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United front
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A united front is an alliance of left-wing working-class organizations. Historically, a united front referred to tactical alliances between social-democratic and Communist parties. While each affiliate of this front remains independent, they work together around common issues (most often through work in mass organizations such as labor unions). While working together with social democrats and other reformists on everyday issues, Communists inside a united front would continue to promote a revolutionary platform. A united front differs from a popular front, an alliance that also contains moderate middle-class and upper-class parties.
Following the Russian Revolution, similar revolutions in Berlin, Munich and Hungary were suppressed. Following the defeat of these revolutions, Vladimir Lenin and others in the Communist International (Comintern) endorsed the united-front tactic as a way of staying involved in struggles during non-revolutionary periods. This policy was generally opposed by Left Communists, who opposed any work with social democrats and other reformists. Lenin responded with his well-known critique, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
In 1927, three years after Lenin's death, the Comintern (now largely under the leadership of Joseph Stalin) adopted the "Third Period" policy, which rejected any collective work with social democrats or other non-Communists. However, after the Nazi suppression of both the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany in 1933, dissident Communists such as Leon Trotsky blamed the Third Period policies for dividing and weakening the German left, thus allowing the Nazis to win power.
Following the suppression, the Comintern reversed its policies completely and adopted the tactic of the Popular Front in 1934. The Popular Front would unite social democrats and Communists with non-working-class parties in alliances against fascism. Trotsky and others criticized the Popular Front as going too far in the opposite direction from the Third Period. The critics believed the middle- and upper-class parties that joined in popular fronts would betray any attempt at revolution or socialism. Trotskyists used the example of the Spanish Civil War, during which the radical National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) were suppressed by a Popular Front government. Trotskyists and some communists continued to support a united-front tactic containing only working-class parties, and they used the united front as the basis for the "French Turn" of the 1930s.
Following World War II, the tactics of Stalinist and Maoist political parties tended to resemble either the Third Period or the Popular Front. Trotskyist groups continued explicitly to support the united-front tactic, but they were often criticized for using this as a pretext for entryism. An example of a contemporary united front policy is Anti-Fascist Action.
