[Marxism] The SWP, Respect and the united front

[Joaquin Bustelo]

	The "United Front" is not a universal panacea. It was a specific
application to a specific situation --the labor movement in several European
countries after WWI-- of Marxists tactics, i.e., tactics based on a
historical and materialist understanding of the evolution of human society
in general and the class political movement of the workers in particular. 

	Fine as the United Front may have been for those days, the tactics
of communists today must be based on today's situation, and on an
understanding that today's situation is radically and qualitatively
different from that of the post-WWI European labor movement.

	In those days, the workers had ALREADY begun to cohere as a class in
a POLITICAL way. The United Front was a tactic designed to help advance the
political maturity of this class political movement by having the class
movement as a whole go through concrete, material political experiences
together. 

	I have my doubts whether that specific form of Marxist tactics
really merited the strategic prominence that it came to have, to the
exclusion of other tactics. 

	But once that class political movement dissipated, which it did in
the United States in the postwar boom and my *impression* is also at least
to a large degree in the other main imperialist countries, the classic
united front of mass workers parties to bring together the class movement as
a whole --or at least the bulk of it-- in a specific political or economic
battle with the bourgeoisie became IMPOSSIBLE, because there was no class
political movement to bring together.

	And this much can ALSO be said about other "Leninist" tactics in
their classical form, including "critical support" and "party building" (as
it was practiced by the Bolsheviks before the October Revolution; the
post-1917 Cominternist cult of the organization is another matter
altogether).

	Rather than prattle on about "united fronts" which are not really
united fronts, what needs to be done is to go back to the source, the
original generalizations about tactics presented in the Communist Manifesto
and ratified time and again by Marx and Engels over a period of more than
four decades, and most especially by Engels who repeatedly stressed the
importance of the outline of Communist tactics presented in the Manifesto,
and whose comments --especially in the last ten or fifteen years of his
life-- are an invaluable aid to understanding that section of the Manifesto
as he applies its basic postulates to the situation then facing the
Communists in Germany, England and the United States. 

	I often heard it said in my youth in the (American) SWP that the
reason to study Trotsky --especially the writings from his last exile-- in
preference to Marx, Engels and Lenin was that his world was closer to ours
and therefore much more accessible. 

	I remember not only myself, but other leading SWP comrades (and a
couple of international comrades) discovering with shock when we went to the
second session of the SWP leadership school in 1980 that the Communist
League of 1847 in reality functioned as what we thought of as a "Leninist
Party," an organizational form which supposedly Marx and Engels hadn't
figured out because the capitalism of the 1800's wasn't yet "ripe" for
revolution. 

	And it was an is striking to me as I read the letters and comments
of Marx and Engels about politics after the dissolution of the First
International about the situation in Britain and political developments in
France and the United States as well as Engels's reminiscences about the CL
and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (the "Organ of Democracy" edited by Marx
during the revolutions of 1848), how much more like our situations are those
they were encountering towards the end of the 1800's, compared to what Lenin
was dealing with. pre-1917 Lenin and his friends were trying to give
organized shape to an already existing but still developing class political
movement on the eve of a democratic revolution in Russia, and post-1917, the
transformation of the class-political movements in Europe, the defense and
development of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, and working out an
integrated, cohesive vision of revolution in the imperialist epoch.

	Ironically, it is precisely this last point which is most relevant
to us, but it is the one on which there exists massive confusion.

	At any rate, I would suggest that the tactical program of the
Manifesto is quite directly and transparently applicable to the situation on
the British left (and not just the British Left).

	And you only need to read the first couple of sentences to go ... oh
oh!

"In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

"The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other
working-class parties."

	THAT was Marx and Engels's STRATEGIC "party-building" perspective.
Don't go around putting up SECTS. 

	The SWP insisted that Respect was "a United Front of a special type"
because recognizing what it really was ... a possible first step on the road
to the rebirth of a workers party in British politics ... calls into
question the SWP's entire trajectory. 

Joaquin