Entryism is a tool. If it’s used carefully and strategically it can be very effective. If it’s used carelessly it will fail and waste time and energy. It’s usually used carelessly.
It’s especially effective for very small orgs/committees. If there’s some shitty org or committee fucking shit up, all you have to do is convince like 4-5 cool people to join it and you’ve done an entryism. Also you organized something and hopefully kick-started the org/committee. Keep in mind that it’s very important that the org/committee is terrible, they’re not open to reasonable change / getting organized, and the people you bring actually are cool. If those things aren’t true, you actually just wrecked an org/committee. Also there’s a good chance the previous members of the org will hate you, leave, and/or attempt their own version of entryism.
So it’s good for, e.g., taking over an insufferably liberal group that’s actively causing harm and is very shitty when, say, you and others advocate for why your org shouldn’t advocate for and fund cops. They prove themselves to be a force for reaction and cannot be reformed. Your options are to create an alternative structure or take theirs over and honestly taking theirs over is often better because you not only get influence for lefty causes, you decrease reactionary influence.
It’s important to remember that our enemies don’t know what entryism is, but they’ll use it and every dirty trick to protect themselves, their power, and their own comfort in their liberalism. No tactics should be off the table by default, they should just be considered thoughtfully so that you don’t make your orgs toxic.
For good measure, though, I’ll point out that there’s lots of toxic examples of entryism. I’ve seen trots try to do it where they just plain lie about what their motivations are and what they care about, but they act as a unified faction and therefore have more influence. This creates a scenario where everyone else needs to react, often creating more factions and preventing an opportunity to build around unifying positions and adapting as a whole org. The key here is to create an org that truly can arrive at and defend unifying positions and fend off these things. Otherwise you will naturally have factions: either subgroups vying for power (we’ve all seen this before, lol) or with a single top-down bureaucratic faction that cannot be unseated, projecting a false sense of unity that fails to have any capacity to build power.
Entryism is a tool. If it’s used carefully and strategically it can be very effective. If it’s used carelessly it will fail and waste time and energy. It’s usually used carelessly.
It’s especially effective for very small orgs/committees. If there’s some shitty org or committee fucking shit up, all you have to do is convince like 4-5 cool people to join it and you’ve done an entryism. Also you organized something and hopefully kick-started the org/committee. Keep in mind that it’s very important that the org/committee is terrible, they’re not open to reasonable change / getting organized, and the people you bring actually are cool. If those things aren’t true, you actually just wrecked an org/committee. Also there’s a good chance the previous members of the org will hate you, leave, and/or attempt their own version of entryism.
So it’s good for, e.g., taking over an insufferably liberal group that’s actively causing harm and is very shitty when, say, you and others advocate for why your org shouldn’t advocate for and fund cops. They prove themselves to be a force for reaction and cannot be reformed. Your options are to create an alternative structure or take theirs over and honestly taking theirs over is often better because you not only get influence for lefty causes, you decrease reactionary influence.
It’s important to remember that our enemies don’t know what entryism is, but they’ll use it and every dirty trick to protect themselves, their power, and their own comfort in their liberalism. No tactics should be off the table by default, they should just be considered thoughtfully so that you don’t make your orgs toxic.
For good measure, though, I’ll point out that there’s lots of toxic examples of entryism. I’ve seen trots try to do it where they just plain lie about what their motivations are and what they care about, but they act as a unified faction and therefore have more influence. This creates a scenario where everyone else needs to react, often creating more factions and preventing an opportunity to build around unifying positions and adapting as a whole org. The key here is to create an org that truly can arrive at and defend unifying positions and fend off these things. Otherwise you will naturally have factions: either subgroups vying for power (we’ve all seen this before, lol) or with a single top-down bureaucratic faction that cannot be unseated, projecting a false sense of unity that fails to have any capacity to build power.