Todd Archer wrote:
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> So any front that comes close to even looking remotely united is to be
> splintered unto its uttermost atomic purity? Is that your preference?
>
The United Front had different meanings and content in different national contexts. In some it was a very powerful practice indeed. In others it was destructive. Also, Thomas may be thinking not of the "United Front" but of the "Popular Front," two quite different concepts and practices.
The United Front as developed in China and Vietnam reflected a context in which there were distinct (and to some extent self-conscious) classes that shared certain interests -- e.g., the expulsion of Japan from China, of France or Japan or the U.S. from Vietnam. I still believe the United Front was the best strategy the CCP could have followed, but it was worse than wrong, it was pitiful when some of the New Communist groups (or grouplets) tried to transfer it literally to the U.S. Among other things it led to the invention of various "classes," since to have a United Front you had to have different classes with overlapping but separate interests to form the United Front. It also led to fantasies about alleged divisions within the bourgeosie. I still feel warm towards my former comrades in LRS, but in their last year of downward spiraling (misled among other things by their successes in the Jackson campaign) they came up with weird ideas like Daley representing the "progressive strata" of the bourgeoisie. Our local group here invited various national formations to send a representative to talk to us. In our meetings both with a rep from the RU (not yet the RCP) and the October League (later the CPML) we went around endlessly on this concept of the United Front.
Several small groups resisted this sort of theological imitation of the Chinese. Soujourner Truth in Chicago, a group that ST was linked with, called Harpers Ferry or something like that, in the east, and a Bay area organization, The New Voice. Soujourner Truth published a pamphlet, if I remember correctly, demolishing the United Front concept, as did TNV. I think the Line of March (originating later than the other groups) also rejected the United Front concept. I think some group (wrestling with the difficulties presented by the unhappy fact that the U.S. did not have a peasantry accounting for 2/3rds+ of the population) invented a weird concept, "The United Front of the Working Class." I don't remember what that meant.
I think some people today really do do want anything "even looking remotely united is to be splintered unto its uttermost atomic purity." But that's their problem. The problem of serious leftists is and always has been to struggle with the many contradictions which the drive for collective action within the atomizing forces of capitalism faces.
Carrol