The Reply of the PB to Comrades Finch and Shaw¶
Core Argument¶
The Political Bureau’s reply to Comrades Finch and Shaw constitutes a rigorous defence of the Marxist theory of centrism against what it identifies as fundamental misunderstandings. The Bureau argues that the comrades erroneously define centrism as a social phenomenon of democratic, ascending capitalism. Citing Trotsky, the PB counters that it is reformism, not centrism, which flourishes under such conditions. Centrism, by contrast, expands on a vast scale during the period of capitalist decline, as the destruction of reformism’s social basis drives workers away from it. The Independent Labour Party itself demonstrates this: it only developed significant centrist tendencies after the first imperialist war and became a fully-fledged centrist party during the 1930s world crisis.
The Bureau further criticises the comrades for failing to grasp that centrism encompasses an extreme variety of political colourations; all three factions they identify inside the ILP are varieties of centrism. The PB also rejects the claim of a contradiction in its own position. Trotsky’s observation that centrism is ephemeral and will not survive a serious revolutionary crisis does not negate its temporary existence and potential growth beforehand. Building the revolutionary party is a process that must occur within this centrist environment, winning workers from it. The comrades’ approach is condemned as subjectivist, treating the party’s development as abstracted from objective conditions, and their prediction of the ILP’s neat disintegration inside the Labour Party is dismissed as formal and sterile.
The PB argues that the comrades have overlooked the workers’ instinctive drive for unity in the face of bourgeois attacks. This tendency is visible in the ILP’s move to affiliate with the Labour Party, which is not merely a rightward shift. The Bureau predicts that, after entry, the ILP will grow rather than disintegrate, and leftward-moving Labour Party workers will gravitate towards it as the apparent left alternative, not directly to the Fourth International. Winning workers from centrism is a struggle that occurs during concrete experience, not before it begins. The PB rejects the accusation that it lacked a detailed plan for ILP work, stating that past forces were too small for such a plan to be realistic. It dismisses as pedantic the comrades’ quibbles over whether the ILP would “disintegrate” or “vanish,” and over whether the Wicks-Dewar group “largely composed” the left wing or had its “majority.” The discussion, it concludes, has been valuable for party clarification on centrism and the ILP.