! Yes! I want to become a Socialist Outlook supporter O " I want more information about Socialist Outlook O ¡ I want to take an order of ........... copies of Socialist I Outlook to sell O , Name: / Address: ' Tel: 2UU Sept. 14, 1991 No.7 , Please return to: Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London, N4 , social democrats defy their leaders and fight shoulder-toshoulder against the Nazis.
The debacle in Germany, when Hitler came to power in 1933, led to a huge lurch by Stalin - not towards the united front but the popular front. This mean Communist parties building government and election alliances not just with so cial democrats but bourgeois parties as well.
The united front policy of the Communist International in its revolutionary period meant not just attempting to build unity of the whole labour movement where possible, but actively building alliances between the like Kinnock, Mitterrand and Gonzalez, this is hardly true; socialism is barely mentioned by these people While socialists can demand that these reformist leaders should break with pro-capitalist policies, this kind of demand serves a purely propaganda function. It is not a serious proposal for immediate joint action.
Today the primary axis of the united front is towards creating the maximum unity in workers struggles, the struggles of the oppressed and political campaigns.
It is here that the dispute about the united front is most acute among the far left. Be united campaigning bodies and utilise them as 'front' organisations.
Militant's ham-fisted insistence on organisational dominance in the Anti-Poll Tax Federation and the SWP's November 1990 coup to take over the NALGO Broad Leftare typical examples Such antics are effectively a policy of division, of putting the interests of particular left organisations against the interests of the working class and united militant action by the left.
They have nothing in common with Lenin and Trotsky's conception of the united front.
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