I’ve been thinking about the third period a lot lately, specifically the end of the third period and the dawn of united fronts. Looking at the state of the left in the west, it seems like things have become fragmented to a point that even the best of us are confused about who to support or which orgs to join. What I’ve been thinking is that we ought to form a united front between all the various communist groups in any given country, but in my case specifically America. I don’t think we should work with liberals of any stripe at this moment, but I do think we should be able to let subtle differences between party lines fall by the wayside. This would allow us to spread our ideas a bit more broadly and represent ourselves at protests as a larger communist group. I think the ultimate goal would be something like the SED or the PSUV, but even something as light as an agreement to work together would be a huge step forward organizationally. I’m curious to know what your thoughts on the matter are.
The issue of United Fronts and Popular Fronts is really only an thorny theoretical problem for the advanced capitalist countries, aka the first world.
Why is the PSUV popular? It isn’t because they are some sort of broad united front of different “left” groups, it’s because they openly tell the Spanish-speaking Mestizo population that the borders separating them in Latin America are imaginary lines drawn up by imperialists. Marxism-Leninism, or anything even approaching it, is always nationalism in third world countries, and Venezuela is no different. Chavez made this crystal clear on a number of occasions, for example, this speech in Cuba:
Marxism-Leninism works in third-world countries because they able to transcend political boundaries that are all but impossible to do in the advanced capitalist countries (and not simply for ideological reasons). Imagine if the vast majority of communists, Nazis, and social-democrats were all in the same party in Germany, and you have something very close to the PSUV. This isn’t to attack the PSUV at all, but this is why people in third-world countries have latched onto Marxism-Leninism in the first place. Ho Chi Minh even wrote openly about it in his short essay The Path Which Led Me to Leninism. To quote it:
The same pattern follows all communist revolutions, though it is more obscured and hidden in the Russian revolution itself. Tell a right-winger to choose which social-democrat to shoot in 1917, and they’re going to point the guns at the Kerenskyists.
The question of United Fronts and Popular Fronts can generally be reduced to a military question. If you are firing bullets at the government, basically anyone willing to also do this should get a place in the Front. If you don’t have an army, then anyone willing to actually help you build an army should be in the Front. Anything else is essentially trying to paper over differences between reform and revolution, and if this something you want to do, you’re going to have a real bad time.