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. For us, this point was reached on June 18, 2019, almost three months to the day after we left the International Socialist Organization (ISO). On that day, Todd C., a long-standing leader of the ISO, took to Facebook to announce his decision to join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to wide applause on the left. On the same day, KYT, another long standing leader of the ISO, published a laudatory review of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ June 12th speech on “democratic socialism,” also to wide applause across the left.
The connections between these two events couldn’t be more apparent. Both represented a decisive shift—months or years in the making—from the politics of “socialism from below” to what Hal Draper called “socialism from above.” Therefore, those who think that the dissolution of the ISO had to do with an unhealthy internal political culture or a botched disciplinary case are missing the point. As we hope to show below, these were pretexts mobilized in the service of the real issue: the decision of a section of the ISO’s leadership and some of its most experienced members to liquidate the ISO’s historical political project. This has opened the road for many to travel the path of too many of our socialist predecessors—toward accommodation with that “graveyard of social movements,” the Democratic Party.
We commend Paul LeBlanc for his comradely accounting of the dissolution of the ISO. Of course, we don’t agree with everything that Paul wrote, as we’re sure many who will read this won’t agree with us. However, we think that Paul’s attempt to step back from the fraught and hot-housed period of March/April, 2019 to provide a political explanation of the ISO’s demise is a good model to follow. The authors of this article don’t purport to address every issue that Paul L raises, nor to address them in the detail they require. Others will address what we’ve left untouched. But we do want to present what we think are the underlying politics of the ISO’s implosion, which is the only way to understand it independently of the individuals involved.
There’s no escaping the fact that Paul wrote an obituary of an organization whose most articulate advocates for its dissolution were found among the leadership elected at its February convention—just weeks before. They had successfully marginalized most of the organization’s longest standing leaders and could have—one would have thought—devised a way forward from the March crisis that would have preserved the organization. Instead, they chose to call for the ISO’s liquidation.
We think that the next months and years will clarify for many the motivations that led people who spent years building the ISO to advocate this destructive course. Todd C., one of the main advocates for the ISO’s dissolution in the newly elected ISO leadership, took the occasion of Sanders’ speech—which essentially defined “democratic socialism” as a culmination of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal—to announce his support for Sanders in the 2020 Democratic Party primaries on Facebook:
I believe that anti-racist, working-class, feminist, internationalist socialists can disagree with Bernie about any number of things (and they shouldn’t be quiet about it), and I respect anyone who remains wary of the U.S. electoral system in general and/or who believes the Democratic Party in specific will get the better of us (as I argued for nearly 30 years). And there are many other ways to fight back without supporting Bernie. But there is something happening here. Hundreds of thousands of new socialists will organize for Bernie over the next year and we should join them. Backing a socialist running in the Democratic primaries can be a slippery slope, but that’s why you wear cleats in the batter’s box.
Todd’s leap into the batter’s box shouldn’t be seen as something separate from the decision to dissolve the ISO. As the April 19 statement “Taking Our Final Steps,” put it: “We were faced with the situation of the organization becoming a barrier to our members playing important roles on the socialist left.” With the ISO no longer able to exert an organizational pull in the other direction, it will seem both logical and natural to hundreds of ex-ISO members looking for a new political home to join the DSA, accepting the consequences of its position of support for Democratic Party candidates as the part of the bargain. In 2019, the Socialism conference, whose origins lie in the ISO’s past Socialist Summer Schools, was essentially handed over to the DSA and its political perspectives. One can simply compare the program from 2019 to the archive of recordings of presentations from previous conferences to see what is undeniably a shift to the political right into an embrace of social democracy, US-style.
Todd’s full endorsement of Sanders is simply the logical conclusion of an evolution that was hidden in plain sight. But our predicting this only a few months earlier produced howls of outrage from other members of the ISO steering committee. How could any of us think that they would follow the same path into the Democratic Party that many former revolutionaries have followed since at least the 1930s?
Even if one doesn’t accept our explanation for the ISO’s dissolution, the end result is the same. The US left now has no nationally organized and substantial non-sectarian, anti-imperialist organization that represents the revolutionary politics of “socialism from below” in the International Socialist tradition. Without the existence of the ISO as a revolutionary alternative, the social democratic politics of the DSA largely represents socialism in the US today. It is not at all surprising that many young socialists will turn first to social democracy in the early stages of this radicalization. But their own frustrations with the limits of reformism—and its accommodation to imperialism—will lead many of them toward revolutionary politics in the future. What revolutionary organization will exist to welcome them into its fold at this later stage of the radicalization? The ISO could have played a role in this development, if it had not been destroyed from within.
Those of us who were considered part of the former “Steering Committee minority (SCMin)” were placed in that position because we voiced criticisms of proposed perspectives for the ISO authored by members of what became the self-proclaimed “Steering Committee majority” (SCMaj). While we found much to agree with in the 2018 Steering Committee’s accounting of the political period, we also disagreed on a number of points, both political and organizational. One of the major documents expressing the SCMaj’s view struck an almost apocalyptic tone: “The future of the socialist left, the politics it adopts, and its capacity to become a force capable of addressing the interlocking ecological, economic, social, imperial, and political crises may well be determined in the next few years.
The future of the ISO and our ability to infuse that left with the principle of working-class self-emancipation, the strategic legacies of the Comintern and the revolutionary movement, and the need for a mass, revolutionary party may also be determined in the next few years.” No evidence was given to support these assertions. Surely it was reasonable for us to have asked for more evidence before we agreed to the proposals tied to them. When we raised concerns about these proposals, the SC majority dismissed them as reflecting a conservative and “stand pat” posture.
We detailed those disagreements in ISO pre-convention bulletin (PCB) contributions and in a letter we distributed at the 2019 ISO convention, which we have included as an appendix below. None of us ran for re-election to the ISO steering committee.1 Nevertheless, we were all committed to building the ISO after the convention. Still, a number of developments at the convention and immediately after gave us reason to worry about the organization’s future.
The first of these was the failure to resolve what we think was the most important political issue that faced us: that of the organization’s commitment to politics independent of the Democratic Party, and specifically, how it would relate to the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign for president. We argued for the organization to take a position in favor of an independent Sanders’ campaign, but against a Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic Party. We felt that after a debate in Socialist Worker and in the ISO’s internal bulletin lasting for six months previously, the time was right for the organization to take a position. The SCMaj argued that we needed to postpone a vote because it wasn’t clear when Sanders would announce his candidacy, what the campaign would look like, etc. As it turned out (and as many comrades had predicted) Sanders announced his presidential campaign in February—in fact, the day after the ISO convention closed.
Two platforms announced themselves in the weeks immediately before the February convention: the “Independence and Struggle”(IS) platform, which proposed a strategy centered around a “concentration” in the labor movement and electoral work outside the Democratic Party, and the “Socialist Tide” grouping that supported ISO endorsement and participation in Democratic Party campaigns. At the February convention, representatives of both the SCMaj and the IS platform agreed to a modified Socialist Tide proposal for an ISO special convention. Formally, members of the SCMaj supported the ISO’s traditional position of independence from the capitalist parties, with several of them supporting positions nearly identical to ours.
Throughout the fall and at the convention, other leading representatives of the SC majority continued to make the case that while they “weren’t convinced” that socialists should use the Democratic Party ballot line, they weren’t for resolving the question at the February convention. They praised the pro-DP comrades for raising their “minority” position, while denouncing as “sectarian” the ISO’s traditional position for independence from the DP that all of us supported and had defended publicly for the previous four decades. Another charge, coming from other members of the SCMaj, was that to argue for opposition to the Democratic Party was merely “principle mongering,” intended to declare any other opinion as out of bounds of the ISO’s political points of unity.
The results of the ISO leadership elections at the February convention included the incorporation in both the Steering Committee and National Committee of representatives of the Socialist Tide. For the first time in its history, the ISO had open advocates of participation in Democratic Party campaigns as part of its leadership. The ISO convention didn’t vote on the Socialist Tide’s proposal to change the “Where We Stand” (WWS), the ISO’s statement of its political principles, to accommodate a pro-DP position. But the ISO convention accepted that political shift de facto in its leadership. In fact, several delegates speaking from the floor urged the convention to vote to reaffirm the ISO’s traditional position on political independence from the Democrats and Republicans. Yet, at the urging of representatives of the main currents—including the SCMaj and IS—and against our arguments, the convention tabled that discussion to a September 2019 special convention when, a number of members argued, the ISO would have the experience of the proposed Bernie Sanders campaign and the August national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America to inform its deliberations.
[Based on reports of what transpired at the DSA convention in August, 2019, it’s difficult to see what the ISO would have learned that it didn’t know in February. The DSA is “all in” on Bernie 2020, and even the resolution affirming a “Bernie or Bust” position (i.e. affirming that the DSA will not endorse any other Democrat for president if Sanders does not win the nomination) doesn’t preclude any member or DSA chapter from supporting any other Democrat against Trump.]
Whatever their stated positions on independence from the Democratic Party, the actions of the SCMaj were designed continuously to extend olive branches and praise to the Socialist Tide comrades. Perhaps some on the SCMaj were sincere in their stated aims of continuing the debate to win the Socialist Tide current back to the ISO’s traditional stance toward the Democrats. But we have since learned that Todd C’s alliance with the pro-DP comrades began as early as September, 2018—before the Steering Committee divided into “majority” and “minority” and before Socialist Tide formed. In other words, the strongly denied political shift towards the Democrats underpinned much of the subsequent debate. It’s clear that some in the SCMaj wanted to erode ISO members’ confidence in our historic position, winning them by default to a pro-DP position for “fear of missing out” on the “historic” opportunities that Bernie 2020 appeared to present.
This ignored the fact that a whole audience (of former ISO members, but one much broader than that) is searching for an analysis of the Democrats. The SCMaj spent so much energy “reining in” what it considered to be “sectarianism” in the old ISO leadership and it didn’t notice (or didn’t care) that for many comrades, both inside and outside the ISO, our position on the Democrats was something worth fighting for.
For us, these developments meant that a central principle of the ISO—support for independent political action and opposition to the Democrats and Republicans as the two main bourgeois parties—was being compromised. If the special convention ended up changing the WWS to allow ISO participation in DP campaigns, or if members of the pro-DP current just decided to act on their own stated goals (inside the ISO or outside of it), the ISO’s commitment to political independence from the bourgeois parties would be gone. As a number of us argued, such a development would render irrelevant the ISO’s existence as an independent socialist organization. With that political principle of the ISO removed, why would anyone make a rational choice to join the ISO when they could join the larger and less demanding DSA instead?
The second convention development that greatly alarmed us was the systematic denigration of the ISO’s internal “political culture” that created an atmosphere of “calling out,” an expectation of apologies for alleged past practices, and attacks on the Leninist project that the ISO has tried to renovate for the 21st century. The Steering Committee majority and all other currents at the convention fully encouraged these actions.
The critique of the ISO’s “culture” was introduced in the pre-convention period as a rejection of the ISO’s so-called “unity of thought” in regard to questions like support for the Democratic Party. The SCMaj’s proposals for “retooling” the ISO, which were widely accepted, envisioned an organization that would grow rapidly because it would require less of individual members, including limiting branch meeting requirements to once a month, while specialized “working groups” would carry out most of the organization’s activities. This plan to adopt many of the DSA’s organizational practices promised rapid growth—as if only the ISO’s organizational “culture,” rather than the general political environment—explained DSA’s growth and revolutionaries’ difficulties during today’s “social democratic moment.” Soon, this developed into a critique of the ISO’s organizational norms that leading members—including members of the SCMaj—described as “undemocratic,” “toy Bolshevik” and reflective of marginalization in the “Trotskyist ghetto.” “Culture” became an all-things-to-all-people critique of the existing ISO that unified a Steering Committee majority bloc, and the other currents, when they were divided on other questions.
The evening convention session on “Building a Multi-racial Organization” pulled the organization even further into a “call-out” culture where the discussion focused almost solely on the ISO’s internal life. Comrades of color reported shocking incidents of uncomradely behavior, mostly taking place on the local level but attributed to the national organization’s “culture.” For example, a number of speakers in the discussion referred to a controversy around proposals on the political development of comrades of color that took place in New York in 2010. The ISO steering committee didn’t even become aware of this controversy until it emerged at an ISO National Committee meeting in 2013. The 2019 convention discussion also included more dubious assertions like, for example, that the ISO’s efforts at affirmative action had promoted white women into leadership positions over members of color. On the following day, when one of us (Paul D.) discussed the ISO’s debate on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, comrades (both chair-recognized speakers and hecklers in the audience) accused him of trafficking in Islamophobia. When he exited the building after that session, a convention attendee threatened him with physical assault, while a couple of members of the SCMaj looked on without intervening.
This atmosphere in which some long-standing members could be treated not simply as comrades with different opinions, but as pariahs, had more in common with Stalinism than with anti-Stalinist “socialism from below” the ISO has upheld throughout its history. If a call-out culture of denunciation, including charges of racism, sexism, and transphobia would replace political argument in the daily life of the ISO, the organization could not survive. An organization built on a shared political commitment, solidarity, and “having each other’s back” would quickly turn into a “circular firing squad” instead. While, as Paul L. notes, a number of leading members were celebrating the convention on social media, the tone set there had a knock-on effect throughout the organization.
In the weeks following the convention, several large branches became embroiled in acrimonious internal fights that comrades in the new national leadership described (positively) as a “reckoning.” These debates over branch political orientation and past practice didn’t produce fruitful evaluation of branch strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they became occasions for further “calling out” of local and national leaderships, for score-settling, and for criticizing political mistakes not as mistakes to be corrected, but as acts in bad faith reflecting a “toxic culture.” This disintegration of the organization at the local level was unfolding before the “Former Member” letter arrived. That is what explains the explosive effect that it had.
The signers of this document, who were on the 2013 SC, completely reject any view that we participated in a “cover up” or that we tried to predetermine an outcome for the case. The disciplinary case was one of the most difficult things any of us has ever had to address, and we approached it with the utmost of seriousness and with full knowledge of its gravity. We believe we acted to the best of our abilities in the context of disciplinary structures established only a few weeks before at the 2013 ISO convention. The five-member committee that rendered the decision—in which only one SC member participated—reported it at the subsequent ISO convention, a result which no one, including the “Former Member,” challenged at the time. Following this case, the Rules Commission established at the 2013 convention worked hard to develop the ISO code of conduct and to elaborate in much greater detail Rules and Procedures for the ISO to follow in addressing such cases. This included a recent case that concluded with the expulsion of a recent SC member. In the week after the “Former Member” letter was circulated, four of the six members of that Rules Commission who were on the 2013 SC either resigned or were suspended from leadership positions.
Trusted comrades on the socialist left who experienced fratricidal faction fights in their own organizations have since told us that we should assume that the “FM letter” was part of a planned intervention, taken with the foreknowledge of at least some on the SCMaj or the newly-elected SC. We have no evidence to support that assertion, but we would be naive to rule it out of hand. In any event, we consider it irresponsible for the 2019 ISO leadership to have released the letter without making a full attempt to verify its contents, or to solicit a response from the individuals who were specifically singled out for blame. Other documents that provided context, such as a letter from the 2013 National Disciplinary Committee declaring a mistrial in the case (in part, because it admitted that it had denied the accused a right to hearing), were later released. But the shock of the initial letter had the effect of establishing a narrative that became fixed as “truth” in many people’s minds.
One of the worst by-products of the leadership-encouraged internalization is it didn’t equip the organization to respond to a political environment when socialist ideas and organization are more popular than ever since the ISO’s founding. We concur with the comrade who told Paul L. that the convention showed “a marked absence of clear reports on the current political period, and of clearly articulated proposals flowing from such analyses.” The policies of the Trump administration were hardly even mentioned in most presentations or contributions from the floor. The critique of the ISO’s pre-2019 convention “political culture” as “propagandist,” voiced both by the SCMaj and the IS group, amounted not just to a denigration of the ISO’s politics. It was also an erasure of the ISO’s past, which has many accomplishments of which to be proud.
The ISO that we—along with thousands of other wonderful comrades—worked so hard to build is the organization whose members built the campus anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s; who worked together with working-class community activists in small towns around the Midwest in the Midwest Network to Stop the Klan in the 1990s; whose student members built the National Network of Campuses Against the War (against Iraq in 1991); and the Campus Anti-War Network in 2002-2004; that helped to build national-level solidarity with the Illinois War Zone workers in the mid-1990s; who helped build the Campaign to End the Death Penalty that helped turn the tide against capital punishment; who took a leadership role in building the 2009 National Equality March for LGBTQ rights; who helped to organize the University of Wisconsin teaching assistants union to lead the occupation of the state capitol in the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising; whose members worked alongside other comrades in the Chicago Teachers Union to organize the successful 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike and to provide a model for the recent Red State revolt and the first ever (successful) strike against charter schools; whose consistent commitment to defending the right to abortion has been expressed in the militant defense of abortion clinics through all decades of the ISO’s existence. Many more struggles and campaigns could be mentioned. Socialist Worker remains an unparalleled chronicle of the struggle against oppression and exploitation through its 42-year run.
Comrades who joined the ISO in the last few years, especially during the Trump era, can’t be criticized for not knowing about its rich history. It should have been the responsibility of their long-standing comrades to acquaint them with it. Instead, many of these comrades disparaged that history.
• • • • • • •
A reading of the ISO’s history also figured in the document by two former members (Saman S and Adam T, who left the ISO some years ago) that Paul L. quotes favorably. We would like to respond to some of Saman’s and Adam’s assertions, based on Paul’s accounting of them.
When the upturn that was meant to save us finally came, with the return of strikes, with the return of socialism-as-movement,” Saman and Adam write, “the SC Minority acted like deer in the headlights. They denied the importance of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]. They clamped down on questions of organizational affirmative action. They pushed out anyone who threatened the structure they had built.
“To their credit the SC Majority, and the majority of the ISO rank-and-file, rejected this abject failure of imagination. This rebellion, however, exposed the extent of the rot. It was not just the SC Minority’s failure. It was an organizational and political failure. All of us were complicit, to one degree or another. Our organization had been meant to keep the ‘seed’ of Marxism safe until the ground was more fertile. But when the time came to plant it, our seed was denatured and mutated.
We find Saman’s and Adam’s points on “clamping down on organizational affirmative action” and pushing out “anyone who threatened the structure they had built” to be tendentious and factually incorrect.2 Their more substantial criticism relates to the question of the ISO’s pre-2019 denial of the importance of the rise of the DSA. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who had the remotest familiarity with the political work of ISO branches in the Trump era will know that just about every one of them developed solid working relationships with local DSA chapters around struggles, from fighting the far right to defending abortion rights, to labor struggles. DSA members marched alongside the ISO in the 2017 Charlottesville, Va. demonstration that suffered the fascist attack that killed Heather Heyer and seriously injured one of our comrades. Moreover, ISO members in various cities worked with DSA members (and sometimes on our own) to set up and maintain ongoing Jacobin discussion groups. Jacobin co-sponsored the annual Socialism conference and leading DSA members spoke at it. We exchanged observers at each other’s national conventions in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The ISO’s national leadership (long before it divided into a “majority” and “minority”) encouraged these initiatives on the idea that we would work with DSA comrades in joint struggles and raise our revolutionary politics within them. We openly said that—unlike other small organizations—we would not “enter” DSA as an organized caucus to recruit its members to our organization.
So what is the content of the criticism being made about the ISO and the DSA? What didn’t the ISO do that Saman and Adam would have advised it do? We don’t know, but we wonder if it comes down to the key dividing line between the two organizations: the ISO opposed working in Democratic Party campaigns; the DSA supports it.3 Is changing that long-standing position of the ISO what Saman and Adam mean by “embracing” the new socialist movement around DSA? Would that concession have made the ISO’s “seed of Marxism” fall on more fertile ground? If that is the case, then the argument Saman and Adam are advancing is similar to that of the former Socialist Tide.
In hindsight, it’s easier to see that much of the urgency of the internal debate inside the ISO dates to the summer of 2018 following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning victory in the Democratic primary against the Democratic Party’s #4 in the U.S. House. AOC’s victory propelled the DSA membership upward and “socialism” became even more popular, especially among the millennial activists who worked in and around AOC’s and soon-to-be State Sen. Julia Salazar’s campaigns. The pressure of those events was expressed most acutely in New York, where the Jacobin milieu had already exercised a pull on ISO members. This is the most likely explanation for why the Socialist Tide current emerged there, why most of the critiques of the ISO’s “political culture” began there, and why the New York District took (in our opinion) a sectarian position in rescinding its earlier endorsement of the Howie Hawkins/Jia Lee Green Party campaign for New York governor/lieutenant governor. These events occasioned weeks of debate in Socialist Worker.
As the internal debate on the ISO and the Democratic Party gathered force through the fall, members of the SCMaj, through articles in Socialist Worker, articles in the ISO PCB, and in parallel debates on social media, began (in our opinion) to soft-pedal criticisms of the DP and the DSA “ballot-line” strategy. Of course, they would argue, the DP was a rotten bourgeois institution, but AOC or Rep. Ilhan Omar might be a “comrade.” As if speaking from the same talking points, the drivers of this shift (members of the Steering Committee’s agenda-setting body, the administrative committee) moved from arguing for independence to the DP, to “not yet being convinced” about the value of socialists running on the DP ballot line, to looking to the DSA members in Congress as representatives for our side. They challenged the basic Marxist idea that prioritizes class and extra-parliamentary struggle over parliamentary and electoral politics, echoing the arguments of those who are trying to renovate Kautsky’s politics today.4
To us, the problem was not that the ISO didn’t recognize the importance of DSA, or that it abstained from joint work with it. It was that a section of its leadership (aka, the SCMaj) didn’t actually want to debate openly what it meant for the ISO, i.e. how the ISO could be the revolutionary wing of the new socialist movement. Trying to win people attracted to the DSA to an organization like the ISO requires both working “with” DSA activists in joint struggles, and “against” the politics and strategies of social democracy at the same time. The ISO had done very well to establish the “with” side of this equation, but a key section of its leadership drew back from the “against” side. In his recent response to Sam Farber’s insightful article on revolutionary socialism, Todd C. wrote, “Rather than revolutionary socialists and democratic socialists defining our ‘points of honor’ that ‘distinguish’ one from the other, it is time to merge the best of our ideas.” During the debates around the ISO convention, the SCMaj explicitly argued that now was not the time to distinguish the ISO’s politics from those attracting people to DSA. Even criticisms of, say, AOC’s endorsing and campaigning for more conservative Democrats or for initially voting to fund the Department of Homeland Security brought warnings against “gotcha politics” or “sectarian” point-scoring from the SCMaj and Socialist Tide. [Silence now replaces warnings, as was demonstrated recently in a featured Jacobin article on the conflict between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and “the squad,” four prominent progressive women of color in the House of Representatives. KYT managed to write more than 2,500 words without mentioning AOC’s and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s vote for the July 25 budget deal that included what Stephen Miles, executive director of the liberal Win Without War called “unprecedented, wasteful and obscene” increases in the Pentagon budget. The non-DSA “squad” members, Rep. Ihlan Omar and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, voted against it.]
The SCMaj’s support for a proposed “new socialist party” composed from the existing left, but independent of the Democratic Party, was supposed to be one way to pose an alternative. But it was sufficiently ill-defined, in our opinion, to be compatible with the DSA left’s calls for “independent” campaigns in support of socialist candidates in the Democratic Party. The Independence and Struggle current advanced a plan for building statewide socialist electoral campaigns outside of the Democratic Party. But its support for the proposed special convention ceded the initiative to the pro-DP forces. With the ISO gone, the IS platform will never know if its plan could have worked.
Paul L. endorses Saman and Adam’s conclusion that “The good news is that half of this problem can be solved by turning into the new socialist movement and embracing it. Only in that collective struggle will our politics come back to life. The other half of the problem is more difficult to solve. It requires opening up a comradely and ongoing discussion about how revolutionaries should organize ourselves today; not just among ISO comrades, but all left-wing socialists.” Given that this statement is so basic and general, it’s hard to disagree with. However, when we get back to discussing questions of struggle, politics and organization, all the old debates about reform and revolution, party and class, the role of the Democratic Party, and how best to fight oppression and exploitation, will have to be part of the conversation. Many of the last elected leadership of the ISO convinced themselves that these questions were either secondary or irrelevant to the newly politicized members of the “new socialist movement.” Even if that was an accurate assessment (and we don’t think it was), it will not suffice in the future to speak to that movement as it begins to draw its own conclusions based on experience and political debate.
Paul compares his experience in the ISO with his experience in the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and draws from his earlier experience a contrast with the ISO. It’s certainly true that the political periods in which the two organizations developed differed, and that this shaped their collective experience. The SWP has an organizational legacy that dates back to the 1920s. The ISO and its immediate predecessors, the International Socialists and the Independent Socialist Club, virtually had to start from scratch. The ISO’s more distant predecessors, rooted in the Shachtman current of the U.S. Trotskyist movement, self-liquidated into the Socialist Party and, then into the Democratic Party in the 1950s and 1960s. [If we keep referring to the importance of the principle of organizational and political independence from the Democratic Party, it’s not without reason!] Nevertheless, in the ISO’s early years, we did benefit from an “inter-generational” enrichment of sorts, with leading figures of the British Socialist Workers Party (e.g., Tony Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Chris Harman, Lindsey German, among others) providing the foundation of our understanding of the politics of International Socialism. For more than a decade after the ISO’s founding following its 1977 expulsion (i.e. not a “split”) from the IS-US, the 1930s era UAW activist and revolutionary John Anderson wrote a regular column on working-class politics in Socialist Worker. Some of the leading activists who helped to form the predecessor of what became Teamsters for a Democratic Union were founders of the ISO. And over the years in our long-term collaborations through the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the solidarity with the 1990s Illinois War Zone labor battles, and Green Party electoral campaigns, ISO members learned quite a bit from veteran activists and socialists who were happy to offer counsel, whether or not they ever joined the ISO. So while there is a kernel of truth in what Paul says about intergenerational continuity in the ISO, the contrast is overdrawn. Moreover, the ISO was hardly unique on the left in this regard. The neoliberal period has been largely a period of decomposition in the far left. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, when other members of the left derided the ISO as “a bunch of kids” who just organized on college campuses, the criticisms hid a tinge of envy. While the rest of the left was shrinking and aging, at least the ISO was growing and attracting young people.
There is value, however, in further situating the period in which ISO developed against that of the generation of the left from which Paul hails. The events of the late 1960s—in particular, the May 1968 general strike in France—posed the question of working-class power and revolutionary organization for an entire generation. Even if the greatest hopes of that generation were not realized, the idea of socialism as working-class power and the need to construct organizations based on theory and practice of Marx, Lenin and the early Communist International engaged tens to hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries. Today, in contrast, after decades of retreat for the working class and the left, “socialism” is something of a free-floating signifier that—while representing an alternative to the neoliberal order—is sufficiently nebulous as to be filled in with Sanders’ conception of socialism as a more robust New Deal. On the more “Marxist” end of this “democratic socialist” spectrum are those who reject revolutionary “rupture” while embracing Kautskyism. Thus, for an organization today to hold to a Leninist and revolutionary point of view in relation to this new social democracy requires it to “swim against the stream” in a way that most ISO members were not accustomed to, and by 2018, most of its elected leadership was no longer willing to. If as sophisticated and experienced a Marxist as Paul LeBlanc offers “critical support” to Sanders and favors running socialists on the Democratic Party ballot line, it’s easy to see why an argument from principle against this may sound “narrow” for those who have recently become socialists.
Paul L. also repeats a criticism that was heard at various times in the 2019 pre-convention discussion, that is, because “sustained and consistent activism as an essential element in the political experience and consciousness of the membership as a whole,” the ISO spent “too much time ‘building the organization’—that became an end in itself—which could be in tension with participation in actual struggle” (again, the presumed danger of “movementism”). The first part of this observation doesn’t seem to square with the oft-remarked notion that the ISO “punched above its weight” for all of the activities in which a small organization was involved. Still, one would be hard pressed to identify in the last 40 years any of the types of ongoing movement activities to which Paul presumably takes as a point of reference: namely, the civil rights/Black Power movements, women’s liberation or anti-Vietnam War movements that sustained the SWP (US) in the 1960s and 1970s. Explosive movements like those against the wars on Iraq, the 2006 immigrants’ rights movement, Occupy or the Wisconsin Uprising—in all of which ISO members played key roles both locally and nationally—lasted matters of weeks or months. And although the war in Afghanistan has lasted longer than the US intervention in Vietnam, there hasn’t been the semblance of a movement against it for about 15 years. Yet, when presented with the opportunity, ISO members remained “stuck in” to long periods of activism around the Campaign to End the Death Penalty or the nearly three-year-long campaign in solidarity with the Staley workers in central Illinois from 1993 to 1995. Of course, we couldn’t overcome the fragmentary nature of the various oppositional movements, especially in the Trump era. And those SCMaj spokespeople who, in 2018 and 2019, argued that the ISO merely needed to take “national initiatives” against the far right or the anti-abortion fanatics, found that we couldn’t simply conjure up movements on our own.
What of Paul’s second point about “building the organization” becoming an “end in itself?” We’re sure that Paul will agree that promoting the politics of international socialism can’t be only a literary exercise. It has to be embodied in a living organization that can develop the politics and train its members to be their tribune in the broader movement. The organization is also the place where experience from one movement or set of members is passed on to newer generations of members. As Duncan Hallas, whose article, “What do we mean by sectarianism?” remains one of the best short explanations of the topic, put it: “It is sometimes asserted that it is sectarian to try to build your own organization in the course of intervention in various struggles. This is nonsense. If you believe that your organization’s politics are correct, or at least more correct than those of others, you will naturally want it to grow and will try to build it. Otherwise you are not politically serious.”
Over the course of 42 years, the ISO experienced constant tension between building the organization and participating in broader movements. This is hardly a point against us. Instead, these are inevitable tensions in any organization that wants to relate to developments outside of itself. But, crucially, we also thought that building our organization—trying to sustain an organization that embodied the project that Paul L. has called “unfinished Leninism”—was a contribution to the broader left. International comrades’ expressions to us of their dismay at learning of the ISO’s dissolution has reinforced this to us. The ISO’s commitment to building a revolutionary socialist organization in the U.S. was a greater inspiration to international comrades than we ever knew. And now it’s gone.
We find much with which to agree in our comrade Sandra Bloodworth’s recent article on “The conundrum of socialist organizing,”:
Socialists can learn from both successes and failures of all the groups that went before us. We are tested by the struggle, we will make mistakes, but there is no pat schema leading along an inevitable and linear path to the creation of a mass party. It will depend on the struggle, the actions of masses of people we cannot influence right now and whether the organizations that do exist meet the challenges when the situation does open up.
If you gain wider influence by junking revolutionary politics and conceding to left reformism or whatever else is more popular, it’s a pointless exercise. All you do is strengthen the forces of those who, when the opportunity comes, will baulk at the idea of destroying capitalism.
This response to Paul L. benefited from the input of a number of long-standing members of the ISO, some of whose tenure spans multiple decades back to the founding of the organization on March 12, 1977. All of us spent the majority of our lives building the ISO, writing for its publications, speaking for it, and representing it alongside fellow activists in the labor and social movements. For many of the reasons outlined above, we came to the conclusion that we could not remain members of the organization. But putting that aside, we do have to face the question of why in 2018/2019, many of our closest collaborators, and a wider layer of ISO members, came to different conclusions about the organization and its future. Over the course of our time in the ISO, we made many mistakes, and we will have to take our share of responsibility for the course the organization took. Nevertheless, we do not regret for a minute the effort it took to build the ISO or the contributions the organization made to the U.S. left. We also believe that as the struggle poses new questions for newly activated socialists, many elements of the ISO’s historic orientation and politics will become more apparent and relevant to this new generation. And we look forward to joining with socialists, including former ISO members, in future projects and organizations dedicated to the politics of “socialism from below.”
We will explore these questions, project and defend the politics of international socialism, document the history of the ISO, and discuss current politics and the issues facing the left today on a new Web site. We welcome constructive contributions to this discussion, as this can only help us all.
—Lance S. and Paul D.
APPENDIX
February 16, 2018
A letter to ISO convention delegates and members
Dear comrades,
We write as longstanding members of the ISO, and also a part of its leadership, to put forward our views at a time of transition for the organization as it faces new challenges and opportunities for the re-emergence of the revolutionary socialist left in the U.S. We have the greatest audience for socialist politics in decades, and the ISO has the opportunity to grow within the new socialist left and play a key role in its development.
The 2019 convention discussion period has led to an unprecedented number of formal groupings, or platforms. Each has advocated for a perspective to take the ISO forward in a period characterized by a sharp new wave of attacks from both bourgeois conservatives and the far right amid a new imperialist power struggle, a generational renewal of the U.S. socialist left and the rediscovery of the strike weapon by organized labor. Such a thoroughgoing debate is necessary for the organization to meet all these challenges and opportunities moving forward. A new generation of comrades has stepped forward to help shape the debates and to assume leadership positions.
Political culture has been a major component of this discussion. The ISO’s internal culture was shaped in a very difficult period for the revolutionary left—during the unprecedented 40-year one-sided class war. It should change in this dynamic new period, led by a new generation of comrades. We believe that effort should be underpinned by organizational changes that allow for more members to directly assess and prioritize our ongoing work, while assuming leadership roles in our organization.
More generally, there is a widely shared view among ISO comrades that we have reached an impasse as the DSA has grown dramatically, and that the 2018 Convention did not meet that challenge. As members of the ISO Steering Committee and of the 2018 convention steering committee, we accept our share of responsibility for that deficiency. Since, various platforms and individuals have put forward perspectives to take us forward.
Different platforms have put forward a number of proposals that we support, most importantly re-centering anti-racist work in the ISO. We have offered a proposal of education on our approach to fighting racism and other forms of oppression. We see this a complement to—rather than a substitute for—other proposals which we support, including increased affirmative action in the ISO and affirming the right of members of oppressed groups to caucus.
However, our disagreement with the main perspective documents of the outgoing Steering Committee majority obligated us to put forward our own proposals for perspectives in several documents. These were not statements of a platform for electoral purposes. Rather, our focus has been to contribute to a perspective that can allow the ISO to increase its size and influence and to extend its implantation in the working class and social movements while maintaining its independence from the Democratic Party, a bourgeois and imperialist party that has absorbed the radical and revolutionary movements of previous periods. In our view, the recent rapid growth of the socialist left inside the Democratic Party has not changed this dynamic. We believe the 2019 convention should reaffirm the ISO’s position on not supporting Democratic Party candidates. In our view, the issue of whether to support candidates running within the confines of the Democratic Party involves the only principle at stake in the pre-convention discussion. We believe this applies to the soon-to-be-announced Bernie Sanders campaign as well. For the sake of organizational clarity, we think the ISO convention, the organization’s highest decision-making body, should take a position on the Sanders campaign. And we should entertain various points of view, including an argument that Sanders should run an independent campaign outside the Democratic Party.
Today, the ISO faces a challenge similar to that encountered in recent years by comrades in the revolutionary left in other countries: how to relate to a widening radicalization and crises within, and splits from, traditional social democratic parties, while maintaining revolutionary Marxist politics and developing socialist cadre in the Leninist tradition. There remains a gap between revolutionary Marxist politics and the wider radicalization that can only be closed through a much higher level of struggle than we have seen so far. While we agree that the ISO should continue to advocate for, and participate in, independent political action and to make the case for a new socialist party, we believe that neither the level of struggle nor the political forces on the ground yet exist on the scale necessary to present such a party as an alternative to the socialist left currently inside the Democratic Party.
Certainly we do not propose to “wait” for a higher level of struggle. The ISO must build the fighting capacity of the left and the working class today, whether struggles are sustained, as with the teachers’ strikes, or whether they are more episodic. That’s been our practice from the time of our founding. In that sense, the ISO has always been a “struggle” organization. At the same time, we must continue our efforts to build the ISO based on strong branches that form the foundation for our work in multiple arenas. We are not opposed to either innovative organizational methods or experimentation.
One signer of this letter initiated the “Let it breathe” perspective adopted at the 2009 convention that anticipated many of the proposals made today in the “retooling” documents, including efforts to organize ISO cadres in labor activity and fractions implanted in movements of all kinds.1
Today, conditions for such experimentation are far more favorable, including efforts to involve comrades who may not be able to regularly attend meetings. But a key lesson of that earlier effort was that activist work became disconnected from the branches, and that the ISO needs weekly branch meetings to assess our work and continue our political education and development. In today’s fluid political situation, such assessment is even more necessary. While various working groups are essential, the ISO must also prioritize its party-building efforts in order to be effective and to grow in size and influence.
For those who claim we in the so-called “SC minority” are merely “clinging” to past practices, we would like to assert that we have learned through trial and error certain basic necessities for building a revolutionary organization. A number of those in the SC majority today called the “Let it breathe” perspective a “disaster”—including at the 2018 convention. In hindsight they raised many important objections, including its subordination of party building to a movement building perspective, when a more balanced approach makes better sense.
Finally, as the ISO considers its direction and priorities, it is important that the generational change in its leadership, which began several years ago, continue with this convention. Those changes should better reflect younger generations and also the racial and gender diversity of the ISO. The signers of this letter have opted not to present themselves as a platform for election to leading bodies. In our time in the ISO leadership, we have had successes and made mistakes. We are proud that the ISO has maintained itself and developed at a time when most other revolutionary organizations disappeared. The time has come for others to help lead the ISO into this exciting new period.
Our proposals have been offered in this spirit. Our collective experiences and assessments in the coming months and years will determine which perspectives proved to be correct. If we are wrong, we will be the first to admit it. If we are right, we’ll be ready to help to get the organization back on track. Either way, we will remain fully committed to and involved in building the organization, and stand at the ready to assist this in any way we can.
In solidarity,
Paul D., Ahmed S., Elizabeth S., Lance S., Lee S., Sharon S.
1 Sharon Smith, “Pre-Convention Bulletin #1, “Organizational Perspectives, Part 1: Preparing to Grow,” December 22, 2008: “The U.S. has entered a new economic, political, and ideological period. Critically, the world economy is in its worst crisis since the 1930s, centered in the crisis of American capitalism… It goes without saying that we have much to figure out, and that the organization as a whole will be required to develop a whole new approach to building our organization to respond to the much greater opportunities for growth that this new era offers…There is urgency, therefore, in making the changes necessary to position our organization for growth and influence in these new circumstances. Presently, the ISO’s organizational structures reflect the needs of the period from which we have just emerged—which was characterized both a much lower level of struggle and a much lower level of political consciousness… In the absence of struggle, we had to rely almost exclusively on reading and discussion to get our politics across. We were holding an organization together, and building slowly, not aiming to bring in tens, hundreds, and eventually thousands to a real and vibrant organization—and party. The situation is now dramatically different… In this period, our politics come up against the test of action. Let’s rise to the occasion.”
2 Several comrades have asked why none of the SC Min put themselves forward for election to the ISO’s leadership bodies. First, we did not want to precipitate what could have become a destructive faction fight. Second, we were committed to continuing a generational transition in the ISO’s leadership that had been in motion for several years. Third, several of us were experiencing health and family issues (Ahmed S’s right leg had recently been amputated to combat sepsis) that would have limited our ability to participate fully. Finally, as noted in the statement appended to this article, we viewed most of the issues up for debate as questions to be answered in the ISO’s practice. Addressing those did not require us to be in official leadership positions.
3 The Steering Committee and National Committee, the two main leadership bodies elected by slate at the 2018 convention, included 35 members, 21 of them being women, LGBTQ and/or people of color. The 2018 convention also created the National Branch Council whose co-chairs were a woman and a man of color. And exactly what pushing out “anyone who threatened the structure they had built” means is unclear. It should be noted that quite a few ISO members voted for or contributed money to Democratic candidates like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—some even announcing that fact on social media—without being disciplined or “pushed out” for this ostensible violation of the ISO “Where We Stand.”
4 In fact, ISO members (including some of the authors of this document) worked with Saman and Adam in the victorious 2019 Chicago city council campaign of DSA member Rossana Rodriguez, who ran as a socialist—and crucially from our point of view—independent of the Democratic Party.
5 On the elevation of electoral politics, see the debate between Eric Blanc and Charlie Post on “Which Way to Socialism” in Jacobin. And before another fact disappears down the memory hole, it should be recalled that Blanc both participated in the 2018 “red state rebellion” of teachers and wrote his article advocating “the dirty break” when he was an ISO member. Jacobin declined to publish Paul D’s response to the “dirty break” article (which appeared in Socialist Worker). Blanc left the ISO the following August, drawing the correct conclusion that his views aligned more closely with those of the DSA than with those of the ISO at the time. This was a principled decision on Blanc’s part, just as it was principled for members of the SCMin to argue their views without being accused of “principle mongering.” However, it became clear that members of the SCMaj and Socialist Tide concluded that Blanc was right, and that there was something wrong with the ISO if it couldn’t accommodate both pro- and anti-DP positions.
Lance Selfa
Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).
