Wrong in commission and omission

Glyn Ford on Entryism

Entryism and the Revolutionary Socialist Left in Britain by Nicolas Sigoillot published Routledge

Spanning more than seventy years, Sigoillot covers the ground, from 1920 and the CPGB’s open penetration of the Labour Party through to 1992 when Militant was the last to be parachuted out to land as the Socialist Party. Split chronologically, first up its the CPGB – on Lenin’s advice – openly, then clandestinely, attempting to organise a reverse takeover of Labour for ‘history demonstrates that, at the first stages of revolutionary upsurge, the masses turn to the mass organisations’. Labour pushed back and Britain’s Communists pulled out with the Comintern’s “class against class” third period that gifted Hitler an easier rise to power. 

The early to mid-thirties saw Communism’s Sunni-Shia schism open a second front in their civil war inside the Independent Labour Party (ILP) as the Stalinist Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) fought it out with CLR James and the Trotskyist Marxist Group for a Bolshevik transformation of the ILP. The operation failed with the RPC jumping ship in 1935 – making off with a hundred ILP activists – while the Marxist Group managed their expulsion in 1936.

The post-war boom was bad news for the far-left. A whirligig of names and numbers came and went as many hibernated inside the Labour Party waiting for economic winter. It finally turned cold in the mid-sixties and Britain’s four main Trotskyist groups conducted a danse macabre in and out of the Labour Party and each other, splitting, dying and resurrecting. The International Marxist Group failed from too little hands on leadership and the Workers Revolutionary Party perished from too much. The Socialist Workers Party survives while Militant, the most successful of them all, conspired with their enemies in a final departure.

Entryism and the Revolutionary Socialist Left has an eye-wateringly criminal price, an untranslated alphabet soup of organisations, while badly edited, and in places repetitious and wrong in commission and omission. For instance, Sigoillot is naive to accept the then minuscule RPC’s claim it orchestrated the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party, and a serious oversight to entirely miss Harry Selby, the first Militant Labour MP representing Glasgow Govan from February 1974 – 1979. If you must, look in the local library!