United front in the context of "Palestinian Joint Operations Room"

The Viet Cong (VC) was an epithet and umbrella term to refer to the communist-driven armed movement and united front organization in South Vietnam. It was formally organized as and led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, and conducted military operations under the name of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV). The movement fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments during the Vietnam War. The organization had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized and mobilized peasants in the territory the VC controlled. During the war, communist fighters and some anti-war activists claimed that the VC was an insurgency indigenous to the South that represented the legitimate rights of people in South Vietnam, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. It was later conceded by the modern Vietnamese communist leadership that the movement was actually under the North Vietnamese political and military leadership, aiming to unify Vietnam under a single banner.

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front (NLF) on December 20, 1960, at Tân Lập village in Tây Ninh Province to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the VC's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Viet Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954). Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The VC called for the unification of Vietnam and the overthrow of the American-backed South Vietnamese government. The VC's best-known action was the Tet Offensive, an assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but also overextended the VC. Later communist offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese. The organization officially merged with the Fatherland Front of Vietnam on February 4, 1977, after North and South Vietnam were officially unified under a communist government.

Parcham (Pashto/Dari: پرچم, lit. 'banner' or 'flag') was the more moderate socialist faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led by Afghan communist politician Babrak Karmal. It was later turned into the Watan (Homeland) Party of Afghanistan with a more Islamic outlook under Mohammed Najibullah. The faction was formed directly after the founding of the Party in 1965 following ideological splits in the PDPA. While the Parchamites stressed the need for swift social-economic reforms to achieve revolution, this was in direct contrast with their PDPA rivals, the Khalqists, who sought an immediate and violent overthrow of the government. Karmal believed that Afghanistan was not developed enough for a Leninist revolutionary approach and instead sought a patriotic and anti-imperialist united front to take the next steps toward revolution.

Maoism, officially Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed while trying to realize a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. A difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that a united front of progressive forces in class society would lead the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than communist revolutionaries alone. This theory, in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to distinguish it from the original ideas of Mao.

From the 1950's until the Chinese economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970's, Maoism was the political and military ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and Maoist revolutionary movements worldwide. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union each claimed to be the sole heir and successor to Joseph Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and the ideological leader of world communism.

Trotskyism (Russian: Троцкизм, Trotskizm) is the political ideology and branch of Marxism and Leninism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. His relations with Lenin have been a source of intense historical debate. However, on balance, scholarly opinion among a range of prominent historians and political scientists such as E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Suny, Richard B. Day and W. Bruce Lincoln was that Lenin's desired "heir" would have been a collective responsibility in which Trotsky was placed in "an important role and within which Stalin would be dramatically demoted (if not removed)".

Trotsky advocated for a decentralized form of economic planning, workers' control of production, elected representation of Soviet socialist parties, mass soviet democratization,the tactic of a united front against far-right parties,cultural autonomy for artistic movements, voluntary collectivisation, a transitional program, and socialist internationalism. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, and a dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which Marxists argue is a major component of capitalism) based on working-class self-emancipation and council democracy. Trotsky also adhered to scientific socialism and viewed this as a conscious expression of historical processes. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favour of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists criticize the bureaucracy and anti-democratic current developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. Emerging from the collapse of the Second International during World War I, the Comintern was founded in March 1919 at a congress in Moscow convened by Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RCP), which aimed to create a new international body committed to revolutionary socialism and the overthrow of capitalism worldwide.

Initially, the Comintern operated with the expectation of imminent proletarian revolutions in Europe, particularly Germany, which were seen as crucial for the survival and success of the Russian Revolution. Its early years were characterized by attempts to foment and coordinate revolutionary uprisings and the establishment of disciplined communist parties across the globe, often demanding strict adherence to the "Twenty-one Conditions" for admission. As these revolutionary hopes faded by the early 1920s, the Comintern's policies shifted, notably with the adoption of the "united workers' front" tactic, aiming to win over the working masses from reformist socialist parties. Throughout the 1920s, the Comintern underwent a process of "Bolshevisation", increasing the centralization of its structure and the dominance of the RCP within its ranks. This process intensified with the rise of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

The Việt Minh (Vietnamese: [vîət mīŋ̟] , chữ Hán: 越盟), officially the League for Independence of Vietnam (Vietnamese: Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh or Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh Hội, chữ Hán: 越南獨立同盟(會); French: Ligue pour l'indépendance du Viêt Nam), was a communist-led national independence coalition formed at Pác Bó by Ho Chi Minh on 19 May 1941. Also known as the Việt Minh Front (Mặt trận Việt Minh), it was created by the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) as a united front to achieve the independence for the nation of Vietnam and later established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), being the predecessor of the contemporary Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

The Việt Nam Độc lập Vận động Đồng minh Hội was previously formed by Hồ Học Lãm in Nanjing, China, at some point between August 1935 and early 1936, when Vietnamese nationalist parties formed an anti-imperialist united front. This organization soon lapsed into inactivity, only to be taken over by Ho Chi Minh and the ICP in 1941. They presented the organization as inclusive of political groups, with a founding charter more nationalist than communist. It exhorted "soldiers, workers, peasants, intellectuals, civil servants, merchants, young men and women" to overthrow "French jackals" and "Japanese fascists", while the group's first chairman was a non-communist. In general, the Việt Minh established itself as the only organized anti-French and anti-Japanese resistance group.