Dimitrov’s United Front: A Last Installment by Norman Markowitz

                As for United Front spread, Dimitrov began to use in his speeches people’s front and  look with hope to the development of peoples front anti-fascist struggles in  France, Spain, China.  At the same time  he noted  the response of fascist states and forces to the Peoples Front, as seen in the Spanish fascist uprising. 

Here, Dimitrov stressed  that the fascist assault in Spain was the direct result of both the Peoples Front victory  and the Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s conquest of Ethopia,and “the earlier seizures  of parts of China by Japan”{Manchuria}.

 All of this, Dimitrov states accurately “took place with the connivance of the bourgeois democratic countries and the league of nations.”    Much of this he sees as the result of opportunism by organizational and political leaders seeking to hold unto “their soft seats” in various nominally anti-fascist parties and organizations.  Some of it . though,was the habit of seeking a “middle policy” which in this case amounted to a of “leave the beast alone,” of ignoring fascist aggression and crime in the misguided hope that the fascist states would be satisfied with their gains and leave their appeasers alone.

                But here, Dimitrov undermined his and the Communist movement’s United Front position by giving unqualified support for the Soviet Moscow trials of former leading Bolsheviks for conspiring with German fascists and Japanese imperialists to overthrow the Soviet State. 

The Socialist International and socialists in many countries, the forces with which the Comintern sought to build the organizational United Front.  Without going into these trials, it is, for our time particularly, it is  significant to note that Dimitrov refers to these former Bolsheviks over and over again as “terrorists”   Those who support in any way these “terrorists” are aiding and abetting fascism in Spain and everywhere else.

                 Once more, without going into the specifics of the Moscow Trials, which the capitalist press in the U.S. called the “purge trials,” Dimitrov’s reference to them as the “trial of the terrorists” established a  potentially dangerous precedent.  

First, it strengthened the position of anti-Communist socialists that the Communists were doctrinaires who could not to be trusted.  Second it called for an allegiance to what were internal Soviet policies on the principle that any failure to give active support to any Soviet policy would undermine anti-fascist unity. 

The term “terrorist” was at the time was not widely used.  It had been first used ironically in Czarist Russia against various groups who plotted the assassination of the Czar and other prominent leaders.  The British had also used it against anti-imperialists using violence in India.

 But, by equating the small numbers of Trotskyites who had founded the fourth International with fascists, the Comintern provided ammunition for its enemies in social democratic and left sectarian circles to argue that the Communist parties and the Soviet Union in its policies were like the fascists enemies of democracy and people’s rights.

 In the U.S. for example, in response to a rightwing counter offensive against the sit down strikes which saw the formation of the House Un-American activities committee and heightened anti-labor violence in 1938, Peoples Front advocates formed the Lincoln Day Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, whose most important sponsor was Franz Boaz, the leading anti-racist anthropologist in the world.  In opposition, social democratic and Trotskyite  opponents of the CPUSA  who had been active in the defense of the Moscow Trial defendants and led by the self styled Marxist philosopher, Sidney Hook, formed an American Committee for Cultural Freedom to fight both fascism and Communism, contending that the only way to save democratic forces in labor and in peoples movements was to remove Communists from democratic mass organizations and  equate Communists with fascists as enemies of  democracy. 

A year later, in the aftermath of German-Soviet non aggression Pact, Hook and his supporters were able to remove Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the “anti-totalitarian” banner, which also led to the resignation of Dr. Harry E. Ward, founder and longtime leader of the Methodist Federation for Social Action and a major Peoples Front leader in the U.S. among religious social and community groups.  The Committee for Cultural Freedom served as a center in the U.S. for the propagation of the totalitarian theory, which challenged the intellectual premises on which united front action was based. 

 The Committee and similar groups began in their attacks on the United Front to red-bait prominent progressives involved in People’s Front campaigns, in that sense providing grist for the mills of HUAC, various state and local HUAC’s that reactionaries established through the country, and for that matter the FBI and various local “Red Squads” (political police units aimed at the left).  After World War the American Committee for Cultural Freedom became both the model and the core organization for the World Congress of Cultural Freedom, established and funded by the CIA through individuals like Sidney Hook to build a global “united front” of the center (including all anti-Communist leftists) against the left

I am not saying that this history would have been different if the Communist movement had spoken against the Moscow trials.  I am not even saying that the Communist movement should have spoken against the Moscow trials.  But, in developing the Peoples Front strategy, where defense of  the trials served no positive purpose,  it made much more sense  to  focus on Soviet aid to the Spanish Republic, Soviet support for collective security against fascist aggression in the League of Nations, Soviet support for workers rights and anti-imperialist movements as the reason for supporting  both Soviet foreign policy globally and the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union

  These policies were indispensible to  the defense of working class rights, and the democratic rights of all people.. 

Also, while Dimitrov’s language and that of the Comintern generally was both theoretically cogent, forceful and accessible to working class people through the world, the tendency to fall into the Soviet personality cult around Joseph Stalin by referring at points to “the Great Stalin” (although the quotes from Stalin were also cogent and solid) was counterproductive.

 It fed charges of Soviet domination of Communist parties, of “Stalinism” as something separate from and an evil force dominating the Communist movement, which would also be used as weapons, first against the anti-fascist people’s front, and then in the U.S. established for the anti-Communist cold war policy.

While I feel that it is important that these criticisms be made today , I don’t see them as at all that significant when compared with the huge positive achievements of the United Front and Peoples Front polices.  Before I conclude this review of Dimitrov let me mention those accomplishments.

First, the people’s front campaign saw Communists join with socialists and liberals to bloc fascist movements and parties from coming to power in any other major developed country.   People’s front campaigns strengthened trade union movements harmed by the depression and in a number of European countries enacted significant reforms.  People’s front organizations and campaigns also provided very practical experience for the anti-fascist resistance forces through Europe and Asia which adopted people’s front concepts and policies to the struggle to defeat the Axis armies, occupiers, and collaborators.

The foreign policy advanced under the banner of the Peoples Front and articulated by Dimitrov and the Comintern, anti-fascist collective security, that is, comprehensive and enforced economic sanctions against Hitler’s rearmament and Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, join with the Soviet Union in providing military aid to the Spanish Republic, some joint military action of Germany did not withdraw from Austria, and finally France joining with the Soviet Union to honor its treaty with Czechoslovakia rather than joining with Chamberlain and the British Empire to surrender the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich, did not of course materialize. 

But this was completely the fault of the non fascist capitalist states, led by the British empire, who in the language of the French right, “Better Hitler than Blum,” preferred to “leave the beast alone”  and in the best case scenario, sic the beast on the Soviet Union, rather than confront the fascist danger, which was also a danger to their national sovereignty

 Under those circumstances, Comintern policy and Soviet policy, together offered the only real chance to defeat fascism short of war and helped to set the stage for the anti-fascist coalition that would defeat fascism in the Second World War.

By end of 1937, Dimitrov and the Comintern saw the danger of ongoing and new fascist aggression as a  greater threat than fascist victories in capitalist countries.  The “Supreme Demand of the present” was to assist the people of Spain and China in defeating fascist and imperialist invasions, assist the peoples of Germany and Italy in freeing themselves from fascist domination; defend “small nations” threatened with fascist aggression and “establish an impregnable barrier against fascist aggression in the East and in the West.” 

 The formation by the fascist powers of the anti-Comintern Pact, the new threats to  small nations like Czechoslovakia are noted, along with the increasingly sinister role of  pro fascist reactionaries in European countries, Chinese puppets of Japanese imperialism and interestingly enough “the Hearst press circles in the United States.”(the Hearst press was a sort of predecessor to the global Murdoch media empire today then the most virulent anti-labor, anti New Deal, anti-Communist and national chauvinist news service In the U.S. ).

 There were hopeful signs in the French Popular Front government, the British labor movement, and in the U.S.  Commenting on the U.S., Dimitrov noted correctly that “for the first time in the history of America, the working class of the United States is displaying its independence as a class, uniting its forces into mass trade unions and actively taking the lead of the democratic and progressive forces in the country against reaction and fascism.” Communists, one might add, had played the central role in bringing about these victories through an informal Peoples Front alliance with the New Deal government.

What can we learn from this classic today?   On the surface, we live  in a world where the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Comintern is nearly seventy years gone, China under the leadership of the CCP is emerging as a great force in world affairs, and the interdependence of and global power of finance capital is demonstrably far greater than it was when Dimitrov was  speaking and writing, and the long period of victories for socialism and anti –imperialism which followed World War II and been challenged by a period of significant defeats.  But history is not so easily erased.

First, that it is the working class, through its organizations and actions, which can win, not political parties, or unions or mass organizations by themselves.  Unity and breadth and militancy are not opposed concepts.  To achieve both unity of action and breadth and militancy, concrete programs must be advanced that the working class can understood—in the U.S. for example, consumer debt reduction(including the more than 1 trillion in student loan debt, the enormous mortgage and general credit card debt) along with public job creation policies which will provide as “social investments” subsidies for working people and tax capital, not vice versa, which has been the policy of U.S. governments since Reagan in an extreme way and which continues thanks to the power of capital and reaction today. 

Also, we must “take the flag” away from the reactionaries who have used it as a weapon against our people by exposing the lies that the country was built on “rugged individualism,” free market capitalism,” great “captains of industry and politicians like Ronald Reagan(ironically, the right can’t so readily go back in history to celebrate Polk, Fillmore,  McKinley, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, who would  thanks to their words and deeds by their real heroes).   People through Europe and Asia learned the very hard way during WWII that Communists and socialists were the real defenders of the best of their national heritage, not reactionaries and fascists serving their exploiters and oppressors).

In foreign policy also, we must advance a consistent peace policy, opposing for example any attack on Iran without supporting or defending the internal policies of the clerical regime; supporting and defending the socialist oriented governments of Venezuela and Bolivia and the socialist government of Cuba; working peace and cooperation with the Peoples Republic of China and seeing it as a major force to build peace. 

And as Dimitrov noted in seventy five years ago, the battle for peace is in essence revolutionary; the battle to organize and unify the working class around its national interests is both internationalist and revolutionary.