In the first theses of the Executive in December 1921, the dangers connected with the tactics of the United Front were emphatically indicated: "Not all the Communist Parties are sufficiently strengthened and consolidated, not all have finally discarded the centrist and semi-centrist ideologies. Cases of going to the other extreme are possible, of tendencies which, in effect will lead to the dissolution of the Communist Parties and groups into a formless united bloc. If the tactics planned are to be carried out with success for the cause of Communism, then the communist parties themselves which carry out the tactics must be strongly and firmly united and their leadership must be marked by clarity of thought."
The Fourth World Congress also pointed out the dangers concealed both in the whole tactics of the United Front and in the special slogan of the Workers' Government. The Congress declared: "In order to avoid these dangers, and in order to be able to take up immediately the fight against the illusion that a stage of 'democratic coalition' is inevitable the Communist Party must not forget that every bourgeois government is at the same time a capitalist government, but that not every workers' government is in reality a proletarian socialist government."
These warnings of the Communist International must be borne in mind, particularly since the recent events in Germany; for the German Communist Party, which after the Russian Section, is the most mature party in the International, has committed grave errors in the application of the tactics of the United Front.
It is essential that Communists in all countries should now ponder carefully what the tactics of the United Front are and are not. They are tactics of revolution, not of evolution just as the Workers' (and Peasants') Government cannot be for us a marked democratic transitional stage, so the tactics of the United Front are not a democratic coalition nor an alliance with the Social Democrats. They are purely a method of revolutionary agitation and mobilisation. We reject all other interpretations as opportunist.
We must bear this clearly in mind, for only then can the tactics of the United Front have any meaning for the Communist International and contribute to the aim of winning over the bulk of the proletariat for the revolutionary fight for power.
Naturally the tactics of the United Front as a method of agitation among the wide masses of the workers are suited for a definite epoch, namely, the epoch when the Communists in nearly every country which is of decisive importance to the working class movement are still in the minority. In proportion as concrete conditions change, so also will the application of the tactics of the United Front have to be modified. Even to-day application of the tactics must differ in different countries. As the fight becomes sterner and assumes the character of a decisive struggle, we shall more than once have to change the manner of application of the
( 65 )
