File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-03.020, message 50


Date: Thu, 31 Oct 96 10:38:16 GMT
From: Adam Rose <adam-AT-pmel.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: Revolutionary Party?



robert scheetz asks me:
> 
> Hope you won't mind an obvious question: 
> In a core country in "normal" times, excluding bourgeois
> electoralism/parliamentarism/reformism, and also, of course, any romanticism of
> militancy ("...the barrel of a gun", Hezbollah's megalo-notion of toppling the
> World Trade Center,
> Ted Kazinski, etc.), what's left, aside from cultivating itself with its
> perfervid house organ and maybe proselytizing students,... for a "revolutionary
> party" to do?
> 
> Aren't there "issues", as with imperialism and racial justice in
> the US in the '60's, (and corporate "downsizing" and digital "automation" today)
> which have revolutionary potential but rather compel united front strategies?
> In this context what would it mean to be "a party of
> revolutionaries"?
> 

First, what do I understand by "united front" ?
Second, when is a united front strategy applicable ?

1. A united front is a an agreement between working class organisations
on a particular action or set of actions to produce a particular aim :
eg smash the Nazis, stop the war in the Gulf, stop the Criminal Justice
Bill, etc.

The SWP in Britain has every reason to be very proud of its initiation
and participation in a whole series of united front style battles
against the Nazis, the Poll Tax, the War in the Gulf, the Criminal Justice
Bill, etc. Sectarians may snipe - but the reason there is no significant
Nazi threat in Britain today is that the SWP set up the Anti Nazi League.

During a united front, however, a revolutionary party cannot simply disolve
itself into the campaign. If it does so, the campaign itself suffers, since
other forces will lead the campaign away from working class, direct action,
towards parliamentary dead ends. Hence the success of a united front itself
depends on the strength of revolutionary political ideas openly argued for
within that united front.

Also, it more often than not requires an overall revolutionary political
understanding, and organisation, in order to set up a united front in the
first place. Had the SWP not been able to win a small but significant number
of workers, Black + White, to a generalised set of revolutionary politics
through the 1970's, the SWP would not have been in the position to found
the Anti Nazi League, and we in Britain would face the same problems as 
the French, Italian, and Austrian comrades face today. This required 
arguments before and during the 1974 - 1979 Labour government about the
nature of reformism, a decididly non united front activity,

2. There are times when a united front approach is necessary. The whole
series of campaigns from the Poll Tax, the Ambulance workers strike,  the pits
campaign, the Criminal Justice Bill, etc etc, was practically one long united front,
1990 - 1994. During this period we the SWP grew from about 4,000 at the 
beginning to about 10,000 members at the end. One reason we were able to do
this was precisely that while being active in each campaign, we also won
people to our ideas. We did not start each campaign from scratch, but with 
a list of contacts and members built up during the previous one.

Now, today, a united front style approach is completely and totally inappropriate.
This is because everything, every argument, every battle, is conducted through
the prism of the coming election. Put simply, if you want to fight, you are
breaking in practise from reformism, from New Labour. The post office workers
have just voted to continue their strike action, in the face of a barrage of
hostile propaganda from the Tories, the bosses, the press, TONY BLAIR, and
their own Blairite General Secretary, Alan Johnson. The argument for a yes
vote was an argument against Blair. The argument to turn the vote into action
( Johnson will use the vote as a negotiating position, not a mandate for action )
is a further argument against Blair, about rank + file organisation and 
independent politics. These arguments are intimately bound up with the
arguments about "Where is Blair taking Labour"  in our "Statement to Tony
Blair." So, today, really, the question is "United Front - WITH WHOM ?" 

> A recent news item told of an effort by holocaust survivors
> to recover from Nazi Swiss bank accounts.  To the extent that
> this litigation threatens the world institution of numbered
> accounts and off-shore banking, would not this constitute
> a modern, core-country, revolutionary programme even tho
> it would entail implicit validation of the bourgeois justice
> system, etc.?
>

The only way socialists could actually DO anything about this is
to hire a good lawyer - which  we couldn't afford even if we wanted
to !

Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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