During the last year Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), has published a number of articles that attempt to give a reasoned defence of the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s, and to argue its relevance to the contemporary workers movement, [1] The appearance of this material in 1975-76 can hardly be explained simply by the coincidence of the fortieth anniversary of Popular Front governments in Spain and France. For the first time since 1947, the major Communist Parties of Western Europe are facing the possibility of entering into capitalist coalition governments in countries hit by social, economic and political crises of varying proportions, Indeed, the issue of Communist participation is currently at the centre of political debate in Europe.
We are rather doubtful about the short-term likelihood of this prospect. Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising that the attention of militants of a tiny party like the CPGB should be turned towards the historical actions and compromises of their comrades in Italy, Spain or France. Many a British Communist must look to the rise of a 'respectable' mass governmental party in any of these countries as the key to the development of the movement throughout Western Europe, and above all as the way in which the CPGB itself will reverse the recent decline in electoral support and at last become a significant force in national politics. At the same time, a governmental alliance between the Communist Party and Christian Democracy in Italy would pose serious problems of explanation, Despite the course of the right-wing politicians who stand at its head, the British labour movement has had a long tradition of opposing open coalition with bourgeois parties in peacetime — a tradition that was greatly strengthened by the defection of MacDonald in 1931. The CPGB will require all the unique 'dialectical' talents of its leading theoreticians to elucidate the progressive nature of wage freezes and other traditional austerity measures enforced by a Communist Minister of Labour, serving under a Christian Democratic Prime Minister.
More generally, the prospect of a lengthy period of capitalist instability, combined with and sharpened by the direct entry of the masses onto the political arena, makes necessary a thorough ideological preparation of the Communist Parties for their role in these events. Of major importance in this process is the attempt to consolidate an alternative political tradition to that of the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary Comintern of the first four congresses. The most obvious choice is at the same time far out of reach — namely, that long opportunist line within classical social democracy running from the French Possibilists through Bernstein to the elder Kautsky. Although the 'Communist' Parties of Western Europe are marked by a similar abandonment of a perspective of revolutionary opposition to capitalist rule, they are still distinguished above all by their historical and present-day links with the bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet state. Whatever certain individuals or currents may dream of, a straightforward fusion of Stalinism with social democracy may be effectively ruled out in the foreseeable future, if only because of the too great and hazardous disruption to the movement it would involve,
Antonio Gramsci, however, has the unquestionable advantages over Bernstein et al that he was a leader of a genuine workers' uprising, that he was a founder member of the Italian Communist Party; and above all... that he was kept out of directly political activity for the last eight years of his life by Mussolini's police. This is not the place to discuss the important theoretical work of Gramsci. What interests us here is rather the current vogue for his name in Communist Party circles, and the attempt to raise a few phrases about 'hegemony' or 'war of manoeuvre' to the status of magical algebraic formulae, capable of receiving the most crassly opportunist arithmetical content. Monty Johnstone provides a model of this banalisation of Gramsci's thought and of the skilful exploitation of the authority of his name. [2]
In a parallel process, the world Stalinist movement has for a number of years been devoting considerable energy to the canonisation of Georgi Dimitrov as the genuine inspirer of modern 'Communism', Of course, we would not wish to challenge his credentials as the systematiser of the first, all important step in finding a 'new way' of looking at the bourgeoisie, However, it is ridiculous to assert, as does Monty Johnstone, that the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern (at which Dimitrov gave the main report) 'laid the basis... for the subsequent policies and perspectives of Communist Parties all over the world.' [3] As Johnstone well knows, the abrupt change in Stalin's perspectives at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War provoked considerable (if momentary) confusion in a CPGB trained for four years in the Popular Front perspectives. Thus, on 23 September 1939, John Gollan was still arguing for unity with the 'democratic' British bourgeoisie: 'Poland has fallen victim to Nazi aggression. Nazi aggression must be defeated by all the resources of the British people and the peoples of the British Empire.' [4] But just two weeks later, a hastily rewritten manifesto of the Central Committee argued that 'the reactionary imperialists of Britain and France... are not now fighting, as they maintain, for democracy against fascism or for peace against aggression, but for imperialist aims . .' [5] Harry Pollitt found himself in the unenviable position of being the author of a public pamphlet, 'How to Win the War', which was on sale when the Comintern representatives brought news of the change of line; he was thus removed as General Secretary, It hardly needs to be added that, in his function of General Secretary of the Comintern, Dimitrov presided over this unceremonious ditching of the Popular Front, as well as over its revival in 1941.
The continuity of Stalinist politics is thus defined not by any political position taken in 1935, but by the socially privileged position of the Soviet bureaucracy and the subordination of the CPs to its international policies of class collaboration.
Further articles in International will examine the post-war ideological and political evolution of the Western Communist Parties, as well as the relationship between their strategies for 'democratic advance' and the Popular Fronts of the Thirties. Although they have in common a profound fear of the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses and a subordination of the workers movement to the bourgeoisie, they may nevertheless be distinguished in terms both of their goals and relation to party programme and of the directness of their correlation with Soviet foreign policy.
Finally, it is no accident that Johnstone's defence of the Popular Front takes the form of a polemic against Trotsky. In several European countries, CP leaders (and court intellectuals like Althusser) [6] are awakening to the terrible realisation that despite the past work of delirious slander and physical liquidation the programme and traditions of Bolshevism remain alive in thousands of fresh militants; that Trotskyism has never been a more powerful force in Western Europe than it is today; and that throughout the coming mass upsurges the Communist Parties will be accompanied every inch of the way by revolutionary Marxist criticism and organisation. The seriousness with which this threat is taken may be gauged by the range of literature that has recently been produced, from the crude diatribes of Basmanov in Moscow to the slightly better attuned and more sophisticated analyses of the British specialist in anti-Trotskyism — Monty Johnstone.
THE GERMAN PRELUDE
Monty Johnstone is quite correct to preface his apology for the Popular Front by a short survey of the Third Period and of the concrete tactics adopted by the German Communist Party. However, we believe that there is a much more intimate link between those heady days of ultra-leftism and later calls for national unity than is suggested by his simplistic notions of a 'correction of sectarian errors', Johnstone's presentation may be summarised as follows: Between 1928 and 1934 the Comintern failed to make a proper distinction between fascism and bourgeois democracy and even characterised social democracy as the 'social-fascist' mainstay of bourgeois rule against which the principal blow should be directed; in Germany, it thus counterposed to common defence of democracy the building of a 'united front from below' between the Communist Party and Socialist workers, and mistakenly saw the seizure of power as the immediate task. Trotsky correctly fought against these policies for a united anti-fascist front of the Communist and Socialist parties 'within the framework of bourgeois democracy'. However, when the Comintern later adopted a defensive strategy 'which flowed from essentially the same premises as' Trotsky's critique, he reversed his own position and ended up advocating a perspective similar to that of the Third Period. [7]
Although Johnstone provides no explanation of the appearance of these sectarian 'mistakes', he describes accurately enough some of the outward features of the Third Period line. On the other hand, the only truthful element in the account of Trotsky's positions is that he consistently combatted the ultra-leftism of the Comintern, Now, we do not underestimate the scholarly effort that Johnstone has put into his articles — judging by the copious footnotes and references, he seems to have paid especial 'attention' to Trotsky's writings on Germany. [8] However, whether consciously or unconsciously, the fruits of his labour are a complete distortion of what Trotsky actually said.
As early as September 1930, Trotsky understood what Monty Johnstone will never grasp — that the position of [illegible] parliamentary regime'. [9] The crisis of 1929 had unleashed a powerful protectionist dynamic within the world economy that rapidly suffocated the export-oriented core of German industry (industrial production fell by a half between 1929 and 1932, and there were already 3 million unemployed in 1930); international creditors demanded the repayment of loans that had formed the basis of the post-war revival; a chain of banks collapsed, spreading financial chaos. At the political level, the bourgeois democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic, which had never won the undisputed allegiance of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, were being swiftly eroded by a regime of presidential decree; in the September 1930 elections, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the declared enemy of the Weimar Republic, increased its vote by 2.5 per cent; whilst at the opposite pole the Nazi vote leapt to 18.3 per cent from its 1928 level of 2.6 per cent. In this situation, the future of Germany rested above all on the capacity of the working class vanguard to replace a political system that was clearly in its death-agony, and to set about the socialist reorganisation of society in planned cooperation with the Soviet workers. A perspective of 'defence of Weimar' could only have paralysed the will of the proletariat and placed its head in a noose that was being methodically prepared by the Nazis. Such indeed was the road pursued by the social democratic leaders of the SPD, who preferred passively to accept as a 'lesser evil' the Bonapartist regimes of Bruening and von Papen (and even the overthrow of their own Prussian regional government) rather than to hasten the burial of the democratic form of bourgeois rule, of which they were the principal midwives and to which they were attached by every fibre of their being.
As for Trotsky, every word that he wrote on the struggle against fascism was based on the understanding that only socialist revolution could save the workers from economic want and fascist dictatorship, We urge readers who are not convinced of this (or indeed the correctness of his argument) to read for themselves the major articles, particularly 'What Next' and 'The Only Road'. However, in the case of Monty Johnstone, who even after reading them still sees these writings of Trotsky as foreshadowing the Popular Front, it is obviously necessary to place at least a few succinct and unambiguous statements before his eyes. Thus:
'A revolutionary party, at the time of a crisis in the regime, is much stronger in the extra-parliamentary mass struggles than within the framework of parliamentarism. But again on one condition: if it understands the situation correctly and can connect in practice the vital needs of the masses with the task of seizing power. Everything is now reduced to this.' [10] (26 Sept. 1930)
'The solution is approaching. The moment has come when the prerevolutionary situation must be transformed into the revolutionary — or the counter-revolutionary.' [11] (26 Nov. 1931)
'A system of joint measures of struggle must be elaborated against the regime of emergency decrees and Bonapartism. This struggle imposed on the proletariat by the whole situation cannot, by its very nature, be conducted within the framework of democracy... (it) lays bare the problem of the state as a problem of power,' [12] (14 Sept. 1932)
Monty Johnstone comes completely unstuck when he tries to expose a contradiction between Trotsky's 'democratic' positions and Ernest Mandel's argument that in fighting fascism the workers movement should 'define the struggle for the conquest of power as an immediate goal' [13]. In fact, Mandel's point is identical with one made by Trotsky himself: 'Precisely in Germany today we are shown that the proletariat is faced with the task of a direct and immediate struggle for power, long before it has been completely united under the banner of the Communist Party'. [14] It is obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to think that neither Trotsky nor Mandel understood by 'immediate struggle for power' the organisation of an insurrection the next day; they were referring to the seizure of power as the only way out of this crisis of bourgeois class rule. We shall return later to Johnstone's frequent and worthless attempts to play on the ambiguity of the word 'immediate'.
How is it possible then that Trotsky both saw the urgent necessity of socialist revolution and at the same time argued that the task of the hour was to organise a KPD-SPD united front for the defence of workers rights? Does this not express a basic inconsistency in his thought?
It is indeed difficult to grasp that the struggle for the needs of the working class within capitalist society simultaneously poses more and more sharply the task of the destruction of that society. The categories of formal logic, which are continually secreted by the conservative apparatuses of the workers movement, show no solution to the problem: they can structure routine trade union and parliamentary activity in periods of relative social peace, and they can permit any amount of speculation on the beautiful socialist future of humanity; but they are useless in the science of transition — of the development and mobilisation of the energies of the working class for socialist revolution. In their different ways, the ultra-left sectarians and the right-opportunists remain imprisoned within these categories. The former can see only the final revolutionary goal and impatiently demand that the masses free themselves from the control of their leaderships by adhering to the revolutionary organisation and its initiatives. The opportunists, on the other hand, are hypnotised by what is, by the might of the reformist apparatuses (and of the bourgeoisie that stands behind them); they believe that any action which jeopardises their control over their members will merely cut the revolutionaries off from the masses. What both attitudes reveal is a profound lack of confidence in the ability of revolutionaries to challenge the reformists for leadership within the countless partial struggles that bring the workers into conflict with the capitalist class, It is therefore not surprising that these two opposites are continually changing into each other; the opportunists will resort to fiery left phrases and sharp turns in order to conceal their adaptation to the bourgeoisie both from themselves and from the masses; whilst the ultra-lefts will attempt to overcome their isolation by a sudden panicky capitulation before the apparatus that they never managed to touch with their verbal, or even physical, assaults. It is only possible to escape from this vicious circle by breaking with the formal opposition between future socialism and the present reality of capitalist society.
From 1930 to 1933 the historical necessity of workers power and democracy existed as an explosively concrete presence within the crumbling Weimar Republic; it was there for all to see in the catastrophic decline of the productive forces, in the erosion of bourgeois democratic institutions, and in the deep radicalisation of millions of workers. What did not exist, however, was a political force able to bring this necessity to the highest levels of conscious expression within the workers movement; in other words, a leadership capable of demonstrating the objective need for power to the Social Democratic workers through the development of their struggle to defend their own rights and institutions.
Of course, these SPD workers believed (although perhaps not as firmly as Monty Johnstone) that it was possible to wage this defensive struggle to the end 'within the framework of bourgeois democracy', It would thus have been the height of madness to propose joint action for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the first burning task facing the whole of the working class — whether KPD, SPD or non-party — was the organisation of a class front against the fascists and the Bonapartist government. And for that they needed the maximum unity in their ranks. However, the united front advocated by Trotsky and earlier by the Leninist Comintern did not imply the slightest renunciation by communists of their revolutionary goals. On the contrary, Trotsky understood that in the course of the struggle for partial and democratic demands (including for the abolition of the regime of presidential decree — a demand that Monty Johnstone would doubtless see as part of his 'bourgeois democracy'), the united workers would be forced to extend the class organisations they had built up over the decades through the formation of soviets [15]. The united front would reach a point where it would be faced with the choice: either to go on fighting for the objective needs of the class even though this conflicts with the structures and repressive apparatuses of bourgeois democracy, or to give up the struggle in order to save bourgeois democracy. There could be no question about the preference of the SPD (which moreover did nothing to rescue its beloved Weimar by its refusal to fight). Indeed, the hostility of the SPD leadership to the united front was based on its clear appreciation that any systematic mass mobilisation would put intolerable pressure on the restricting shell of bourgeois democracy and challenge its own influence over the working class.
Does this mean that the united front is merely a 'manoeuvre' engaged in by the communists in order to eliminate their social-democratic rivals? Only bureaucratic careerists committed exclusively to the defence of 'their own' [illegible] in the name of a working class, on which the united front is based and [illegible] all organisations of the workers movement. Those [illegible] to stand in the way [illegible] the revolutionary [illegible] the masses will be swept aside in the course of decisive events that demand a unified and resolute class leadership.
Scattered throughout Trotsky's writings on Germany are warnings against an opportunist conception of the united front that is the traditional [illegible] 'Naturally, if it is not intended to go beyond the limits of a [illegible] revolutionary party will maintain an intransigent independence from its [illegible] allies of today, since it knows that tomorrow or the day after they will become [illegible] opponents of a further advance of the class. In other words, its [illegible] of the front will be thoroughly subordinated to its strategy [illegible]. [17]'
GERMANY AND STALINISM
Before we go on to look at the Popular Front itself, we must say a few words about the evolution of the Comintern in the [illegible] Johnstone can offer of the sectarian line of the Third [illegible] he diagnosed as the same infantile [illegible] layer within the Soviet [illegible] state [illegible] and the elimination of inner-party democracy within the [illegible] bring the entire peasantry under its administrative control. [20] Everything within the world movement was subordinated [illegible] pressures and contradictions of Soviet and world politics and economics, Virtually anything that moved without the approval of the bureaucratic apparatus was regarded as an 'opportunist' threat to the success of the adventure; and if it could not be stopped in its tracks by repression, then it was driven out of reach of the 'loyal communists' by hysterical denunciation. Thus in Germany not only the SPD but also the Left Opposition, the Brandlerites and the SAP were characterised as agencies of 'social fascism'; the task of patiently winning over the reformist workers through a common experience could not possibly have been conceived of at this time. Of course, this does not mean that Moscow or the KPD were more or less consciously working to sabotage the German revolution; but nor can the leaders be considered as genuinely naive and sincere militants who had been led into error by their own revolutionary zeal, The Stalinist betrayal of the German working class, expressed in its practical opposition to class unity and its capitulation to Nazism without a struggle, was a direct result of the drive for power of the nationalist Russian bureaucracy.
We should not underestimate the lasting impact of the Third Period on the consciousness of the cadres of the Communist International. The membership of nearly every section declined between 1929-33 in response to the climate of bureaucratism and sectarian irrationality (Germany was an exception to this trend, but this was owing to the extremely sharp social crisis and polarisation rather than to the popularity of KPD policies, as formal logic would suggest). Those who remained underwent a process of re-education that may aptly be described as the destruction of thought; living roots in the whole class were violently wrenched up and replaced by unquestioning submission to the national and international apparatuses; verbal and physical violence supplanted skilfully pitched propaganda and agitation as the principal weapons of the cadre; dramatic predictions of the imminent collapse of capitalism removed the need for careful study of the mood of the masses and of the political and economic conjuncture; the leading role of the party in the revolutionary process was re-interpreted as the infallibility and untouchability of the party apparatus; and finally the crucial importance of the Soviet Union as a centre of world revolution was turned on its head so that the first duty of all Communists became devotion to the 'socialist' fatherland. It was this dizzying regime of bureaucratic ultimatism that prepared and made possible the renunciation without serious internal crisis of the perspective of world revolution in the turn of 1934-35.
Monty Johnstone neglects to mention that as early as 1930 Trotsky had warned of the ease with which ultra-left sectarianism would pass over into its opposite. [21] Indeed, one of his main criticisms of the centrist opponents of the KPD was that they were unable to see Stalinism as a consistent bureaucratic tendency characterised by empirical left and right zigzags. [22] It thus came as no surprise when on 3 March 1933, after a month of total silence on the German events in the Comintern press, the Executive Committee launched a call for a united front with social democracy which for the first time in its history offered to 'refrain from [verbal] attacks on social democratic organisations', [23] Although the primary function of this appeal was to cover the tracks of the KPD (as if a whole generation of workers could forget such a crime overnight!), its explicit renunciation of the freedom of party criticism and propaganda was a harbinger of that bureaucratic non-aggression pact which the 'united front' was to become in the hands of Dimitrov and Co.
Nevertheless, is it true, as Monty Johnstone argues, that Trotsky's break with the Comintern after the German defeat was 'at best overhasty and based on an impressionistic rather than a fundamental, analytic approach' [24]; or that, at worst, he was simply 'overwhelmed by his hatred of Stalin' [25]? We need not take the first suggestion seriously, since Johnstone has already given us sufficient indication of what he regards as 'fundamental analysis': namely, a combination of half-truths, 'oversights', and circular reasoning. As for Trotsky's pathological 'hatred' of Stalin, one would have thought that this would have reached a peak by 1930, when Trotsky's own expulsion from the CPSU and USSR was being followed by systematic arrests, deportations and the first executions of Left Oppositionists, However, he understood that the Comintern was still in the middle of the greatest test in its history, and that under the impact of the decisive events in Germany and the struggle of the Left Opposition the world party could still be brought back to revolutionary Marxism. Thus his position was well-defined from at least December 1931 onwards: 'Yes, should the fascists really conquer power, that would mean not only the physical destruction of the Communist Party, but veritable political bankruptcy for it... The seizure of power by the fascists would therefore most probably signify the necessity of creating a new revolutionary party, and in all likelihood a new International. That would be a frightful historical catastrophe, But to assume today that all this is unavoidable can be done only by genuine liquidators, those who under the mantle of hollow phrases are really [illegible] to capitulate like cravens in the face of the struggle and without a struggle,' [26] Only the complete prostration of the KPD and the concern of the Comintern bureaucrats solely to save face finally convinced Trotsky that the Comintern had broken its links with the proletarian world revolution, [27]
THE 1934 TURN
Monty Johnstone's account of the 1934 turn to the Popular Front is of the kind that abounds in children's history books. After the crushing defeat in Germany, so the story goes, the sectarian fanatic Stalin was locked in battle with the untarnished hero Georgi Dimitrov, who, hand-in-hand with his staunch comrade Maurice Thorez, managed to get the monster under control and thus to open up a bright new future for the Comintern, [28]
Now, the most cursory examination of the events of 1934 will show that, like most such tales, this one is made up of one part truth, three parts falsehood and six parts omission, The key date, which is barely mentioned in Johnstone's 'concrete analysis of a concrete situation', is 6 February 1934. Encouraged by the success of Hitler in Germany and exploiting the financial scandals which were then rocking the political arena, a mob composed of various fascist groups laid siege to the French Parliament in an attempt to put a clear stamp on events, They were driven back relatively easily by police gunfire, but managed to shift the Government sharply to the right and, most importantly, to arouse a spontaneous mass upsurge against the counter-revolutionary threat, What was the response of the leaderships of the workers movement to this development? Like their German comrades, the much stronger French Trotskyists had for some time placed the slogan of the united front against the fascists at the centre of their agitation, and thinking workers in the mass organisations were aware at least of the elements of their alternative policy. This unrelenting pressure of Trotskyist ideas must therefore have played a certain role in the development of currents favourable to united action in both major parties. It also explains the vicious physical attack made by Stalinist thugs on a group of Left Oppositionists at a Paris public meeting in July 1932. [29]
At its July 1933 conference, the Socialist Party (SFIO) had split over the question of parliamentary support for the bourgeois Radical Government and over the general ideological basis of the party, The extreme right wing, led by Renaudel and Déat, took nearly a seventh of the membership out into a new populist party and thus left the Blum leadership severely exposed for some time to the left pressure of the rank and file. In particular, the Paris region of the SFIO fell under the control of the Jean Zyromski-Marceau Pivert current, which gave a certain expression to the aspirations of the class by its systematic agitation for CP-SFIO united action. On 6 February the SFIO leadership issued a characteristically vague call on the workers to 'prepare to defend their organisations'. However, the Paris region took the initiative of asking the Communist Party (PCF) for discussions on joint action against the fascists; receiving no reply, it sent a delegation to the offices of L'Humanité but this met with no more success. On the 8th, L'Humanité thundered its reply to these 'social fascists': 'We are prepared to fight with anyone who really wishes to struggle against fascism. But how is joint action possible with people who prop up governments when they cut wages; who sabotage strikes; or who abandon a class position to collaborate with the capitalist regime and thus prepare the ground for fascism?' [30]
In effect, the month of February found the PCF in a state of disorder similar to that of the German KPD.., but with the important difference that a sizeable rebellion was breaking out in its ranks. At the December meeting of the Comintern Executive Committee, Maurice Thorez had talked of acts of indiscipline in branches of the PCF and doubts about the correctness of tactics towards the Social Democracy, whilst appearing as the staunchest defender of the Comintern line. 'The Central Committee', he reported, '[had] rejected these opportunist proposals and condemned their adoption'. His colleague, André Marty, was of the same opinion, that 'it remains an essential task to overcome resistance to the Comintern line, for this confuses the party and cripples its action'. [31] However, the next month a leading member of the French Executive, Jacques Doriot, came out openly in favour of CP-SFIO joint action against the growing menace of the fascist leagues; and the PCF and the Comintern were to be preoccupied over the following period with the explosive revolt of a section of its proletarian base led by Doriot, who was the Communist Mayor of St. Denis (which has always been a PCF stronghold in France).
The depth of the confusion within the PCF was clearly revealed on the decisive day of 6 February. That morning, the party daily L'Humanité made a call for a demonstration just a few hundred yards from the fascist gathering. Its slogan? '... at one and the same time against the fascist bands, against the Government, and against social democracy'. It was not surprising, therefore, that in the later fighting at the Place de la Concorde, groups of Communists lost their identity and even joined in the attacks on the police. [32] Of course, there is no truth in certain bourgeois accounts of the events as a joint fascist-communist uprising; what was expressed was the complete disorientation produced by the campaign against 'social-fascism'. Three days later, the PCF attempted to recover ground by the organisation of its own demonstration and the erection of barricades in the workers' districts of East Paris! Despite the courage of the Communist militants (six of whom were killed by the police), this action of 9 February was essentially a sectarian adventure whereby the leadership hoped to 'outdistance' the Socialist workers and insulate itself from the powerful urge to unity,
It was this same mass pressure that forced the CGT and SFIO leaderships, together with nearly every other tendency in the workers movement, to organise a general strike and mass demonstrations on the 12th, As late as the 11th, L'Humanité was still denouncing the treachery of the 'social-fascists' who had postponed any action, and predicted that 'the workers will repulse the Socialist leaders in disgust'. However, during the night of 11-12 February, the PCF leadership took a last-minute decision to demonstrate, and the next day the movement for the united front became an unstoppable force through the spontaneous fusion of the two demonstrations and repeated chanting of the slogan 'Unity!' [33] This is not to deny that Thorez and Co continued bravely swimming against the stream for some time to come. The day of unity was immediately followed by a renewal of the campaign against the 'social-fascists' and against the Doriot current within the party. Thus L'Humanité of 15 February took up the traditional refrain that the SFIO was 'the chief prop of the bourgeoisie in its efforts to create a fascist regime', whilst at a 'higher' level the Executive Committee of the Comintern reaffirmed on 3 March that 'the only way to form the United Front is by fighting relentlessly to destroy the treacherous Second International'. [34] The whole PCF apparatus was mobilised to isolate the oppositionists within the party, who were beginning to sign local agreements on their own initiative with SFIO branches. Doriot was subjected to a torrent of abuse, and a public meeting in Rouen to which he had been invited to speak was broken up by a squad of Stalinist toughs; if he was not yet expelled, this was only because a little more time was required to isolate him from his base and to take the wind from his sails. By the end of June the party leadership had taken over virtually the whole of the platform and was thus able to expel him at minimum cost. [35]
The first indication of the turn was provided by a Pravda article of 23 May 1934, which stressed that it was permissible to enter into agreements with social-democratic leaderships for joint action. This was reprinted a week later in L'Humanité together with an appeal addressed to the SFIO leadership, According to Albert Vassart, who was then in the Soviet Union, this initiative of the PCF was taken following 'imperative directives sent by coded telegram' from Moscow. [36] In any case, between the end of May and the PCF conference of 23-26 June, Thorez does not present the picture of a man altogether in control of the situation. Thus the mid-June issue of the party's theoretical journal carried an article in which he denounced the SFIO in the most violent terms; and right up to 25 June he continued to reserve the right of criticism of other organisations of the united front. It was only at the end of the conference, which had been extended by a day, that Thorez suddenly accepted all the conditions set by the SFIO bureaucracy and declared himself for 'unity at any price': 'neither from the mouth of any of our propagandists, nor from the pen of any of our writers, in L'Humanité or even in the Cahiers du Bolchévisme [the theoretical journal of the PCF] as in our entire press, will there be the slightest attack against the [illegible] or the leaders of the Socialist Party'. (L'Humanité, 29 June 1934). [37]
What lessons can we draw from this volte-face? First, it is clear that the capacity for united action detected by Monty Johnstone in the PCF and Maurice Thorez was in fact the distorted bureaucratic response to the revolt of a substantial [illegible] of the workers of the party, Of course, if the turn had been grounded in revolutionary Marxist principle and accompanied by a democratisation of the party regime and a thorough balance-sheet of past positions, then it might be attributed to the process of internal struggle that is the life-blood of a political organisation. But the explanations of the new course asserted that all that was involved was a tactical readjustment by an infallible leadership to the new (!) conditions of fascist menace; and the figure who had been fighting most vigorously for the turn was expelled at the moment of its implementation. Secondly, there cannot be the slightest doubt that both the decisions of orientation and detailed PCF initiatives were directed by the CPSU/Comintern apparatus in Moscow. This does not contradict the first point since, despite the haemorrhage of members during the Third Period, the PCF was then the largest and most strategically placed party in capitalist Europe and its further isolation from the class and above all internal 'disruption' would have rendered it useless in coming years as an instrument of Stalin's policy, We must now briefly discuss the significance for the French working class movement of the United Action Pact signed by the PCF and SFIO in July 1934.
In the days following 6 February, the most advanced sections of workers had demonstrated their determination and ability to break down the obstacles to class action erected by the SFIO and CP apparatuses. It is unquestion[illegible] forward in the self-confidence and fighting strength of the working class; for the first time, broad masses sensed their tremendous collective power and the possibility of unlimited advance on the basis of it. Almost overnight the organised workers movement became the central force in French politics and drove onto the defensive the fascist bands that had seemed on the verge of repeating Hitler's unobstructed march to power. The full extent of the capitulation and treachery of the German Social-Democratic and Stalinist parties became evident in the light of these first mass actions [illegible].
From February onwards the word 'unity' was on everyone's lips. But if unity is absolutely necessary for the struggle of the working class, it is by no means sufficient to provide a clear direction for the movement. (No-one can imagine, for example, that the German proletariat would have been assured of victory over Nazism if it had been united behind the SPD; indeed, Austrian Social Democracy, which commanded the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the working class, had put up only token opposition to Dollfuss during his eleven-month consolidation of dictatorial power). On 12 February, the SFIO and PCF leaderships had been united only in their resolve to limit the strikes and demonstrations to one-off protest actions and to prevent them from developing into an ongoing movement capable of driving the fascist bands off the streets and challenging the newly formed Bonapartist government (38); and the protracted process that led to the conclusion of the July Pact was marked by the suspicions, manoeuvres and compromises of the two apparatuses, rather than by mass meetings and public debate on the tasks of the workers movement and the political thrust of the united front.
WORKERS UNITY AND CAPITALIST CRISIS
This seems to be the point at which Monty Johnstone's 'Trotsky' abandons his correct positions and goes over to revolutionary phrase-mongering. [39] It is rather curious, then, that Johnstone does not find it necessary to mention any of Trotsky's numerous explanations of the change in the emphasis of his positions in 1934
We have already seen in relation to Germany that Trotsky foresaw the time when the task of communists would be to 'move the Social-Democratic workers, after a rapprochement is made with them on the basis of defence, over into a decisive offensive', [40] In the spring and summer of 1934, the French workers movement had reached precisely that stage where the bureaucratic leaderships were preparing to absorb the powerful movement for united class action and to rob it of its spontaneously anti-capitalist dynamic; repetition of the bare slogan of the 'united front' would then have pointed no way forward at all to the working class. The central question became rather the creation of an organisational framework for the actual carrying out of joint action — a framework in which all tendencies within the workers movement would be represented, and which would be committed to energetic struggle against the fascists
In the Action Programme for France, which was published in June 1934, Trotsky stressed that the purpose of the 'united front from above', for which the Left Opposition had fought for so long, was not to [illegible] between those standing 'above' the masses, but to open up the possibility of consistent united actions of the working class masses themselves. He thus proposed the formation of nation-wide committees of action and the creation of a unified workers' militia, without which the workers would be incapable of defeating the heavily armed fascist bands [illegible].
In 1936 no-one had any doubts that seriously organised committees of action, by drawing millions of workers into day-to-day political activity, would unleash a dynamic that was diametrically opposed to parliamentary reformism Once [illegible] power of their [illegible] they would seek to use this instrument not only to deal [illegible] all with the fascists, but to struggle for a whole series of [illegible] made urgent by the crisis of French capitalism [illegible] would not take long [illegible] the potential of concerted action and to set up its own committees in the image of those of the workers [illegible] was anathema to the SFIO and PCF leaderships who looked to the capitalist state to fulfil the task of defeating the fascists by means of an (inevitably formal) legal ban. The French Communist Party still occasionally talked of forming committees of action, and the Third Period slogan 'Soviets everywhere' was still chanted on demonstrations, [illegible] essence of the PCF's agreement with the SFIO [illegible] the abandonment of the [illegible] to build [illegible] bodies under [illegible] circumstances. 'Unity at any price!' meant quite precisely opportunist unity at the price of the renunciation of mass struggle. [42] As Trotsky put it at the time: 'Yesterday the greatest danger was the sabotage of the united front. Today, the greatest danger lies in the illusions of the united front, very closely related to the parliamentary illusions: the diplomatic notes, the pathetic speeches, the handshaking, the bloc without revolutionary content — and the betrayal of the masses.' [43]
The fundamental continuity between Trotsky's writings on Germany and those on France is thus the understanding of the need for united mass action in pursuit of the goals of the working class. Before 1934 the social democratic and Stalinist apparatuses stood in the way of such action by their refusal to enter into any joint agreement whatsoever; after summer 1934 they remained an obstacle by their limitation of any agreement to 'summit' deals, complemented by periodic protest marches and meetings. This continuity of Trotsky's position is, moreover, rooted in the objective world character of capitalist economy and of the catastrophic crisis that was then shaking it. Fascism, war, the instability of bourgeois-democratic institutions and the decline of the productive forces manifested themselves throughout the European continent, and programmes that remained confined to 'immediate demands' and the 'defence of democracy', such as that presented by the French Communist Party, left intact the capitalist organisation of society that was dragging the masses down into disaster. Of course, this crisis first reached breaking-point in the 'weakest link' of the imperialist chain — Weimar Germany; but the same pressures were operating on French capitalism — the proud republican victor of Versailles — and posed with increasing urgency the socialist tasks of the proletariat.
It was precisely because the social democratic bureaucracy understood the explosive dynamic of mass organisation in this period of capitalist crisis that it opposed the formation of action committees — followed closely, and more and more consciously, by its 'Communist' partners. And conversely, it was because the French Trotskyists understood this explosive dynamic that they were the most consistent fighters for organised mass action. They knew that their June Action Programme — which mapped out a path of struggle against the dying capitalist regime — was, in its general features, the only way forward for the movement of the working class; that consistent mobilisation now on the burning question of the fascist bands would 'naturally' select a leadership of the most energetic, resolute and class-conscious sections of workers, and that such a leadership would be capable of moving the united front forward to its 'natural' goal: the conquest of power.
Does this mean, as Monty Johnstone asserts, that Trotsky's programme was 'incompatible . . . with the proletarian united front'? [44] Well, it was clearly incompatible with the desires and aims of the 'Socialist' and 'Communist' gentlemen who then stood at its head, just as in April 1917 Lenin's programme of soviet power was 'incompatible' with the 'united front' of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. But to put this forward as the conclusive argument is the unmistakable hallmark of that philistine labour 'realism' which bases itself not on the objective needs of the workers and their powerful urge towards class action, but on what is 'possible' for the bourgeoisie and its reformist bureaucratic agencies to stomach.
ORIGINS OF THE POPULAR FRONT
One thing was abundantly clear in the autumn of 1934: the new turn in French politics could not stop at a Pact which declared its intention to organise the struggle against fascism, attacks on democratic freedoms, and war preparations solely by means of joint meetings and protest demonstrations Either the unity of the working class would take the form of committees of action uniting the defensive and offensive tasks of class struggle, or the pact would become an electoral and parliamentary coalition of workers' and bourgeois parties strengthened by the occasional festive rally, By October the French Communist Party had taken the first step along the path of alliance with the bourgeois Radical Party [45], and during the following years was increasingly to subordinate its own programme, its pact with the SFIO and ultimately the whole of the workers movement to these guardians of 'democratic capitalism', Perhaps Thorez genuinely thought at first that he would be able to convert this alliance into a 'broad popular movement' based on elected mass committees. But for revolutionary Marxists it was literally inconceivable that the coterie of professional politicians who made up the core of the Radical Party should sacrifice their parliamentary power base to such dangerous plebeian bodies. In fact, contrary to the carefully cultivated Stalinist myths, the Popular Front never did and never could become a mass movement. [46] From the moment that Thorez launched his call for a front of 'labour, freedom and peace' with the bourgeois Radicals, every declaration of every Communist leader in favour of popularly elected committees was in effect nothing more than a demagogic screen for the party's policies of class collaboration.
As we said earlier, Marxists are not opposed in principle to agreements with bourgeois leaderships for practical joint action in pursuit of goals that are in the interests of the working class. If the Radicals had been capable of organising their petty bourgeois electoral base into committees of struggle against the fascist leagues, or if they had been prepared to participate in any mass action, then this could only have been welcomed; even at the parliamentary level, a revolutionary deputy would have found no difficulty in voting from the independent standpoint of his own party for any resolution abolishing the regime of presidential decree or the Senate that was elected by partial suffrage. However, what was involved in the coalition with the Radicals was not such a concerted action of independent forces, but the entry of the major workers' parties into a long-term bloc with a bourgeois party on the basis of its own programme.
Monty Johnstone defends the actions of the French Communist Party by reference to a schema that effectively excludes the proletariat from an independent political role in the epoch of capitalist decline. He argues that 'the defence of the bourgeois republic became in the 1930s the next stage for a country like France threatened by fascism', and goes on to explicitly counterpose this conception to the perspective of 'socialist revolution' that 'had for long been seen by Marxists [as] the next stage'. [47] Here Johnstone drops for a moment the pretence of establishing some theoretical continuity between the Popular Front and the revolutionary Comintern; the earth-shattering discovery made by Thorez and Dimitrov is presented in a familiar form comprehensible to everyone: socialism may be the glorious future awaiting humanity, but it has nothing to do with the mundane tasks facing the working class today.
Now, although Monty Johnstone is at sufficient 'distance' from Bolshevism to be able to make such a clear assertion, it was by no means as simple for his forerunners, Stalin and Dimitrov. When they were accused (by the Trotskyists) of renouncing socialist revolution in order to strengthen bourgeois democracy, they replied that this was a vile slander manufactured by enemies of the Soviet Union and the working class, and so on. Indeed, at the Seventh World Congress, Dimitrov categorically rejected such a 'stages' view of the tasks of the proletariat and stressed that 'it was necessary to prepare for the socialist revolution' by means of the Popular Front struggle against fascism. 'The Right opportunists', he declared, 'have tried to establish a special ''democratic intermediate stage'' lying between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the purpose of instilling into the workers the illusion of a peaceful, parliamentary passage from the one dictatorship to the other. This fictitious ''intermediate stage'' they have also called ''transitional form'' and even quoted Lenin's words! But this piece of swindling was not difficult to expose: for Lenin spoke of the form of transition and approach to the ''proletarian revolution'', and not of some transitional form between the bourgeois and the proletarian dictatorship.' [48]
Of course, these words express not principled revolutionary politics on Dimitrov's part, but the compulsion on the Stalinist leaders of 1934-5 to reconcile their perspective with the traditions of revolutionary Marxism, to present prostration before the 'anti-fascist bourgeoisie' as a 'transitional approach to socialism'. And there can be no doubt that in the consciousness of the tens of thousands of Communist militants of the period, all the manoeuvres and public concealment of positions were justified by the 'objective' imminence of socialist revolution, Only the Trotskyists were able to see then what Monty Johnstone has no compunction in saying today: that the line of the Seventh World Congress was not based on the imminence of revolution but on its renunciation for the 'foreseeable' future. It required the experiences of June 1936 in France and the Spanish revolution to demonstrate in practice that Dimitrov's attacks on right opportunism at the Moscow Congress were merely a bureaucratic cover against revolutionary Marxist criticism, and ultimately against the socialist instincts of the working class itself,
We have already pointed out in the case of Germany the extreme abstractness of Monty Johnstone's picture of the Thirties. He is nowhere concerned with the real material forces that were shaking European bourgeois society to its foundations, but only with the idealist constructions of 'bourgeois democracy' and 'fascism'. The reason for this aloofness is obvious: if Johnstone were to analyse the crisis of the world capitalist economy and the roots of fascism in a ruined and desperate petty bourgeoisie, he might realise that the 'strengthening' of bourgeois democracy could in no way have removed the breeding-ground of mass impoverishment, imperialist war and the fragility of bourgeois democratic institutions. His attachment to 'bourgeois democracy' would then appear as attachment to a rotting social order incapable of satisfying the basic needs of the masses. For if 20 per cent unemployment, widespread hunger and falling living standards, the drift to war and the rise of counter-revolutionary armed bands do not place socialism on the agenda as 'the next stage', then what do they pose? Continuing unemployment and hunger? Or perhaps Johnstone believes that the working masses are rewarded for their devotion to bourgeois democracy by a suspension of the laws of motion of capital? Traditionally, Marxists have seen a crisis of the capitalist order as necessitating the boldest and most resolute struggle by the working class to impose its own revolutionary solutions.
For Monty Johnstone, however, the decline and putrefaction of bourgeois society forces the proletariat to become the finest champions of the ideology and political institutions created by the bourgeoisie in the epoch of its ascendancy! Or, as Maurice Thorez proudly claimed: 'The Communists have become in literal truth the trustees of bankrupt capitalist culture.' [49] Yes, 'in literal truth'! And not only of the culture!
Whilst admitting the originality of the 'stages' theory in Comintern history, Monty Johnstone seeks to trace it back to Lenin's 1905 text Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. We cannot deal here with Johnstone's peculiar 'anti-Trotskyist' version of Russian history, the essentials of which were developed by Zinoviev and Stalin in 1923-4 as a 'tactical weapon' against the Opposition; in fact, it has been refuted so clearly and so frequently that one can only wonder at Johnstone's ability to continue reproducing it without mention of any of the substantial arguments. [50] We must briefly touch on two points:
(1) It is true that until 1917 Lenin saw the immediate task of the Russian revolution as the creation of a bourgeois democratic republic, and that he regarded the posing of socialist goals as a premature diversion from the struggle against Tsarism. In numerous passages of Two Tactics he states quite clearly that the political reforms aimed at by the Marxists 'will, for the first time make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class', and that an extensive period of 'the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism' is a precondition of a future socialist revolution. [51] At the same time, however, he repeatedly stressed that the Russian bourgeoisie was interested above all in the action to carry through the 'bourgeois revolution'. The Bolshevik slogan of 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' expressed clearly the [illegible] mission of the working class and the need for independence from the bourgeois politicians, but it failed to define the relationship between on the one hand the social and political goals and soviet class organs of the proletariat, and on the other the political aspirations and institutions of the bourgeoisie. Writing shortly after, Trotsky did not deny the central importance in Russia of the classical demands of the bourgeois revolution (in particular, confiscation of the landed estates), but argued that, whatever the wishes of its leadership, the working class in power would not be able to 'limit its mission to the creation of republican-democratic conditions for the social domination of the bourgeoisie'. It would be forced to establish its own dictatorship and introduce socialist measures in combination with democratic ones. [52]
It is incomprehensible how any present-day writer can pretend that Lenin's ambiguous conceptions of 1905 were realised in 1917. From the first moment of the revolutionary upsurge of 1917, Lenin went decisively beyond his previous positions to refuse any support to the bourgeois Provisional Government, to pose the seizure of power by the proletariat as the immediate task of the coming period, and to outline a series of measures that would assert the control of the workers' state over the economy. 'In their entirety and in their development', he wrote in the Fifth 'Letter from Afar', 'these steps will mark the transition to socialism, which cannot be achieved in Russia directly, at one stroke, without transitional measures, but which is quite achievable and urgently necessary as a result of such transitional measures...' [53] Upon his return to Russia, Lenin waged a merciless struggle against all those 'Old Bolsheviks... who now speak only of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry"'; such people he characterised as having 'in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle.' [54] As Trotsky had foreseen, the 1905 formula proved to be 'obsolete, no good at all, dead' [55] in the face of the reality of workers soviets and dual power.
(2) Although the Bolsheviks' earlier notion of the tasks of the revolution were similar to that of the Mensheviks, the two currents were actually separated by an abyss. In Two Tactics, Lenin concisely expressed the difference in the following way: 'One side [the Bolsheviks] says: advance the revolution to its consummation despite resistance or passivity on the part of the inconsistent bourgeoisie, The other side [the Mensheviks] says: do not think of independently advancing the revolution to completion, for if you do, the inconsistent bourgeoisie will recoil from it.' [56] It was above all the training of the Bolshevik Party in the spirit of suspicion and class hatred of the bourgeoisie that enabled Lenin to overcome the inadequacies of his positions as soon as the revolution broke out, and to win over the rank-and-file and finally the party leaders in April 1917. But there had never been any question of the formation of a bloc on a common programme between the Bolsheviks and the political groups of the bourgeoisie; not for one moment had [illegible] against 'trying to revive' the dead formula of the democratic dictatorship in Russia; and yet we find Monty Johnstone trying with all his might to place it at the centre of the stage in bourgeois France in the 1930s. In 1917, Lenin and Trotsky finally reached agreement on the socialist character of the revolution; but Johnstone continues to contrast Trotsky's country with the so-called 'Bolshevik strategy for Tsarist Russia'. [58] Johnstone and Thorez support the idea of a Radical [illegible] minimalist programme [illegible] whereas Lenin fought all his life for the political independence of the proletariat!
THE RADICALS AND THE PEASANTRY
Monty Johnstone further motivates the bloc between the French Communist Party and the bourgeois Radicals by the necessity of drawing in the peasantry and the middle classes into an anti-fascist coalition. He argues that the formation of such a bloc was an indispensable step, just as a united front between the KPD and SPD was central to the organisation of mass working class resistance in Germany. Now, Trotsky did not underestimate the importance of an alliance with the peasantry in France and even stated that 'to approach the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie of the cities, to draw them to our side, is the necessary condition of the success of the struggle against fascism, not to speak of the conquest of power.' [59] However, the bourgeois Radical Party, which traditionally leant on the peasantry for support, was not a mass organisation like the workers parties or even the SRs in Russia; it succeeded in 'organising' little more than the grouping of Paris politicians and circles of provincial dignitaries. To have 'demanded' that a Herriot or a Daladier mobilise the peasant masses in struggle would have made a laughing-stock of the revolutionary who had such illusions. Moreover, all historical accounts agree on the precipitate decline in electoral and other support given to the Radical Party as a result of the bankruptcy of its policies, its cowardly capitulation to the reactionaries on 6 February 1934, and the corruption of its leaders in the context of a global capitalist crisis. It offered nothing to the impoverished peasant masses but repetition of the old demagogic promises, now supported by association with the strength of the workers movement.
For the peasantry, only a struggle to effect a fundamental [illegible] illusion and trickery that had long been the staple fare of 'Radicalism'.
THE RADICALS AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY
The extent of the self-effacement of the PCF before the Radicals will become clear if we resume a description of the stages of the alliance. Thorez's call in October 1934 for a popular front of 'labour, freedom and peace' on a programme of charitable aid to 'the poor' and unemployed, dissolution of the fascist leagues, public works and a forty-hour week met with little initial response. The Radical leaders had not yet grasped the extent of the conversion of the Communists to parliamentary politics and the possibility of reviving their own fortunes through such an alliance; whereas the Socialist leaders, still under considerable pressure, feared an erosion of their mass base if they were to accept 'a 'common programme' which does not contain a single measure of a socialistic nature'. [61] The break in the situation came only in May 1935 when the signature of a Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance announced a new turn in European politics. 'In itself', of course, the pact represented an attempt by Soviet diplomacy, unobjectionable in itself, to utilise inter-imperialist contradictions for its own benefit. However, it was accompanied by a statement that gave for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union explicit political support to the military policies of a capitalist state: 'Stalin fully understands and approves of the policy of national defence pursued by France in order to maintain its armed forces at a level consistent with its security needs,' It was only a matter of time before the French Communist Party was to express its own approval by means of its parliamentary vote, and by the abandonment of its anti-militarist campaigns of recent years. At this the alliance between 'patriotic Communists' and 'democratic imperialists' rapidly took shape and squeezed the social democrats into acceptance of the conditions, By the end of May, Thorez was offering to 'overlook' the bourgeois character of the Radicals and accept it into an amorphous left wing when he declared in parliament his readiness to support a Radical government 'which would really apply the policies of the Radical Party . . . since (it) is the most important of the left-wing groups in this Chamber,' [62]
The Popular Front finally made its public debut at a mass demonstration on 14 July — the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Communist, Socialist and Radical leaders presided at the closing rally over the swearing of an empty oath to 'remain united for the defence of democracy... to give bread to the workers, work to the young, and peace to humanity as a whole' [60] Although the principal [illegible] among the 500,000 demonstrators were workers, the function of the rally was to show to the bourgeois Radicals that the Communist Party could mobilise and loyally place at its service the enormous strength of the workers movement, So as to leave nothing ambiguous, Maurice Thorez appeared with a huge tricolour draped across his chest: 'from now on', he seemed to be saying, 'we Communists shall be the most devoted French patriots and shall not disrupt the unity of our people with our agitation'
The 14 July was preceded and followed by a wave of chauvinist articles in L'Humanité such as had not been seen in the workers movement since the 'national unity' of the first imperialist world war
It seems clear that the July rally and the formation of the Popular Front had at first a contradictory effect on the mass movement by weakening the National Union Government then headed by Pierre Laval. Thus, widespread protests developed the following month against a decree-law that reduced the pay of all state employees by ten per cent; the movement culminated on 6 August in a virtual uprising at the naval bases of Toulon and Brest and bloody street battles with the police. Although the PCF had supported the protests, it recoiled in horror at the sight of independent working class action that went beyond the orderly routine of demonstrations and above all threatened to upset the delicate alliance with the Radicals. Communists, Socialists and trade union leaders united in denunciation of the sailors' actions as the work of provocateurs, and on 17 August L'Humanité took the unusual step of publishing a Politburo letter to the regional Party secretaries drawing their attention 'to the agitation in these two cities whose purpose was to divide the Popular Front and provoke unjust accusations against the workers' organisations', [64]
The August events brought into the light of day the contradictory pressures operating on the PCF leadership: on the one hand it could increase its influence among the working class only by organising a mass movement; but any significant movement threatened to escape its control and jeopardise the real aim of the party — to strengthen the coalition with the bourgeois Radicals and its own weight within it. The policy of Thorez aimed at steering a fine middle course and suppressing the mass movement at the decisive conjunctures. Thus the immediate response of the PCF after August was to drop its offensive against Laval and retreat into parliamentary manoeuvres and preparation of a joint programme with the Radicals. In the heat of the struggle it had proved its commitment to law and order and its usefulness as a strike-breaker and a dampener on the masses. By August the whole superstructure of apparatuses, alliances and 'unity' of organisations was in place and ready to assume the task of administration and defence of the bourgeois republic; all that remained was to top it off with a demagogic programme that was finally published in January 1936.
STALIN AND THE RADICALS
One of the most curious aspects of Monty Johnstone's account of the turn to the Popular Front is the lack of attention to the processes taking place within the CPSU. A serious analyst could not have failed to tackle the problem of explaining how the 'basically correct' turn of the world movement was accompanied not by an 'improvement' in the Soviet Union, but by the effective destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the unleashing of a mass terror unprecedented in world history. It is well-known, for example, that of the 139 full and candidate members elected to the Central Committee at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, only 29 emerged alive at the next Congress in 1939; and that 1,108 out of 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress [illegible] disappeared during the great purges. [65] For a Marxist, such [illegible] events of 'domestic policy' are surely not unrelated to the 'world policy' of the Stalin leadership. However, Monty Johnstone cannot escape from a fundamentally eclectic approach to the question: he sees on the one hand successes of the Comintern and on the other hand certain of the errors and crimes within the Soviet Union — the two could just as well have occurred in separate epochs under separate leaderships!
Now, although the details are still not clear, it is today almost certain that in 1934 secret and muted divisions were breaking out within the central Moscow apparatus. According to Roy Medvedev, 270 delegates had voted against the re-election of Stalin to the Central Committee at the 17th Congress — an unmistakable, if unsystematised, expression of discontent with his leadership. At the same time, Sergei Kirov, the boss of the Leningrad organisation was elected to the highest bodies of the party, and appears to have become the focus of significant forces outside Stalin's camarilla. It would, of course, be wrong to imagine that what was involved was a consistent programmatic opposition — people like Kirov had played a leading role in the Twenties in the defeat of the Left and Right Oppositions, and proclaimed themselves in a loud public voice to be firm supporters of Stalin's 'general line'. They expressed rather a certain continuity of cadre and tradition with the party of the October Revolution, and a spontaneous resistance to the concentration of dictatorial powers in the hands of the Bonapartist General Secretary, at a time when the army of disoriented bureaucrats was turning to just such a figure in order to ensure its positions of power and privilege, and beginning to feel as an intolerable restriction the remaining continuity with Lenin. In 1933-4, the Kirov current thus seems to have acted as a brake, both on the most wildly adventurist schemes and on Stalin's early attempts to initiate the physical liquidation of opponents. In response to this constraint on his freedom of movement (or on the 'monolithicity' of the party), Stalin tactically gave up ground, whilst promoting and drawing together an inner circle of 'loyalists' which included such people as Nikita Khruschev. Finally, on 1 December 1934, his police agents executed the assassination of Kirov, and he was able to utilise the resultant campaign against 'plotters' and 'spies' to launch a wave of arrests and to silence even the slightly discordant voices within the party. [66]
What is the relevance of these events to discussion of the Popular Front? Monty Johnstone presents the turn as a victory of enlightened forces over the fanatical Stalin, but ignores the fact that the consolidation of the turn in 1934-5 rested upon the consolidation of absolute power by Stalin, It had evidently proved impossible to convene the Seventh Congress of the Comintern as planned in summer 1934, given the unresolved situation within the CPSU as well as other sections such as the PCF, Its postponement by a year allowed sufficient time for Stalin's domestic Mafia and his international hatchet-men like Dimitrov and Manuilsky to create the necessary conditions for an 'authoritative' gathering, It is no doubt true that in the absence of clear policy directives from Stalin (who occupied himself little with Comintern affairs in 1934), certain divisions could appear and even endure for a short period within the Comintern apparatus, one can well imagine, for example, the calculations of a Bela Kun that he could read Stalin's mind better than Dimitrov, and that when the General Secretary ended his tactical ploy he would call a halt to the [illegible] concessions to social democracy and 'unity'. But although these considerations are not unimportant on a secondary level, they do nothing to explain the thoroughness with which the supposed 'dogmatist and sectarian' Stalin embraced and cynically exploited the Popular Front, followed with scarcely a whimper by Kun and his associates. The real reasons for the change of policy have to be sought in the re-examination of the European arena made by the Stalinist [illegible] in the Stalin-Laval pact of May 1935.
The turn away from the Third Period naturally made it possible for the French Communist Party to overcome its isolation, which, despite the unquestioning obedience of its leaders, must have been a source of constant concern. However, that turn could have become a return to revolutionary Marxism only if Thorez had been capable of a fundamental break with Moscow. The Comintern apparatus no longer viewed the action of its national sections through the prism of a world revolutionary strategy, but judged them by their usefulness to the manoeuvres engaged in by Soviet diplomacy with the imperialist powers. The overriding authority of Moscow during this period is nowhere better expressed than in Manuilsky's speech on the work of the Seventh Congress. His report opens with the statement that 'Our Congress was the Congress of victorious ''Socialism in the USSR''', and goes on to assert that this victory is the factor that will make possible 'victory on a world scale' by causing 'a powerful movement towards Socialism in the capitalist countries . . That is why the prospect of the whole development of the world working class movement is inseparable from the further victories of Socialism in the USSR. That is why all the key problems of this movement, all its tactical problems, revolve around the central axis — the reinforcement of the USSR as the base of the world proletarian revolution.' [67] Over the years, the language and the underlying political conception have become familiar: instead of the Soviet Union being considered as a responsible fraction of the revolutionary movement of the working class, the international proletariat is itself seen as a subordinate part of the 'socialist fatherland' (or, more precisely, of its controlling bureaucratic summit),
Since the manoeuvres of Soviet diplomacy were thus seen as the basic 'tactical problem' facing the French Communist Party, it was inevitable that what Monty Johnstone terms the 'complementarity' of Soviet and PCF policies should take the form of a 'complementary' reconciliation with French imperialism. [68] At the height of the mass struggle of 1936, Marcel Gitton stated unambiguously in L'Humanité (3 June) 'We think it impossible to pursue any policy that would risk endangering the security of France in the face of the Hitlerite threat.' This in itself mirrored the equally clear expression of concern of Stalin's master diplomat, Maxim Litvinov: 'The essential point is that France should not allow her military strength to be weakened. We hope that no international disturbance will favour the designs of the Reich,' [69] A year later the Stalinist propaganda agencies no longer contented themselves with regrets at the revolutionary disturbances in Barcelona, but attributed them directly to fascist agents!
The function of the Popular Front will become clear from an examination of the French and Spanish upsurges of 1936.
JUNE '36
It is not often realised that throughout the period from 1932 to 1936, the parties that formed the Popular Front already commanded a parliamentary majority with 322 seats, Thus the real significance of the April-May election results was not so much, as Monty Johnstone suggests, the fact that these parties together received 'an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies with 378 seats', but rather the greatly increased representation of the major workers parties and the corresponding defeat of the bourgeois Radicals. If, despite losing nearly half-a-million votes and a quarter of their seats, they 'remained a force to be reckoned with', this was due above all to the second-ballot withdrawal in their favour of lower-placed SFIO and CP candidates. [70] Monty Johnstone professes to understand that election results 'need to be analysed dynamically in their social context to assess trends and revolutionary potential', but, like Thorez before him, he ends up clinging to the remaining Radical vote as to a life-jacket against revolution — as if the truly dynamic tendency of the situation were not the evident radicalisation of the popular masses searching for a new leadership but the abiding attachment of the most conservative sections to the sinking ship of Radicalism!
In reality, the outcome of the elections was neither anticipated nor welcomed by Stalin and the leaders of his French followers, The class struggle had succeeded in leaving its mark even on the Popular Front, from which all thought of class struggle had been banished; the timid leadership of the Socialist Party had been impelled into office instead of that stable Radical administration which was the linchpin of Stalinist strategy and for which the PCF had been campaigning during the previous period. 'The voter', Trotsky wrote, 'has expressed his will—so far as he can in the straitjacket of parliamentarianism—not in favour of the People's Front policy but against it.' [71] Monty Johnstone demonstratively scratches his head at such an obvious affront to common sense. But if Johnstone himself is so enwrapped in a parliamentary straitjacket that he cannot glimpse the significance of the class polarisation reflected in the May elections, the French workers delivered astonishing proof the following month of their will to struggle and their lack of respect for the Radical policies and friends of their leaders.
The great strike wave that swept France in May-June 1936 brought the masses in their millions to the centre of the arena. [72] Starting on 11-12 May with two successful defensive battles in Le Havre and Toulouse, the movement rapidly assumed the character of a generalised confrontation between the working class and the employers. By the end of the month, virtually all the major engineering factories in the Paris region were out on strike, and in the next few days layer upon layer of textile, distribution, catering, printing and other workers — organised and unorganised; provincial and Parisian — enthusiastically followed the lead of the huge proletarian concentrations of Bloch and Renault. Everywhere economic demands were articulated to a still confused yet profound revolt against the stranglehold of big capital over society; everywhere workers occupied their factories in direct challenge to the rule of the bosses. The bourgeoisie was seized with panic and could do no more than grant far-reaching concessions on the 'economic' front, whilst trusting to the moderation of Blum and Thorez to maintain its social domination and its ability to launch a counter-attack at the first opportunity.
However, the initial attempt to end the movement — the Matignon agreements of 7 June between the Government, the employers' federation and trade union leaders, including the Communist Benoit Frachon — merely provoked an intensification of the strike wave. Sensing the weakness of the capitalists, the worker militants began to raise fresh demands, in particular for the establishment of a minimum wage over and above the agreed increases and, failing this, for the nationalisation of their factories. In one area of Paris the Hotchkiss workers issued the call for an elected central strike committee, grouping representatives from 34 local factories. On 11 June, when Thorez made his famous speech to a meeting of Paris Communists, the country was at fever pitch and the capital ablaze with rumours that a demonstration to the city centre was under preparation. Now surely this was the time for the PCF to give effect to its talk of popular elected committees and the still current slogan of 'Soviets everywhere!' Had not Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress stated that, 'as the movement grows and the unity of the working class strengthens, we must go further, and prepare the transition from the defensive to the offensive against capital, steering toward the organisation of a mass political strike'? [73] And had not Thorez himself argued that with the formation of a Popular Front government, 'the Popular Front and the Communist Party will occupy new positions, which we shall utilise to prepare the installation of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat'? [74]
When he was actually faced by a mass strike movement, however, Thorez could see only one way forward: 'we need to know how to end the strike' that was so menacing to 'national security'. In reality, the French Communist Party had throughout the 'disorders' done everything in its power to prevent the movement from finding a political voice. It had refused to participate in the Blum Government, not because it saw it as a bourgeois administration, but because 'the Communists will serve the people's cause better by supporting the Socialist-led Government loyally, uninterruptedly and without reservations, than by their presence in the cabinet — which would give the enemies of the people a pretext to launch campaigns of fright and panic.' [75] Once the spontaneous strike wave had begun, the party could evidently retain its mass base and influence over events only by active participation in the movement. But all its efforts were directed towards limiting the struggle to purely economic demands, and it never ceased to present itself as the party of order and 'national interest'. Thus, on 6 June, Vaillant-Couturier gave in L'Humanité the following reason for desiring a speedy end to the conflict: 'The prolonging of the present situation, which is due to the egotism and obstinacy of the employers, cannot but imperil the security of the people of France.' Several months later, when he was no longer under such intense mass pressure, Thorez went so far as to disavow what Johnstone refers to as 'the great sit-in strikes, in which the Communist trade unionists played a leading role and the Communist Party gave its full support.' [76] On reflection, the Stalinist 'son of the people' thought 'it is better not to use that form of struggle, given the development of reactionary campaigns that sow trouble and uncertainty among the common people [les petites gens]'. [77]
'The Communist Party Means Order!' proclaimed in bold headlines L'Humanité of 14 June, and indeed this was no empty boast. Only the party that was still linked in the consciousness of the masses with the October Revolution, that still declared its commitment 'in principle' to soviet power, and that had placed itself at the head of the strike movement — only that party was capable of bringing the workers to heel. Thorez's speech of 11 June, in which he gave instructions to the Communists to bring the strikes to an end, represented the culmination of a process whereby the Communist Party had been transformed from a revolutionary vanguard into an agency of bourgeois order within the workers movement.
Monty Johnstone attempts to defend Thorez by one of his grotesque historical analogies. 'This was no more a ''betrayal''', he says, 'than was the action of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who in June and July 'held back and shaped into a peaceful demonstration' the ''spontaneous excitement'' of the Petrograd masses...' [78] What Johnstone forgets is that the Bolsheviks' action during the July days was guided by the aim of the seizure of power, and by the need to win over broader sections of the masses to that revolutionary goal, It was the Mensheviks and Right SRs who then 'meant order' and who were preparing to liquidate the power of the soviets into the 'Democratic Conference', And in France it was the Communist Party that was guided by its explicit rejection of revolution as the way out of the crisis of bourgeois society
At the same time, Johnstone's invocation of the example of the Bolsheviks demonstrates 'too much' for his purposes For even if the May-June strike movement were comparable to the July Days, this would show that what was involved in France was not simply an everyday struggle for economic demands, but a profoundly revolutionary mood amongst the workers, which the PCF for its own reasons felt compelled to dampen.
[illegible] strations in July 1917 because broader masses had first to be won to the goal of the seizure of power, successfully accomplished in October; Johnstone attempts a grotesque analogy with Thorez's call to end the strikes in June 1936, whose purpose was precisely the opposite.
Monty Johnstone's further thoughts on the subject of revolution (which, it must be remembered, he has already ruled out for that epoch at least) read like a Menshevik litany of cravenness: 'Even assuming... that the Socialists with 16.92 per cent had been prepared to join with the Communists in proceeding ''from the very first day of the strike'' to establish ''a regime of dual power'', would they have had a reasonable chance... of carrying the majority with them? Was it not simply wishful thinking to believe that millions who had registered their support for bourgeois parties at the ballot-box one week would have transferred it to the workers parties on the barricades the next? And, indeed, if these millions were really capable of such volatility and illogicality, is it not just as probable that they would have veered back again to the right when things became difficult the week after?... Had the workers' parties as a minority attempted ''the conquest of power by the proletariat''... the likelihood is that they would have driven a significant part of the one and a half million Radical voters into the arms of the Right... Across the Rhine stood Nazi Germany allied to Fascist Italy...' and so on. [79] If such wisdom had prevailed in April 1917, when the Bolsheviks still represented a small minority of the proletariat, not to speak of the peasant masses, then the world would have been a very different place indeed — the French workers would have faced in 1936 not just German imperialism (and we should add British imperialism 'just across the Channel'), but Tsarist-bourgeois Russia further to the East!
What is completely absent from Monty Johnstone's thinking is a realisation of the enormous social and political power of the working class when it is united behind a determined revolutionary leadership; he sees the strength of the enemy and the vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie as insuperable barriers to the advance of the working class, rather than as elements of class struggle that confront the proletariat as obstacles to be transformed and overcome, In short, for all his talk of 'hegemony', he sees the working class not as the potential leader of humanity, capable of rousing and directing the broad masses under its banner, but as a shame-faced giant that must hide its power for fear of provoking reaction.
What, then, was possible in June 1936? We have no wish to follow in the footsteps of centrist confusionists like Marceau Pivert, who could excitedly declare in one breath that 'Now everything is possible!', and in the next breath express their unbounded confidence in Leon Blum. If the proletariat had possessed a leadership adequate to its tasks, it could rapidly have placed itself at the head of the popular masses in the struggle to destroy the power of the capitalists; but the French 'Communists', who cynically exploited their revolutionary past in their claim to leadership, counterposed to Pivert's formula 'the Communist (!) declaration: everything is not possible; the crucial slogan of the Party remains: ''Everything for the Popular Front, everything through the Popular Front''''. [80]
Monty Johnstone pretends that the choice in June 1936 was either immediate insurrection or the policy pursued by the Communist Party. In this he is following a long anti-revolutionary tradition that seeks to ridicule the revolutionary perspective by identifying it with the seizure of power tomorrow. Now, amongst Leninists it is of course possible to discuss the precise tactics applicable at every point of a mass upsurge within a shared revolutionary strategic framework. But, as in Russia, what was essentially under debate was not the military-political organisation of insurrection, but the definition of a revolutionary perspective, the organisation of the vanguard of advanced workers around it, and the formulation of clear conjunctural slogans responding to the needs of the masses and leading towards that goal. [81] We have already given sufficient evidence to show that the policies of the PCF were aimed at removing the danger of revolution.
Nor is it true that the distinction is between the 'wishful thinking' of revolutionary Marxists and the 'sober realism' of the struggle for 'economic demands'. In a period of capitalist crisis the only way out for the masses is the fusion of the struggle for their material interests (against falling living standards, unemployment, erosion of democratic rights, and the fascist bands) with the political struggle for state power.
Let us take the example of living standards. One of the principal economic gains of the mass strike (which had nothing to do with the Popular Front programme) was across-the-board wage increases of between 7 and 15 per cent. Faced with the threat of revolution, the capitalists were prepared to grant what were then massive rises in the knowledge that they could be recuperated in more peaceful times by mechanisms such as inflation. And indeed, within one or two years all the gains of 1936, except paid holidays, had been liquidated by the capitalist counter-attack. Any genuine socialist could have foreseen this outcome as well as the working class response: the automatic rise of wage levels simultaneously with rises in the cost of living (a 'sliding scale of wages'). However, the French Stalinist, Socialist and trade union leaders well understood that such radical measures to defend the interests of the working class would be completely unacceptable to the capitalists and the 'Radicals', and would quickly bring to the fore the question of where the state power lay, Just as Blum and Thorez held up 'unity' in 1934 as a self-sufficient goal for the masses, so in June 1936 they presented the Matignon agreements as a self-sufficient victory that could be consolidated by a period of 'democratic order'. Thus, far from it being the case that the PCF pointed a 'realistic' way forward, the only way in which the immediate needs of the French masses could have been defended was by revolutionary-despotic measures enforced by the power of the mobilised masses.
All the propaganda and agitation of the French Trotskyists centred on these tasks facing the working class and on the need to forge a leadership adequate to them. Although we should not exaggerate the extent of the Trotskyists' influence, the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists certainly did not share Johnstone's view of them as a 'puny band'. L'Humanité launched an hysterical attack on Trotskyist 'provocateurs', with whom it identified the revolutionary tendencies of the working class itself; and on 14 June it implicitly associated itself with the Blum Government's confiscation of the Trotskyist paper La Lutte Ouvrière, As we shall see more clearly in the case of Spain, the 'defence of democracy' was inextricably bound up with the suppression of workers democracy and the basic democratic rights of the revolutionary opponents of class collaboration.
AFTERMATH
The aim [illegible] hinder the movement of mass strikes [illegible] directly political goals. 'Everything for the Popular Front, everything through the Popular Front' involved the characteristically reformist concentration of political activity in the meeting-rooms of parliament and cabinet, and if the demobilisation of the masses was in the end accomplished with relative ease, this was due above all to the illusions in the Blum Government systematically aroused by the professedly 'Marxist' SFIO and 'Bolshevik' PCF,
What, then, were the fruits of moderation? A year later Blum withdrew from the centre of the stage having achieved nothing but the consolidation of bourgeois rule and the demoralisation of the mass movement. 'What went wrong?', asks Monty Johnstone, and with a show of 'fairness' he admits that of course 'the Communists... did make certain mistakes in applying their new line in novel and complex circumstances'; however, his balance sheet is limited to a quotation from Thorez's own statement in 1947 (which, as we have seen, responded to the polemical needs of the hour): 'We did suggest the creation of People's Front Committees democratically elected in the factories and localities. We suggested the holding of a National Congress, composed of delegates elected by popular assemblies at the base . . but we did not succeed in breaking the opposition of the Socialists and of our partners to the holding of a sovereign congress.' [82] The bureaucratic deceit underlying this assessment is quite transparent. At the highpoint of mass activity in May-June 1936, the Communist Party did not even raise the slogan of committees, still less engage in a systematic fight for them; it supported the Blum Government and its Radical successors even during its own campaign for aid to the Spanish Republic; and, most significantly, it attempted to broaden the Popular Front not by mass mobilisation and organisation but by raising the slogan of the 'French Front'! This innovation, which is not mentioned by Monty Johnstone, was to be based on 'respect for the law, defence of the national economy and of the freedom and independence of our country' — in other words, on a programme that could be (and was intended to be) acceptable to the most conservative bourgeois politicians. [83] In the end, the PCF leadership declared its willingness in March 1938 to form a straightforward government of national union that would include such reactionary Catholic diehards as Louis Martin. So much for Monty Johnstone's argument that the Communist Party's policy of alliance prevented the Radicals from being driven into the arms of the Right. [84]
Finally, we should look at the positive achievements attributed by Johnstone to the Popular Front. [85]
1. 'The People's Front did succeed in its first aim which was to stem the growth of the French Fascist movement'.
It is certainly true that the powerful mobilisations of the working class movement in February 1934 had demonstrated that the fascists would not march to power with the same ease as in Germany. One of the reasons why the German bourgeoisie had backed Hitler after 1930 was its growing conviction that he would not meet with any effective resistance from the SPD and KPD — resistance that would have unleashed the spectre of proletarian revolution. In the face of the capacity for spontaneous working class action (vividly reaffirmed in May-June 1936), the French capitalists could no longer be so confident. Thus, although they doubtless considered contingency plans for a military coup backed by a fascist movement, they hesitated to turn to the leagues as a political solution. We cannot of course assert categorically the way in which the petty bourgeoisie and fascism would have developed, 'if' the inter-imperialist contradictions had not become so closely intertwined with the national class struggle after 1939. What we can say, however — and in this sense Trotsky was perfectly correct — is that the Popular Front, by leading the mass movement into the dead-end of bourgeois coalitionism and consequent rapid demoralisation, prepared the most fertile ground possible for an anti-working class dictatorship of one kind or another, Despite the evident dissimilarity between the Pétain regime and traditional fascism, it is nevertheless true that it was the Hitler-Pétain dictatorship that succeeded in the task of the destruction of the organised workers movement. Johnstone further points to the dissolution by Blum of the fascist leagues and attacks Trotsky for describing this as 'a lie and deception'. Blum did indeed issue an order on 18 June 1936 dissolving the Croix du Feu, But Johnstone does not mention that the very next day its leader, Colonel de la Rocque, founded an ideologically identical Parti Social Français, which was allowed to function throughout the following period, Nothing in the history of France or Spain has challenged Trotsky's position, which had previously been that of the Comintern, that 'only the armed workers can resist fascism'. [86]
2. 'The Popular Front period was also one of trade union unification and growth from one to five million members'.
Again, this contains an element of truth, but no more. The enormous growth of the CGT occurred in the wave of enthusiasm that accompanied and briefly succeeded the spontaneous strike wave of 1936 and the temporary conquests. However, by 1938 hundreds of thousands of workers were already leaving the CGT, which on the eve of the war stood at the same level as in January 1936 (i.e. approximately one million members). [87] There could be no clearer indication of the lack of perspective for the workers movement provided by the Popular Front and its Stalinist, Socialist and syndicalist guardians of social peace.
It is naturally impossible to discuss here fully the course of the revolution and civil war in Spain. [88] However, it is in the policies pursued by Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) that we can see most clearly the anti-revolutionary character of Monty Johnstone's positions, as well as the difference between revolutionary Marxism and the Popular Front.
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION
Between February and July 1936, as Johnstone recognises, 'a great explosion of militancy and initiative among the working people' swept Spain. 'Workers occupied factories and peasants and agricultural workers took land from the big landowners' [89] in a movement strikingly familiar to, yet going considerably beyond, the May-June events in France. The major difference was that the Spanish Communist leaders, who knew as well as Thorez 'how to end a strike', did not have sufficient prestige and influence among the masses to bury the upsurge in an equivalent of the Matignon agreements. Despite the efforts of the Popular Front, which had won the February parliamentary elections, this instinctive revolt posed more and more sharply the question of power. And yet Monty Johnstone claims that these actions were in accordance with the perspective of the Popular Front!?
The bourgeoisie rapidly understood the depth of the upsurge and the lack of room for compromise: it could place no confidence in the ability of the Spanish Blums, Thorezes and Jouhaux to carry out their policing role within the workers movement. In June-July 1936 the capital was filled with rumours of an imminent military putsch, which the Republican Popular Front Government of Casares Quiroga awaited as it would a natural disaster. The 'Communist' Republicans, drawing greater energy from their Bolshevik past, called on the Prime Minister to take 'firm action' against the plotters, as if a lifeless mummy in a Madrid office could utilise any section of the forces of 'order' to combat the rebellion of virtually the entire state apparatus! Only the arming of the masses and the ruthless dispersal of the 'Republican' army and the police could have spared the Spanish masses from the coming civil war. But, as Monty Johnstone will learnedly point out, the slogan of 'workers and peasants' militias' would have been 'highly provocative' under the prevailing circumstances: it would have mixed up 'the defensive' and 'the offensive'; it would have separated the workers from their 'middle class allies'; it would have ignored the sacred distinction between bourgeois-democratic and socialist stages; it would have suggested that state action against the fascists was indeed 'a lie and a deception'; in short, it would have blown to pieces the whole criminal policy of cowardice and class collaboration that went by the name of the Popular Front, Therefore, the Communist Party did not agitate for militias in the critical days before the 18 July.
Even after the launching of the military rebellion, the Government continued in the words of Trotsky so resented by Monty Johnstone, 'to lull the workers and peasants with parliamentary illusions' by its broadcast appeal: 'The Government has noted the offers of aid it has received and, while offering its gratitude, states that the best way to help us is to carry on normally with everyday life, in order to set an example of calm and trust in the military forces of the state.' [90] Faced with such paralysis, the Communist Party and the right-wing Socialists issued a treacherous communiqué of their own: 'It is a difficult, not a desperate time. The Government is sure that it has adequate means to crush this criminal move, Should its means prove inadequate, the Republic has the Popular Front's [i.e. of the CP and SP] solemn promise. It is ready to intervene in the struggle as soon as it is asked for help. The Government commands and [illegible]' [91] The masses paid little heed to such [illegible] proved more adequate guides for workers action than the leaders of the Communist International (although in the months to come, of course, their inability to engage in the struggle for power was to prove fatal for the revolution).
Twenty years after October, the full extent of the [illegible] even Monty Johnstone are forced to admit, 'the whole state apparatus was destroyed and state power lay in the street.' [92] Not just in the street, we may add, but in the countless revolutionary committees which rapidly covered the unoccupied part of the country. However, Johnstone's trust in parliament and the Popular Front is not so easily shaken, for on the same page he argues that 'to have overthrown the parliament just elected by the people by a revolution for the establishment of soviet power' would have played into the hands of Franco! Thus, even when 'the whole state apparatus (which for Marxists includes parliament) is destroyed and state power lies in the street', even when he is faced by the most gigantic revolutionary upsurge in the history of at least Western Europe, Johnstone repeats the old refrain that revolution is 'highly provocative', To the power of the armed people of July 1936 he prefers the atomised [illegible] their Stalinist and social democratic hangers-on. Even six months later, by the way, the prime minister of Spain, Largo Caballero, could reply to Stalin's praise of parliament with the observation that 'there are no enthusiastic defenders of parliament to be found here, even among the Republicans', [93]
If in July the bourgeois state was smashed to pieces, and if parliament lay and continued to lie suspended in mid-air above the masses, nevertheless none of their leaders had the will to administer the coup de grace. The Caballero Socialists were swept along by events, whilst continuing to mouth phrases about the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'; the Anarchists recoiled in horror from the idea of a workers state, whilst entering the bourgeois government 'just for the moment'; and the POUM, dreading above all 'sectarian isolation', fell into line at the decisive conjunctures. Again the parallel with the situation of the Russian workers movement is evident. But whereas from April onwards the Bolshevik Party gradually won decisive leadership of the masses in the struggle for workers' power, the Spanish Stalinists — who were alone among the major currents in having a precise goal — set about the reconstruction of the demolished bourgeois state with tremendous energy and determination. In this they were greatly assisted by the military support and growing political control of Moscow over the actions of the Republican Government. Their authority was nonetheless also based on a single argument that has for millennia been the stock-in-trade of the deceivers of the masses, namely, 'first we must win the war, then we shall see about liberty, equality, fraternity, who knows, perhaps even socialism'. The speech of Dolores Ibarruri quoted by Johnstone gives a flavour of the demagogy of the period: '.... this miners' wife and daughter made it clear that the struggle was 'not for the Spain which is dying together with the enemy, but for the Spain we want to have — a democratic Spain .... which will give the peasants land, which will socialise industry under the control of the workers'' and 'will completely and comprehensively, and in a revolutionary spirit, solve the economic problems that lie at the foundation of all revolutions.'' ' [94]
In July 1936 there were just two strategic roads open, and indeed two ways of combatting the military uprising: either the centralisation of the existing revolutionary committees and militias into a powerful workers state and army, or the destruction of the committees and militias and their replacement by a strong bourgeois state apparatus, largely bypassing or abolishing the institutions of bourgeois democracy. In his writings, Trotsky repeatedly argued that the key to victory lay not in a handful of bourgeois Republicans and their friends in London and Paris, but in the mobilisation of all the energies of the masses behind their own state and their own army; any other course would lead to the demoralisation of the masses and inevitable bourgeois repression against their militant vanguard.
By depriving the masses of their most important weapon — their revolutionary organs of struggle — the Popular Front coalition broke the fighting unity of the workers and peasants. It was only a matter of time before this was consummated in the physical suppression of those workers' organisations that responded, however ineffectively, to the revolutionary aspirations of the masses. Already on 17 December 1936 Pravda gave the cue to its GPU agents and their native associates in Spain: 'In Catalonia the elimination of Trotskyists and Anarcho-Syndicalists has already begun; it will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.' After the first Moscow trial and the shooting of innumerable 'mad dogs', 'spies' and 'wreckers', the implication of the threat was unmistakable. Thus, whereas for Trotsky it was the revolutionary unity of the working masses that was essential for victory, to the Executive Committee of the Communist International it was 'the complete extermination of the Trotskyist POUM gang' that constituted 'one of the most important prerequisites for victory over the fascist murderers and vandals'. [95] Beginning with the exclusion of the POUM from the Madrid Defence Junta in November 1936 [96], and culminating in the arrests and murders of POUM and Anarchist militants in 1937, the counter-revolutionary Stalinist-Republican repression was one of the principal factors of demoralisation and demobilisation. It should also be realised that the Negrin Government, which followed the removal of Largo Caballero in May 1937, was a bourgeois-democratic regime that had 'important elements' not of socialism but of military dictatorship: it was based on a widely employed censorship, suppression of 'anti-Republican' organisations, 'catch-all' definitions of capital offences (such as 'acts or demonstrations tending to weaken public morale, demoralise the Army, or diminish collective discipline'), a powerful secret police, and so on. By late 1937 no less a figure than Winston Churchill could write approvingly of the dramatic changes: 'When in any country the whole structure of civilised and social life is destroyed by atavistic hatreds, the State can only be reconstituted upon a military framework .... In its new army .... the Spanish Republic has an instrument not only of military but of political significance.' [97]
It is in this light that we should view the events of May 1937 in Barcelona, Despite the formation of a regional bourgeois government, the growing control exercised by Negrin, and the dismantling of the power of the committees, Catalonia had remained a stronghold of the CNT and POUM. On 3 May, as the climax to a campaign against these two organisations, the Stalinist leader Rodriguez Sala led a detachment of armed police to occupy the central telephone exchange, which had been administered by a joint CNT-UGT committee since the previous July, Fighting broke out almost immediately and by evening a spontaneous workers' insurrection had placed Barcelona in the hands of the masses. CNT leaders were later to repeat ceaselessly that, had they wished, they could have taken power with the minimum of effort. The problem was that they did not wish, and all their efforts were directed instead to securing the dismantling of the barricades and a return to work. The punishment for their betrayal was swift indeed: utilising the results of their own provocation, the Stalinists depicted the uprising of the Barcelona proletariat as a plot by Trotskyist fifth-columnists, and in the ensuing witch-hunt they succeeded in beheading the POUM and isolating Caballero Socialists and Anarchists within the Government.
What is Monty Johnstone's account of these events? He ignores the attempted occupation of the telephone exchange, which triggered the explosion, Instead he portrays the left-Anarchists, POUMists and ultimately the Barcelona proletariat itself as playthings of a handful of Franco agents, thus implicitly excusing the brutal repression of the workers' leaders by the GPU and its Spanish accomplices. [98] In support of his bureaucratic-police conception of history, all he can do is quote the boast of Franco's brother to the German ambassador that his thirteen agents in Barcelona had 'succeeded .... in having the shooting started in the streets, which then led to the desired results'. It is obvious that Franco, whose brother was a master of black propaganda, had a vested interest in thus describing to his Nazi allies the miraculous feats of his agents, In any case, Franco does not mention where his agents were placed: it would seem more logical that they had been behind the initial act of provocation — the Stalinist occupation of the telephone exchange.
Ultimately, of course, all this talk of provocation is beside the point. In the spring of 1936, two powers and two tendencies faced each other in Catalonia. One of these was revolutionary and, whatever the desires of its leaders, associated with the CNT and the POUM; the other was bourgeois Republican and consciously identified with Stalinists and right-wing social democrats, A clash between them was inevitable — the GPU and Stalinists had long been meticulously preparing for the final confrontation with the revolution, If it had not been fully clear whether this would meet with resistance or capitulation on the part of the CNT and POUM leaders, after the surrender in Barcelona there could no longer be any serious doubt about the outcome.
CONCLUSION
Throughout Monty Johnstone's articles, one feels the author straining at the leash of 'scrupulous analysis' to which he has supposedly committed himself. At the end, however, he finally breaks loose and feels free to heap on Trotsky one of those epithets coined in the high Stalin period. It now seems that in 1933 (i.e., at the height of his [illegible] against the petty-bourgeois hysteria of the 'Third Period') Trotsky had all the features of what one 'Ralph Fox aptly described . . as ''the petty bourgeois in a hurry'' ', [99] What then, we may well ask, does this Monty Johnstone represent?
We have seen enough examples of the handiwork of this amateur forger: how he systematically distorts Trotsky's positions on the German revolution; how he ignores Trotsky's real views on the united front in France; how he covers up the role of the Comintern at the decisive conjunctures and falls into the most blatant self-contradiction when he tries to justify it. Devoid himself of the slightest trace of dialectical thinking, he can only try to bury the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism in that stagnant swamp of eclecticism and zig-zag that has characterised Stalinism throughout its history. It is true that he no longer considers Trotsky to have been in the pay of the imperialist secret services in October 1917; but in his 'research' he has done little more than sift through the stale left-overs of the Stalin school of falsification and warm them up for a new public.
It is no accident that the CPGB (not to speak of the CPSU) is still incapable of honestly facing up to its own history, passing off such scurrilous intellectual swindlers as 'objective critical analysts', For the whole existence of Monty Johnstone's political stage-managers is based on a deception that inevitably breeds the method of eclecticism and distortion. What else can be expected of people who talk occasionally of revolution only to conceal their fear of it from advanced workers; who, in the manner of the most despicable labour bureaucrats, equate the prostration of the Italian Communist Party before Christian Democracy with the strength of the workers movement; and who, when they are faced in Spain or Chile by the revolutionary aspirations of the exploited and oppressed masses, can recognise only 'petty bourgeois haste', 'threats to national unity' and 'provocation of the bourgeoisie'? Truly, they show no limits to their 'petty bourgeois haste' to assist the bourgeoisie in the exorcism of the spectre of communism!
Nevertheless, these cynical manipulators will in future have to call on the services of rather more capable scribes than Monty Johnstone. The recent revival of Marxist theory and of informed interest in Trotsky's historical struggle has left little room for such shady characters, whose intellectual prostitution is clearly discernible beneath even the most highly polished surface. And in the vital, frank debate that is now developing amongst revolutionaries on the central questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics, Marxists will treat with the contempt it deserves the debilitating stew of historical falsification and class capitulation that has long been the staple fare of the Johnstone kitchen.
NOTES
1. Johnstone, 'Trotsky and the Popular Front', in Marxism Today (1975), [illegible]; see also Johnstone, 'Trotsky and World Revolution', Cogito pamphlet, 1976.
2. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 361
3. [illegible]
4. [illegible], 23 September 1939
5. World News and Views, 7 October 1939.
6. See, for example, Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, London [illegible]
7. [illegible]
8. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York, 1971.
9. 'The Turn in the Communist International' (September 1930), in [illegible], p. 69. Our emphasis.
10. [illegible]
11. 'Germany, The Key to the International Situation', in ibid., p. 121.
12. 'The Only Road', in ibid., pp. 321-2.
13. Quoted in Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 308n.
14. 'What Next?', in Trotsky, op. cit., p. 194.
15. 'The logic of events is such that the struggle for ''parliament'' and for ''democracy'' becomes for every Social Democratic worker a question of power, Therein lies the main content of the whole conflict from the standpoint of the revolution. The question of power is the question of the revolutionary unity of the proletariat in action. A united-front policy with respect to the Social Democracy must be pursued in the very near future to render possible, on the basis of proletarian democratic representation, the creation of class organs of struggle, i.e. of workers' soviets.' 'The Only Road', in ibid., p. 328. See also the section of 'What Next?' entitled 'Through the United Front — to Soviets as the Highest Organs of the United Front'. in ibid., pp. 193-8.
16. See ibid., esp. pp. 201, 296, 307, 380, 393.
17. It is this 'active, revolutionary attacking element in the policy' that Monty Johnstone cannot tolerate or even 'see'. He thus hints that Trotsky's criticisms of the Comintern were essentially the same as those of the centrist Brandlerites and Sozialistisches Arbeiterpartei (op. cit. (1975), p. 309); a more aggressive assertion of the same point — intended no doubt to 'harden out' YCL readers — may be found in 'Trotsky and World Revolution', p. 10, The following is a typical assessment by Trotsky of the Brandlerites: 'The Brandlerites are one of the mouthpieces of Social Democracy... The moment the relationship of forces changes radically to the advantage of the proletarian revolution, the Brandlerites will again turn out to be... a brake on the revolution' (op. cit., p. 73).
18. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 309. It is true that Johnstone states that Trotsky's writings on Germany should be read 'critically'. However, it is clear from his single example that this refers not to Trotsky's revolutionary perspective (which he prefers not to read at all), but to relatively minor points such as Trotsky's argument in 1931 that 'the attempt of the fascists to seize power in Germany must lead to the mobilisation of the Red Army' as 'the arm of the proletarian revolution'. Of course, Johnstone denounces this as 'of an adventurist character', but what he does not bother to mention is Trotsky's assessment of such a call in 1933 as... 'sheer adventurism'! (Trotsky, op.cit., p. 387), In reality, such an aggressive internationalist response to the rise of Hitler was ruled out not by questions of principle but by the absence of any workers' resistance in Germany in 1933, and above all by the extreme instability of the Soviet Union itself, following Stalin's policies of previous years,
19. The similarity is striking between this and Khruschev's 'analysis' of the autocratic features of the Stalin period in terms of 'the personality cult'.
20. The disastrous consequences of the policy of forced collectivization are well-known and are one of the main causes of the phenomenally low productivity of Soviet agriculture today. See, for example, Isaac Deutscher, Stalin.
21. '[The Stalinists] will undoubtedly raise the cry that the Left Opposition stands for a bloc with the Second International. These cries, as soon as the real leftward swing of the working class takes the bureaucrats unawares, will not prevent the announcement of a fourth period, or a second stage of the third, and all the Molotovs will enter... into a period of opportunist experiments like the Anglo-Russian Committee and the workers' and peasants' Kuomintang.' (Writings 1930, pp. 61-2).
22. See, for example, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 227.
23. The Communist International: Documents, (Ed. Jane Degras), Oxford 1965, pp. 253-4.
24. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 319.
25. Ibid., p. 350.
26. The Struggle Against Fascism, p. 134.
27. See ibid., pp. 419-34.
28. See Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 310.
29. See Trotsky, Writings 1932, pp. 166-8.
30. Quoted in Danos & Gibelin, Juin '36, I, Paris 1972, p. 15.
31. Degras (ed.), op. cit., pp. 291-2.
32. The March edition of Communist International admitted the character of the disorder, whilst asserting that 'leadership by the Communist Party over the workers' demonstrations that spontaneously (!) took place was not in evidence on that day'. (Degras, op. cit., p. 315).
33. According to Albert Vassart, who was shortly to become the PCF representative on the Comintern Executive, the decision to authorize participation was taken by the Comintern plenipotentiary in Paris, Eugen Fried. (Vassart, 'Compte-rendu d'une conférence'. La Révolution Prolétarienne, No. 414, p. 23 — cited in Daniel R. Brower, The New Jacobins, New York 1968, p. 36). Uppermost in the mind of Fried was doubtless the fact that the Comintern and the PCF were threatened by an original kind of 'united front from below': local PCF branches had begun to break orders by joining ad-hoc committees for the 12th, and it could not be anticipated how many would take part willy nilly in the united actions.
34. Rundschau, 8 March 1934 (quoted in Julius Braunthal, History of the International, vol 2, London 1967, p. 424).
35. Although Doriot's struggle momentarily coincided with the dynamic towards the united front, his opposition to the Comintern expressed many of the opportunist features of the later policies of Thorez and was certainly not grounded in a revolutionary Marxist perspective. After his expulsion, he moved fairly rapidly in the direction of fascism
36. Vassart, op. cit., p. 24.
37. Again this seems to have followed telegraphic instructions from the Comintern Regional Secretariat. See Brower, op. cit., p. 60.
38. The 'Radical' Premier, Daladier, capitulated to the pressure of the fascist bands outside the gates and made way for a regime of 'national union', headed by the right-wing politician Gaston Doumergue. This government, like its immediate successors, ruled by a system of presidential decree that largely bypassed parliament
39. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), pp. 313-4. In his eagerness to exploit every available authority, Johnstone falls into the most blatant self-contradiction. Thus, he quotes with glowing approval Isaac Deutscher's critical judgement that Trotsky 'viewed the French scene through the same prism through which he had viewed the German scene' (ibid., p. 349). Could Johnstone really have forgotten that his own argument is the direct opposite of Deutscher's?!
40. The Struggle Against Fascism, p. 73.
41. 'A Programme of Action for France', Writings 1934-5, p. 32.
42. Thorez's opportunist slogan, 'Unity at any price!', represented a clear break not just with the 'Third Period' but with the elementary principles on which the Comintern and its united front policy had been based. See, for example, the 1921 ECCI directives on the united front: 'The principal conditions which are equally categorical for communist parties in all countries are, in the view of the ECCI, the absolute independence of every communist party which enters into an agreement with the parties of the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals, its complete freedom to put forward its own views and to criticise the opponents of communism. Whilst accepting a basis for action, communists must retain the unconditional right and the possibility of expressing their opinion of the policy of all working-class organisations without exception, not only before and after action has been taken but also, if necessary, during its course. In no circumstances can these rights be surrendered.' (The Communist International: Documents (Ed. Jane Degras), vol. 1, London 1971, p. 313).
43. Trotsky, Writings 1934-5, p. 35.
44. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 374.
45. Monty Johnstone asserts that this was an initiative taken by Thorez. We have no firm evidence to confirm or refute this, but, given his behaviour earlier in the year, the close supervision exercised over him by Comintern representatives, and his reputation throughout his life as the most supple and unquestioning follower of the twists and turns of Moscow's policy, it seems highly unlikely that such a radically new departure would have been decided upon by the French Party without the prior approval of powerful figures within the CPSU and Comintern apparatus.
46. Johnstone quotes Thorez's regrets ten years later that 'the People's Front... became a simple agreement of leaderships' and that the Communists did not succeed in establishing 'democratically elected People's Front Committees in the factories and localities' (op. cit. (1975), p. 348). However, we should bear in mind that these remarks were made in 1947 at a time when the PCF was [illegible] to its expulsion from government and to the imperialist intensification of the cold war by a ferocious attack on the social democrats. We cannot accept that this is an honest assessment, since the policies of the PCF made inevitable the form that the People's Front actually took. Moreover, Thorez's judgements had no bearing on future party strategy: where was the call for mass committees in 1968? where does it appear in the perspective of the Union of the Left?
47. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 313.
48. Dimitrov, Selected Speeches and Articles, London 1951, pp. 97-8.
49. Thorez, France Today and the People's Front, London 1936, p. 180.
50. M. Johnstone, 'Trotsky — His Ideas', in Cogito No. 5, 1969. The best answer to virtually all Johnstone's arguments is Trotsky's real ideas, contained in Lessons of October, The History of the Russian Revolution, The Stalin School of Falsification, and Permanent Revolution. For recent relevant expositions, see D. Avenas, 'Trotsky's Marxism', International, Vol. 3, Nos 2 and 3; N. Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, London 1976; and the reply to Johnstone's article by Alan Woods and Ted Grant, Lenin and Trotsky, Colombo 1972.
51. See Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 9, pp. 48-50.
52. Trotsky, Results and Prospects, London 1971, pp. 233-4.
53. Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 340,
54. Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 45.
55. Ibid., p. 50.
56. Collected Works, vol. 9, p. 103.
57. We are here leaving aside the not unimportant point that Lenin's writings referred to backward, semi-feudal Russia where the proletariat constituted a tiny (although strategically crucial) minority of the people. It never entered the head of Lenin or of the German socialist leaders of the time to advocate a 'stages' strategy in imperial Germany, any more than it would occur to a British Marxist to put off the struggle for socialist revolution until 'the people united' had replaced the monarchy by a bourgeois republic.
58. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 313,
59. Trotsky, Whither France?, New York 1966, p. 15, Trotsky's supposed 'underestimation of the peasantry' was of course a constant propaganda refrain in the Twenties — at least until the Stalinist apparatus went over to forced collectivisation of the peasant masses and 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class'. For Trotsky's reply, see Permanent Revolution, London 1971, esp. chs. 2 and 3.
60. See Whither France?, pp. 99-100.
61. Quoted in Brower, op. cit., p. 78. For a long time, the SFIO leaders were able to present themselves as left critics of the PCF's adaptation to Radicalism.
62. Débats parlementaires, 1934, p. 1545, Quoted in Brower, op. cit., p. 95.
63. Thorez, op. cit., p. 187,
64. For Trotsky's comments on the events, see Writings 1935-6, pp. 48-50.
65. Cf. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, ch 6
66. Stalin's responsibility for the murder of Kirov is now almost universally accepted by non-Stalinist historians of the period. See, for example, Medvedev, op. cit.; S. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, London 1974, p. 346.
67. D.Z. Manuilsky, Speech on the Work of the Seventh Congress, London n.d. (1935?), pp. 8-10, Emphasis added. Cf. Dimitrov's 1937 article on 'The Soviet Union and the Working Classes of the Capitalist Countries': 'The historical dividing line between the forces of fascism, war and capitalism, on the one hand, and the forces of peace, democracy and socialism on the other hand, is increasingly becoming the attitude towards the Soviet Union, and not the formal attitude toward Soviet power and socialism in general. (Dimitrov, op. cit., p. 185).
68. Johnstone argues that the 'complementarity' of policy is 'no proof of the usual Trotskyist contention that the Popular Front was dictated by Stalin to promote the foreign policy "needs of the Soviet bureaucracy" to which the Communist Parties were allegedly forced to subordinate the class struggle in their countries'. In support of this argument, he quotes Trotsky's 'admission' in a 1938 private conversation that 'you cannot think of the Comintern as being merely an instrument of Stalin's foreign policy' and that 'the French Communist Party is not only an agency of Moscow, but a national organisation with members of parliament, etc.'. For Monty Johnstone, who seems to have mentally replaced 'not only' by a much simpler 'not', 'such statements... completely contradict (Trotsky's) public pronouncements that the Popular Front was a criminal policy dictated by Moscow'... (Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), pp. 310-311). However, the contradiction 'completely' disappears once it is realised that the PCF's need for a new policy in 1934-5, after the disaster of the 'Third Period', was concretely filled by the Popular Front policy of alliance with 'democratic' imperialism, which was rooted in the Soviet bureaucracy's fear of revolutionary mobilisation of the European working class, combined with fear of an attack by German imperialism and an understanding of the usefulness of the PCF as living proof of Moscow's renunciation of world revolution and as a cement of a Franco-Soviet alliance.
69. In an interview with Georges Luciani. Le Petit Parisien, 16 June 1936. Quoted in G. Lefranc, Le Front Populaire, Paris 1974, p. 59.
70. The principal historian of the period, Georges Lefranc, gives a total of 370 seats for the Popular Front parties. These were divided as follows: SFIO 97/146; PCF 10/72; [illegible]; Radical Party 159/116. Lefranc, op.cit., p.58
71. The word 'policy' is curiously omitted without indication in Johnstone's use of the quotation. See Whither France?, p. 142. Quoted in Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 347.
72. It is of course impossible here to give more than a general impression of the strike movement, The most exhaustive account is that contained in Danos & Gibelin, op. cit, For a condensed version in English of this description see R. Kirkwood, 'The Fire Last Time: France 1936', in International Socialism, March 1973.
73. Dimitrov, op. cit., p. 63.
74. Quoted in F. Claudin, The Communist Movement, Harmondsworth 1975, p. 200.
75. Letter of 14 May from Politbureau of PCF to SFIO, Quoted in Danos & Gibelin, op. cit., p. 35.
76. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 215.
77. Letter to Paris Region of PCF, 30 October 1936. Quoted in Danos & Gibelin, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 61
78. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), p. 316.
79. Ibid., p. 347.
80. Quoted in Danos & Gibelin, op. cit., p. 117.
81. Johnstone is fond of dismissing transitional slogans as a Trotskyist quirk, but the following passage from Dimitrov's report to the Seventh Congress shows how deeply rooted was the conception in the traditions of the Comintern, Only the final liquidation of that tradition in the great purges made it possible for future theoreticians to heap ridicule on the notion, 'We demand from any united front government... that it should carry out definite and fundamental revolutionary demands required by the situation, For instance, control of production, control of the banks, disbanding of the police and its replacement by an armed workers' militia Fifteen years ago Lenin called upon us to focus all our attention on "searching out forms of transition or approach to the proletarian revolution"... To help the millions to master as rapidly as possible, through their own experience, what they have to do, where to find a radical solution... — these among others are the purposes for which both transitional slogans and special "forms of transition or approach to the proletarian revolution" are necessary.' (Dimitrov, op. cit., pp. 97-8).
82. See Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), pp. 449 and 348. The coy term 'our other partners' refers of course to the Radicals
83. Thorez, 'Report to Arles Congress of the PCF': quoted in Danos & Gibelin, op. cit., vol. 2, p.59.
84. Johnstone, op. cit. (1975), pp. 315, 347.
85. Ibid., p. 349.
86. 'The New Revolutionary Upsurge and the Tasks of the Fourth International', Writings 1935-6, p. 36.
87. [illegible] a bureaucratic unconstitutional expulsion of leading PCF members after the outbreak of the war [illegible]
88. See, in English, P. Broué & É. Témime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, London 1972; F. Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain, New York [illegible]
89. [illegible]
90. [illegible]
91. [illegible]
92. D. Ibarruri, Speeches and Articles, 1936-38, Moscow 1938, p. 6 Quoted in Johnstone, op. cit. (Cogito), p.11.
93. Quoted in Claudin, op. cit., p. 708
94. Johnstone, loc. cit., emphasis added. Elsewhere, Johnstone curiously admits that 'in practice [i.e. in the actions of the masses — P.C.], this popular revolution .... contained within it important elements of a Socialist revolution, though not a Soviet one, overstepping the bounds of a bourgeois-democratic revolution' (p.12) 'In practice', and at the time also in theory, the Spanish Stalinists did everything in their power to force those 'elements' back into the bounds of bourgeois democracy. See, for example, the declaration of José Diaz, Secretary-General of the PCE: 'We wish to fight only for a democratic republic with a broad social content There can be no question at present of a dictatorship of the proletariat or of Socialism, but only of the struggle of democracy against Fascism. (Quoted in Broué & Témime, op. cit., p.195). Moreover, as is indicated in Ibarruri's speech, even the completion of the bourgeois-democratic reforms was to await the end of the war, Thus the confiscation of land, which Johnstone points to as an example of the resolution of the Popular Front Government, was sanctioned only in relation to landowners who had gone over to Franco, and it was in any case merely a formal recognition of a situation brought about by extra-parliamentary action at least three months previously, it requires an astonishing degree of polemical blindness to endorse the legalistic cretinism of Professor Hugh Thomas, for whom the measure of October 1936 'legalising the expropriation of land owned by nationalists revolutionised the life of Spain' (quoted in Johnstone, op. cit. (Cogito), p. 12). As if the life of Spain had not [illegible] revolutionised by the revolutionary expropriation of [illegible]. Since Johnstone has such evident respect for the esteemed Professor, it is perhaps worth quoting his description of PCE strategy: 'Social and other reforms, Azana and the Communists could now agree, should await victory, And it was the adoption of this policy which gave the Communist Party much of its power ... Their moderation gave them the friendship not only of the Republicans but also of the many regular officers in the Army who thought [the same]. The Anarchists were genuinely puzzled by the Communists' close alignment with bourgeois democracy. At a National Youth Congress in Valencia in January, the Secretary-General of the Socialist-Communist Youth, Santiago Carrillo .... said "We are not Marxist Youth. We fight for a democratic parliamentary republic." Solidaridad Obrera named this "Reformist Quackery" "If the United Socialist Youth are neither Socialist, Communist, nor Marxist, what are they?" ' (Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p.461.).
95. Degras (ed.), op. cit., vol. III, p.424.
96. 'Enrique Rodriguez, POUM leader in Madrid, was informed of this decision by the Socialist Aimar, who told him: "[Soviet] Ambassador Rosenberg has vetoed your [nominee]. It is unfair of course, but try to understand us: the USSR is powerful; we have chosen between depriving ourselves of the POUM nominee and depriving ourselves of the help of the USSR. We prefer to give in and reject the POUM".' (Broué & Témime, op. cit., pp. 239-40).
97. Quoted in ibid., p.314.
98. Forty years later, it is possible for Johnstone to express his [illegible] 'far from being in line with the Popular Front conception, such action worked in precisely the opposite direction'. (op. cit., [Cogito] p.12). In reality, the murder of Andres Nin, like the liquidation of the Russian Bolsheviks, was an integral part of Stalin's renunciation of world revolution and its replacement by 'the strengthening of bourgeois democracy'. In a revolutionary period, bourgeois democracy needs to be strengthened above all against the vanguard of class-conscious workers. The Popular Front willingly assisted (and in Republican Spain, where only 'the bourgeoisie's shadow' sided with the Government, it took over entirely) these tasks of bourgeois state repression.
99. Ibid., p.16