Claiming working people face the imminent danger of fascism taking power — in France, Hungary, Italy, Argentina and the U.S. — Stalinist parties of all stripes, Social Democrats and middle-class radicals are resurrecting proposals for a 1930s-style Popular Front Against Fascism.
This scheme ties the working class to an alliance with the so-called progressive wing of the capitalist class, the very class whose rule gives rise, at times of deepening crisis and sharpening class struggle, to fascist forces. It led to a wave of bloody defeats in the 1930s, including the victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
“New Popular Front rallies French to save democracy from Macron-Le Pen coup,” was the headline of an article last September in the People’s World, the online paper of the U.S. Communist Party. It hailed the left coalition led by the French CP, together with France Unbowed, the Socialist Party and Les Ecologistes, for collaborating with the government of French President Emmanuel Macron to block the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen from winning the election.
Similar arguments were used in the U.S. to justify a multiclass alliance against Donald Trump, who Stalinist forces and many others claim is a fascist.
“Georgi Dimitrov would be smiling this morning in Marxist heaven,” read a People’s World article about the French election results. Dimitrov, a leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and Stalin’s Communist International in the 1930s, is credited with being the author of the Popular Front.
Communist Parties worldwide were instructed to form coalitions with imperialist parties deemed “antifascist,” or seen as friendly to Moscow’s diplomatic needs.
It was a new name for class collaboration — working-class parties and organizations subordinating the interests of the exploited producers to the bosses and their government, under the banner of forming a “grand alliance” to stop fascist forces from taking power.
Far from being a strategy to rout Nazi thugs, Popular Front blocs blocked revolutionary prospects and working-class upsurges in many countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas, with disastrous consequences for working people. The goal wasn’t for the working class to take political power into its own hands, but to win “peaceful coexistence” for the Stalinist regime in Moscow with “democratic” imperialist regimes in the U.S., France and elsewhere.
This treachery opened the way to the fascist victory in Spain, propped up Hitler’s rule in Germany, and made the onset of the second imperialist war — World War II — inevitable.
In the U.S., the new line applied by the CP was to provide unqualified support for Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and against rising sentiment for a labor party.
The Communist Party championed Roosevelt’s New Deal, paving the way for U.S. entry into the imperialist slaughter in World War II. This brought with it attacks on constitutional rights and on space for political action by the labor movement, the Socialist Workers Party, Blacks and other oppressed nationalities.
The CP “has followed some variation of the People’s Front strategy ever since, making adjustments as circumstances demanded, right up to the present day,” People’s World managing editor C.J. Atkins proudly states on the paper’s website.
In contrast, the revolutionary working-class course advocated by the Socialist Workers Party was and is the mobilization of the working class to lead millions oppressed and exploited by capital to take political power into their own hands to prevent fascist brutality as the crisis of capitalism deepens.
This program is detailed in The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, adopted by the SWP in 1938. It is the heart of the SWP’s program today. Updated for today’s conditions, it’s available in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward.
A popular front to stop Trump?
As the so-called anti-MAGA coalition of Democrats, Stalinists and virtually all of the left moves “into the next stage of the fight” after the 2024 elections, they blame “deplorable” working people for voting in Trump. And they complain that the Democratic Party leadership failed to put forward an economic program to address the effects of the crisis workers face, as if it’s possible for a capitalist party to do such a thing.
These forces debate how to “remedy” the working-class “dealignment” from the Democratic Party and “pry back working-class voters from the clutches of Trumpism,” as the Social Democratic website Jacobin put it.
What does the ANSWER coalition, led by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, prescribe? “Defeat Trump’s extreme-right billionaire agenda.”
But “Defeat the Trump agenda” means nothing but support to “better” Democratic Party candidates in upcoming elections. It is a cover-up for class collaboration.
Trump won’t solve the crisis workers are living through. Neither would have Kamala Harris, or any other Democrat or Republican. Bosses don’t stop being bosses and the capitalist government in Washington does not stop serving the interests of the bosses.
The most noteworthy feature of the 2024 U.S. presidential election was the number of strikes that took place over the past year. It showed the growing conviction among workers that class struggle is the road forward.
The Socialist Workers Party says this is our starting point: Build, extend, and strengthen the trade unions, and use that union power to advance the interests of working people. More workers today are seeing that this course goes hand in hand with building a party of labor that can lead a fight to overthrow the rule of the bosses and their parties, for the working class to take political power.
This latest attempt to recycle the dangerous illusion of the popular front as something progressive means it is time to revisit these lessons for working people and youth today repelled by the brutal realities of capitalism.