A New Popular Front?

[AmericanMarxist]

Is it the solution to our issues? Having been in the left for a number of years now, we have a million splinter groups ranging from socialist to anarchist and everywhere in between. Seeing as komsol/komintern type gatherings have stopped with the fall of the soviet union, we are unable to accomplish or network. Think of the popular front during the 30s, we organized international brigades and were at the height of our influence.

Perhaps it is time to set aside our differences, unite, and hold some sort of major leftist gathering in order to draft a set of goals for the next decade, recruit, and exchange ideas.

[subcp]

There have been numerous regroupments and proto-regroupments outside of Third International linked groups. The popular front was the complete subjugation of the Communist Party to the bourgeoisie. The popular front is how we end up with the CPUSA acting as a loyal agent of the ruling Democratic Party today. Unity has to be organic, not superficial. Umbrella organizations fall apart; look at the opportunism of the various Trotskyist groups in the UK trying to regroup around a parliamentary, electoral front (Respect, Socialist Alliance, etc).

[Die Neue Zeit]

The Popular Front was and is class collaborationist. The United Front was and is economistic. Communitarian populist fronts are an option to consider.

[Geiseric]

The popular fronts didn't work and it led to communists supporting the imperialist wars. What you're thinking of is a united front, which had a historic victory in Russia specifically against a white army coup during the revolution. Popular fronts are with pro capitalist parties, which is a no no. However united fronts with social dems and reformists is only an option when there's a threat of reaction or when there's a full on assault on the working class. Such as a front with the SPD and KPD would of wored. But we need to form a working class party, not orgaize sects.

[blake 3:17]

Such as a front with the SPD and KPD would of wored.

"Worked" or "whored"? I think you mean the former, but the latter is more interesting.

[blake 3:17]

To the OP, I am in favour of a new Popular Front. I'd agree with Walden Bello, the great Phillipino Marxist, that the new International needs to be based out of the peasantry.

In no way do I dismiss industrial struggles or struggles in the imperial heartland. How they play out I might disagree with.

One of the central features to parts of the original Popular Front was the fight against racism as both moral and strategic. I'd largely agree with that, depending on the circumstances.

The biggest issues hitting Canadian politics right now are resource exploitation and ripoff, the non-violent insurgence of aboriginal peoples, and some new energy in the unions. If we keep an idea of those working together, without being afraid of offending one another, there's the possibility of an effective socialist politics transcending the NDP or Far Left sectarian BS.

We'll see.

[Comrade Jandar]

The OP seems to be confusing "Popular Fronts" for internationals such as the original IWMA or the Comintern. They are not the same thing.

[Grenzer]

The Popular Front was and is class collaborationist. The United Front was and is economistic. Communitarian populist fronts are an option to consider.

Jargon is a serviceable substitute for analysis it seems. For all your ranting and raving about economism, you don't really understand what it is. Maybe you should, you know, actually try reading Lenin Rediscovered before pretending that you know what you're talking about..


To the OP, I am in favour of a new Popular Front. I'd agree with Walden Bello, the great Phillipino Marxist, that the new International needs to be based out of the peasantry.

In no way do I dismiss industrial struggles or struggles in the imperial heartland. How they play out I might disagree with.

One of the central features to parts of the original Popular Front was the fight against racism as both moral and strategic. I'd largely agree with that, depending on the circumstances.

Sorry, but this is the nuttiest thing I've seen all month, no small feat given that the social-plutocratic propaganda machine is in overdrive for the holiday season.

First of all, no actual Marxist would propose something as absurd as a peasant based international. This idea is thoroughly reactionary to the core. The peasantry is the vestigial remnant of previous modes of production; it is the proletariat that is the revolutionary class within the context of capitalism. This fact was universally acknowledged by all the prominent Marxists of the 19th and 20th century. It puzzled me as to how a self-described revolutionary could espouse such a reactionary idea, but then I recalled that you had hailed Eurocommunism as an "interesting idea" and then it made sense.

On the practical level, the peasantry cannot be organized as a class for itself. This has actually been tried before, and met without success. If a peasant based organization could be constructed, it would likely not be peasant in nature, but petit-bourgeois. The following may of interest:


(Krestintern; International Peasant Council [MKS]), an international peasant revolutionary organization that existed between 1922 and 1933. The Peasant International was founded at a congress of the representatives of peasant organizations that met in Moscow from Oct. 10 to Oct. 16, 1923. Among the countries that sent delegates were the USSR, Poland, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, the USA, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Indochina, and Japan.

The goal of the Peasant International was to defend the interests of the toiling peasantry and to draw it into revolutionary struggle. Its slogan was “Peasants and workers of all countries unite!” The Peasant International was headed by the Council, which was made up of representatives from the peasant organizations of member countries. The International Peasant Council elected a permanent body, the Presidium, which was headed by a secretary-general.

The journals Krest’ianskii internatsional (Peasant International) and Mezhdunarodnyi krest’ianskii biulleten’ (International Peasant Bulletin), which examined the peasant movement in various countries, were published by the International Peasant Council. In 1926 the Peasant International organized the Inter-national Agrarian Institute, which was to do theoretical studies of the agrarian question and the peasant movement.

The organization dissolved because it had no practical purpose; the peasantry cannot be organized in such a manner.

As for the popular front, you are dead wrong. The origin of the popular front in the early 1920's was in anti-fascism. The popular front is class collaborationist, and should be rejected on that ground.

In all, what you are proposing is just a mixture of Stalinism and old school Narodnism.

[blake 3:17]

Yet peasants have refused to go gently into that good night to which Collier and Hobsbawm—not to say Marx—would consign them. Indeed, one year before Hobsbawm’s book was published, in 1993, La Vía Campesina was founded, and over the next decade this federation of peasants and small farmers would become an influential actor on the agriculture and trade scene globally. The spirit of internationalism and active identification of one’s class interests with the universal interest of society that was once a prominent feature of workers’ movements is now on display in the international peasant movement.

Vía Campesina and its allies hotly dispute the inevitability of the hegemony of capitalist industrial agriculture, asserting that peasants and small farmers continue to be the backbone of global food production, constituting over a third of the world’s population and two-thirds of the world’s food producers.29 Smallholders with farms of under two hectares make up the bulk of the rice produced by Asian small farmers.30

The food price crisis, according to proponents of peasant and smallholder agriculture, is not due to the failure of peasant agriculture but to that of corporate agriculture. They say that, despite the claims of its representatives that corporate agriculture is best at feeding the world, the creation of global production chains and global supermarkets, driven by the search for monopoly profits, has been accompanied by greater hunger, worse food, and greater agriculture-related environmental destabilization all around than at any other time in history.

Moreover, they assert that the superiority in terms of production of industrial capitalist agriculture is not sustained empirically. Miguel Altieri and Clara Nicholls, for instance, point out, that although the conventional wisdom is that small farms are backward and unproductive, in fact, “research shows that small farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop. Small integrated farming systems that produce grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products outproduce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms.”31

When one factors in the ecological destabilization that has accompanied the generalization of capitalist industrial agriculture, the balance of costs and benefits lurches sharply towards the negative. For instance, in the United States, notes Daniel Imhoff,

the average food item journeys some 1300 miles before becoming part of a meal. Fruits and vegetables are refrigerated, waxed, colored, irradiated, fumigated, packaged, and shipped. None of these processes enhances food quality but merely enables distribution over great distances and helps increase shelf life.32

Industrial agriculture has created the absurd situation whereby “between production, processing, distribution, and preparation, 10 calories of energy are required to create just one calorie of food energy.”33 Conversely, it is the ability to combine productivity and ecological sustainability that constitutes a key dimension of superiority of peasant or small-scale agriculture over industrial agriculture.

Contrary to assertions that peasant and small-farm agriculture is hostile to technological innovation, partisans of small-scale or peasant-based farming assert that technology is “path dependent,” that is, its development is conditioned by the mode of production in which it is embedded, so that technological innovation under peasant and small-scale farming would take different paths than innovation under capitalist industrial agriculture.
But partisans of the peasantry have not only engaged in a defense of the peasant or smallholder agriculture. Vía Campesina and its allies have actually formulated an alternative to industrial capitalist agriculture, and one that looks to the future rather than to the past. This is the paradigm of food sovereignty, the key propositions of which are discussed elsewhere in this collection.

http://monthlyreview.org/2009/07/01/food-wars

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

This sort of option was probably made difficult by the mass murder of communists, by other communists, in the late 1930s. :thumbdown:

[Die Neue Zeit]

Jargon is a serviceable substitute for analysis it seems. For all your ranting and raving about economism, you don't really understand what it is. Maybe you should, you know, actually try reading Lenin Rediscovered before pretending that you know what you're talking about.

Please. Since you went off-topic, I did read well before an amateur such as yourself did, but on this specific score I have begged to differ with what comrade Lars Lih deemed a slippery slope, politely, and have sided with various CPGB writers on the subject (narrow vs. broad economism).

Here, the United Front was and is economistic because the core of united action is trade union "struggle."


Sorry, but this is the nuttiest thing I've seen all month, no small feat given that the social-plutocratic propaganda machine is in overdrive for the holiday season.

The only "machine" in overdrive this past December has been the anti-political, ultra-left one.


If a peasant based organization could be constructed, it would likely not be peasant in nature, but petit-bourgeois.

Perhaps, I don't know, Blake meant that such organization should be based on the rural petit-bourgeoisie? :glare:

Common work with such an organization I can agree with (hence a Communitarian Populist Front), but as you already know I'm for a separate worker-class political organization across borders.

[Grenzer]

Please. Since you went off-topic, I did read well before an amateur such as yourself did

Get over yourself. Reading a preview on google books is hardly the same as actually reading the full book, something you've openly admitted that you've never done. As usual, you are clumsily rummaging through things you scarcely understand, picking up on the jargon and little else.

You aren't really in a position to talk about what constitutes experience as you have no connection to class struggle, preferring instead to spin reactionary 'theories' that have nothing to do with it. Funny how the CPGB itself has recently called you out on reactionary nonsense, or in their words, "spread[ing] forms of thought which are in themselves reactionary" (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/943/letters).

[Die Neue Zeit]

You aren't really in a position to talk about what constitutes experience as you have no connection to class struggle

In with the ad hominems. Pot, meet kettle. Ultra-lefts call out against "voluntarist" left activism and questionable "activism," and then they use and have used ad hominems to pre-empt criticisms of their own lack of connection to class struggle.

Because genuine class struggle is political and not economic, most of us here don't have any direct connection to such other than the indirect means of education and agitation. You, amateur sir, don't have any such connection to genuine class struggle, and neither do BMH, Ravachol, the ICC "militants," or the rest either.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

In with the ad hominems. Pot, meet kettle. Ultra-lefts call out against "voluntarist" left activism and questionable "activism," and then they use and have used ad hominems to pre-empt criticisms of their own lack of connection to class struggle.

Because genuine class struggle is political and not economic, most of us here don't have any direct connection to such other than the indirect means of education and agitation. You, amateur sir, don't have any such connection to genuine class struggle, and neither do BMH, Ravachol, the ICC "militants," or the rest either.

Whilst I don't wish to join in the ad hominem attacks on you, I do think you'd be better to just admit you're inexperienced when it comes to activism and organising, rather than trying to wriggle your way out on some technicality.

Honesty is often the quickest way to respect and, ironically, showing your human side would do a lot to highlight your supposed 'higher development' as a proletarian or whatever.

[blake 3:17]

Perhaps, I don't know, Blake meant that such organization should be based on the rural petit-bourgeoisie? :glare:

Bello suggests that the family farm unit is the most reliably productive agricultural model.

Bello, James C. Scott, and Mike Davis have all spoken in favour of relatively traditional agriculture, not micro-managed by the state, as being the most resilient, most relatively equitable, most skilled, and least environmentally destructive.

This has been the cause of some cognitive dissonance for me and has been one issue among several to cause me to question Marxism while remaining a socialist and anti-capitalist.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Bello suggests that the family farm unit is the most reliably productive agricultural model.

FYI, I was making a sarcastic remark at the other poster. I have stated a constructive disagreement with this assertion, going instead with the wage-earners-in-vertical-food-production model.


This has been the cause of some cognitive dissonance for me and has been one issue among several to cause me to question Marxism while remaining a socialist and anti-capitalist.

No worries.

[blake 3:17]

FYI, I was making a sarcastic remark at the other poster. I have stated a constructive disagreement with this assertion, going instead with the wage-earners-in-vertical-food-production model.


No worries here. I think we just disagree. Amicable disagreers to power!