Building the united front under the leadership of the proletariat, in steps and leaps

A training manual by the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, May 2025

We write this training manual after the OCR has made some important, if initial, strides in sinking roots among the proletariat, launching and leading focused mass organizing and broader agitation efforts, mounting a few small but significant political interventions, and recruiting and training cadre. These achievements and their limitations point to the need to cultivate broader support if the subjective forces for revolution are to grow, and for greater organizational capacity and strategic sophistication if we are to mount bolder and wider reaching political interventions. To fulfill those needs, it is time to start taking seriously the task of building the united front under the leadership of the proletariat.

What is the united front under the leadership of the proletariat?

As our Manifesto and other writings make clear, the proletariat is the class strategically positioned to lead the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transition to communism that starts after the seizure of power. However, to succeed in either of those processes, we must tap into the full breadth of the proletariat as well as the strengths, skills, and potential contributions of other classes. Revolutionary warfare will require the assistance of various members of the petty-bourgeoisie, from doctors and nurses to logistics coordinators to technical experts, and more generally, the revolution cannot prevail if the proletariat does not wrench broad sections of the population away from allegiance to bourgeois rule. The socialist society built on the ashes of the present order will require various technical and intellectual skills that are currently the preserve of the petty-bourgeoisie, and will need the willing participation of broad sections of the population to function and flourish.

The united front under the leadership of the proletariat (UFULP) is the alliance of classes necessary for proletarian revolution and the socialist transition to communism. It is not a coalition of different political or even class forces, but a strategic process of bringing many individuals and whole sections of people over to the side of the class-conscious proletariat and its revolutionary objectives. It is built through the step-by-step work of developing organized ties, interlocutors, and allies among different classes, and in leaps when it is possible, owing to widespread political struggle in society, to bring whole sections of people objectively (if not necessarily subjectively) under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat and its vanguard party.

The specific alliance of classes that constitutes the UFULP depends on the concrete conditions of a given country. Historically, an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry was at the core of the UFULP in the course of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, which took place in countries with large rural populations and widespread feudal exploitation. In the US today, there is no peasantry, but there are oppressed nation(s) and nationalities—Black people, Indigenous populations, Chicanos, and various immigrant populations—subjected to discrimination, violence, inequality, and other pervasive social problems. Those oppressed nation(s) and nationalities include various classes, with the proletariat among them facing the worst oppression, but the entirety of their struggles against national oppression can be an important motive force for revolution in the US. Therefore, the solid core of the UFULP in the US is the alliance between the multinational proletariat and the struggles of the various oppressed nation(s) and nationalities to overcome their oppression.

In addition to that that solid core, the UFULP must also be a way to encompass the conflicts that various classes have with bourgeois rule, from the myriad forms of oppression that different people face beyond just class exploitation (for example: discrimination against LGBT people; restrictions on the reproductive rights of women), to ways that the motions of capital threaten the livelihoods and economic and social stability of the broad masses, to how capitalism prevents people from contributing to solving social problems and enriching the human experience. On the latter, think of how teachers are denied the resources and institutional support necessary to educate proletarian children, how the capitalist healthcare system prevents doctors and nurses from properly treating the health problems of the masses, or how artists and intellectuals are walled off from the masses. The fact that communist revolution is the only way to truly solve these and other problems is a material basis for the UFULP.

However, those in class positions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie have a material stake, to varying degrees, in the capitalist system and ingrained ideological allegiance to bourgeois rule. Therefore, building the UFULP is a contentious process full of class struggle, and not just between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Some classes will be difficult to peel away from their allegiance to the bourgeoisie owing to their greater material stake in bourgeois rule, especially when those classes solidify into ideological blocs united to defend their specific class interests. In the contemporary US, that includes the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie and the revanchist petty-bourgeoisie. Other classes, most especially the well-paid working class, have a force of inertia owing to their stable economic position, and are difficult to budge away from bourgeois allegiance. To build the UFULP, we have to make a sober assessment of which classes are in greater conflict with and have less ideological allegiance to bourgeois rule and focus our practical efforts there while contending with and working to defeat reactionary classes.

In the contemporary US, besides the lower and deeper sections of the proletariat, the upper ranks of the proletariat (those with relative stability of employment), the lower ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie, the dispossessed sections of the well-paid working class, and the progressive petty-bourgeoisie are where we can likely find the greatest number of potential supporters for, and even active participants in, the revolutionary movement. The liberal petty-bourgeoisie is largely under the wing of liberal sections of the bourgeoisie, but segments of it may be swung over to the side of the revolutionary proletariat in the course of certain political struggles. The progressive petty-bourgeoisie, an ideological bloc that seeks to stand with the masses, has been rapidly shrinking over the last decade, but remains the segment of the petty-bourgeoisie most friendly to proletarian revolution.

The preceding basic class analysis should inform how we go about building the UFULP, but we must not treat classes as frozen entities. In order to recognize opportunities for building the UFULP, we have to be attuned to the motion and development of different classes, to how the motions of capital are affecting their class position, and to their ideological dispositions and political actions as contradictions in society unfold. We strongly suggest studying the editorial “The reactionary repudiation of a restorationist program and the ongoing tantrums of two reactionary petty-bourgeoisies” in Going Against the Tide #3 to gain that analytical ability, especially since this manual is by necessity more schematic in its class analysis.

Building the UFULP step-by-step: organized ties, interlocutors, and allies

When someone says “we have people everywhere,” you expect it to be hyperbole. Florists use that expression. It doesn’t mean there’s somebody working for them in the bloody room!

-M in the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace

How we go about building the UFULP should be in two ways: step-by-step and in leaps. The former refers to the systematic process of developing organized networks of supporters of the vanguard party of the proletariat among different sections of the people. These supporters can in turn function as the links and levers necessary for making leaps in building the UFULP when the opportunities for doing so emerge. Furthermore, they can carry out support tasks crucial for the ongoing work of the vanguard party.

The network of supporters we are describing is made up of organized ties: people who are not members of the Party¹ but are partisan towards it. They follow its leadership on some level and have an ongoing, organized connection to the Party, usually in the form of being part of a Party-led discussion circle and subscribing to our publication(s). Their level of commitment is below that of a cadre, and they need not be intensely involved in Party-led political work. The main contribution of organized ties is often to provide practical support to the Party’s ongoing work, such as funds and meeting places. What sets potential organized ties apart from other members of their class (whichever class that is) is that, for whatever reasons, they happen to be ideologically advanced, gravitating towards revolutionary politics and wanting to support a revolutionary movement. Developing these individuals into organized ties means training them in our politics and giving them ways to support and contribute to our revolutionary work.

The bulk of the Party’s organized ties (OTs) should be built among the proletariat, with the aim of broadening our reach into different sections of the proletariat where we are not currently carrying out intensive mass organizing efforts. The greater the breadth of our OTs among the proletariat is, the more we will be able to understand the conditions, struggles, and thinking of our class and the better we will be able to carry out the mass line. Furthermore, proletarian OTs will be ideological, political, and organizational conduits for the leadership of the proletariat, as a class, in the broader united front.

Organized ties should also be built among other classes, from progressive teachers to immigrant store owners to professional artists and intellectuals and many others, who can also play a role in buttressing and spreading the revolutionary proletariat’s leadership more broadly. OTs should generally be people who have settled into adulthood and can be expected to be steady and ongoing in their partisanship to and practical support for the Party. Youth do not generally make good candidates for OTs, positively because they have greater freedom to make major life changes and should be struggled with to fully commit to and be on the frontlines of the revolutionary movement, and negatively because their commitments can be fickle and their political thinking in flux.

Potential OTs can be met in many different ways, but especially through broad revolutionary agitprop work and by the attractive force of our public campaigns and struggles. More quietly, they could be met through family, social, and cultural ties, and by cadre working at jobs with large concentrations of proletarians or attending houses of worship. Organized ties should be built so wisely and so well that the repressive state apparatus does not know the nature, or even the existence, of their relationship to the Party—in other words, communication and meetings with OTs should not be done in ways that can be easily surveiled. As the OCR develops fully-fledged local branches, at least one unit should be constituted in each branch that focuses on developing OTs, taking contacts who do not fit into existing political work off the hands of other cadre. Specific efforts to gather ideologically advanced contacts, such as revolutionary literature tables at festivals and at proletarian transit hubs, can be the springboard for intensive follow-up work to turn those contacts into OTs. However, cadre should not wait for units and specific efforts devoted to developing OTs—we should all be thinking about contacts that can be developed into OTs and take initiative to start that process.

As we scale up the work of developing organized ties, we should be thinking about how OTs can fulfill strategic and tactical needs during revolutionary civil war. Just to give one example, truck drivers and transportation workers more generally could be coordinated—by the existing OTs of the Party among them—to develop supply lines for the revolutionary army of the proletariat and to get food and other necessities through the enemy’s encirclement and suppression attempts against liberated territory. The experience of the revolutionary people’s war in Peru, where the broad ties of the Communist Party of Peru carried out crucial support tasks, up to and including hiding its leader, Chairman Gonzalo, in a middle-class suburb of Lima, provides many lessons in the strategic and tactical use of OTs. Cadre who are assigned to developing OTs should be thinking with a bit of military logistics in mind.

Besides developing organized ties, building the UFULP also requires cultivating what we call interlocutors and allies of the Party, the latter word meant strategically, not in postmodernist identity politics terms. These are individuals who are consolidated around ideological positions different than our own who are acting politically on those positions in positive ways, and whose principled commitments bring them into dialogue and working relationships with us and our political work. With interlocutors, we have in mind individuals with whom we can have productive discussion and debate about our and their thinking, writing, and strategizing. Interlocutors are intellectuals in one way or another, including but not limited to professional intellectuals such as college professors, whose intellectual work can be productively brought into dialogue with our own. With allies, we are implying more of a practical, collaborative relationship working together on specific political campaigns or other Party-led work, with whom we can strategize together and have a high level of trust, including as pertaining to organizational matters.

Interlocutors and allies are developed largely through meeting them, or seeking them out, in the course of our practical efforts. For example, if we are gearing up to lead resistance against an impending imperialist war by the US bourgeoisie or against some new draconian repressive measure, we should be pursuing religious leaders whose Godly convictions compel them to stand against injustice, progressive intellectuals and journalists with the desire and ability to expose the injustice, and artists who want to put their cultural creation in service of resistance. We may also find political activists outside our circles to work with in these endeavors, but that is an increasingly rare possibility these days. Our relationships with interlocutors and allies should go beyond specific political campaigns—we should be cultivating long-term relationships based on mutual respect, curiosity, and reliability (theirs and ours). Those ongoing relationships should include discussions of our literature as well as their own ideas, whether they express them in writing or in other forms. Having long-term relationships with a broad range of interlocutors and allies will strengthen our own strategic thinking and intellectual work and enable us to launch and carry out campaigns with a UFULP character and the breadth to reach beyond our own circles.

Developing allies for the Party’s revolutionary work is by and large the responsibility of comrades assigned to specific areas of ongoing political work; for example, a comrade focused on women’s oppression should get to know and cultivate allies among non-communists who are waging principled struggle against the oppression of women. All our cadre should have an eye towards potential interlocutors, but we will need to assign specific cadre, likely the ones focused on OT work, to seek out intellectuals and artists who can become interlocutors with the Party. At some point after a local Party branch has been established, local leadership should make a plan for how the Party can engage with the intellectual, cultural, and artistic life in their area, including by drawing up a list of potential interlocutors and systematically approaching them. Central Party leadership should give guidance to this process, receive summations of work to develop interlocutors and allies, and take responsibility on a national level for work with (and to develop) interlocutors and allies.

The Party’s organized ties, interlocutors, and allies are the concrete, organized expression of the UFULP in an ongoing way, and must be built step-by-step through systematic work and by cadre specifically assigned to this task, but with all cadre seeing it as their responsibility to at minimum assist in this process. The greater the breadth and number of our OTs, interlocutors, and allies, the more we will be in the position to contend for leadership and in turn expand our forces in the struggles leading up to the revolutionary civil war.

Making leaps forward (and backward) in building the united front

To limit ourselves to step-by-step work in building the UFULP, however, would be to miss opportunities for making leaps in the development of the UFULP. Those opportunities come about when various classes are pulled into motion against specific moves of the bourgeoisie and motions of capital, whether that is an economic crisis, a rapid change in the established political order, a war that depends on the participation and support of wide swaths of the population, or some other major event. These opportunities are most familiar to us as large, spontaneous waves of protest, but they can also come in the form of widespread political debate or cultural controversy.

A vanguard party must be able to step into these opportunities and vie for proletarian leadership, including by way of mobilizing class-conscious proletarians to be an assertive force. Doing so requires the following basic ingredients:

Recognizing when such an opportunity is emerging before it reaches its apex. This is why we need to have a keen analysis of how different contradictions are unfolding in society and how different classes are moving in relation to them.
Having cadre who are experts and (potential) mass leaders in relation to the particular contradictions who can step up and get a wider hearing and lead many people when the opportunity emerges. This is why we have to cultivate such experts and mass leaders in an ongoing, systematic way as we recruit more cadre.
Convening meetings with our interlocutors and allies to strategize how to intervene in the particular situation, getting commitments from them to work alongside us, and developing organizational forms with them.
Preparing and training the forces directly under our leadership to boldly enter the fray, with a definite division of labor and chain of command, and redeploying cadre as necessary without disrupting important other fields of political work.
Cohering a political program in relation to the specific opportunity that sets the dividing lines for mass struggle, including by way of slogans and demands, in such a way that can draw in various classes and ideological viewpoints under proletarian leadership, and constituting the organizational forms that can advance that program and invite broad participation.

These ingredients cannot be treated simply as a checklist, but as moving parts in a contentious process. The kind of opportunities for building the UFULP in leaps that we are talking about here involve the subjective agency of not just the revolutionary proletariat and its vanguard, but a wide variety of classes and political forces. We have to develop the strategic firmness and tactical sophistication needed for swinging sections of those classes over to our program of struggle, finding the political forces we can work with, at least tactically, and neutralizing the larger number of political forces who will be seeking to undermine and sabotage our efforts. There will be many twists and turns in the struggle, and in the course of it the UFULP is likely to take both leaps forward and backward. For example, if the liberal petty-bourgeoisie enters the fray, they may be willing to follow our program of struggle to some extent if no other political force can offer them a compelling one, but are likely to quickly come back under the wing of the liberal bourgeoisie as soon as its political representatives put forward even a tepid program of struggle (inevitably directed towards the next election). After the high tide of mass struggle dies down, we will find that many people and even classes that embraced our program of struggle fade away or even become hostile towards us.

The two strategic challenges become how to take the opportunity as far as possible in the moment and how to consolidate as much as possible from the opportunity. The former is a matter of finding the ways to both intensify and broaden the struggle, and those two aspects can be in contradiction. The two common errors are tailing the other class forces involved in the struggle in order to maintain the breadth or jumping too far ahead of where others are at and losing the breadth as a result, often done by jacking up the level of programmatic unity beyond what is necessary at the moment.

The latter strategic challenge is a question of using the (usually temporary) leap forward in building the UFULP to make advances in UFULP work we identified as step-by-step. In other words, in the midst of a mass struggle with a UFULP character, the Party needs to make leaps in developing OTs, interlocutors, and allies, and then sustain those relationships after the high tide of struggle. Making sure there is systematic revolutionary agitprop work carried out within the mass struggle is one important way to do this, as it introduces new audiences to our full revolutionary politics. Rigorous follow-up work with new contacts as well as forging organizational forms that foster breadth of involvement will also be essential. The thread through all this is that in the midst of the mass struggle, we need to be transforming the consciousness of the people brought into motion and creating organizational forms to sustain and further develop that consciousness in a revolutionary direction.

While each leap forward in building the UFULP will not proceed in a straight line forward, we should come out of each leap with the UFULP in a stronger position than it was before, and this process repeats wave after wave until the UFULP is of adequate strength for launching revolutionary civil war, during which the UFULP must take an even bigger leap forward. To that end, we have to master both the step-by-step and the by-leaps aspects of building the UFULP and the dialectical relation between the two, where one reinforces and strengthens the other. Ultimately, building the UFULP is about navigating through contradictions, in this case the non-antagonistic but at times difficult contradictions between the proletariat and its potential class allies. This manual has given a strategic approach, specific tasks, and a number of formulas for navigating those contradictions, but at the end of the day none of that will work unless you can think dialectically, firmly grounded in our communist objectives but flexible in your thinking and tactics.