Click on the headline to link to a Workers Vanguard article, dated August 28, 2009, The United Front Tactic: Its Use and Abuse by Joseph Seymour as interesting background for the note below on the question of the united front.
Markin comment:
Apparently the rich lessons, politically rich lessons that is, to be derived from a short note added to a commentary on the need to boost our efforts in the struggle against the Obama Afghan war policy are endless. (See, The Streets Are Not For Dreaming - We Need An All Out Anti-War Push To Get Out Of Afghanistan- And We Need To Start Now, dated July 3, 2010.) Recently I posted an additional commentary based on that notion, the notion that the times were on our side in that struggle against the Afghan war policy but that we had better get moving to organize the opposition, including the now “famous” note that explained why I was less than enamored of the recently held U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in late June. (See, Once Again, On The U.S. Social Forum- A “Teachable” Moment, July 12, 2010.)
As part of that explanation I also mentioned a political action 2004, at a time when the Social Forum held a previous conference that coincided, not coincidentally, with the Democratic Party National Convention that was held in Boston that year. That action, an anti-war march on the convention site the day before the opening of the convention was called by the ANSWER coalition (and some other independent groupings). Given the opportunity to vocally oppose that party’s commitment in the still somewhat popular Iraq war and it nominee Senator John Kerry’s early endorsement of the Iraq war and other aspects of then-President Bush’s war policy it seemed like a “no-brainer” for anti-war militants to attend the event.
The local ad hoc anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of, and that had been formed in 2001 in opposition to Bush’s Afghan war policy, answered the call and attended the event, although we did not officially endorse the action. The main reason for that stance was that some of our members did not support the slogan of "Hands Off North Korea" that was included in the call for the demonstration. Or, at least, did not support the slogan in the uncritical sense that the organizers placed on it. That non- endorsement stance is not an unusual one, and we have all, I am sure, attended marches, rallies demonstrations and other action where we attended based on our own slogans without being part of an official endorsement. On some issues, and that included Iraq at that time, the need for militant action trumped the behind-the-scenes political wrangling.
What prompts this posting, however, is that a member of our local anti-imperialist committee, a newer member who was not then involved with our group, didn't understand why, after reading my post, if we were attending the demonstration, recruiting people to attend it, publicizing the event and all the other things that go into preparing for a political action, large or small, why we did not endorse the event. Hence I get another, "teachable" moment, perhaps.
Over a long life time of political activity, including attending marches, workshops, rallies, picket lines, and the like the notion of the united front, a true united front, has probably been the most difficult one to understand, and to deal with, in our small leftist political universe. I include myself in that category because for a long time I was very mushy (nice precise political term, right?) on the question, as well. I would characterize my own earlier positions as a “family of the left” non-aggression pacts that in the end prohibited any political clarity, or sorting out of political differences, between the myriad groups, leagues, tendencies, et al. that inhabit our American left landscape. In short, we are not all necessarily pulling in the same direction, strategically or tactically. Certainly political neophytes, like our newer member, could not then be accused of opportunistic naivete if they did not automatically understand such a concept.
In the communist movement, mainly from the work of the Communist International that emerged on the world labor scene in the aftermath of the Russian revolution of 1917, the original sense of the united front tactic was to try to get mass Communist organizations to outmaneuver mass Social Democratic organizations by proposing join actions on major issues in the interest of the working class and of pushing the class struggle forward. And, importantly, most importantly, showing in those join actions that the Communist organizations were more doggedly committed to seeing the actions through to the end, to being the best fighters for the class, up to and including revolutionary struggle.
Obviously in America, with its historically-deforming lack of a mass-based communist party (or, for that matter, the lack of a mass-based reformist labor party either), even in the heydays of the 1930s and 1940s when such formations were not without some influence in this country the use of the united front has not conformed to that Comintern notion mentioned above, or mainly does not apply to the tasks of the small propaganda groups that dot our political milieu , or has had to be modified to fit the American political scene.
Thus, in America, the united front really stands for the proposition that we communists are weak and that we need to unite as many organizations and individuals as possible by using this modified means. Of course, as every communist knows, or should know, the concept of the united front has taken a severe beating as a tool to forward the aims of the class struggle. It has been turned, for the most part, by Stalinists, ex-Stalinists, wanna-be Stalinists, Social Democrats, wanna-be Social Democrats, and not a few anarchists into a parliamentary tool that includes capitalist and pro-capitalist formations. In short not a united front but a popular front, and there is a difference, historically written in blood in such places as Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s, between those two concepts. That popular front strategic conception has, however, continued, in one form or another dominate the leftist landscape for the last fifty years, or more.
Look, let's make it simple. The united front is merely a basis for an action, one time or on-going depending on the issue (on-going, for example, in legal defense cases) by different organizations that join together for a common purpose. The best example of that is an anti-war protest based on a slogan of immediate withdrawal from one or another of America’s imperial adventures. Around that issue everyone can unite, make their own analysis and draw their own strategic conclusions, make their own propaganda and fight for their other programmatic points. Beyond that “minimum” the united front makes no sense.
And that is where the question of 2004 comes in. The ANSWER coalition’s call for the demonstration included a grab bag of slogans on a range of issues, some supportable, some not. In realty the political program presented by the ANSWER coalition represented a call to support their slogan and to form a propaganda bloc on that basis. As I mentioned above some of our members were not committed to defense of North Korea, critically or otherwise. Actually, although that was the main question in dispute over endorsement there was also controversy on the question of Haiti and ANSWER's semi-support of a return of Astride. There were also organizational considerations centered on whether we could have a speaker at the pre-march rally. All in all there were plenty of grounds for not officially endorsing the action.
That, however, is a far cry from not attending, or ordering one's members not to attend a demonstration under one's own banners and with one's own propaganda. Hell, it is done all the time. Most of the leftist political actions over the last few decades have been done that way. So the question of not attending in those circumstances comes down to this- the U.S Social Forum/UJP/Green leaderships were making a conscious decision not to offend the Democrats, or at least not "embarrassing" that organization in the public’s eye by taking a political dive on confrontation that covention week. You know, and here is the "perhaps" part of the "teachable" moment mentioned in the headline such opportunism doesn't really pay in the end. For all their kowtowing to the Democrats, then or later, what did they get- a now vastly expanded war in Afghanistan, among other miseries, by the Democrats led by one former self-described “anti-war activist” of uncertain provenance, President Barack Obama. You reap what you sow.
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