Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/68

 64 of the political views or beliefs of separate workers or groups. Further, the purpose of this United Front is to fight against the bourgeoisie. By that you can see that the United Front is aimed at our class enemy. And again the idea of the United Front sharply conflicts with the theory and practice of the reformists, for with them the question is one of collaboration between the classes.

These are the boundaries of the United Front for us Communists which we cannot overstep. And because the United Front should be a purely labor front, because its aims are against the employers, against the bourgeoisie, therefore it should conduct a struggle and not discuss collaboration. That was the reason why the reformist organizations were all the time against the United Front. This is the crux of their position.

They look upon the United Front as a new invention of the Bolsheviks, the slogan of a United Front they understand as a new maneuvre of "Moscow," and under the name "Moscow" they understood everything, the Profintern, Comintern, the whole of Soviet Russia, and all that has anything to do with the Russian revolution.

That is the way the reformists understood our proposals for a United Front although in reality they are opposed to it because it holds a clear proposition for the class struggle, for breaking up all coalition with the bourgeoisie, because they are the ardent defenders of such a coalition.

As long as a United Front would be created with the Communists—and in this respect they had a clear understanding—the possibility of a united front with the bourgeoisie had to disappear. There is no third way out of it and therefore it is plain why the Amsterdam International was so opposed to the idea of a United Front, and quite naturally attempts were made to defame this idea instead of realizing it.

In connection with the United Front there were many gestures made by the Amsterdam and the Second internationals. You will remember the Berlin conference of the three internationals where the Comintern, the Second and the Second-and-a-Half Internationals were represented. Here we had no united front but only talk; on one hand, on the question of the evil of Bolshevism; and, on the other, on the evil of reformism. This meeting of the representatives of the three executive committees, was only a trial of strength, but it could not give any concrete results. This failure however, could not stop the Profintern and Comintern from attempting to create a United Front and, whenever a proper moment would arise in the labor movement, we would call upon the Internationals, the Amsterdam and the others, proposing coordinated action. Usually we would get no answer at all, or get one in the that "We will not fall for the provocations and maneuvres of Moscow."