ILP conference and tasks of the left¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter, published in Socialist Appeal in mid-April 1943, seizes upon the fiftieth Jubilee conference of the Independent Labour Party to deliver a sharp Marxist reckoning with the organisation’s past, present, and future. It opens by acknowledging the historic achievement of the ILP’s formation: the first assertion of independent working-class politics in Britain, breaking from subservience to capitalist parties. This, the author insists, remains an imperishable foundation for the workers’ movement. However, the tribute is immediately qualified by a stern polemical demand. Those who claim Marxism must understand the ILP’s fundamental limitations. The party was built not on scientific socialism but on reformism. Its founders never grasped the revolutionary solution required to overthrow capitalism, instead advocating a gradual evolution through reforms.
The core argument is that the ILP leadership, at this Jubilee moment, has wilfully failed to settle accounts with this reformist past. Rather than educating the membership by explaining the party’s development from confusion to its current claimed revolutionary position, the leadership presents an unbroken, seamless tradition. The author denounces this as a dereliction of elementary duty. The real tribute to the sincere but confused pioneers would have been a critical balance sheet, raising the consciousness of the ranks for the urgent tasks ahead. Instead, the leadership lets the dead bury the dead.
This failure is not accidental but organic. The chapter’s central polemical thrust is that the ILP remains, in essence, the left flank of reformism. Its leadership are “organic centrists,” who under pressure can slide back into the reformist fold. The historical context drawn upon is the shift from an earlier period of capitalist expansion, which could afford grudging reforms, to the present epoch of imperialist degeneration and decay. The organisations built as bulwarks of workers’ democracy are now threatened with disintegration unless they transform into fighting bodies capable of conquering power. For this epoch of wars and revolutions, a revolutionary party is needed, not one whose methods and ideas remain far closer to reformism than to revolution. The ILP, despite its history, is judged unfit for this task.