too.

Austria’s Defense Corps And 1934 Defeat

C. Derick Varn 1:05:09

All right. So in the 1920s, you have the establishment of the Communist Party USA, and it explicitly picks up Paul Levy's logic initially and tries to form a united front from above with mainstream labor. So this is a United Front from Above tactic, but it is a labor tactic, not a party tactic, because we don't have a parliament. So they tried to build labor parties like the Farmer Labor Party and the Progressive Trade Unions. They're basically trying to do to force what happened in Germany in the 19th century and America in the 20th. They also wanted to use the American Federation of Labor to move towards more militant class struggle and to break the two-party duopoly in the United States, which, again, in the US at this time is not as ridiculous as it sounds today because this was not legal, the two the two-party duopoly in the United States was not legally enstanced at the state level the way it is now. In fact, is the election of 1918 that really leads to that as consummate because you have like the bull moose party, the socialists, the democrats, and the republicans, and the bull moose party gets a ton of votes, the socialists get a ton of votes, and the democrats kind of win by the breakup of the two, and that's when you start seeing the real suppression of you know third parties because it's because all you know, there have only been two parties in America, and in the pri in the past, there have been other parties like the people's the populist party. The know-nothings, etc. But they had never been able to like establish themselves beyond the state level, and they often dissolved and liquidated themselves into either the Democrat or the Republican Party, depending on the time period. Mostly the Democrats, actually, both weirdly, both the no-nothings and the progressives, I mean the populist end up in the Democrats for the most part. It makes sense when you think about you know who's involved, what the Democrats were in the 19th century.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:14

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:16

However, during third periodism, this this United Front from Above strategy is dropped in 1927 to the United Front Strategy from Below. This leads to the creation of like the TUUL and the T the first the TUEL, then the TUUUL, which is communist parties uh joining things, and they work alongside what was going to become the CIO. The reason why the the Labor Party from above, if the AFL leadership and Gompers were militantly anti-communist, and they successfully purged the communists from most of the unions by the mid-20s. So the those purged communists were very ready um to join up with people who had been in the IWW 20, 10, 20 years before, and start doing popular front from below stuff. This is how William C. Foster really made his name. And that's also how Hammer and Ho really works out. So we'll come back to that. That's where that really develops. So unlike in Europe, where the where this where a third periodism is a disaster, in the United States, it builds socialist capacity because they quit being reliant on Gompers and the guild unions.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:36

Then you can also see if oh no, you can go ahead.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:39

No, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:40

Oh, I was just gonna say, and the popular front is even more devastating in the United States, I would argue, because of that.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:46

Oh yeah. In 1930s, you have the Popular Front. This is picked up in 1935. The CP the CPUSA formally starts calling stops calling FDR a social fascist and starts calling him a progressive ally in print. This is also where you see broaderism kind of pick back up. You see communism as 20th century Americanism, you see the pink glasses on Lincoln and Jefferson and really focusing in on this, you know, the Marx relationship to the Republicans, but the Republicans have betrayed themselves, so now we have to work with these progressive Democrats in the FDR administration. This is why a lot of socialists, not just the Frankfurt School, were in the OSS. I know that neither Democrats want you to think that what the John Burke Society says was true, but it is actually true that there are both spies and not spies in the in the Roosevelt administration because of the Popular Front, particularly around Henry Rawls and what would become the Progressive Party. You also have a flirtation with a United Front and a Popular Front with the Socialist Party, which is also weirdly purging communists from its ranks at the same time, it's encouraging a popular front. Because this is where the socialist party starts doing its weird rightward pivot, where the only people left are the socialist right. And eventually by the 1950s, they're literally also engaging in McCarthyism and all that fun rot. Fat a lot of good it did them. This leads to the CIO and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. This also leads to the Scottsboro Boys the Fifth Campaign of Black Teenagers, which falsely accused of rape in Alabama, which starts also the the beginning of what is a front organization, the National Negro Congress in 1936, which was a which was a black church labor union and civic group thing to fight Jim Crow. This leads to the black belt thesis, which is never popular in America. Weirdly, it's popular amongst communist leadership. It is not popular amongst black people in America, oddly enough. But you know what? The Mob Ribbentrop Pact completely screws this up until America enters the war in 1942, which leads to a renewed popular foratism. But the literally the Comintern tells the CPUSA to start focus to stop its anti-fascist United Frontwork and start calling FDR a warmonger in regards to Hitler, which means the organization loses like the most membership that it does until the 50s.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:45

Yeah, it's a it craters.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:47

Yeah, it craters the CPUSA in the United States. And then when they enter the war in 1942 and the communists are serious about fighting fascism, a lot of the a lot of the former communists come back and bring people with them, and you have this massive expansion of the communist party of the SP USA on the coast, actually, primarily, which is not where it was historically strong at first. This is where we get our association with it today. And oh boy, this this does not actually go so well because the various things that they had used to establish this actually leaves them wide open for purging when the AFL CAO joins together and the anti-communists are in charge. There's state-level purges by both Democrats and Republican states to pre as precursors to Mc to McCarthyism.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:43

And with the Popular Front method, these former communist unions are slowly dissolving just into the AFL. C like the membership is like everybody's starting to work for the AFL because the AFL is bigger, or the CIO, because I think this is before they merged, right?

Germany’s Missed Unity Against Fascism

C. Derick Varn 1:12:59

And Taft Hartley is passed in 1947. So almost immediately at the height of the Popular Front, you have you have union leaders being required to sign non-communist affidated, effectively purging all the radicals in the CIO who were not John Lewis, and you know, a kind of labor Republican, uh LaGuardia Republican socialist type out of the out of the CIO leadership, and in the 1950s they're purged from the CIO altogether. So the Popular Front actually goes really, really bad in the United States. Now, I could spend all night talking about the failures of the Popular Front in other places, but what I also would say is the United Front in the US isn't really ever tried in the same way that it's tried in Europe because there's not a way to try it. The United Front was an attempt in the US to build a labor party, not to have coalitions with other socialist parties because they did not exist here. So this leads us to the problem that Brand is going to talk about. As you've seen in my definition of the United Front in different contexts, it's not one thing. It's not one strategy, it's not applicable in one place. And if you try which one you pick is your model, it's gonna dramatically change which one you think is right.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:24

That yeah. That that is kind of the if you look at like the three instances, you have the United Front that's happening in Europe, you have the United Front that's happening in China, and you have the United Front that is happening that tried to happen in the US, and all of them are completely different contexts. We had a lot of different readings that we went through. I do think the most interesting ones were I actually found there was uh we read specifically a piece called, and I thought this was the best when it came to like the European context, specifically the Italian context, but it was called Gramps Gramsci the United Front Comintern and Democratic Strategy, where it kind of goes through what Gramsci was like understanding the United Front to be, and specifically as well, that Gramsci uh rejected the actual quote is uh he r resolutely rejected the call in 1924 for the PCI to simply support democratic opposition to fascism as a move that would consign the communists to subalternate subalternity and ultimate liquidation. Uh in the prison notebooks, he insists that hegemony requires a party to take the initiative in the event of political crisis and dislocations in the oppositional block. So I think I think there's a consistent understanding of the United Front. And also I think the United Front is complicated and difficult and is a bunch of different things and can mean a bunch of different things for a bunch of different parties. Because again, in the United States, there's not a labor move, like there's not a party apparatus. In Europe, when the United Front strategy is announced by the Common Turn, we're you're actually just coming out of like three or four failed revolutionary periods. And so a lot of people read the United Front as almost a walking back of, oh, okay, we're not going to be able to actually do what we just did in Russia in 1917 or yeah, in the Russian Empire in 1917, everywhere else in Europe. And some of some people would say the United Front in Europe is actually the beginning of the walk back. Um, I don't know if I agree with that.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:21

But I mean, I think the United Front is actually a a response to the fact that the forced joining together led to factions within the Socialist Party that were totally incomprehensible to each other. But you also have to deal with the fact that after the Russian Civil War, factions are banned in the Soviet Union and are never reinstated, and this is also imported to China, which means that faction struggles are they're not abolished, it's just it's an all-or-nothing faction struggle, and a lot of times you have to kill the other side. Um, you can't just you can't just, you know, politically win there, they they you see them as a potential undermining factor, so you have to completely destroy them. This is not as bad in China as it is in Russia, because Mao actually talks about in the 1950s. I know people, you know, for all of Mao's anti-revisionism and Stalin goodness, he does have a critique of how many people Stalin allowed to be killed are killed himself during the purges, that he makes a lot of hay out of in the 1950s about why you have to be careful with just following the Soviet line, even though he's very pissed at Khrushchev for the secret speech. And I mean, that's a weird thing to explain to people because but it is true that, like, even during the Cultural Revolution, the massacres were not like the Russian purges where they were just rounding up party members and executing them. It was street battles that occurred from them, it was people committing suicide, it was it was ethnic civil wars that they couldn't control. I mean, little mini civil wars. I mean, they're not formally civil wars, but like ethnic massacres between ethnic groups that see each other in class terms. Yeah. But what it isn't is like the secret police going around and railing up your political enemies, and then you know, also maybe we'll throw in your ex-girlfriend because we have a quota to meet, and and you people laugh, but I mean, even people who defend Stalin will admit this happened. In fact, that's part of their defense of it, is like so Stalin didn't mean for that to happen. This was uh popular democracy, you know, and it just got into excess. And I'm like, well, yeah, great. And then you know, Yuzov and the Yuzov China made it worse. Although, in my opinion, from studying Soviet history, Daria is worse than Yuzov. But anyway, I mean there's some truth to the Stalin to the Stalin defense line that it wasn't all from the top, but the top is why like most of the Bolsheviks leaders got killed. Oh, yeah, for sure. It's also why the Mediev Forest massacre happened, which again no one denies happened, not even like I guess some Stalinists now do, but the Soviet records don't. Um, they just justify it. I mean, like, so I I find all this very, you know, interesting about you know, during the popular front, there's also this attempt for purges. I mean, what we can see is the United Front has problems. The popular front I think has more.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:33

This is this this is where I think every like on across the board, except I think China is the only example where I can say, I think the popular front was probably more effective in what was going on. When like that one of the readings actually pointed out the reason they call it the United Front not a popular front is because just when like the translation they were using of Popular Front was explicitly more revolutionary and communist, and they were trying to be like a unified front about it, so they just adopted the United Front. But I think in every other circumstance that's not necessarily China, it seems to me that like the United Front had problems because of inconsistencies and incoherency from leadership, from the type of organizing, and also just an understanding of fascism.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:19

Yeah, and yeah, one is you're responding to fascism. Two is like, what orgs are you are you considering workers' orgs? Because like exactly like even the United Front from Above in America was not a party front, it was it was leadership working with leadership, then later on it became from below, which is worker working with worker and just ignoring the leadership. But in Europe, you got parties and unions, and in the resistance to fascism, you have parties and unions too, but it actually starts off with the unions, which is the basis for the popular front later on, which does kind of make the United Front from below doesn't ever lead to a popular front argument that some of the left communists or the left line the left communist Leninists take also seem wrong.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:05

I mean, so yeah, it's it's a difficult, it's a difficult line to walk because I think half the problem is when talking about the United or Popular Fronts, there's a confusion about what exactly that means. Um, I actually, when you laid it out, like kind of your three things earlier on, I think that's really important. With I think in from what I understand from all the reading, it's the biggest thing is just the non-participation in like an active governing body. Right. Uh and I think that the turn away from that is and I think one of the reasons actually that China is successful is it didn't really become there, wasn't really like a question of like full governing body until there was already like a critical mass of support for the Communist Party.

C. Derick Varn 1:21:51

Because the government had collapsed.

Spain, France, And Popular Front Lessons

SPEAKER_00 1:21:53

Exactly, exactly. We have like in the piece, the United Front in the New China, they have like a really nice timeline right at the beginning where they describe in 1923 to 27, unstable but potent alliance between the Kuomintang and the CCP, 1927 to 37, rift and civil war, 1937 to 41, Imperfect United Front, and then 1941 to 45, smoldering war within a war, triangular structure, like struggle, KMT, CCP, China, Japanese and puppets. Like it's it's I think you've actually said this on on some like on some episodes of the podcast before, but the thing that I think is consistently shown what like through the success of either this popular front in China or the some successes that you see in the United Front is that what actually determines the success. Well, the popular front pretty consistently determines failure for a socialist or a communist movement. I I'll say that pretty outright.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:49

Yeah, I can't I literally can't think of a single time that it's worked, and yet the most commonly invoked strategy, it is invoked today after Zoramandani's win in New York. It was invoked by Bashkar Sankara around Bernie in 2016. It was invoked, you know, during the SPUSAs that we endorse right-wing Democrats because the Republicans are a scary fascist period, which was not the Trump period, but actually the Bush period. Um it has literally never worked.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:22

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:23:23

And not just not in the United States. I can't think of a place where it's worked.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:29

And it's it's the same exact scenario every single time, especially because a lot of these communist groups were moving from the United Front into the Popular Front, is that they start to dissolve or liquidate their like the independent unions. They start to incorporate themselves into the official party apparatuses or the official like bourgeois trade union apparatuses, and then slowly membership in the communist orgs fades and dies. This is what happened in with the Canadian Communist Party as well, where they just dissolve their the workers', I think it's the workers' unity group or workers' unity league into just the AFL. And then by the end of this popular front period in Canada as well, the Communist Party is gone, radical unions are gone. But any success of the United Front seems to more so rely on global instability and a world war more than necessarily the strategy, which is an unfortunate thing that I think communists need to reckon with more.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:28

Honestly, if we're completely honest, that's true for most revolutions. Yes. Yeah. Like, yeah, like particularly the big ones. The national liberation revolutions are slightly different, but even then, that's in the context of the post-war of the post-war settlement.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:45

And a lot of those are national fronts, which is another, which is another complete, like, is an iteration of these, but is not the same. It's not the same. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:54

Oh, we're gonna talk about the weird ones and another episode. I I think I'm gonna telegraph next two episodes, and this time I'm actually gonna try to make the citation list for you guys. I'm gonna take what Brandon's research and throw it in there, and I'll you know, my history is the me reading primary documents and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of uh socialist history. I could make you a reading list, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's gonna help you. I mean, in so much as like you're gonna be reading hundreds of thousands of pages for for the rundown I just gave you. And I'm not saying that everything I said is unbiased either. I just tried to be like as fair as I possibly could about what we're doing. Oh, I'm way more biased strategy.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:37

I'm definitely more. I think the United Front is a is a more successful organizing style, especially in the context of Europe and probably the United States. And and I mean, everything when you when you do any kind of bring any of these theories over to the United States, you have to do them differently because the United States is nothing like a European parliamentary system and has explicitly built laws against certain types of organizing when it comes to this type like type of work.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:06

Teph Hartley is mofo.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:08

Um so I mean So I'm happy to be the biased one here.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:16

I think we have to look at this. I mean, like Latin America, we I didn't go into but the cre people always say, oh, post-structurals and post and postmodernism killed killed communism. No, it fucking didn't. You know what killed communism? The weird shit that the French Communist Party pulled that made that stuff popular in the first place, which was to run often to the right of the socialist party, and then when Mitterrand, not to be confused with Milleron, came to power. This becomes a Mileron. I don't know. Well, I never know when I'm supposed to swallow the the T or the D in French.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:55

Um I'm really bad with French. I called him instead of foyer, I think I called him Fourier for years, the utopian socialist.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:02

Yeah. But Mitterrand's government really infuriated a lot of French communists and led to those a lot of those people becoming Baudrillard. If you read Baudrillard's books about the divine left, you actually see he's mad at the communists for not being communist enough. And this eventually leads him to start questioning the whole theoretical apparatus. It was not just the CA, I'm sure it didn't help, but other gaullists or whatever. It was also the fact that the communists and these popular fronts often subsumed themselves and could not figure out how to deal with other popular movements. I mean, May 68 notoriously the French Communist Party can't figure out what the hell to do there, they have no response to the Sino-Soviet split, which is a major problem. And then, yes, they're all open to intelligence agencies anyway, but those other two things are probably more of a problem than the intelligence agencies are, if I'm completely honest. And this only gets more intense through the 70s. I mean, like, because how do you form a popular front when you literally have not just communists, but specifically different kinds of Marxist Linux killing each other in maths in wars? It's not an easy thing to parse. Oop, oop, there we go. Sorry, watching. So it's it's just this is where we're at in this time period.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:31

And I don't I don't I definitely don't want to be like overly determinist about it. I think you can probably, and I think you've pointed it out, you can draw a line from the United Front from below into the popular front, and then all of the contradictions and incoherencies of that, the dissolving. Of different explicitly revolutionary movements into bourgeois or liberal institutions. Like I think you can draw that line, but I don't necessarily want to say that had to have happened.

China’s Two United Fronts And War

C. Derick Varn 1:29:02

Yeah, I don't think so either. So I think we're gonna strategize here. Okay, so the next one I think we're gonna cover New Democracy and the National Front. Love it. Then I'm gonna talk about what the left communists did, because the one thing we can say about the left communists is even like I am sympathetic. I'm not as sympathetic to Border Gun as Democracy, but I'm sympathetic to a lot of council communist critiques, a lot of the cynical critiques. The problem that I have is even anarchists think those guys failed in revolutionary straight light. Um like I remember reading a platformist anarchist critiquing critiquing the left communists as being like, maybe you went too far, guys, because you guys just lost over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then I think we have to deal with the elephant in the room, which is like, what if revolutions don't happen the way you think they happen? Because because the history does not justify the second international narrative, and it kinda doesn't really justify the the common terms narrative either. I guess we can't say if it justifies the third worldist narrative or not, because that's not done yet, but so far not looking great. Yes, so you know, and people might go, well, Varn, why are you still a communist? And I'm like, Well, because I do believe in workers workers' power, but I think there's some some real issues we have to deal with about when these revolutions happen and what context and how, and this is even true for bourgeois revolutions. I can't think of a bourgeois revolution that isn't tied into another war. So is this something we're gonna have to talk about? Maybe that'll be an addendum fronts and wars, but for we have two more episodes, definitely planned. One is on the national front and new democracy, and maybe we have to deal with national Bolshevism, even.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:06

Yeah, that about that might be good, actually.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:09

And then as like some of the other you know, attempts to deal with these unity problems, the mass line. I think we have to deal with, even though it's implicit in the popular front. And then lastly, we have to deal with the left communists, and then maybe we have to deal with like, did any of these fronts actually work for what they say? Like, they work for something, yeah. Like they all achieve even the popular front achieves something. It's a question of does it achieve what it sets out to do? And and that I think is a a question that I think we should all be a little bit more uncomfortable with than we are, because we just assert that these things work because they're supposed to.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:53

But when in announcing uh the popular front, which was called the United Front, Mao explicitly said our minimum program is the bourgeois revolution, right? So you have to ask these questions about these fronts and these parties and these movements is what what was their minimum front? What was their maximalist front? Or yeah, what was their maximalist plan, not front? I've been saying front too much. It's infected my brain.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:18

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it has the maximum plan. And we'll also, I guess maybe another series you and I can do is what are the plans and stages and programs? Because that's actually what I got in the socialist history like really, really hardcore, and about 50 about 12 years ago, it was me just documenting the various programs and platforms socialists are going on and being like, Oh my god, like let me try to sort this.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:46

I've got an entire section of my shelf, it's not uh able to be seen, but it's literally just like party programs in like from different countries, different languages, and including like a bunch in like the US as well. So, yes, that'd be a great series.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:59

Yeah, so we could do that, but anyway, we'll finish the fronts so we know at least two, and we might do an addendum on revolutions and war, and if the fronts, if any of the fronts work at all, I guess you guys can hear our our mutual stances kind of, but maybe not, like um, and you know, maybe something we can also do is like speculate on what we can learn from when it does work and when it doesn't, and what we can take away from that positively, other than just like because the one thing that I think made studying the the the the United Front, and I came to the same conclusion as you really going back over my notes, is I thought it was pretty clear what it was, and then I started looking at how they what organizations counted where and when, and what's considered a United Front from below or above, and how and it like it's so different from country to country that you're just like, Oh my gosh, this is way more difficult than I thought.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:52

Yeah, you almost have to look at like you have to dive really into the particularities with the with the United Front in a way that you don't really have to do with the popular front.

C. Derick Varn 1:33:59

No, the popular front's actually clear what it is, which is something that, but it's also clear that the early socialist demarx didn't like it before it's even called that. So, but anyway, all right, Brandon. We'll see you in a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:13

Sweet, sounds good.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:15

Take care, take care.