The ILP and the problem of affiliation¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter’s core argument is that the question of the Independent Labour Party’s affiliation to the Labour Party constituted the decisive strategic axis for the Revolutionary Communist Party’s work within the ILP, and that the RCP’s support for affiliation was correct, whereas the position of the American factionalist Stuart—who advocated silence or opposition on the issue—was anti-Marxist and based on a schematic, unhistorical method. The author insists that the affiliation question was not a matter of abstract principle but of concrete perspective: the ILP, once the wartime coalition was broken, faced stagnation and disintegration outside the Labour Party, whereas inside it could become a crystallising centre for leftward-moving Labour workers, accelerating differentiation and facilitating the RCP’s work. The chapter draws on the experience of the 1945 ILP conference, where a vote of 89 to 72 defeated affiliation, and provides a detailed breakdown of the anti-affiliation vote: more than half were pacifists, over a quarter sectarians (Ridley, Eaton, Gibson), and only a small remainder “confused lefts”. The author challenges Stuart to name genuine left-wingers beyond this proportion, a challenge he claims will not be met. The polemic is directed squarely against Stuart’s “Report”, which is accused of juggling figures, fabricating a false “unprincipled bloc” between the RCP and the ILP leadership, and quoting Trotsky selectively to claim that affiliation required a revolutionary programme. The author retorts that the RCP faction fought for the full programme of the Fourth International, including affiliation to the FI, and that the ILP leadership’s subjective opportunist motives were exposed by the British comrades more thoroughly than by the anti-affiliationists. Stuart is further accused of petty-bourgeois moralism for condemning the RCP’s vote alongside the leadership, whereas Marxists must support progressive historical tendencies regardless of subjective motives—citing Engels’ support for the ILP’s earlier efforts to form a Labour Party against the sectarians. The chapter concludes with a vindication by events: the ILP’s failure to affiliate left it a stagnant, isolated sect; its general election vote of 46,000 was the smallest since its foundation, less than half the Socialist Party’s US presidential vote, while Stuart had already written off the SP as dead. The RCP’s perspective is thus upheld, and the ILP is reduced from a primary field of work to a secondary factor subordinate to factional work inside the Labour Party.