Workers' united front (Comintern)
노동자 통일전선
The tactic the Comintern adopted from around its Third Congress (1921): communist parties proposed joint action to social-democratic parties, trade unions and other working-class organisations to defend the immediate interests of the majority of workers, such as wages, working hours or resistance to fascism. Communists were to fight side by side while keeping their own programme and freedom of criticism, and so win over the workers of the reformist parties. It was in effect abandoned after 1928 for the Third Period line and the theory of social fascism; in the early 1930s Trotsky argued that the German workers' parties should use it against the Nazis.
In depth
Why it arose
When the revolutionary tide after 1917 ebbed around 1921, the communist parties of Western Europe were mostly left as minorities within the working class. After isolated risings such as the German party's March Action of 1921 failed, the Comintern turned to a long-term tactic under the slogan "To the masses!". Since most workers still followed social democracy and reformist unions, communists were to win the majority through the experience of fighting alongside those organisations. The tactic was worked out at the Third Congress (1921) and the Fourth Congress (1922), whose theses defined it as "an initiative whereby the communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie".
How it worked
The motto was "march separately, strike together". The communist party kept its own organisation, programme and freedom to criticise the social-democratic leaders, but it did not simply go over their heads: it approached them directly with demands for joint action. A refusal made them look like an obstacle to unity in their followers' eyes; acceptance put them on the terrain of strikes and demonstrations where communist methods would be tested. The theses stressed that this had nothing to do with electoral deals between leaders. In Germany the tactic was applied in 1922–1923, and in autumn 1923 "workers' governments" with communist ministers were formed in Saxony and Thuringia.
"From below" and the change of line
After the Sixth Congress (1928) and the Tenth Plenum of the Executive (1929) the Comintern branded social democracy "social fascism" and refused joint action with its leaders, leaving only the united front from below, aimed at detaching social-democratic workers from their leadership. In his writings on Germany in 1931–1932 Trotsky attacked this as a barrier to workers' unity against the Nazis and demanded practical agreements for joint struggle between the communist and social-democratic organisations; to fight fascism, he wrote, he was ready to conclude practical fighting agreements with the devil, his grandmother, and even with Noske and Zörgiebel.
Difference from the Popular Front
After the Nazis took power in 1933, the French socialists and communists signed a pact of joint action in 1934, and the Comintern's Seventh Congress (1935) dropped the theory of social fascism and made the Popular Front its official line. The two terms were often used interchangeably, but the workers' united front meant joint struggle between working-class organisations, whereas the Popular Front also drew in bourgeois parties such as the liberals and took the defence of bourgeois democracy as its programme. Trotskyists rejected the Popular Front and kept to the united-front tactic of the Third and Fourth Congresses. Alliances called "united fronts" elsewhere, such as the Kuomintang–Communist fronts in China, are distinct from this entry.