14.09.2023

Forms of popular frontism

Repeating calls for ‘no platforming’, calls to line up behind reactionary nationalists are, argues Mike Macnair, modern forms of madness. We favour free speech

Last week’s polemic from Tony Greenstein, ‘Placing anti-Semitism in context’, and the letters from Pete Gregson and Ian Donovan, all have the character of the leftwing equivalent of the traditional Tory letter-writer, ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ - outraged and frothing at the mouth at the latest unacceptable break with dogma.

In this case the outrage is in response to my article, ‘Anti-Semitism of useful idiots’ (August 31). Gerry Downing’s letter in the same edition is not frothing at the mouth. But in its second half, it is still - as comrades Greenstein, Gregson and Donovan are - within the frame of the definition of ‘insanity’ commonly (falsely) attributed to Albert Einstein: “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

What is being done over and over, with the same results (a series of defeats, more or less disastrous) is two forms of popular frontism: ‘no platform for fascists’ and obligatory political support for the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’.

It is perfectly understandable that the left should keep trying this recipe in spite of endless disastrous failures. In the first place, the global people’s front between the USSR and the ‘democratic’ allies against fascism was the banner under which World War II was fought by the Allies from 1941 to 1945. The people’s front was then the banner under which ‘bureaucratic socialist’ regimes were created across eastern Europe, in China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Then during the cold war more such regimes followed: Cuba, South Yemen, the fall of South Vietnam; Laos and Cambodia. And alongside these, a series of left-nationalist regimes which identified as ‘socialist’ and their ruling parties as people’s fronts, and so on.

This was always only one side of the picture. The people’s front policy had been disastrous between 1935 and 1940 - most acutely in Spain, but also in France (where the demoralisation produced by the Popular Front government prepared the ground for the elite sabotage of 1940 and the Vichy regime). Alliances with left nationalists produced disasters for communists and workers’ movements in several countries in the post-war period. In the mid-1970s, moreover, the USA shifted from a policy of “containment” of communism to “rollback”, deploying ‘human rights’ and ‘national self-determination’ rhetoric, together with financial engineering and the promotion of “efficient markets” ideologies. Under the new conditions, the policies of the people’s front, national roads to socialism and party monolithism - the core elements of post-war ‘official communist’ strategy, apart from the attachment to the USSR - became consistent recipes for defeat.

Meanwhile, however, the self-identified anti-Stalinist left had begun to adapt itself to the people’s front, national roads and party monolithism. The route was essentially via the ‘revolutionary’ character of the anti-colonial nationalist movements, meaning by this these movements’ involvement in forms of direct confrontation with the state; and the fact that the idea of ‘national roads to socialism’ led these movements to play up (and in some cases, like Cuba, exaggerate) their independence from the USSR. Celebrating, and then tailing, the left nationalists influenced by the ideas of Moscow and/or Beijing led to internalising the fundamental ideas of ‘official communism’ apart from pro-Sovietism. Hence, “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

The case of no-platforming as a form of popular frontism is both simpler and raises more fundamental issues. That of the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ involves the early Comintern conception of the ‘anti-imperialist front’ being read through Dimitrov’s interpretation of the ‘united front’ from the 7th congress of Comintern, so as to enforce tailing the nationalists. The empirical points raised by comrades Greenstein and Gregson are wholly secondary to the fundamental political commitments to keep “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

Racist speech

‘No platform for fascists’ began as ‘official communist’ activity before the far left had any political significance.¹ It inherently entails popular frontism, because it denies the right of racist (etc) speech to a specific group which is politically-rhetorically identified with the World War II enemy - while ignoring the much more effective racist incitement operations of the Conservative Party and its press, and of the Home Office (and of the equivalents in other countries). That is, it inherently asserts a ‘broad democratic alliance’ against ‘fascism’.

For Trotskyist advocates of ‘no platform’ the tactic is conflated with Trotsky’s arguments in 1930-33 for the policy of the workers’ united front against fascism.² But this is utterly misleading. Trotsky’s arguments were for the workers’ united front (of the Communist Party, Social Democratic Party, smaller left groups and the trade unions) both for physical-force self-defence against fascist organised attacks and to pose an alternative potential government coalition against the idea of a fascist government. The idea of ‘crushing fascism in the egg’ by denying fascists freedom of speech where there was not a significant immediate physical-force threat to the workers’ movement was absolutely not part of Trotsky’s agenda.

It must be added that for the Stalinists ‘no platform’ also meant ‘no platform for Trotskyite-fascists’. The relationship of forces in Britain did not allow much implementation of this idea, but it was certainly applied by stronger ‘official communist’ parties elsewhere. In fact, ‘official communism’s rejection of freedom of speech in general grew outwards from the rejection of freedom of speech within the movement in the form of the 1921 ban on factions and the police coups against the left and right in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927-29.

The working class as a class practically needs decision-making for collective action. To make usable decisions, it needs the information about alternatives to be available to it. That requires freedom of communication. The result of censorship regimes is to vest control of what can be said in some element of the state, or of the labour bureaucracy. At best the result is cover-your-arse decision-making by bureaucrats, leading to ‘garbage in, garbage out’ and ‘planning failure’. More commonly, the censorship regime is used for the benefit of the capitalist class. Comrade Greenstein is unwilling to recognise that the Corbynite left was unable to fight back against the ‘anti-Semitism’ defamation campaign because the left had sold the pass on freedom of speech and poisoned the minds of a generation of student union and trade union activists with ‘no platform’ policies.

Moreover, what has been the positive effect of ‘no platform’ policies? The answer is - zero. The left has been pursuing ‘no platform’ policies in a systematic way since 1974, approximately 50 years ago. Of course, outright Nazi groups remain marginal in the UK: you would hardly expect mass German nationalism in this country. But far-right policies as such have become mainstream, and not just in the UK but globally. The policy no-platforming was supposed to serve - crushing fascism in the egg - proves to be a complete delusion. That implies that the moral case for no-platforming as protecting the vulnerable against hate speech also fails. Hate speech and attacks are not prevented by no-platforming operations. Hence, it would be just as useful (and have fewer disadvantages) to summon an exorcist to get rid of the far-right demons.

Nationalism

Comrade Greenstein says:

Like Lenin I make a distinction between the nationalism of the oppressed and the oppressor. I do not equate Irish republicanism and unionism, nor do I equate Palestinian nationalism with Zionism. One is fighting oppression; the other is perpetrating it.

Ian Donovan similarly, but more extremely, says that the CPGB

refuses to defend the resistance of Muslim people in Iraq, Iran and Palestine against imperialist and Zionist invasions and terror. During the Iraq war, they made a polemical point of honour of refusing to defend Iraqi resistance against the US/UK invasion. Likewise, they refuse to defend Iran against imperialism.

In both cases, if in different forms, what is involved is a vulgarised form of the early Comintern concept of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ (AIUF), which called for communists to support national movements in the colonial countries. It is vulgarised for two reasons. The first is that it incorporates Georgi Dimitrov’s conception of the united front, from the 1935 Seventh Congress of Comintern:

‘The communists attack us,’ say others. But listen, we have repeatedly declared: We shall not attack anyone, whether persons, organisations or parties, standing for the united front of the working class against the class enemy. But at the same time it is our duty, in the interests of the proletariat and its cause, to criticise those persons, organisations and parties that hinder unity of action by the workers.³

Contra comrade Greenstein, this was not Lenin’s view. The theses and discussions of the Second and Fourth Congresses of Comintern make clear that the AIUF required common action of the communists with the national movement so far as possible, but combined with open criticism of the leaderships of the national movement.⁴ The “refusal to defend” “the resistance” of Iran, of which comrade Donovan accuses the CPGB, consists of our perfectly clear, open opposition to the imperialists’ war operations and sanctions, together with open political opposition to the reactionary anti-worker regime in Tehran and to the various sectarian groups which claimed to lead ‘the resistance’ in Iraq.

The second reason that the approach is vulgarised is that the early Comintern’s AIUF was a strategic line which saw the world revolution as immediately posed, so that the national movements against imperialism could combine with the revolutionary movement in the imperialist and middle-rank countries, and with the USSR, to immediately break the back of imperialism and enter a global worker-peasant alliance. Stripped of this context, what is left is a bare moral claim. But, while there is a clear moral case for opposing imperialism and colonialism, this moral claim does not imply “defending” the politics of national movements or regimes which happen from time to time to be in conflict with imperialism.

Three reasons

Why the context of the strategic line of the early Comintern has to be stripped out is that, in the first place, the USSR has fallen, and with it the spinal core of any idea of successively adding left-nationalist regimes to the ‘socialist camp’. Secondly, the particular dynamics of formal colonialism were largely, though not completely, disposed of in the cold war ‘decolonisations’, leaving behind semi-colonial forms (like those the UK had already employed in 19th century Latin America). Thirdly, already by the late 1970s the USA had successfully performed a ju-jitsu trick of turning the strengths of the ideas of the people’s front and national roads into weaknesses for the international communist movement: particularly with Richard Nixon in Beijing exploiting the national contradictions between the USSR and China.

Under the new circumstances, nationalism as such seeks not general emancipation, but to raise the ranking of one’s own nation-state, while leaving the global hierarchy intact. Zionism is already an example of what began as ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ turning into ‘nationalism of the oppressor’. But there are many others. And - for example - the Islamic Republic of Iran is both an oppressed country vis-à-vis the USA and an oppressor state vis-à-vis its own population and minority national groups.

The argument that Jewish wealth and power explains US support for Israel is part of the same politics. It dodges the issue of the interests of US imperialism as such. It is not merely non-explanatory of the Kennedy administration’s decision to back Israel.⁵ Equally, and on the other side, it is non-explanatory of the late appearance of ‘no platform for anti-Zionists’ in the UK. Arabism remained an important tendency in the UK state core down to the debate around the Iraq war. It was after the shock of the anti-war movement - and especially after Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader - that UK state resources and the mass media began to back seriously the no-platforming campaigns of the Zionist movement.

Our correspondents, then, demand that we must stick to the popular-frontist strategy, “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Clearly we should reject this view.

1. E Smith No platform: a history of anti-fascism, universities and their limits of free speech Abingdon 2020, chapter 2.↩︎

2. Articles collected in L Trotsky The struggle against fascism in Germany New York, NY, 1971.↩︎

3. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s7.↩︎

4. Available at www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm.↩︎

5. I refer again to VP Shannon Balancing act: US foreign policy and the Arab-Israeli conflict Aldershot 2003, chapter 2, text at notes 45-49. Shannon may be wrong on the date, but comrades have not given me reasons to suppose so.↩︎