After the failures of the policies of the Third Period and the resulting sectarian isolation of the Communist Parties from the masses became apparent, the Communist International waw fit to review these practices and alter their course. In France a People’s Front directed against the danger of fascism had been instituted and its influence and example led the Seventh Comintern Congress to call for the creation of People’s Fronts throughout the entire world Communist movement. Differing from the United Front in the sense that all but the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie could be members, the People’s Front was called a permanent policy for advancing the interests of the proletariat toward socialism. In the United States this People’s Front policy led to a kind of patriotic demagogy where the CPUSA went to great lengths to prove that there was little difference between the spirit that guided the bourgeois founding fathers of the American Revolution and themselves.
Unfortunately, they were all too correct in this assertion at times. While the wholesale revision of Marxism-Leninism in the Third Period – its abandonment of the theory of uneven development and Leninist economic practices – was bad enough, the People’s Front brought revisionism to new heights. In the People’s front and its practices, we will find many similarities with Soviet revisionism, Eurocommunism and the anti-monopoly coalition of the present day CPUSA. In this sense the study of the People’s Front is crucial because of the continuity between its practices and what we are living through today. This continuity is none other than the continuity of Marxism in crisis in different historical periods.
I. Discuss Browder’s assertion that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” and how he justified it. How is this an example of revisionism and how could it be produced in the first place? Discuss how the CP’s strategy and tactics influenced this idea and were influenced by it. What should we make of Browder’s criticism of the slogan as being “unscientific?”
II. Discuss Lovestone’s criticisms of the People’s Front and the accuracy of these criticisms. What does he say about the independence of the CP and working class action within the Front; the understanding of the class struggle of which the Front was exemplary; the relation of the Third Period to the People’s Front; the manner in which the course pursued in the People’s Front affected the preparation of the proletariat for revolution; the idea that the Front was to be a permanent alliance; etc.?
III. How do the political and theoretical practices of the People’s Front relate to Soviet Revisionism, Euro-Communism and the CPUSA’s anti-monopoly coalition? What does this signify for modern Marxism-Leninism?
What is Communism? By Earl Browder, Chapter I. “Who are the Americans?” pp. 18-21.
“Concerning American Revolutionary Traditions,” The Communist, December 1938, pps. 1079-82.
The People’s Front, Earl Browder, Chapter VII “Democracy and the Constitution,” pps. 235-248.
People’s Front Illusions, Jay Lovestone, pps. 3-12, 28-41, 79-86.