A Second Installment of Dimitrov’s. The United Front  by Norman Markowitz

                In our first installment of Dimitrov’s  main report(which is largely reproduced on our website) I concluded with the specific references to conditions in the U.S.  I should have mentioned that the Comintern regarded the anti-fascist struggle in the U.S. of prime importance, in the words of Dimitrov, “as we all know, the United States is not Hungary or Finland, or Bulgaria, or Latvia.  The success of fascism in the United States would vitally change the whole international situation.”

                Of course the victory of those elements within the Republican Party who are advancing fascist programs  would  have an even greater destructive  effect today.

                The rest of Dimitrov’s  report deals with the relationship of the united front to “fascist mass organizations,”  social democratic organizations, the trade unions, women, youth, and the ideological struggle against fascism, along with the necessity of the unity of theory and practice among the Communist parties and the building of unity within the trade unions and the working class.

                Here there are valuable insights for us today. 

Where Dimitrov speaks of the necessity of reaching out to workers in fascist controlled countries and organizations under fascist influence, those who did respond to the crisis by supporting fascism, we should look  today strategically to those districts of Ohio, Wisconsin, Central Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota,  Wisconsin, where the ultra-right “tea party” Republicans tipped the balance to give the Republican control of the House.

  The working people in these districts have the right vote, which of course did not exist in fascist dominated countries.  They have seen the rightwing politicians they elected  attack other basic rights as they seek to destroy public sector unions, enact legislation to restrict the reproductive rights of women, oppress undocumented workers, none of which has done anything to help them. 

These voters can be reached with appeals to policies that will deal with the questions of jobs, real incomes, and the crippling debt burden.  They can be won from the  contemporary versions of fascist demagogues who appeal to their “urgent needs” by directing their anger unto government, public employees, progressive taxation, undocumented workers, away from their exploiters and oppressors since these politicians, Walker, Kasisch, Christie, et al, are advancing policies that are directly harming them in the interests of their exploiters and oppressors.

                In dealing with “social democratic governments”(at the time in power in Scandinavian countries) Dimitrov calls upon Communists to move away from  the policy of criticizing their general policies and instead look to and seek to advance the programs which they both share with Communists and which they were in many cases elected on---their more advanced programs, as t he basis for united action.  Here , while we have no “social democratic government,” we can look for example at the Obama 2008 election campaign not to condemn his administration for failing to deliver on those  promises which we support and share but  on the need for united political action and struggle to both create the elected majority and the mass organizations that will translate those promises into policy.  

In this regard, Dimitrov makes a powerful  argument against the left opposition to the united front inside and outside the Communist party.  “Self satisfied sectarianism….satisfied with its doctrinaire narrowness, its divorce from the real life of the masses….which professes to know all and considers it superfluous to learn from the masses, from the lessons of the labour movement.  In short, sectarianism to which, as they say, mountains are mere stepping stones.”

                Today there are those who say that if  the trade union movement attacks the Democratic party  millions and millions of workers will flock to its banner.  If mass struggles are launched against both the Obama administration and the right, great victories will be won—that the masses are being held back by their unions,  all of their mass organizations,  that, to paraphrase Dimitrov, the whole capitalist institutional superstructure, the mountain of organizational and ideological power, can be jumped over as a launching board or stepping stone if the workers are led to hurl themselves at it directly. 

In the U.S. today, such policies  of “self –satisfied sectarianism,”  taking the form of “we were right about Obama so don’t get fooled again” omits what the last four years under a McCain national administration would  have meant and or course what the next four years of a Romney national administration, which such policies  would help to bring about, would likely be.

These were the central themes of the main report.  In replying to the discussion of the report, Dimitrov summarized many of these themes and added some new insights.

First one should remember that it is the working class(and in the U.S. the overwhelming majority are workers and employees, not farmers, artisans, small business people, self employed professionals) that we are seeking to unite.  We must also take seriously their values and perceptions, seeking to build upon that which is positive, the egalitarian traditions, the civil rights and civil liberties traditions, not ignore or mock them.  We are struggling to defeat capitalism, not capitalist definitions of democracy which capitalists themselves employ hypocritically.

 And, to use Dimitrov’s phrase, we  should not be “national nihilists.”  The forces of fascism and reaction in the U.S. like those in the fascist states in the 1930s were “rummaging through history” to present a twisted view of the German, Italian, and other peoples  as  defending great civilizations from inferior savage enemies, undermined by subversive liberals, socialists, and communists in their ranks as they looked toward Hitlers, Mussolinis, Pilsudskis, Francos, et al,  as saviors.

Today, we can and must look at the best of U.S. history, Tom Paine, Thaddeus Stevens and Frederick Douglas, Robert  La Follette and Florence Kelley, Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Anne Braden, as the struggle to make the general welfare clause of the constitution and the bill of rights of the constitution not simply formal rights and freedoms but effective ones.  By understanding and identifying with a positive past, we can expose the  reactionaries  whose use of the  “tea party” as a symbol of what they represent is as rational as Sarah Palin’s idiot comment that Paul Revere  riding to “warn the British.”

 Also, those revolutionaries, while they were not democrats with a small d in any way  were  not  supporters of corporations or laissez-faire capitalism(which was just in its infancy as an ideology) or vigilante militias, and understood the necessity of both taxation and public regulation of economic activity(which, as merchant capitalists, landowners/landlords, and slaveholders, they interpreted in their own class interests) The flag they created and fought under, and the Republic and Constitution that they created, belongs to us,  not the reactionaries and contemporary fascists who demagogically use such documents and symbols t o serve and defend the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class in the service of a finance capitalist dominated system. It is our duty to  interpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights   and the role of government in the interests of the working class

In the next installment we will look at Dimitrov’s post Seventh Congress writings on the anti-fascist struggle