While most articles on the ISP website address issues of interest to the broader socialist left, the following contribution provides a critical assessment of the International Socialist Organization’s (ISO) dissolution that is especially relevant to former ISO members. François Laforge is a research scientist at Princeton University. He has been a member of the formerly International Socialist Organization for over two decades. He is active in local struggles.

FINDING REASONS FOR THE ISO’S LIQUIDATION

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 2001 I wasn’t sure at all that the ISO would survive the wave of ultra-patriotism and the enormous political backlash against the left that followed, but we did. Little would I imagine that 18 years later the ISO would implode at the dawn of the most politically fertile moment of our lives so far. This is a terribly ironic tragedy. 

When I moved to the US from France in 1997 I was supposed to stay a couple of years… But here I am 23 years later, an American citizen living in New Jersey.  Without exaggerating, I can say that I have built my life here because of the ISO: the organization and the comrades. I am a long-standing ISO member who had been organizing in multiple vibrant branches (New York, NY (4 years), Boston, MA (2 years), Oakland, CA (6 months), Queens, NY (6 years), TCNJ, NJ (3 years) and a twig in NJ (2 years) but who has never taken positions of leadership other than belonging to a branch committee at one point. 

I want to understand what happened to the ISO because I believe most of us made a huge mistake in letting the Steering Committee (SC) Majority destroy our organization. Sure, a majority of ISOers (myself included) and former members voted online to end the organization, but the path to this collective decision was fraught with many undemocratic moves on the part of the SC Majority. So much so that I don’t see the process as having been democratic at all. 

HOW THE QUESTION OF LEADERSHIP TRANSITION WAS INSTRUMENTALIZED BY THE SC MAJORITY

Comrades had various levels of engagement with the ISO. I had never been committed enough to actively seek positions of leadership and this has weighed on me constantly throughout the years. I suppose that many comrades in my situation—i.e., as of 2019 not part of a branch with a structure of leadership but a twig or even sometimes just a member-at-large—understand that leadership means sacrifice, hard work and willingness to assume responsibility. Because of these challenges many comrades decide to abstain from leadership knowing that others (more courageous?) will take it.  The question of generational renewal of leadership is certainly a crucial one for any organization but for a revolutionary one it is also the most difficult. To develop comrades who share fundamental principles and who are willing to dedicate their life to lead a revolutionary organization is nearly impossible yet it is necessary. 

To this day I admire comrades in the SC Minority for their commitment to the organization through the years. However, I have always seen with a wary eye that the ISO was led at the top by the same group of comrades, year after year. Although several years ago the SC was expanded to include new comrades and new structures of governance were created within the ISO, the same comrades had remained in the top leadership for several decades. It’s not that I didn’t trust or had any reason to distrust ISO’s top leadership or that I disagreed with their lead (far from it) but the more the emergence of a new layer of leadership was overdue the more I was worried about the nature of the coming leadership transition. This question must have been on the back of every comrade’s mind, especially older comrades like me.

This is where I feel the SC Majority has been disingenuous and has made it appear as if they were operating a leadership transition whereas, in truth, they were liquidating the ISO plain and simple.

The word “reckoning” was deliberately used by the SC Majority to inflame passions and paint the SC Minority as a band of conspirators who have been manipulating the organization for nefarious and selfish purposes year after year. It had also the hopeful meaning of finally confronting the supposed errors of the SC Minority (e.g., rape coverup, culture of racism, etc.) in order for the ISO to be cleansed, reformed and strengthened in its commitment to fight for the self-emancipation of the working class. One small problem though…none of this happened.

In the words of a comrade during the crisis: “We took the ISO back [from the SC Minority] at the Convention, but we must follow through. We knew about the bullying and manipulation. Some people are to blame, and we need a real investigation. But we must prove that we’re changing in practice. Don’t let the SC Minority win by us falling apart now. Justice looks like the ISO rebuilding itself in a new way so we can prove the SC Minority wrong that they had to maintain control no matter what or things would just fall apart.”

Well, things spectacularly fell apart, didn’t they?

THE SHOW TRIAL OF SHARON SMITH AND THE SC MINORITY

The setup

At no moment during the “reckoning” did I feel genuinely convinced that Sharon Smith, much less the whole SC Minority, had covered up a rape. The famous “letter from a Former Member” document represented the opinion of one person vis-à-vis Sharon Smith’s supposed misconduct but no political analysis was given which made it look more like a personal reproach than a serious political analysis. The other documents from the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC) added to a picture of chaos during the first implementation of the internal procedure of determining whether an ISO member had committed a rape. Then ISO members received documents and statements from comrades on the Appeals Committee (AC). It was obvious that the blame for the chaotic nature of the procedure was imputed to the different actors, but it was equally clear that it would have been nearly impossible to cleanly resolve this particular rape case because of the special circumstances (1) it was the very first case the newly created structures (i.e., NDC and AC) had to resolve and no matter how much we wish to be perfect there’s a learning curve that, by nature, includes mistakes and (2) the victim refused to communicate whether directly or indirectly with anyone during and after the whole process. The determination of a mistrial was sickening for comrades in the NDC, AC and SC (since, to their sole and private knowledge, a potential rapist was kept within the ISO and no justice was provided for the victim) but any other outcome in this particular case would have amounted to throwing “due process” or the “presumption of innocence” out of the window. That was the conclusion I drew when I read the documents presented to the membership at that time and still believe in now. 

What shocked me though was the absence of a rebuttal from Sharon or the SC Minority which, I knew, from 23 years of experience, would be more substantive and politically grounded than what ISO members had been allowed to read so far. Having known Sharon for more than two decades as she was a leading ISO comrade, I was surprised that she would not say something in her defense. I mistakenly interpreted her “silence” as the result of guilt on her part and, by association, the SC Minority. Frankly, once an element of doubt about the SC Minority’s innocence (with respect to the supposed rape cover up) had taken root in my mind then what was needed to cement the idea was a barrage of all sorts of accusations (racism, abusive relationships, etc.) that many long-standing comrades have been willing to lever against the SC Minority. The manufactured resentment that many leading ISO comrades felt toward the SC Minority led them to refuse to let the whole ISO membership hear the SC Minority’s side of the story. For example, a leading comrade at that time expressed “disgust that Sharon wrote. to me several times yesterday to contest the Former Member’s document…”? This is why I do believe Sharon when she say she tried—but wasn’t allowed to—communicate to the ISO membership (https://internationalsocialism.net/did-a-rape-coverup-destroy-the-iso/). Knowing now the critical, life-threatening personal circumstances she was facing at the time (her partner Ahmed Shawki’s leg amputation) it’s even more courageous on her part to have attempted to do so more than once.

But none of the SC Minority comrades accused of wrongdoing had any chance to tell their side of the story to the membership to defend themselves of any of these accusations. In other words, there was no “due process” for any of the SC Minority comrades. A large portion of the ISO membership (myself included) condemned the SC Minority without a real investigation nor a fair procedure. It still feels surreal that we let a show trial happen without anyone raising their voice and say: “Wait a minute…something is going terribly wrong here!”

I want to make clear that I am not suggesting that comrades who voiced their grievances during the crisis were dishonest. Accusations of racism, sexual misconduct and other reprehensible behaviors should always be taken very seriously within a revolutionary organization. However, now that the ISO has been liquidated there is actually no way to ever get to the bottom of those issues collectively, as an organization.

Why is it that most ISO comrades conceded to forgoing “due process”?

Every comrade knows that for a victim of a crime related to sexism, racism or any other systemic oppressions it is an uphill battle to obtain justice from the institutions of the very system that produces these oppressions. Often the perpetrators of such crimes go free. So it is naturally hard, especially for comrades who dedicate their life to fighting against these types of oppression, to admit that a person accused of such crimes should have the right to tell their side of the story. I suppose the reasoning is that since the perpetrator used the oppressive power of the system to their advantage then why should they be given the benefit of “due process” or even the “presumption of innocence”? I believe this is the kind of thought process that led the Former Member to declare that “due process” was a bourgeois thing, a legalistic bureaucratic BS (as the Former Member would say).

But this is wrong because “due process” or “presumption of innocence” are rights that ordinary people fought for, rights that are fundamental to any democracy and that we would want to preserve in a socialist society. The fact that these rights were won through bourgeois revolutions doesn’t mean they are bourgeois rights (an example of true bourgeois right is “freedom of enterprise”). The right of “due process” is legitimate whether in a capitalist society or a post-capitalist one. As a revolutionary organization we always acknowledged and fought for these rights when they were denied to working class people in practice; for example, around our work with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. 

We have to listen to both the victim and the accused testimonies simply because, in matters of justice, we have to hear both sides to establish the truth. There is no other way. After that we can make our own judgment and vote on a decision.

But suppose that under some circumstances it is not possible to establish guilt or innocence of the accused. Do we decide, as an organization, to uphold the principle that “it is better to let a guilty person go free than make an innocent one suffer”? Or do we choose the opposite? I don’t know if we actually considered that question a political one.

The idea of forgoing “due process” or “presumption of innocence” for perpetrators whose crimes involve a form of systemic oppression is a distorted political instinct that manifests itself in more subtle ways. This is well exemplified with the Charlie Hebdo debate within the ISO of a few years ago. One position was: since the Islamists are fighting an imperialist country (France), are themselves the victims of Islamophobia and colonialism, and their targets were journalists who have drawn racist cartoons against Islam, we shouldn’t denounce the Islamists terrorist methods—because if we denounce them we are taking the side of the system. The other position was: we should first and foremost condemn the system for creating the conditions that lead to terrorist attacks, but it is also necessary to condemn the terrorists for using methods that are undemocratic, counterproductive for the left, anti-working-class, etc. The latter position doesn’t mean that we give a free pass to journalists who propagate Islamophobic stereotypes. We had denounced Charlie Hebdo’s racist cartoons many times before the terrorist attacks. The former position, on the other hand, could lead people to say: “Charlie Hebdo’s journalists had it coming, it’s their fault if they attracted the wrath of the Islamists, they shouldn’t have drawn and published these racists cartoons”. This might serve as a justification to some form of justice (to which the ISO I knew wouldn’t adhere) but it has nothing to do with politics, even less with Marxist politics.

ON THE NEED TO REBUILD

Comrades who didn’t agree anymore with the Leninist principles on which the ISO was founded decided to destroy the organization. They succeeded. They led us to believe that dissolving the ISO would lead to the formation of a new and better revolutionary organization. But that never happened.

Since the ISO has imploded, comrades have dispersed. Many have decided to join DSA and form caucuses within it. Others have formed very small revolutionary groups and collectives. Others I presume have decided to retire out of politics or at least revolutionary politics. But these comrades could have done so simply by quitting the ISO and doing their own thing.

The harm is done, what do we do now?

I strongly urge all former ISO comrades to read the documents produced by some of the formerly SC Minority comrades, especially Sharon’s defence (https://internationalsocialism.net/did-a-rape-coverup-destroy-the-iso/) and Lance Selfa’s political assessment of the ISO’s demise (https://internationalsocialism.net/what-happened-to-the-international-socialist-organization-a-political-assessment/). By hearing the “other side of the story” and comparing it to your experience during the ISO’s crisis of 2019, you might realize that you were deceitfully led into liquidating the ISO.

The need for a sizable revolutionary organization united around a set of Marxist politics has never been as obvious as it is today. I believe that comrades at The International Socialism Project are committed to the politics of the formerly ISO. Check out their website at https://internationalsocialism.net/.