This article first appeared as a document in ISO preconvention bulletin #43, February, 2019. It more or less accurately predicts that the then-current trajectory of the ISO could lead to its liquidation into the DSA/Democratic Party. Though the ISO collapsed before this outcome came about, a month after this article was […]
THE THANKSGIVING myth is intertwined with this country’s origin myth. Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 in search of freedom. Indians helped them plant corn and survive. They made a compact that is the basis of our first constitution, and they held a feast, […]
We live in a time of peril and promise. The crises that face our world can seem overwhelming. An impending climate catastrophe. A global emergency of refugee displacement and migration. Wars rendering whole countries unlivable. The imposition of vicious austerity measures that have robbed working people of their rights and […]
Lance Selfa and Paul D’Amato, in a response to an article by Paul Le Blanc, offer their analysis of why the ISO dissolved after more than 40 years. The passage of time has a way of clarifying issues that seemed so fraught and confusing in the heat of the moment. […]
Sharon Smith analyses the causes and consequences of the collapse of the International Socialist Organization in 2019.
Antonis Davanellos is a leading member of the Greek socialist organization International Workers’ Left (DEA). DEA had close, collaborative relations with the ISO until the latter’s disollution. Davanellos wrote the following assessment not long after the ISO’s final national convention held in February 2019, which he attended as an invited […]
“Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” —the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977 1 “The […]
Us history is full of examples of how revolutionaries abandoned their project and dissolved into reformist organizations. Max Shachtman’s Workers’ Party is one historical example.
Antonis Davanellos analyses the political situation in Greece following the parliamentary elections last July, which saw the return of the right to power, the defeat of Syriza, and the failure of Left.
Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: A Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, Verso, London, 2019.
Ian Birchall, in a chapter from his book Bailing Out the System, examines the history of European social democracy and its practical and theoretical limitations.
In what was originally a public presentation at a Socialism conference, Lance Selfa looks at origins of Maoism and its international impact.
Many of Gramsci’s concerns as an active revolutionary are those he took with him into prison as the leader of the Communist Party and throughout his life: combating the determinism of Second International Marxism, and emphasizing the importance of human agency in transforming society.
This is a modified version of a presentation delivered at the ISO’s 2015 national convention by Paul D’Amato, and appeared that year in an internal bulletin. Though there were a number of members who disagreed with its main arguments, no responses were written, and the debate came to an abrupt […]
The argument that Trump’s base consists largely of rust-belt industrial is a flimsy argument based on false assumption, stereotypes, and false data.
