Page:The Lessons of the German Events (1924).djvu/66

 ness. The whole objective situation in Germany favoured these tactics. As a result of its labours the Party achieved great success: it won the increasing sympathy of the masses, and caused disruption in the ranks of the Social-Democrats.

A number of our sections began to employ the tactics of the United Front only slowly, after overcoming much resistance and along with many errors. In France a considerable section of the Party in 1922 failed to understand the tactics of the United Front, and seriously feared that they would be interpreted as an ideological concession to the Social-Democrats. In England a section of the comrades wrongly interpreted the tactics of the United Front in the sense that Communists were not to criticise the opportunist Labour Party in Parliament. In Finland, similar false conclusions were come to. In Roumania, a section of the comrades honestly believed that the tactics of the United Front meant a parliamentary collaboration with the Social-Democrats. In Italy the Communist Party for a long time committed the exact reversed error, and refrained from giving the tactics of the United Front a wide application for fear that the purity of the theory and programme of the Communist Movement might thereby be compromised. A number of other parties made a too mechanical interpretation of these tactics, and thought it was enough to address a stereotyped open letter to the Social-Democrats once a month and then forget all about it. They were not able to employ the tactics of the United Front for the purpose of carrying on a real political fight.

The mistaken application of the tactics of the United Front made in a number of countries, especially at the beginning, does however, not mean that the tactics themselves are wrong. This conclusion would be just as mistaken as the rejection of the revolutionary exploitation of parliamentarism on the grounds that certain parliamentary fractions are only able to learn to make use of it after many errors. The tactics of the United Front were, and are, in themselves, right, in spite of incidental errors connected with them.

The tactics of the United Front have their strong sides and they have their dangers. Although in October, 1923, we did not possess a safe and certain majority in the German proletariat, nevertheless, the very fact that the young Communist Party at that period could seriously ask itself whether it had not already a reliable majority to proceed to seize power, proves that the tactics of the United Front are capable of bringing about the most essential pre-requisite for the seizure of power, namely, the winning over of a majority of the proletariat for the proletarian revolution. If the Communist Parties have to take into consideration the psychology and the mood of the backward masses still remaining under the influence of the Social Democrats, this does not prove the erroneousness of the tactics but merely points to a source of danger in the application of the tactics.