The LP tactic¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the tactic of entrism into the Labour Party, originally conceived by Trotsky in 1936 as a temporary expedient, has been ossified by the Revolutionary Socialist League into a permanent and fetishised principle, detached from the changed realities of wartime Britain. The core narrative thrust is that the RSL’s insistence on maintaining a “Socialist left” orientation inside the Labour Party is sectarian and opportunist, failing to recognise that the war has fundamentally altered the terrain of working-class political development.
The chapter draws on the Marxist method of subjecting strategy to the test of historical events. It cites Trotsky’s 1936 advice to enter the Labour Party after the Independent Labour Party stagnated, but notes that subsequent events—including the ILP’s temporary revival and the war’s convulsions—have rendered this orientation obsolete. The RSL, by contrast, clings to a 1938 WIL thesis predicting a mass influx into the Labour Party, ignoring that the war has diverted working-class consciousness onto the industrial field rather than into the Labour Party’s skeletonised structures.
Key claims include: the working class is not homogeneous; advanced and backward strata develop at different paces and in different directions. While backward workers may turn to the Labour Party, the most advanced militants are moving away from it—towards the ILP, away from a disillusioning Communist Party, or directly towards the WIL. The RSL’s demand to “orientate” workers towards the Labour Party is therefore both redundant (organised workers already support it) and counterproductive, as it repels the best elements. The chapter argues that the “point of attack” is now the industrial field—trade unions, factories, the shop stewards’ movement—not the moribund Labour Party. Guerrilla tactics across multiple fronts, including the ILP and even the Labour Party where fruitful, are necessary.
The polemic is directed squarely at the RSL leadership, accused of “superciliousness,” formalism, and opportunism. The RSL’s “critical support” for Labour candidates during the wartime coalition is exposed as effectively supporting the national government. The RSL’s charge of “double book-keeping” against the WIL is rebutted as a failure to grasp dialectical complexity—a mass movement develops in contradictory ways, not along a single schematic line. The chapter concludes with a military analogy: a commander who fails to redeploy when the front has shifted leads his army to defeat. The RSL, by clinging to an obsolete entrist tactic, is leading its forces to political irrelevance.