Course, you'll never see this oh so earnest Yoshiebot, but, in the Weekly Worker of the CPGB, http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/ there have been dozens of pieces on how the UK SWP has ruined the potential of the Socialist Alliances to offer a much needed alternative to the left of New Labour. By ruthless sectarian BS, demogogy and all the other behavior like meeting packing that gives some Trotskyists such a bad name in united fronts. (I can still remember how in '91 @ ILWU, Local 6 HQ in S.F. , over two hundred of us anti-war activists spent an evening till after Midnight trying the best we could w/ all the parliamentary procedure we could muster to defeat a united front of the WWP, RWL and Uhuru House on March/Rally tactics and speakers until a woman in the back from West Virginia, w/ a Son in the Army then, quietly stuffing envelopes and keeping the coffee machine going, got all us male marxists to shut the fuck up and stop yelling at each other rather than Bush I...)
The vote totals for the Socialist Alliance candidates have been less than impressive. Just like here, where a slim majority of the USA public now opposes the War, when months ago, in the usual pattern, pro-war opinion was quite hegemonic, BUT, the marches and rallies against the war are anywhere from a half to a fifth of the size they were in the buildup to the War, methinks that the ability of the explicitly socialist and communist left f(r)actions that exercise preponderent weight in the anti-war coalitions along w/ a smattering of Xtian Left pacifists and Left Democrats, to mobilize that anti-war majority is hindered by the inability of your standard left networks and individuals to reach/touch base with those not already part of one's social set/periphery. Hell, I can think of folks I knew growing up, as angry about the Vietnam War as my Mom and I, in some cases 'cuz they had family members killed or wounded, but, they absolutely despised the anti-war movement and would argue w/ my Mom and I till we were exhausted. A gulf of mutual incomprehension, exacerbated by a cultural divide over such issues as Rock and Roll, Dope and Long Hair. As people who know mke well know, I am still a Hippie in my appearence, though I was a teenager during the Punk Era so I should have a Mohawk, but, when discussing this War w/ my culturally conserverative relatives I don't try to rub their noses w/ ancillary obviously hot button issues. And, I don't think, (though I do try to slyly introduce via populist Americanisms) that using the usual grad student hyper-abstractions you use, so bloodless and souless, gets to the core why Capitalism and Empire Is Such a Death Dealing Machine.