The November Elections and a United Front for Revolution
This is Part Three in a series on anti-fascism and revolution. Part One focused on the failures of the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s (SPD) lesser-evilism against the Nazis and looked to one of its leading members, Franz Neumann. Part Two looked at what he ended up calling for, which was a “united front for revolution,” and considers this in terms of Lenin’s approach to revolution, the role of a revolutionary party, and “soviets.” Part Three looks more in depth at a united front for revolution through the writings of Clara Zetkin, one of the co-founders of the German Communist Party (KPD).
Typically, when someone uses the phrase “united front” today, like to “save multiracial democracy,” they’re talking about a coalition of progressive non-profit organizations engaged in what’s ultimately some sort of “get out the vote” effort. At their core, these approaches seek to reform the institutions of settler colonial and capitalist oppression, attempting to place a diverse, equitable, and inclusive mask over the genocidal nature of the system, as fascists prepare for violent “total dominance” and our annihilation at the hands of their “Project 2025”.
Tragically, no matter how high the threat of large-scale violence becomes, our supposed leaders lack any sort of plan to stop fascism, beyond a fundamentally suicidal constitutional fetishism rooted in passivity. It’s not the first time, not by a long shot. For those of us in the decaying Christian Zionist capitalist settler colony called “America,” all we have to do is think back less than four years.
Middle Class Constitutional Fetishism and November 2024
Remember what happened when fears grew of Trump’s possible refusal to leave office after losing the November 2020 election? We witnessed the “institutionalist” allegiance of a middle class left that offered us a more conservative settler version of the social democracy that failed against the Nazis. Efforts like “Protect the Results” and “Choose Democracy” warned us that we might have to “defend democracy in the streets.” What those coalitions were calling for was not democratic, and they certainly weren’t arguing for democracy in the streets, which is what we need.
They wanted a hard coup against a soft coup; calling on the military to “stand with the constitution” and remove Trump if he attempted to stay in power. Army generals warned us back in December 2021 that a civil war was brewing within the Armed Forces and that another coup attempt around the November 2024 elections was likely. They warned that much of the military might be in support of such a thing by then. That civil war has escalated, while the GOP is engaged in an ongoing soft coup to “end democracy.” Their side isn’t hiding anything anymore.
What happens if Trump wins in November? What good would come of efforts like Protect the Results and Choose Democracy now? Technically, Trump would come to power within the flawed framework of the constitution itself, not to mention our fake “democracy.” Will the middle-class reformist left encourage vague protests again, in hopes that the military will orchestrate a hard coup? That’s delusional and there’s a reason why “hope for the best, plan for the worst” is a more than just a 460-year-old proverb.
If Biden wins, he will no doubt continue to criminalize anyone on the left that his administration regards as “domestic extremists,” while he expands Cop Cities across the country. This is just another way of saying anyone who does not conform to a “law and order liberalism” rooted in the genocidal settler colonial nightmare otherwise known as the Protestant work ethic and the middle-class American Dream. This is where “Middle Class Joe” meets “Genocide Joe,” while the distinction between his semi-dictatorship of law-and-order liberalism and GOP fascism becomes increasingly blurred.
Trapped like animals in a cage of their own creation, Democrats are increasingly turning on those who refuse to tow the authoritarian party line. Sadly, most middle-class settlers have little hope that any real change is possible, certainly not revolution. The truth is that most of these institutionalist or middle-class leftists don't actually believe that a majority Black, Brown, and Rainbow working class can achieve anything but modest reforms. For those who do, it will supposedly only come about through years under their expert tutoring, which is just another way of saying we need to “civilize the savages.”
We do need actual revolutionary leadership and organization to offer a fighting alternative, but this isn’t because some sort of “lower class rabble” needs to be told what to do from puppet masters behind the scenes. It’s just that the rest of the left seems to be in the process of shifting ever more rightward, which makes it increasingly difficult for those who are threatened and suffering to believe their lived experience is more valid than all those who are telling them to conform and patiently wait for their potential annihilation at the hands of fascism.
As such, should we really try building alliances with the organizations of a dying middle-class reformist left that’s currently eating itself alive? Instead, we need a nationwide united front for revolution rooted in community defense. We must offer up a political home for those who know that the middle-class settler left and its American Dreaming is doomed either way. We need to be organizing our forces to strike against GOP settler fascism and the Democrats’ semi-dictatorship.
We need a nationwide anti-fascist alternative to help us come together and build a revolutionary party that offers up this united front for revolution to anyone who agrees that the time has come. It’s just as Clara Zetkin once said: “there comes a moment in the life of each individual and people when everything can be won if one risks everything. Such a moment has come.”[1]
Clara Zetkin and the United Front as Soviet Congress
Back in 1984, famous abolitionist and reformist academic Angela Davis wrote about Clara Zetkin and what we would now refer to as her intersectional Marxism. Zetkin was a co-founder of the German Communist Party (KPD) but was pushed aside after Stalin’s successful takeover in 1928. Then, years later and after her death, one of Stalin’s collaborators by the name of Georgi Dimitrov successfully erased her politics through clever propaganda about a very different and fundamentally more conservative heteropatriarchal approach to a “united front.”
At the age of 75, nearly blind, and terminally ill, Zetkin’s speech to the rest of the German parliament months before Hitler’s early 1933 soft coup should be heard everywhere today. Here’s a sentence near the end: “All those who feel themselves threatened, all those who suffer and all those who long for liberation must belong to the United Front against fascism and its representatives in the government.”[2]
She also argued that lesser evilism resulted in “the greatest of all evils: the passivity of the masses.”[3] Back in June 1923, ten years prior, she spoke of the need for a “liberating communism” to stop the Nazis. It was meant to be rooted in “workers self-defense and the united front.”
She believed that fascism emerged from “the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy” and that revolutionaries had to offer an organized, fighting alternative. In the abstract, Zetkin argued that broad masses of people were “longing for new and unshakable ideals and a world outlook that enables them to understand nature, society, and their own life; a world outlook that is not a sterile formula but operates creatively and constructively.”
She believed this was central to how the united front was going to succeed, by being a fighting alternative to what she called “the rotten ground of the bourgeois social system.” For us today, this was just another way of saying that we should abandon the middle-class American Dream and a society oriented around nuclear families, that we should fight for the abolition of the USA itself through revolution. In practice, she believed that the united front should be made up of “factory detachments” and their community-based equivalents. She called these “self-defense units.”
As far back as 1923, she knew that fascism was forced by its internal contradictions to try and, as she put it, “secure the power for social rebirth by seizing control of the state and utilizing its apparatus of power for its own ends.” That was the only way it could hold together the class forces whose contradictory interests threatened to constantly tear the Nazis apart.[4]
Zetkin believed the self-defense units had to prepare for the possibility of a fascist coup. So it wasn’t just defensive, but offensive in terms of growing the capacity to launch and sustain strikes. In the event of a fascist coup, Zetkin thought the contradictions of fascism and capitalism were both at their most exposed and vulnerable. The goal of the united front was to take advantage of this and rapidly accelerate a movement for revolution out of the crisis.
Ten years later, in her speech to the rest of the Reichstag months before the Nazi’s coup, she again repeated her calls for that united front. She believed that the working class were the ones to lead the united front for revolution. But she knew that middle classes were being “proletarianized,” that everything was falling apart, and that a working class fighting for revolution could bring people from other classes along with them.
She also kept believing in a “liberating communism.” At the end of her speech to parliament, she called the united front a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany.” The word “soviet” was just the Russian word for “council” and the Russian Revolution of 1917 informed her thinking. As outlined in Part Two, this is like what Lenin famously meant when he said: “All power to the soviets.”[5] He wanted to smash the state and replace it with a “commune of communes,” with soviets as each commune’s essential democratic building blocks.
Against the Nazis, the “self-defense units” that made up the united front were supposed to become the “Soviet Congress.” The units were supposed to be formed for workplace and community defense and to grow the capacity for striking, while she also believed they were the seeds of a fighting communist alternative. She anticipated a potential fascist coup and believed the self-defense units could, in the course of the struggle, seize factories, become soviets, smash the state, and build the commune of communes through the “Soviet Congress.”
Questions for Future Dialogue
What does the Soviet Congress have to do with a revolutionary party? That’s a big question. After Stalin and Dimitrov successfully took over the KPD, Zetkin didn’t really have a party to rely on. Folks like she and Leon Trotsky kept trying to get them on board with a united front for revolution right up through the Nazi coup. Folks like Stalin and Dimitrov admired “the rotten ground of the bourgeois social system,” so they weren’t interested in soviets. They were on the far-right of the Communist International, which meant that they hated the broad history of socialist and communist feminism, because they loved the nuclear family and associated colonial projects like the USA.
We’re also fundamentally lacking a revolutionary party today. The role of a party in relation to a united front for revolution is still very much an open question. Zetkin and Trotsky advocated for developing a clear strategy for revolution as the official politics of the united front. Only after doing so was the united front to be taken to the broader reformist left to see who was willing to join.
How is this approach to building a united front for revolution different from building a party for revolution? They actually seem quite similar. The same can be asked about a Soviet and a local branch or chapter of a revolutionary party. What’s the difference? Again, these seem like open questions and a basis for broader discussion.
NOTES
[1] Clara Zetkin, “Proletarian Women Be Prepared,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1984). P. 112.
[2] Ibid, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, 174.
[3] Ibid, 172.
[4] Ibid, “The Struggle Against Fascism,” in Marxists.org Archive. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/struggle-against-fascism.html.
[5] Ibid, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, 174-175.
Atlee McFellin lives in East Cleveland, Ohio and is originally from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was raised in no small part by his late maternal grandmother who was born into a middle-class Catholic family and grew up in Hitler’s Germany.
