Popular Front

Why Did the Comintern Reverse Its Line?

From 1928 the Comintern's official line was 'class against class': capitalism had entered its final crisis, revolution was imminent, and social democracy, which kept workers tied to reformism, was 'social fascism', fascism's twin. Under this line the German Communist Party treated the Social Democrats as the main enemy, and while the two fought each other, Hitler took power in 1933 and destroyed them both.

The first signal of the turn came not from Moscow but from the field. In February 1934 in France, Socialist and Communist columns merged in the streets against the far-right leagues' riot, and that July the two parties signed a unity-of-action pact. Dimitrov, famous for turning the Nazi arson charges back on his accusers at the Leipzig trial, became the Comintern's new general secretary, and in his report to the Seventh Congress in August 1935 he defined fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital' and proclaimed the broadest possible coalition against it as the new line. There was no explicit self-criticism of the social-fascism thesis, but the direction was the exact opposite.

How Does It Differ from the United Front?

The two words are often mixed, but they operate at different levels. The united front, a concept in use since the early 1920s, means joint action among working-class organizations: workers' parties and trade unions. The popular front goes beyond them, to alliance with liberal and middle-class parties like the French Radicals or the Spanish Republican Left, and takes as its immediate goal the defence not of socialism but of bourgeois democracy itself.

That extension was the heart of the controversy. To its supporters, it was the only realistic road to defending democracy against the greater enemy of fascism. To its critics, it was a structure in which workers' demands had to be trimmed to what liberal parties could accept in order to preserve the alliance: the institutionalization of class collaboration.

Where and How Was It Tried?

In France the Popular Front won the elections of May 1936 and installed the Blum government, leaving behind the great strikes, the Matignon Agreements, paid holidays and the 40-hour week before collapsing within two years. In Spain the Popular Front won the elections of February 1936, but the generals' rising in July began a civil war, inside which raged the struggle over 'war first or revolution first'. In Chile, the Radical Aguirre Cerda won the presidency as the popular-front candidate in 1938. In China the second united front of 1937 was justified by the same logic, and the American party went as far as the slogan 'Communism is twentieth-century Americanism'.

The line ended as abruptly as it began. When the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in August 1939, the Comintern dropped the antifascist coalition overnight and declared the war an inter-imperialist one, forcing every party into another hairpin turn. The antifascist alliance revived with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and the postwar 'national fronts' and 'people's democracies' of Eastern Europe were explained as extensions of popular-front logic.

What Remains in Dispute?

Trotsky called the popular front another name for betrayal: in France it caged a revolution that had begun inside parliamentary forms, and in Spain it rolled back the revolution to preserve the alliance and lost the war as well. The defence points to fascism blocked or delayed in both countries, to communist parties becoming mass parties for the first time, and to the tangible things workers gained, from paid holidays to collective agreements. Historians also divide over the motive of the turn itself: a change pushed up from below by antifascist pressure in each country, or handed down from above by the needs of Soviet diplomacy as it turned to collective security. The hairpin turn of 1939 is regularly cited as evidence of the latter's weight.

The name outlived the concept. Half a century later, when the mass movements of the Baltic republics in the last years of perestroika called themselves 'popular fronts', they were borrowing the name from the memory of the 1930s.