[Note: the next post has a deep dive podcast that dives more deeply into this topic].
In 1972 the International Marxist Group described people who wanted to enter the Labour Party as political necrophiliacs going into a corpse, and called the project of taking the party over a totally revisionist concept which today borders on absurdity.
The dating matters more than the insult. Pat Jordan wrote “Aspects of History of the IMG” in 1972. The IMG went on until 1982, and the second half of the 1970s was its most successful period. So this is not a post-mortem written by survivors. It is an organisation auditing its own mistakes ten years before the end, while it still had its best work in front of it. This piece draws mainly on that document, together with contributions attributed to IMG figures including Tariq Ali.
That is the rare thing here, and it is the reason the document is worth reading now. Most organisations only write this kind of assessment after they have collapsed, when the account is settling scores rather than improving anything.
Why self-assessment is a practical instrument
Jordan’s argument for it is not moral. Political weaknesses become visible when an organisation intervenes in the class struggle rather than commenting on it, and a mistake that costs a propaganda group very little can be seriously damaging to a party trying to lead. Auditing yourself is how you find the faults before the intervention does.
A fundamental theoretical evaluation of past work, on this account, strengthens an organisation rather than embarrassing it, and the contrast is with the arrogance of sectarian and subjectivist approaches, which have nothing to evaluate because they were right all along.
The IMG Basic Documents put the test in one line. Willingness to discuss past experience openly, including where events did not verify your prognoses, is the sign of a serious party.
Regroupment: paper agreement is not fusion
The warning is blunt and it is the one most worth carrying into current British arguments. Never mistake paper agreement for real ideological fusion.
Regroupment is necessary. It also requires thorough clarity about political positions, and coming together on the basis of confusion or undisclosed differences is to be eschewed at all cost. Principled regroupment, or none.
The corollary about growth is equally practical. When new forces arrive quickly and from various directions, integrating them without diluting the organisation’s politics needs a period of very wide discussion and a process of selection before full integration into the cadre. The answer is not to restrict debate. It is propaganda for the organisation’s general conceptions plus serious internal education. Without a firm grounding and continuous theoretical work, an organisation collapses into pragmatism, and the pragmatism generates the next round of errors.
Entry work, and what it costs
The IMG’s caution about entry tactics comes from having done them, and the specific costs it names are all organisational rather than theoretical.
An entry orientation produces responsibilities inside the host organisation that clash with the work of building your own, particularly where you are not publicly organising in your own name. The commitment to an open face and to distributing your own literature is the counterweight, and it is a commitment that gets quietly relaxed.
Security caution arising from entry work made the IMG overcautious for periods, and that hindered the recruitment of worker militants.
Slogans and demands developed inside entry work start to be treated as self-sufficient, which is the point at which the tactic has replaced the strategy.
And waiting for lefty, the expectation that a left current would emerge inside the Labour Party, turned out to be utopian.
The conclusion is not that entry is forbidden. A well-planned entry aimed specifically at recruitment can be considered, provided it is tied to struggles against the bureaucracy. The conclusion is that you keep your political identity and refuse the constraints the host’s bureaucracy will try to impose.
Impatience has a name
The proposal to move rapidly from a propaganda group to a League for Revolutionary Action was read inside the IMG as an adaptation to impatience and a search for shortcuts, tending towards ultraleftism.
The corrective is not passivity. Intervening in the class struggle is far more significant than commenting on it, and revolutionaries have to attempt to lead concrete struggles and analyse them. What it rules out is treating an ideal programme drawn up in the past as sufficient. Theory has to keep being developed, propaganda has to be educative as well as agitational, especially where there is no mass base, and the cadre has to be grounded well enough that a fast-moving situation does not simply wash the politics out. The document’s own phrase for the task is a serious and conscientious effort to regain all the territory we have held.
What the IMG got right
The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign is the case. Working with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and with the North Vietnamese and the NLF, the IMG helped build a mass campaign that radicalised thousands of young people and changed the pattern of British left politics.
It also built the IMG. The campaign won over important cadres, gave the organisation political leadership inside emerging currents, and created a setting where its politics, its contacts and its literature could all circulate, with a conscious orientation to the labour movement throughout. Movement work and party building were the same activity.
Mike McNair’s history of the IMG credits it with a principled stance on Ireland and with agitating on it, which was not a popular position to hold in Britain.
On the women’s movement, anti-racism and lesbian and gay liberation, the position is a genuine tension held open rather than resolved: the organisational autonomy of movements of the oppressed is recognised, and revolutionaries are nonetheless urged to aspire to political leadership within them rather than treat them as politically autonomous. The document does not pretend that is comfortable.
Labourism, and the error it produced
The IMG’s frame for the dominant ideology of the British working class was Labourism, and the ideological hold of social democracy was treated as the thing to be understood before anything else could be planned.
The trade union bureaucracy has a dual nature. It rests on workers’ organisations and it operates as an instrument of employer pressure, which is why it is bound to differentiate into right and left tendencies in a crisis, tracking the pressure of class forces. Reading that requires sociological assessment, not judgements about the psychology of individual officials.
This ideological hold, rooted in the central position of British capitalism and imperialism, also shaped the attitude of British workers towards the Irish, towards Indians and towards Black people, which is where an analysis of Labourism stops being a question of party structures.
The analytical error the document identifies is precise and still common: failing to distinguish the Labour Party’s organisational hold from its ideological hold. Various left groups conflated the two, and their analyses went wrong accordingly.
The use of it
If you are in an organisation now, the transferable item is not the IMG’s verdict on entry work in 1972. Conditions differ and the document says so.
It is the practice. Write the assessment while the organisation is alive. Include the prognoses that events did not verify. Publish it internally with names and dates attached, and let it be argued with.
An organisation that cannot produce such a document has not avoided having errors. It has only avoided knowing what they are.