The United Front Yesterday and Today

by Coco Smyth · May 17, 2025

The United Front method elaborated by the early Communist International has been vital to the continuing strategy and tactics of various Marxist currents up to the present. However, too often it has been conceived of as the elaboration of a universal method of organizing rather than the specific product of a concrete analysis of the dynamics of the international class struggle. We must do the type of thinking that produced the United Front strategy, not just reproduce the tactics associated with it.

The World Revolution

The breakthrough organizing method referred to as the United Front was the product of both historic victory and profound defeat. With the astounding Bolshevik-led victory of the 1917 October Revolution and the construction of Soviet power from the ashes of the former Russian Empire, workers and radicals of all stripes turned their eyes to Russia. The Bolsheviks, however, had their eyes trained elsewhere.

Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and the other leaders of the new Soviet state believed that their revolution was just the opening shot in a class war that would spread into other countries. They also believed that workers’ rule in the Soviet Union would inevitably be destroyed without successful revolutions elsewhere, especially in Germany. Revolution in Germany was key, as it was a significant economic and military power in the region and would likely become the spearhead of counter-revolution. It also had a large and powerful working class and substantial socialist movement, which if able to attain power through revolution, would become an essential political ally, and economic lifeline to the fledgling Soviet state.

The Bolsheviks believed the revolutionary wave would inevitably recede if it didn’t crash over the imperialist states presiding over the capitalist-system worldwide. To make revolutionary expansion possible, the Bolsheviks believed they had to spread the lessons of their revolution to others internationally and use all the forces at their disposal to organize the global revolutionary movement.

Their chief instrument for achieving this was the Communist International (Comintern), an international assembly of revolutionaries based in Russia which aimed to build and inform revolutionary socialist parties across the world. The leaders of the Comintern believed that only explicitly revolutionary parties should be constructed. They excluded the reformist socialist leaders who had led the movement to a cataclysmic crisis by supporting and aligning with their own ruling classes that led them into the carnage of the first World War–betraying the first principles of socialist internationalism.

The Genesis of the United Front

The Communist International believed the ongoing wave of revolution sweeping countries like Germany, Hungary, and Italy in the aftermath of World War One necessitated firmly principled and systematically organized revolutionary parties—the type necessary to rise to the challenge of seizing power immediately.

In this era of mass radicalization, many communist leaders believed that all that was needed for world capitalism to come crashing down was a push. Gregory Zinoviev and many throughout the Communist International felt that the key task of communists was to go on the offensive to topple the ruling classes weakened by war. Zinoviev and his co-thinkers in the Comintern apparatus argued for the immediate formation of revolutionary workers councils based on the Russian model. Once organized, these councils should unite and prepare the working classes for insurrection and the seizure of state power.

Sadly, this approach was met with successive defeats. In Hungary, the socialists seized power without much of a fight but were ousted within a year by imperialist armies which intervened to rescue the Hungarian ruling class and crush the revolution. Much of the revolutionary leadership was killed off in the process. The leader of the Hungarian communists, Bela Kun, fled to the Soviet Union in disgrace after this historic defeat.

In Germany, a series of local Soviet governments seized power in Bremen and Munich but were also crushed one-by-one by the bloody repression of the Freikorps, a paramilitary force deployed by the Social Democratic Party to smash socialist and communist uprisings. The revolutionary upsurge in Germany came to an abrupt end after the poorly organized “Spartacist Uprising” in Berlin was crushed through force of arms. Leaders of the Spartacists, the German Communists, were killed and imprisoned. Most notably, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most important figures of revolutionary socialism were summarily executed by order of the Social Democratic government.

In Italy, the factory council movement which swept the country was broken by fascist gangs aligned with the Italian ruling class. The fascists broke working-class resistance and eventually seized power, creating the first fascist state under the leadership of Benito Mussolini.

Rethinking Revolutionary Strategy

These defeats alongside the military defeat of Soviet forces in Poland put an end to Communist hopes for the immediate toppling of the capitalist order. Communist leaders, led by the Russians, were forced to reevaluate their perspectives on the world situation and re-think the path to power for the working class.

The Communist International had succeeded in constituting an international revolutionary movement with parties from all over the world. Comintern membership included parties from the imperialist nations as well as from across the colonized world. The key task outlined in the “Twenty-One Conditions of Admission to the Communist International” required members to split entirely from the traitorous social democratic parties in order to form explicitly revolutionary parties. This was achieved with varying degrees of success in dozens of countries.

The foundation for building the international communist movement had been laid, but the defeat of the global revolution by 1921 forced a radical rethinking of the tasks for the revolutionary movement. Very few continued to believe the working class was on the cusp of seizing power, as it appeared to both socialists (and their enemies) from 1917 to 1921. The world situation had changed. The Communist International had to grapple with this new reality. This started with an analysis of why the world situation had changed.

The Comintern’s Third and Fourth Congress were the venues where revolutionaries debated the nature of the new international situation, the class struggle, and socialist strategy while grappling with the defeats of the previous years. Heated discussions took place, opinions and perspectives varied, but one thing was clear: a new strategy must be developed to reorient the revolutionary struggle within changed conditions. The Comintern’s majority repudiated the “Theory of the Offensive”, and Instead, they developed the strategy of the “United Front”.

The Analysis Behind the United Front

The basis of the United Front strategy was based on the recognition that the Communist Parties had not succeeded in winning majority leadership of the working classes in their respective countries. Now, in a period of retreat from revolutionary struggle, the capitalist class had gone on the offensive to smash the communist parties and worker’s struggle and re-impose the hegemony of capitalist and imperial power.

The clearest expression of this capitalist offensive was through the alliance with fascism. Fascist paramilitary organizations unleashed violence against the working class, smashing unions and attacking socialist and communist party organizations to eliminate the existential threat they posed to capitalism. Mussolini’s success in defanging the famously mass and militant Italian workers movement served as a model for aspiring counterrevolutionaries in countries across the globe. Fascist movements were quickly formed and sprung to action throughout Europe, most notoriously in Germany with the rise of the Nazi party.

Given the relentlessness of this capitalist offensive combined with the minority status of communists in the workers movement, the Communist International called for united defense against these systematic attacks.

Most simply (and strikingly), the United Front strategy called on revolutionaries to unite with reformists based on building larger forces against fascism using the slogan to “march separately, and strike together”. “March separately” meant that as revolutionaries, we must build our own organizations capable of implementing revolutionary strategies. This part of the slogan confirmed the Comintern’s principal goal to build a purely communist movement independent of the reformist socialists. It also recognized the but recognized the magnitude of the threat of fascism, and the need for tactical unity to confront and defeat fascism in “striking together.” This meant that while maintaining their revolutionary principles, communists needed to seek every opportunity to unite the broader movement in struggle against fascism, counter-revolution, and capitalism.

The United Front entailed tactical engagement with the leadership of reformist parties to find common ground against a common enemy. It also worked to mobilize and politicize the rank-and-file working class members of the social democratic and reformist parties to press beyond the reformist limitations (and vacillations) of their leaders in the class struggle against fascism. The pursuit of united action in this manner strengthened the defense of the whole movement. It also demonstrated to the working classes how revolutionary theory and practice exposed fascism as a violent outgrowth of defense of capitalism in crisis, and that the defeat of fascism opened the pathway for the overthrow of the capitalist system itself.

The United Front strategy could be misinterpreted as a call for waving away the past disagreements with the reformists to pursue unity at all costs. But the strategy was not aimed at building unity for its own sake. If reformist leaders refused to accept proposals for united action, the communists could reveal that their reformist leaders were the problem — they were standing in the way of what was needed to be done. The entire purpose of the United Front was to break the working class from its reformist (and inevitably) counter-revolutionary leadership. The communists could show themselves to be the most consistent fighters on all the issues facing the working class, expose the misleaders of the socialist movement, and achieve a greater scale of revolutionary leadership and influence in the working class, to strengthen and increase the possibility for socialist revolution.

The Living Tradition of Marxist Strategy

The heyday of the original United Front strategy was unfortunately brief. It was abandoned along with the revolutionary aspirations of the Communist International through the process of bureaucratization of the late 1920s. The Comintern adopted a succession of new and contradictory strategies that fundamentally weakened the communist movement up until the unceremonious dissolution of the Comintern in 1943.

Despite its abandonment by the “official” communist movement, Marxist groups across the world have looked to the United Front as an alternative to ultra-leftist, sectarian, opportunist, and class-collaborationist strategies advocated by the hegemonic trends in the socialist movement. In recent decades, the United Front has been reemerged as an important strategy for the revolutionary left, but has gone unexamined despite its regular invocation.

For many, the United Front has become a universally applicable principle of Marxism like anti-capitalism or class independence. In this view, a universal prerogative of Marxists is to orient towards forces to our political right. This has been justified as means to break the working class from political misleadership, and to build coalitions to strengthen the struggle and give us a platform. The United Front under this formulation has been reduced to “common sense”. Yet, this is not how its originators saw it. Revolutionary socialists shouldn’t think of it in this way either. The United Front strategy was a product of a global analysis developed under political and historical conditions.

What we are lacking is the core of that original analysis: a strong comprehension and theorization of the situation of the international class struggle today and the integration of strategy and tactics to orient towards that reality.

Sketches of an Analysis

To apply the United Front today, it is necessary to highlight the distinctions between the past and current periods.

The United Front was formulated under conditions in which Communist parties operated in many countries and had a developed mass base while still constituted a minority within a mass working class movement. In most countries with significant socialist movements, the social-democratic parties directly organized millions of workers through their party organizations or affiliated unions. There were millions of workers searching for a way forward and looking to the socialists and communists for leadership.

Today the fundamental dynamic facing the socialist movement is the lack of a constituted mass base of workers needed to be broken from a reformist leadership by a disciplined communist party. Instead, the working class in countries like the United State have no constituted working-class leadership, whether reformist or revolutionary, or have no leadership whatsoever. In absence, many look to leadership in the bourgeois capitalist parties like the Democrats and Republicans.

Additionally, the labor movement in the U.S. has been severely weakened over the past half-century. Purges of socialists and communists from the unions reduced a culture of labor militancy and replaced the tradition of class struggle unionism with conservative and impotent business unionism. Unions have been reduced and hollowed out and dominated by class collaborationist leaders aligned with—and subservient to—the Democratic Party. These leaders yearn to make deals with the bosses instead of organizing the workers they represent against them. Meanwhile, socialists and communists have struggled against significant odds to rebuild their forces. Furthermore, while mass social movements have rocked the United States time and time again in the 21st century, they have not succeeded at organizing themselves into an independent and combative resistance to the capitalist parties and their reactionary policies.

This leaves us with the question of the fundamental tasks facing the revolutionary left in this period. There are two interrelated tasks as core to our current work:

Constituting solid revolutionary organizations which can analyze present conditions and implement strategies to further the struggles of workers and oppressed people.
Pushing the social and labor movements towards political independence and opposition to the capitalist system to constitute a mass base for revolutionary politics.

Revolutionaries are “fish out of water” without mass movements and organizations we can operate within. To effectively build these essential mass organizations, we need to constitute stronger revolutionary organizations. We must regroup principled revolutionary socialists scattered between like-minded organizations and attract those not yet in organizations. We have to recruit and develop a new layer of socialist cadre who can give leadership not just to our organizations, but to the mass movements. We need our revolutionary organization to develop an analysis of present conditions and bring together revolutionaries so we can pursue a collective strategy to channel existing mass discontent into an organized formed fist against the ruling class and the capitalist system.

Our United Front can’t be a utopian attempt to redo the original iteration which occurred under wildly different conditions. Neither can it be a commonsensical synonym for working in coalition with the dominant strands of reformism. We need to build our revolutionary organization, challenge bourgeois leadership in the movement, and help revitalize the unions and build up new mass organizations with other forces. We must break entirely from the Democratic Party and expose it to the working class and oppressed groups as it is, and actually operates at all levels of the state: as our class enemy (including its phony left-wing!). We need to avoid tailing existing movements and instead develop our own capacity to lead through effective organizing and offering a clear political alternative to politics as usual.

Fundamentally we must learn to think in the systematic ways the early leaders of the Communist International did about our current period. We need to study the classic United Front not to attempt to replicate it or reduce it down to common sense, but to glean how revolutionaries integrate their strategy within a global analysis for today.

Our Tasks Today

We can rebuild the fighting capacity and organizations of the working class, but it will require creative thinking and effective strategy and tactics suited to our conditions.

We must reject some of the thought-terminating cliches that have substituted for revolutionary strategies in the decades of decline of our movement. We can’t just “wait for conditions to change in our favor” or “just build cadre”, or “shift the Overton Window.” Instead, organized revolutionaries must help give the social and labor movements form and direction as they have in past periods of radicalization. Revolutionaries built the movements, and their power and mass influence depended on. They ignite the embers of working-class discontent and channel it into organization and against the oppressive system.

Historical study and serious analysis of the contradictions of the system today provides us enough material to build strategies to reconstitute the socialist movement broadly, and its revolutionary wing in particular.

Coco Smyth is a member of the Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists.