[Marxism] The SWP, Respect and the united front

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yesterday the SWP issued a statement on the crisis in Respect that 
defended its reputation as having “a long record of working over a wide 
range of issues with people and organisations with different views to 
our own.” This reputation, such as it is, is based on following “the 
method of the united front as developed by Lenin and Trotsky in the 
early 1920s and further elaborated by Trotsky faced with the rise of 
Nazism in the early 1930s.” For those unfamiliar with Leninist arcana, 
the united front was a tactic meant to ally revolutionaries and 
reformists against a common enemy, most especially the fascists. The SWP 
makes it quite clear that they are the revolutionaries, although it is 
not quite so clear who the “reformists” are. They state:

     (a) The possibility of fighting back against particular attacks and 
horrors depends on the widest possible unity. The minority who are 
revolutionaries cannot by their own efforts build a big enough movement 
ourselves. We have to reach out to draw into struggle over these 
questions political forces that agree with us on particular immediate 
issues even if they disagree over the long term global solution to them.

     (b) By struggling over these things alongside people who believe in 
reform, the revolutionary minority can show in practice that its 
approach is the correct one and so win people to its ideas. As Rosa 
Luxemburg wrote more than a century ago, the revolutionary understanding 
of the need to confront the present system is the best way to win even 
meagre reforms within it.

There is so much confusion here that one hardly knows where to begin. 
Let’s establish first of all that the united front was never intended to 
be applied to electoral politics. The united front could be summarized 
under the slogan “March separately–strike jointly”. In his December 1931 
article “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism,” Leon Trotsky wrote:

     No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders 
of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! 
March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to 
strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with 
the devil himself, with his grandmother, and even with Noske and 
Grezesinsky. On one condition, not to bind one’s hands.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/04/the-swp-respect-and-the-united-front/

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