[Marxism] The SWP, Respect and the united front

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Mike Pearn replies to accusations that his criticisms of Respect amount to a
schema as follows:  "lan might well be right but the schema is not mine in
origin I simply borrowed it from Fred Engels and Leon Trotsky."

Sure, but what you could not borrow were the social, economic and political
conditions of those years. You're not in the last years of the 1800's, as
England's world manufacturing monopoly was being increasingly challenged by
U.S. and continental European capitalists,  nor in the 1930s, with its
world-wide economic depression.

You live at the beginning of the 21st Century a time when the most
significant challenge to capital is --and has been for a half century-- the
liberation movement of peoples oppressed by imperialism, and when it is
precisely the success of those movements that are the likeliest and most
direct route to a rebirth of the class political movement in the major
imperialist countries.

This isn't a shortcut; it IS the road because it is the superprofits from
the exploitation of the Third World that allows capitalists in the major
metropolitan centers to buy social peace at home. 

Yet you reject the road because it is not the destination.

Marxism is a tool for analysis, not a series of formulas to be learned by
rote and used to  denounce reality when it fails to live up to the schemas.

Joaquin