New Popular Front: new instrument against the working class

We are publishing below an extract from the contribution of a comrade who took part in the international public meeting organised by the ICC in July. First of all, we would like to pay tribute to the very serious approach and the combative spirit of comrade C., who is seeking to draw some initial conclusions from the debates by expressing the arguments that have strengthened and changed her point of view, by further enriching the discussion. In this, comrade C. is fully, and with great responsibility, part of a proletarian debate, the aim of which is to clarify the historical aims and means of the proletariat's struggle[1].

In the part of her contribution which we publish below, the comrade demonstrates her concern for political clarity by drawing on the historical method of marxism to explain the difference between the Popular Front of 1936 and the New Popular Front of 2024. She thus shows not only the bourgeois nature of these two left-wing coalitions in a different context, but also all the democratic mystification that lies behind the evocation of Léon Blum by the left today.

EG, 5 September 2024

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I'd like to comment on this afternoon's public meeting on the elections. First of all I'd like to thank you for holding this discussion. I had a feeling that we wouldn't have time to cover all the topics on the agenda, which is a shame, but the discussion was very interesting all the same. The international nature of the meeting, with comrades from many different countries offering different perspectives was very enriching, and I hope that despite the problems and difficulties of holding meetings in multiple languages, that the ICC will be able to organise other meetings of this type. (...).

The second point I'd like to raise, and which unfortunately I wasn't able to address during the discussion, is the role of the Popular Fronts, and in particular the ICT’s analysis of them[2]. I didn't have the opportunity to go into the ICT's position in depth, so I can only refer to what comrade P. said, i.e. that the ICT draws a parallel between the New Popular Front and Léon Blum's Popular Front in 1936. The ICT says that the role of the Popular Fronts is to drag the working class into the spiral of imperialist world war. This is a fallacious and empty parallel, but hardly surprising when one leaves aside the framework of decomposition. Unfortunately, the subject has not been developed very much, and on rereading the discussion I note that there have been very few contributions on the subject.

To understand how the situation differs, we need to compare the current situation with that of 1936 and the election of the Popular Front. In 1936, the working class had just suffered a major defeat. This defeat left the bourgeoisie free to pursue and impose all its ambitions, which ultimately led to the massacre of the Second World War. At that time, the Popular Front was the manifestation of the weakness and defeat of the proletariat, which had no choice but to fall in behind the bourgeoisie and allow itself to be embraced by all the bourgeois ideologies such as anti-fascism.

Today, the situation is radically different: the proletariat has not rcently suffered a defeat, on the contrary, it is beginning to recover from its previous defeat and from the period of counter-revolution, as shown by the international movements of the last few years, which are on a far greater scale than those of previous decades. As we saw earlier, while populism is a threat to the bourgeoisie, it also has the advantage of being used to mobilise the working class in parliament. In this sense, the left has placed itself in the vanguard of the defence of democracy, presenting itself as the only alternative to populism. But even so, after decades of deception, lies and attacks as soon as it comes to power, the left remains relatively discredited.

That's why, in an attempt to convince and mobilise, it is presenting an increasingly unrealistic programme. I'm thinking, for example, of the €1,600 minimum wage presented by the New Popular Front in France. Another clue is the lack of unity within the NPF. Unlike the Popular Front of the 1930s, as soon as it came to power the NPF was already in the process of dissolving because of its heterogeneity and political incoherence. These few elements clearly show that the situation is not comparable to that of the 1930s, and that by drawing such a parallel, the ICT can only be totally mistaken in its analysis.

As for the left, it is my opinion that appealing to the memory of the Popular Front in the current context, when it is incapable of even mobilising and winning the approval of the workers, is a serious mistake for it, and that it risks costing it dearly in the long term by being a major factor in undermining its credibility [...].

C.
 

 

 

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[1] We have also published other contributions about this meeting on our website Thoughts on the discussion on populism at the ICC’s international online public meeting in July

 

[2] The Internationalist Communist Tendency is an organisation of the Communist Left