We in the ILP see it as a duty of Labour Party membership to seek to help the Party grow and develop through discussion and debate. To that end we are also committed to work to defend and develop member participation, democratic practices and a constitution which, in many respects, prefigure the democratic socialist society that we are working towards: which empower the membership; acknowledge the responsibilities of, and the limitation put on leadership (particularly when in government); ensure fair and democratic procedures that do not favour any particular tendency within the party; accept a plurality of views; encourage debate; and allow minority opinion the democratic opportunity to become majority opinion.
Independent Labour Publications is committed to work for the return and retention of a Labour government and to work for the introduction, extension and implementation of policies that promote a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many and not the few. This implies a classless society, one which is no longer dominated by a minority which structures, shapes and constrains our lives.
The commitment of the ILP is rooted in its determination to help work for a democratic socialist society defined by the measure and quality of its democracy, justice, freedom, choice and equality, by its diffusion of power and responsibility, cooperation, mutual assistance and a complex flowering of diversity and creativity .
“In building socialism we must discover the way, and discriminate between many alternatives, deriving authority for our choices not from absolute historic laws nor from reference to biblical texts but from real human needs and possibilities disclosed in open, never-ceasing intellectual and moral debate. The aim is not to create a socialist State towering above man and upon which his socialist nature depends, but to create a ‘human society or socialised humanity’ where (to adapt the words of More) man, and not money, ‘beareth all the stroke’.”
E P Thompson, 1960, Out of Apathy