We Need a New Popular Front
What the politics of the 1930s can tell us about our time
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Popular Front. It’s a strange kind of daydream, but I can’t escape the increasingly relevant lessons of the 1930s to today’s political climate in the United States, Great Britain, and beyond.
What was the Popular Front?
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 established the Soviet Union as the world’s only communist power. Although Marxism advocates for global revolution and the abolition of nations, the defeat of communist revolutions in Europe combined with ideological infighting in the Soviet Union led to the adoption of the “socialism in one country” platform. Josef Stalin’s desire to consolidate gains and strengthen the Soviet Union won out over Trotsky’s more ambitious “Permanent Revolution;” Trotsky was subsequently exiled and eventually assassinated.
The Soviet Union, however, assumed the leadership of international communist movements under the guise of the Comintern, which provided ideological guidance and logistical support to Communist movements in exchange for closer alignment with the Soviet Union.
