The Popular Front

Put in a nutshell, the Popular Front without an orientation toward FDR would have been based on a Labor Party rather than the Democratic Party, the party of the bosses. William Z. Foster had a better class instinct than Browder on this particular question. He thought that the Farmer-Labor Party might qualify as the base for a Popular Front. Even though this party had developed more of a middle-class base since its formation earlier in the century, it was still possible to transform the class composition by aggressively recruiting workers.

Another possibility would have been to form a Labor Party from scratch. Even though Roosevelt had wide-spread popularity in the ranks of labor, there was also a strong desire to create a class-based party, especially after FDR had come out with his "plague on both your houses" comments after the cops had murdered strikers during the "Little Steel" strike.

The desire for a break from the Democratic Party was especially strong in New York, where Communists actually took the initiative to form the American Labor Party. The ALP was formed in 1936 by leaders of the needle trades union, reports Roger Keeran in his article "The Communist Influence on American Labor" contained in "New Studies in U.S. Communism", edited by my friend and ex-SWP member Frank Rosengarten. Keeran states:

"It had the backing of unions representing 400,00 members, and in the years 1936 to 1946 it carried between 5 percent and 50 percent of every election district in New York City. The ALP was the base for the most consistently pro-labor candidate elected to national office, Congressman Vito Marcantonio. State chairman of the ALP until 1953, Marcantonio represented East Harlem in Congress between 1938 and 1950. The ALP and Marcantonio relied on the energetic campaign efforts of Communists and the unions under their leadership. Gerald Meyer points out 'that through its control of the neighborhood clubs and via the affiliation of the Communist-led unions, the party rapidly became a major force within the ALP. By 1948 [party leader] Dennis privately noted that virtually every ALP club leader throughout the city was a party member.'"

It is a bit difficult to say what would have been the equivalent in the 1960s radicalization, a period of labor quiescence. The most promising formation was the Peace and Freedom Party, which ran Dr. Spock for President in 1968 and received enough votes to win permanent ballot status in California, no small achievement.

The Peace and Freedom Party failed largely because it was ignored by some groups on the left or picked apart by parasitic sectarians who did choose to work in it. The Communist Party could not come to terms with the new leftish leadership of the Peace and Freedom Party and initiated their own Freedom and Peace Party [!] which ran Dick Gregory, if my aging memory serves me correctly on this one. The Freedom and Peace party soft-pedaled the notion of building an alternative to the Democratic Party and mostly spoke about the need to stop Nixon.

The Socialist Workers Party characterized the Peace and Freedom Party as "petty bourgeois" (this is like the pot calling the kettle black) and ignored it, while running their own rather dynamic campaign on behalf of Fred Halstead in 1968. Halstead was a 6'5", 350 pound garment cutter who was leading the party's antiwar work. He was a gifted speaker who was able to translate Trotskyist mumbo-jumbo into terms understandable by the average American. There are no people like this left in the zombie cult known as the SWP.

Smaller groups bored away at the Peace and Freedom Party and drove serious activists out of the organization. Could you imagine a meeting convened to discuss where to pass out campaign flyers and running into a jargon drunk like Hugh Rodwell, who wanted to put the Shanghai massacre of 1927 on the agenda? And then never lifted a finger to actually pass out leaflets like the rest of the group? Yecchh.

The only thing that has held similar promise in recent years are the electoral bids of Jesse Jackson. If Jackson decided to bolt from the Democratic Party and turn the Rainbow Coalition into a political party, then we might be talking about something real. Expecting Jackson to leave the Democrats is a little bit like asking a Trotskyite to stop calling people "Mensheviks" that they disagree with politically. Don't hold your breath. Opportunism and sectarianism are powerful drugs.

Leaving aside the electoral aspect, the main requirement in building something like the Popular Front is being able to communicate to the American people in the language of their everyday lives, as Browder stressed. In recent years, the Sandinista revolution has provided rich lessons in how to do this. They spoke to the masses in terms of "Sandinismo", which drew upon the culture and traditions of revolt in their own history. We should think much more about how to do this ourselves. Instead of using symbols of other people's revolutions, like hammers and sickles, we should think creatively about what are the most resonant themes for the American people. One of the interesting things about the militia movement, as murky or reactionary as its politics are, is the degree to which it does this. The whole idea of a militia is a throwback to the early days of the American revolution.

The best formulations I have heard on the subject are contained in Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez's "Fire in the Americas". Burbach is head of the Center for the Studies of the Americas in Berkeley and has spent a lot of time in Latin American and Nicaragua in particular. Nunez was the director of the Center for the Study of Agrarian Reform in Sandinista Nicaragua. Burbach has sort of gotten derailed ideologically recently and taken up a "postmodernist socialism", which is tied to an undialectical understanding of the Zapatistas, but "Fire in the America" remains a valuable resource. Here is a sample passage:

"What are the weak links in the chain of bourgeois rule? Where can breakthroughs be made? One weakness is that the bourgeoisie, and the capitalist system it controls, are driven to produce an ever increasing materialistic and atomized society. Truly humane values--love, solidarity, etc.--are devalued by capitalism. At present the New Right is trying to overcome this contradiction by emphasizing traditional values like the family and patriotism, but the left can respond more effectively by showing how social and moral disintegration are rooted in late capitalism.

"The central contradiction of contemporary capitalism however is that it is increasingly undemocratic. Economic and political power are concentrated and centralized; the average citizen plays no role in running the giant corporations. In the political sphere, it is only centralized organizations, like business associations and trade lobbies, that play major roles in the selection of our political leaders. And of course it is control of the media by these organizations and the bourgeoisie that determines what political options and messages are presented to voters. Moreover, Watergate and Contragate show the darker sides of 'imperial' presidencies and a general contempt for constitutional procedures.

"It is the 'death of democracy' that the left can use as a political banner in the United States to challenge the hold of the bourgeoisie. In this struggle, the left can reclaim the US past, including historical milestones like the Declaration of Independence. It can appeal to the country's progressive political tradition which includes anti-war movements as well as political leaders like Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Debs, Robert La Follette, and Martin Luther King Jr."

Louis Proyect