Course adjustment

In April and May in 1920, Lenin, the head of the new Soviet state and Bolshevik Party, wrote “Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” 15 years later, another communist Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, presented to a worldwide meeting of Communist Parties, a speech in a similar vein titled “The United Front against War and Fascism.” Both speeches persuasively and forcefully addressed the dangers and problems of political sectarianism and narrowness of parties across the world. As a result, the communist movement worldwide and in its respective countries substituted its previous sectarian strategic and tactical policies and practices for policies and practices that accented the politics of broad unity and sustained action against the rising fascist threat.

It needs no saying that conditions are different today. And yet the rise of fascism and right wing extremist authoritarian rule here — Trump and Trumpism — and on a global level should be a sufficient prod for the democratic, progressive and left movements/coalitions to revise and re-calibrate their politics, much like what was done in the 1930s, to accent peaceable protest and broad unity in every arena of struggle, and especially the electoral arena.

Much will depend on their willingness