Neprimerimye

On the Revolutionary Suicide of the ISO.

The following is written from a perspective that is sympathetic to the revolutionary project of the now dissolved ISO. It is written from within the IS tradition(s) and is based on the contributions made to Marxist theory and practice by that now disintegrating current. Perhaps more fundamentally it is written from a stand point which argues that the IS tradition(s) represent(ed) a development from and partial break with the Marxism of the Fourth Internationalist movement, as it became ossified after World War Two, in an effort to return to the Classical Marxism of the revolutionary period of the Communist International.

What follows is an outline attempt to explain why the ISO collapsed as a result of its isolation from the working class which deformed it politically and organisationally. To which must be added the point that the organisational and political deformations that were present at its birth tended to isolate it from the working class. Only a thorough historical account of the history of the ISO could fully explain how the organisation developed and why it disintegrated with such rapidity. Certain footnotes have been provided for those readers who wish to explore that history in more detail than the current essay can easily supply given the constraints of space.

The prehistory of the ISO.

The political roots of the ISO can be traced back to the split in the newly founded Socialist Workers Party in 1940 led by Max Shachtman which was based to a considerable degree on the youth only recently won from the reformist Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. There is no need to detail the decline of the newly minted Workers Party, its transformation into the Independent Socialist League and subsequent merging into the, you guessed it, Socialist Party in 1958. No need either to detail the formation by former WP/ISL militants, most prominently Hal Draper, of the Independent Socialist Committees and their evolution into the International Socialists from which the ISO was to emerge fully formed in the manner of Pallas Athena in 1977. No need because accounts of these developments can be found in books and articles by Milton Fisk[1], Martin Glaberman[2] and Peter Drucker[3].

It is worth saying a little as to the nature of the perspectives of the WP and why they were abandoned by the ISL. In short the WP took from Trotsky the concept that the world war would lead to an intensification of the class struggle and that revolutionary opportunities would develop. Such a scenario demanded that the tiny forces of the Fourth International, with which the WP identified itself, had to develop a cadre that could in the near future lead mass parties as the followers of the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties rallied to Trotskyism. Given the urgency of the situation the young militants of the WP industrialised themselves taking jobs in factories with bulging order books due to war production. Unlike many revolutionaries who simply ignored reality when the much hoped for revolutionary opportunities did not materialise the WP transformed itself into a propaganda group that pioneered a number of developments of Marxist analysis, for example the theory of the Permanent War Economy, but slowly shed members as the class struggle gave way to class peace and left the Marxist cadres of the ISL isolated. The tragedy of the ISL was that despite the appearance of standing against the current given in its paper Labor Action it had adapted to the pressures of the Cold War in an attempt to remain relevant and able to influence the labor bureaucracy. But in so doing it abandoned everything that defined it as a revolutionary socialist tendency eventually abandoning even its political independence of the boss class by advocating a realignment of the Democratic Party which then as now meant in practice becoming supporters of the liberal Democrats of the day.

The history of the ISC and IS contains a number of features in common with that of the WP/ISL. Formed by former ISL militants and a small number of younger comrades the ISC initially saw its purpose as defending the revolutionary politics of the WP/ISL while making socialist propaganda in available forums. At first this meant participation in the famous Free Speech Movement in Berkeley where they were based and later involvement with the then new Peace and Freedom Party. As a tiny group of young white mostly student radicals the emerging IS had little option but to take advantage of such opportunities as they came across them but even in this early phase they made few political concessions to the rising tide of Black Nationalism and the Black Panther Party, then as now extremely popular with starry eyed white student radicals, identifying nonetheless the vital importance of the struggle against black oppression in the USA.

The rapid growth of labor militancy in the 1970s was the making of the IS as a coherent national tendency advocating Socialism from Below and its militants took full advantage of the opportunities to intervene in the living class struggle. The result was a small but viable organization of perhaps some 300 members spread across the continent with growing connections to numerous rank and file initiatives in the unions and workplaces. Politically too it presented a picture of growing maturity until its development was stopped short with the slowdown in labor militancy after the impact of the oil shock of 1973. The result was an increased stress on the importance of reform movements, rather than rank and file organisations, together with a development of a voluntarist practice at the behest of the erstwhile National Secretary, an import from Manchester, that can be traced to an infatuation on the part of a section of the leading elements of IS (Britain) with the politics of the Italian workerist groups. When a pushback developed against the voluntarism which was being advocated by the leadership a pushback developed in a section of the organization. This would lead, together with serious disagreements over the course of the Revolution in Portugal, to the group splitting into three distinct tendencies. In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of IS three tendencies would develop which had their roots in whole or part in the experiences of IS from 1964 to 1979.

The formation of the ISO, Solidarity and Labor Notes.

Founded in 1977 the ISO presented itself as returning to the rank and file perspectives of the IS as opposed to the adaptations of the IS leadership to reform caucuses in the union bureaucracies. As such it was attempting to repeat the strategy of IS by developing an orientation on militant workers organised in rank and file movements. As we shall see blow it was a strategy that was no longer applicable in a changing world.

While the ISO stalled its parent organization split a second time with one group taking the name Worker Power[4], from the name of the IS paper which they had control of, while the other continued to call itself IS. Within two years WP had given up the ghost and led by Steve Zeluck[5] its remnants began publishing Against The Current[6] as a non-organizational journal aimed at regrouping revolutionaries in a multi-tendency group. An endeavour that led to the founding of Solidarity a couple of years later when IS fused into the new group along with Socialist Unity a splinter of a split from the SWP (US). Since then Solidarity has continued to publish Against The Current, which has often run some very interesting material coming from a variety of political standpoints on the revolutionary left, but it has not managed to develop a cadre able to intervene as a body with a single political line. Nonetheless despite having long held the line against liquidationism many if not most of its active members are now being absorbed by the reformist DSA.

Meanwhile another leading member of IS, Kim Moody, founded Labor Notes the title being taken from a column that first appeared in Workers Power. First published in 1979 this was a monthly magazine aimed at rank and file trade unionists in order to assist them in the struggle against concessions. Having parted company with IS the latter fused with Workers Power forming Solidarity[7]. The first Labor Notes conference followed in 1982 and a series of books and pamphlets on labor issues began in 1983. Labor Notes has not hesitated to take openly political positions, for example it adopted a position of opposition to NAFTA, and has not been an advocate of a narrowly conceived project centered on union reform.

By the early 1980s then the three children of IS had developed different aspects of their parent group. The ISO had developed as an interventionist self consciously Leninist group that saw itself as belonging to international tendency led by Tony Cliff and the SWP (Britain). Solidarity, with its more ideologically mixed heritage failed to develop as a cadre organisation but did publish an intellectually adventurous magazine. Finally Labor Notes developed the union work that IS had carried out but with none of the baggage that goes with a membership based organization.

A leadership is formed.

In its first few years the ISO floundered about seeking a clear orientation and perspective as its hopes for a revival of class struggle and the building of a rank and file alternative to the union bureaucracy and Democratic Party hucksters left it high and dry. The result was a reversion to making broad socialist propaganda and increasingly looking to the SWP (Britain) for both political guidance and organizational models. This led to a somewhat mysterious faction fight between the original leadership around Barbara and Cal Winslow which centered on their autocratic style of leadership although it is also claimed that their Marxist feminism was an issue if the few sources I have on this episode are to be believed.[8] The real problem however was that the perspective of the ISO did not fit the changed realities of the early 1980s as the number of strikes fell year by year meaning that advocacy of rank and file movements became abstract as such movements dissolved nationally and locally. Nonetheless the new leadership team gathered around Ahmed Shawki, Sharon Smith and a number of talented young recruits to the organisation were content to follow the advice of the SWP and use any argument they could against the founding leaders of the organization. Organizationally this meant not simply ousting the Winslows from leadership but pushing them out of the organization as a whole for fear of factionalism. The single tendency model previously unknown in IS was now an established fact and would in time have dire consequences.

At this point in time the connection with the SWP through Ahmed Shawki in particular was far from being negative and it began to deliver results with the modest growth of the organisation. With a newly established and unchallenged leadership the ISO could emulate the techniques of the SWP as best it could. In practice this meant making Socialist Worker a place of serious coverage of labor and American politics with increasingly confidant commentary as comrades became more knowledgeable and developed the skills of their revolutionary trade. A heavy emphasis on education, at one point the ISO was selling a quarter of the print run of the British International Socialism Journal for example, and the annual Socialism conferences helped form a layer of highly if sometimes almost academically educated Marxist cadres. Such techniques found their audience on the campuses of many universities across the USA which in turn reinforced the orientation on education and in the medium term built a slim base in a number of educational unions.

The Other International Socialists.

As has been mentioned above the relationship between the Independent Socialists (USA) and the International Socialists (Britain) was always important for both groups. The latter, founded in 1950 as the Socialist Review Group,[9] had from its earliest days an ambiguous relationship with its American counterparts both drawing on ideas developed by the former and at the same time expressing hostility to their understanding of Stalinism in power and out. A full account of that, sometimes subterranean, relationship has yet to be written but with the formation of the ISC and extended visits to London by a number of American activists during the 1960s it was renewed on a basis of healthy if loose collaboration.

In his history of IS (Britain) Ian Birchall details the perspectives that guided the organisation through the 1960s in a period that was characterised by the Long Boom and relative prosperity for most workers combined with growing sectional industrial struggles as well as active mass movements in the form of CND and the Labour Party youth group the Young Socialists. IS aimed, with some success, to build its influence through and in these mass movements with the ultimate aim of developing roots in the industrial working class. 1968 changed these perspectives and IS was transformed into an independent organisation that doubled in size over the course of the year.

Through the early 1970s IS built a small base in industry and gained footholds in white collar areas too as students took jobs in the civil service and local government. In all areas of its activity from the weekly Socialist Worker to its branch meetings and interventions in other areas the main thrust of the organisation was that rank and file groups needed to be built in the unions and a revolutionary organisation built alongside and through the movement in general. Strategy was generally ignored except when internal dissidents and opponents raised the question of the so called Transitional Programme of 1938,[10] which was only ever raised in the form of a touchstone against evil with ritual invocations of its method, despite its advocates rarely if ever explaining what they meant by method. When a programme was drawn up by IS it was swiftly forgotten as the organisation descended into its worst internal crisis and lost a sizeable layer of industrial militants and a number of long term leaders and senior cadre.[11] Although the roots of the opposition within IS to the right to form factions at any point had been laid some years earlier, due to a destructive experience with an apolitical sect which had ‘entered’ IS, the split with the International Socialist Opposition in 1976 redoubled the feeling that factions were always destructive and so to be avoided.[12]

With its perspectives no longer valid as the power wielded by unofficial rank and file bodies in the workplaces waned due to the employers offensive the IS that emerged from the crisis of 1976 turned left. A forced march to the left that would in time lead to the abandonment of the rank and file strategy as retreat turned into a full scale downturn in struggle and a left turn became a holding operation. But initially the downturn in industrial struggle was accompanied by an upturn in political engagement on the left with the second Cold War bringing CND back to life as a mass movement, the rise of the fascist National Front caused numerous local anti-fascist campaigns to be launched, unemployment too saw many local initiatives and the Labour left enjoyed its day in the Sun too.

To some degree IS, now to be rebranded for no good reason as the Socialist Workers Party, took part in such campaigns on a principled basis but a tendency developed to ignore local initiatives especially if they had links to the trade union bureaucracy or were in whole or part state funded. Having founded The Right to Work Campaign, originally as an offshoot of the Rank and File Organising Committee,[13] the leadership soon found it congenial running campaigns that were in effect fronts for the SWP rather than having to deal with irritating allies in the labor movement. The RTWC, regardless of its political irrelevance beyond the far left, became the blueprint for a series of ‘United Front’ campaigns run by the SWP over the years.

The big campaign and the one that had a major impact on national politics was the Anti Nazi League. Despite the ecumenical national steering committee the ANL was from the start completely controlled and staffed by the SWP in every locality and nationally. It was a massive success driving the National Front back into the gutters from whence it crawled but it was too big for the SWP the cadre of which often functioned as ANL activists rear guarding the revolutionary organisation. It was also the case that most of the tens of thousands who took part in ANL actions of one kind or another were politically a long way from revolutionary socialism being more aligned in general with the politics of Tony Benn and the then buoyant Labour left. Another innovation for the SWP was the first Marxism conference held in 1977 which then developed into a major feature of the groups calendar throughout the 1980s and beyond.

By the early part of the 1980s a pattern of SWP activity and governance had formed that was to all intents and purposes a blueprint for its co-thinkers outside Britain especially the ISO. But it was a blueprint that the group was capable of breaking away from when events in the class struggle dictated the need to do so as with the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85. And crucially it was a blueprint that the leadership of the ISO successfully imported to the USA or so appearances would suggest. And for all its limitations it was a blueprint that served the ISO well enough in a period when the working class was in retreat and all that could be done was build a small pre-Leninist propaganda group.

Size as we know has advantages in revolutionary politics in that it allows for specialization and the development of a radical democracy from below. Small groups dedicated to producing and distributing propaganda tend, if successful and the ISO was successful in this period, to produce generalists lacking specialist skills but possessing some ability in many fields. Such groups also tend to operate on the basis of consensus within an informal grouping regardless of formal structures. Such features are of course characteristic of most if not all pre-Leninist sects whatever their formal politics and structures. It is enough to glance at the history of the Socialist Labor Party[14] for a rather interesting confirmation of these arguments. Such parties also tend to be very centralised politically with a formal program and frequently have formally very democratic regimes. One might even describe them as democratic centralist but not in the Leninist sense!

Building through campaigns and on the campuses.

This section must be short as it is not the purpose of this article to provide a detailed history of the ISO.[15] Suffice to say that between the early 1980s the ISO was built through an orientation on the campuses, often the campuses of the more prestigious universities, on the basis of a sometimes abstract dedication to socialism and workers power. That said where and when it was possible the ISO did a first class job of supporting workers struggles as for example with the Illinois War Zone 1983-85 and the campaign around the Charleston 5 in 2000. The organization was also capable of taking the initiative in anti-war and civil rights campaigns having their greatest impact perhaps with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. In a hostile period it is to the credit of the ISO that it went from 150 members in 1990 to 1,000 or more a decade later. It certainly built a cadre but only very rarely a cadre of activists rooted in working class struggles and one might ask could that have been any different in light of the low level of workers struggles in that period?

Despite swallowing in one gulp the SWPs organizational blueprint in one area they did not emulate that groups structures. In the early years of ISO it appears that a specialist Industrial Department, to use the vocabulary of the SWP, was not required so small was the group and limited its labor movement work. In later years labor work had a low priority with a low level of workplace and union struggles and few members working union jobs. When the opportunity presented itself to carry out strike support work a specialized Industrial Department was superfluous and the existing structures and leadership adequate to help local branches. In fact the IS was able to carry out exemplary strike support work through the Staley Workers Solidarity Committee in the 1990s and later in 2001 played a leading role in the solidarity campaign with the Charleston Five. But such work, which had much in common with early twentieth century campaigns run by the Industrial Workers of the World, did not and could not build a base within the ranks of labor for the ISO.

The only way to build a base in the workplaces and unions is through a long term orientation that concentrates on the systematic recruitment of militant workers and the formation of a militant minority organised in a rank and file movement. Which is easy to write about but far more difficult to do especially in a period of retreat or defeat. But it is a task that can be hastened even by a small revolutionary organization if it has the ability to share, generalize from and learn the lessons from the experiences of those militants it does possess. Which is why the experiences of the ISO in the education industry are indicative in illustrating the limits of the groups leaders and politics. If only because this is the only industry where the ISO had a concentration of members in a few key cities where the group had an infrastructure that could support some degree of political and organizational specialization on Leninist lines.

Having recruited successive layers of party cadre on the campuses it was natural that some of these well educated young militants would gravitate towards careers in verdant groves of academia and as teachers in the high school system. (The same tendency could be observed in Britain where comrades recruited at university moved quite naturally into the teaching profession or took jobs in the ranks of the Civil Service.) Despite the lack of an Industrial Department to develop this work the young militants of the ISO were able in a number of cities to make serious inroads in building the unions they worked in and as a result some won union offices and were involved in leading disputes. In contrast to Britain it was far more complicated a matter to draw lessons from unions that in practice corresponded to individual colleges or universities rather than being branches of a single union that negotiated wages and conditions at a national level.

It is a given that comrades elected to union office are under considerable pressure to conform to the normal practices of the union bureaucracy. Individuals in such a situation could only obviously require both support and advice or they run the risk of being absorbed into the union bureaucracy. The ISO leadership was of course well aware of such pressures and placed labor work under the direction of Lee Sustar a member of the SC for many years. In Chicago where ISO members were influential in building a militant oppositional caucus and played a creditable role in leading the 2012 strike Sustar simply ignored the political opportunism of ISO member and Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey. Sharkey was not disciplined in any way when he publicly endorsed Chuy Garcia on behalf of the CTU as a Majoral candidate for the Democratic Party.[16] That Sharkey was able to get away with such an openly class collaborationist policy and not be questioned is proof of the lack of Leninist practices on the part of the ISO leadership.

The break with the SWP.

In 2001 the famous teamsters and turtles demonstration took place in Seattle. Across the world it was hailed as the beginning of a new anti-capitalist movement combining old social forces, such as trade unions, and newer movements like the youthful green movement. That this diverse and more often than not disunited loose coalition of social forces had been gathering strength for some time was of little importance to the leadership of the SWP which condemned the ISO for failing to be enthusiastic about the Seattle demonstration and not mobilising its forces for the demonstration. That Seattle is hundreds of miles from the otherwise closest ISO branch and that the group had put a lot of effort into building for the event was of no interest to the leadership of the SWP. A bitter row erupted between the two leaderships that would lead to the expulsion of the ISO from the International Socialism Tendency a worldwide network of groups that were based on the politics of the IS tradition and was led by the SWP. In what was its first and thus far only public decision the ISO was unceremoniously expelled from the network.[17]

To a considerable degree the dispute between the ISO and the SWP leadership had little to do with politics or perspectives but was far more focused on the intention on the part of the SWP to retain the ISO in a client relationship where all major decisions were made in London. The ISO by contrast understood that the SWP was not growing and were increasingly confidant as a result of their own increase in membership and influence. It should be noted that similar disputes had already taken place or would in the near future in Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece and South Africa sometimes resulting in splits as a result of heavy handed interventions by the SWP.[18] In some ways the most damaging being the split in the International Socialists South Africa as to whether they should call for a vote for the popular frontist ANC or for the new small Workers List Party. Disgracefully they chose to support the ANC which has since proven to be the best defender of capitalism and therefore of racism in South Africa. With its expulsion from the IST the ISO was subject to a factional struggle as the SWP encouraged a small group of comrades to build a faction in opposition to the national leadership with the predictable result that the comrades were in their turn expelled forming for a brief period Left Turn a small group of their own which disavowed the SWP as it developed movementist positions.

A leadership ossifies.

The forced emancipation from the tutelage of the SWP was an important moment for the ISO and its leadership. It came at a time when the group was growing, its new magazine the International Socialist Review, first published in 1997, was rapidly finding itself a place and Haymarket was being launched as a publisher of new books. Crucially the more cautious perspectives of the ISO were soon proven to be far closer to reality than the pious delusions of the SWP. All of this opened up the opportunity to break with the past practices inherited from the SWP[19] and many comrades were in time to question the Janus like inheritance with some encouragement from the leadership. This process of questioning received political positions was most successfully pursued with regard to women’s oppression and over the course of time important work was carried out in relation to Social Reproduction Theory and the concept of inter-sectionalism.

The years from 2001 to 2009 were not unsuccessful for the ISO although the high turn over of members was not solved by adopting a far more selective approach to recruitment and higher levels of activity than was typical of the SWP. The work done on SRT and inter-sectionalism continued, deepened and served to differentiate the organization from the IST although more recently and more cautiously the SWP too has begun to take SRT seriously. The downside of the ISO in this period however was that its organizational forms became rigid and to a considerable degree clientelist. That is the small core of comrades around Ahmed Shawki and Sharon Smith, recruited in the early 1980s, functioned as the core leadership of the ISO and as such as an undeclared faction protective of its position and privileges. This group was however becoming more detached from the work carried out by the cadre as a result of the leadership roles coming to be seen as theirs by right of being the founders of the organization. Distanced from the general membership a process of ossification was now impacting the leadership but at the same time the membership too was increasingly distanced from new layers entering into revolt who were far more plebeian than the highly educated graduate members of the ISO. The ability of the ISO to intervene, recruit and root itself in the working class was now adversely affected by the class background of a majority of the organizations leading members in stark contrast with the self conception of the organization as the best fighters for socialism within the workers movement. Crucially however it was not the social position of both leadership and members as such that kept them outside the newly emerging struggles but the false perspectives and false orientation of the leadership.

Those not busy being born are busy dying.

The economic crisis of 2009 hit the USA hard and continued attacks on the working class led to a series of revolts against capital. To its credit the ISO intervened in all of these struggles but without any obvious major success in terms of winning influence or recruits. In fact the membership of the organization stagnated and began to fall in this period precipitating a series of local crises within it that would reach a false crescendo in 2014, with the formation of the Renewal Faction, only to reappear at the final Convention in 2019. Time does not allow for detailed discussion of each local crisis, nor do they merit such treatment, but there is value in briefly looking at them as they allow us to identify a number of common features which cannot but be understood other than as morbid symptoms with regard to the body politic of the ISO.

Among the earliest such localized crises was that of 2010 in New York City where a document concerning the recruitment and retention of members of color was attacked by the NYC District Committee throwing the district into crisis and leading to the direct involvement of the Steering Committee. An attempt to reconcile those involved would again surface in 2013. Also in 2010 an expulsion in Washington DC led to the resignation of eight other members a majority of the branch’s members of color. As in NYC the SC was directly involved and acted in a heavy handed manner from all accounts. If the experiences of NYC and Washington DC were the result of asking why the ISO had problems recruiting and retaining people of color, itself a symptom of a more general malaise, local crises in the Bay Area, Chicago and New England addressed that malaise more directly.

One such incident was that as a result of political disagreements in the Bay Area between 2009-11 six experienced members left the organization but remained in touch with each other in an informal grouping. As is common with such only partially developed critics of an established leadership having published their criticisms of the ISO leadership they dissolved and went their different ways politically.[20] Another which was in many respects similar to the case of the Bay Area Six concerned seven comrades in Chicago who after leaving the ISO formed the short lived Socialist Outpost group. Little more than a now defunct website Socialist Outpost did at least post a document that raised some legitimate criticisms concerning the perspectives and organizational practices of the ISO.  The last grouping to develop criticisms of the ISO in this period did so from within the organization, which formally constituted itself as the Renewal Faction, appears to have made attempts to form links with other dissidents but they too, having been expelled as a body, fell apart leaving only their website as evidence of their existence.[21]

It is far from unusual that when small socialist groups fail to grow as expected that some members will search around for explanations as happened in the ISO at the beginning of this decade. In such circumstances some comrades will develop criticisms of the revolutionary organization to which they belong which appear to be very leftist or radical but enable them to move to the right politically once the threads connecting them to the organization are severed.[22] This would appear to be the case with the comrades from the Bay Area, Chicago and I would presume of the majority of former Renewal Faction comrades too. It is only proper then to examine their declared positions regardless of where they as individuals stand today or the actions of individuals at the time of these disputes.

All three groups raised similar arguments and criticisms of the ISO. To be brief all argued that the perspectives developed by the group were wrong and did not even come close to describing the current period. In addition to which the group was accused of pandering to liberals while ignoring more radical elements. Moreover much was made of the weaknesses of the groups internal regime and it is on this point and only on this point that they scored a direct hit. Each of the three groups made further points which the others tended to endorse later. We might mention in this respect the accusation by the Renewal Faction that CERSC,[23] the tax free body associated with the ISO, was a source of corruption and of the NGOization of the organization. Which is a real problem for the left and not just in the USA but it cannot be shown that CERSC is a cause let alone the cause for the problems of the ISO. All of the groups tended to locate some or all of the ISO alleged weaknesses in its former links with the SWP (Britain) or in Trotskyism which was for the Bay Area comrades mired in an idealism which they traced to the Transitional Program of 1938. We shall return to this point later.

Having developed a set of criticisms of the ISO it is striking that none of the critical groups saw fit to put forward any kind of political alternative other than to declare that the crisis in the organization was one of a lack of theory, in the case of the Renewal Faction, or that a number of organizational changes were needed. Some of these suggestions, made by the Bay Area group in their article The Theory and Practice of Idealism in Trotskyism and the ISO, merit further discussion in part because the answers to these points made in the internal Pre-Convention Bulletins of the ISO are at best partial and sometimes wrong if the past practice of the Marxist movement is taken as our reference point. One such point being the call for the right to form permanent factions. A nonsense given that a faction is by definition a temporary body within a larger body which seeks to revise the perspectives or the theoretical foundations of the latter body in part or full by replacing or convincing the existing leadership of its case. As for the demand for Elected District Organizers the real question here is not the assertion of the elective principal but rather the belief on the part of the dissident comrades that District Organizers will act as representatives of a disliked Steering Committee. While this can be true it misunderstands the proper role of both the leading committee and the appointed organizers that they defend the groups politics, some might say program, and perspectives not their personal whims or fancies. Both the dissident comrades and the representatives of the leadership who did their best to refute the propositions of the Renewal Faction reveal here their lack of comprehension as to the role that a program plays in building the revolutionary movement. This is also true of the demands that the slate system of election for the Steering Committee be abolished and that body be elected anew.  Only the call for debates to be aired in public in the Socialist Worker comes close to understanding that the revolutionary group can only develop healthily if its periphery is party to the debates within it. With each of the demands and the rebuttals made in the Pre-Convention Bulletins organisational fixes were made to substitute for lack of political answers to questions only hinted at.

A Return to the Status Quo Ante Bellum?

Having devoted a considerable amount of effort debating their dissidents in Socialist Worker and more so in the Pre-Convention Bulletins the leadership of the ISO and the membership settled down to more positive discussions and implementing the campus perspective. The discussions centred for the most part on how to make the ISO better relate to, recruit and retain members from specially oppressed groups. To some considerable degree this was the result of the leadership being alert to the nature of the ISO being unrepresentative of the working class and the organizations periphery. Despite itself in some ways the long established leadership around Shawki and Smith had endeavoured, since the break with the SWP and IST, to develop new theories in areas where they felt they were weak. For example the rejection by the SWP of Marxist feminist analyses and positions was firmly jettisoned and replaced by a more nuanced thinking which placed a heavy onus on Social Reproduction Theory. SRT was supplemented by Inter-sectional theory, although less successfully in the opinion of this writer, and a more open approach to identity politics. On the other hand the leadership remained committed to maintaining its own position and the sometimes harsh regime that had long characterised the organization appears to have remained unwelcoming for many especially members of socially oppressed groups.

It is a dangerous moment in the life of a state when a hitherto authoritarian regime attempts a process of democratic reform and liberalisation. The same is true of small revolutionary groups dominated by long established leaders. Yet in a halting sometimes contradictory manner this appears to have been one of the tasks the leadership of the ISO seems to have been rather blindly groping towards after breaking with the SWP. In this they were at times supported and at times pushed forwards by a part of the membership concerned as to the relatively stagnant development of the group. Such was the level of concern at all levels of the organization that even members of the sitting SC began to consider the need for a change in the organizational structures of the group and a change in orientation. Initially however the leadership was able to retain its positions despite limited organizational changes at the 2018 Convention but as we know this gathering served to set the scene for the more dramatic changes that took place at the 2019 Convention.

The Leadership Fractures and Falls.

The groundwork for the ouster of the hard core of the Ahmed/Smith leadership team had been begun in earlier years with the most important constitutional change being the move to the election of leadership bodies by voting on individual candidates rather than on a single full slate of approved candidates. The moral prohibition on factions was also greatly relaxed and the convention delegates were faced for the first time with the choice of four competing platforms putting forward candidates on clear if limited political platforms. The four platforms in question being in the first instance the Minority of the outgoing SC led by Ahmed/Smith which stood on the basis of their record; the SC Majority which had at its core much of the historic leadership of the ISO and called for a reorientation, or retooling as they put it, that would make the ISO more interventionist; the Independence and Struggle platform based on a number of district leaders which called for further democratization of the group and in common with the SC Majority a more interventionist orientation and finally there was the Socialist Tide Revolutionary Current platform which agreed on the need to face outwards but also argued for making use of the Democratic Party ballot line.

Dramatically not a single member of the SC Minority Platform won a place on the incoming SC. Take together the SC Majority and the Independence and Struggle Platforms won a plurality of seats. Given the large areas of agreement between the SC Majority and the Independence and Struggle Platforms, not to mention Socialist Tide and the independents, it should have been a reasonably easy task to beginning working on the much talked about retooling of the ISO in order for it to become a more interventionist organisation. Given the degree of agreement a new majority leadership could and indeed should have been forged around the coming together of the SC Majority and the I&S Platforms but in the few weeks that the organization had before the crisis broke no one from either Platform attempted to bring them together. Within a few weeks the ISO had dissolved.

It could be argued that had the Former Member letter not unleashed all of the various problems the ISO had long harboured that the incoming leadership would have weathered the storm. Such a scenario rests on the probability that the SC Majority and the I&S Platform would have been able to find enough common ground to allow the organization to reorientate itself by means of democratic reform and by turning outwards towards the class. This writer finds this possibility to be doubtful given the generally rightist politics of some members of the SC Majority and the involvement of some in the previous regimes leadership methods. The probability is that at least part of the older cadre would have fought above all else for the preservation of their own positions regardless of the needs of the membership. Given the tendency of much of the older cadre to seek agreement with the right wing this could easily have led to a fudged position with regard to the Democratic Party being adopted at the projected Special Convention that was scheduled for September. The result would have been either a renewed factional struggle or an organization burdened with perspectives on labor and the Democrats that were in contradiction with each other. For revolutionaries political clarity is a positive just as it is a massive drawback for centrists.

The Revolutionary Suicide of the ISO.

The events that followed the Convention can easily be summarized. Not long after the Convention a communication was received from a Former Member which recounted an alleged sexual assault by a member of the ISO and more damningly the efforts made by the former leadership to conceal it and protect the alleged rapist.[24] The case was not new and was well known both within the ISO and amongst the wider left. Within the ISO the question of how members could be protected and how such incidents should best be dealt with had been a major subject of discussion for a number of years. The so called Delta Affair in the SWP where a leading member had been protected by his allies in the leadership of that organization only made the letter from the FM more explosive. What was new in that letter was the revelation as to how great the efforts of elements of the former leadership had been to protect the alleged rapist. It was also a massive shock when it was revealed that the alleged rapist had been elected onto the incoming SC as a supporter of the Independence and Struggle Platform. Another communication coming only four days later from a leading figure revealing her knowledge and participation in the affair served to deepen the shock many comrades were now experiencing and set in motion the dissolution of the organization already demanded in the FM letter.

From this point a tidal wave of expulsions, suspensions and resignations decimated the incoming Steering Committee and National Committee leaving surviving comrades reeling and emotionally battered.[25] The calls to dissolve the organization grew ever louder and more insistent until it was resolved to hold a ballot to decide the issue. The ballot was held after a very short discussion nationally, not a single bulletin was produced for example indeed there were no written documents other than hastily written resolutions, with many branches not having the opportunity to meet. With the leadership buckling under pressure, none of the members of the new SC had been elected to that body before 2014, it is significant that at no time did the Crisis Leadership Team – which consisted of surviving members of the SC and NC plus a number of other comrades – take any kind of initiative or make any proposal as a collective. That each and every member of the CLT acted properly and as best they could in dire circumstances is not in question what is vital is that as a leadership they took no responsibility for proposing a way forward that is to say leading the organization. It was then all but inevitable that little more than two weeks after the FM letter appeared the membership of the ISO voted to dissolve the organization. More hopefully it was also resolved that the CLT remain in place, if only to manage the remaining tasks to ensure an orderly dissolution, and that in the future a new model organization be founded.

The act of revolutionary suicide had then been taken to its logical conclusion: the ISO had dissolved so that a new revolutionary organization might be born. But how?

What Killed the ISO?

What killed the ISO is not an easy question to answer as it cannot but be the case that a considerable number of factors played a role. It is certainly true that the nature of the organizations internal culture and the bullying that was a part of it was a major contributory factor. The regime however was not evenly experienced in every constituent part of the organization with smaller branches, especially those distant from the center, being far less affected. It would appear that the positives of belonging to a sizeable national organization far outweighed the minuses for the smaller branches. By extension the same considerations apply in full force to the treatment sometimes meted out to POC and other specially oppressed comrades. Nor can it be said that the legacies of the SWP are what brought the ISO down unless one wishes to ignore the fact that it was the theory and politics taken from the SWP that played a massive role in the growth of the ISO from at least 1983 onwards. These related criticisms have more than a little justification it must be said but rather than address such problems politically it is observable that the solutions typically proposed tend to be organizational in character.

Some critics wind the clock back further by arguing that it was the original sin of Leninism or Democratic Centralism that destroyed the ISO but this argument is almost invariably a rationalisation on the part of those using it to allow them to move towards a reformist vision of socialism. The rapid growth of the DSA has proven to be a magnet for such comrades. As a rationalisation it is rarely necessary for such comrades to examine what Leninism or Democratic Centralism means in the context of an advanced country in the neo-liberal world. Another related argument is that it is the Transitional Program of 1938 that distorted the Marxism of the ISO and caused it to develop elitist and substitutionist tendencies. These latter arguments contain a germ of truth but are not developed by those deploying them if only because discussion of Leninism and transitional politics was not an area that was paid any consistent or systematic attention in the ISO or for that matter any IS tradition group.[26] It is to these questions that our attention must be given if we are to understand who killed the ISO.

Transitional Politics.

As we have seen the ISO can trace its political origins back to the Fourth Internationalist movement led by Leon Trotsky an ancestry it shares with the every one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism today. Regrettably this also led it to share some of the weaknesses that stem from the development of Trotskyism as a faction of the Communist International that was forced to transform itself into a tiny palimpsest of what was a mass movement. All too often this has led the various organizations that claim to be Trotskyist to ignore or treat with contempt figures from even the early days of the Comintern that did not join the Trotskyist movement. The only major exceptions to this rule being Gramsci and to a lesser degree Mariategui indeed some Trotskyists appear to make it a point of honour to be as hostile as possible to any Marxist thinker or activist who was not a disciple of Leon Trotsky. Finding any discussion of figures as important as Korsch or Thalheimer in the publications of the Trotskyist groups was until recently as rare as hens teeth.  Even a figure as important, although rather problematical, as Lukacs is only rarely discussed in the publications and on the websites of the various groups.

All of the groups which emerged from the political destruction of the Fourth International after World War 2[27] were isolated from the working class and could do little more than attempt to defend the politics and perspectives which they had inherited. For most groups this led to a failure to understand the changed political landscape and total confusion as to the class nature of Stalinism. The upshot was that only a tiny number of groups tried to develop their understanding of contemporary capitalism rather than simply rely on outmoded formulas. Some of the tendencies which did seek to deepen their understanding of capitalism would depart from the framework of Trotskyism entirely, as with the Johnson-Forrest Tendency and Socialisme ou Barbarie, while contributing considerable insights in a number of areas self-consciously broke with Trotskyism. Those few groups that exhibited an ability to evolve invariably lost or forgot crucial elements from the theoretical and political armoury that they laid claim to.

This forgetfulness led to distortions and lacunae, in both IS traditions, when they began to grow from the early 1960s onwards. Both groups stressed the centrality of the working class to the revolutionary project and the need for a revolutionary socialist party but neither group did much to elaborate revolutionary strategy[28] and tended to treat talk of a program as being a slightly shoddy legacy that could be easily discarded. As the orthodox Trotskyists tended to use Trotsky’s Transitional Program of 1938, the central purpose of which was to map out a viable revolutionary strategy for the Fourth International, as a kind of shopping list from which slogans would be extracted and used as substitutes for developing strategies based on the struggle in the real world IS might be forgiven for forgetting the purpose of a program to a party building project. Worse than this the very idea of transitional politics was forgotten due to its being associated with sectarian tendencies. That the development of program and revolutionary strategy, based on the use of transitional politics, was foundational to Leninism and the early Comintern[29] was also forgotten at least for most of the time.

Typically when Trotskyists discuss the concept of transitional demands or slogans reference is made to the discussions with members of the American SWP that took place in 1938 around the time of the foundation of that party and of the Fourth International. In those discussions Trotsky makes many excellent points but it is significant that his arguments bear considerable similarity to those of Thalheimer made earlier in 1928. The arguments made by Thalheimer are superior in their greater clarity and explain how transitional slogans are to be used by revolutionary communists. In the first instance he differentiates between transitional measures and transitional slogans in the practice of Marx and Engels a point which has often confused later commentators. He then discusses how in Marx’s work transitional slogans are not just used, as they were in Russia in 1917, as mobilising slogans prior to the workers taking hold of the state power but are also to be used to educate the workers after a defeat in order to prepare for the next revolutionary offensive. He describes how this concept of a transitional politics can be found in the famous Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist League of 1850 and in doing so links transitional politics to the concept of permanent revolution although this is not explicitly brought out in his comments. Thalheimer continues by citing the practice of the Bolsheviks before the October Revolution and cites Radeks speech concerning The These on Tactics passed by the Comintern at its Third Congress in 1921. He notes how transitional slogans were to be used not only immediately prior to the seizure of state power but also in preparation for that moment as their use would educate the party cadre and the working class masses. Crucially for today he notes how the general crisis of capitalism means that transitional slogans retain their importance even in periods that are not revolutionary. And was it not noted as far back as Clauswitz that a successful defense can be turned into a successful offense if the army has been prepared for such an eventuality before the moment of decision arrives?

An IS Program?

Discussion and debate in the ISO over questions of political strategy was restricted to discussions over individual tactics only. If the Transitional Program of 1938 was mentioned it was only in reference to the work of Trotsky and it was left unexplored. The wider question as to whether or not the ISO needed a program of any kind was largely left like a red haired stepchild ignored in a corner. To return for a moment to the prehistory of the ISO we know that when Shactman formed the Workers Party in 1940 it took as its own the Transitional Program and adopted a number of resolutions that modified the perspectives of that document in the light of developments and their changing theoretical assessment of the world. In this revisionism they were acting in an entirely orthodox manner – the SRC would act in a similar manner when founded a decade later – which approach changed when they dissolved into the Socialist Party. In the meantime they drew up and adopted The Fight for Socialism[30] as their program which in its turn was modified as events dictated. When the socialism from below tendency was refounded as an independent body however it was to lack a program.

Across the pond in good old Blighty the SRG/IS also lacked a program but as a small group lacking the attributes both good and bad of a Leninist group its members were, at least until 1968, relatively homogenous politically and did not require the adoption of a formal programmatic document as a lode star. With the transformation of IS into a formally Leninist organisation and its growth in numbers the question did arise a number of times during the 1970s in part due to the efforts and influence of more orthodox Trotskyists but more one suspects as a result of inexperienced but clever comrades reading the freshly republished collections of Trotskys writings from the 1930s.

Historically the Trotskyist movement in Britain had been almost totally working class in terms of its social composition with intellectuals a rarity. This had changed, reflecting the growth of working class youth attending universities, with a steady recruitment of students throughout the 1960s. 1968 enabled IS to double its size and for a brief moment become an overwhelmingly student based organization. Due to the theoretical work done before 1968 it remained an organization intent on building itself within the working class movement particularly among shop stewards who led the then and often powerful unofficial Joint Ship Stewards Committees in the factories and workplaces. After further growth IS began a Turn to Industry, rejecting the idea of colonising students by having them take jobs in factories, it systematically built itself and strengthened the stewards movement by selling copies of the weekly Socialist Worker at factory gates and union meetings. At the same time a natural drift of former students into white collar jobs, primarily teaching and the Civil Service, enabled IS to build a small but real base in many economic sectors. This in fierce competition with the then still powerful Stalinist Party and the far more numerous but unorganised left-wing members of the Labour Party in the union movement.

1972 was the highwater mark of workers power in Post War Britain[31] and IS too reached its high point at this time. Temporarily stalled, as they thought, IS spent some of its energies engaged in a series of internal discussions on numerous questions. One question raised by various internal critics concerned the need for IS to adopt its own program which position was also endorsed by various members of the leadership. The debate on the question was of a poor quality if only because the internal critics were of far less ability than the leadership who would appear to have been of the opinion that although a program might be a good idea it would be better to concentrate for the moment on other matters. Nonetheless sections of the membership continued to press for such a program and it was agreed to draw such a document up.[32] The most extraordinary aspect of what was a comprehensive but poorly elaborated document was that it was forgotten as soon as it was adopted, unamended, at IS Conference. Not long afterwards in a bout of vainglory IS would be relaunched as the Socialist Workers Party without a founding conference or a program in stark but uncommented upon contrast to all previous practice in the revolutionary movement. It was a major step backwards towards a sectarian understanding of the vanguard party.

Since the 1970s there has been no explicit discussion as to the need for a program or transitional politics in and around the SWP but for one rather peculiar exception. In 2003 Alex Callinicos, the best known theorist associated with the SWP, published his Anti-Capitalist Manifesto.[33] The book is one of his more accessible works but appears to have provoked very little debate or controversy it did however deserve far better. If only because in his book Callinicos essays a rare contemporary attempt to describe transitional demands and to elaborate his own personal program using the method of transitional politics. It is the opinion of this writer that he failed but it is telling that even in his own organization the book appears to have sunk with but little trace ironically only a few years before the current revival of discussions concerning socialist strategy now underway.  

It is perhaps a little more surprising that IS (US) never saw fit to draw up a program of their own given that a number of its founders had been members of the SWP when it supported the Transitional Program and later when the WP adopted Shachtman’s The Fight for Socialism as its program in 1946. As with the IS in Britain the organisation in the USA was far more concerned to build a group based in the working class even if it meant forgetting the centrality of a program in developing and anchoring a political strategy. It is notable that when the strike movement that IS had hitched itself to and the social movements went into a decline this lack of strategic vision was a major cause of the disintegration of IS into three organizations IS, Workers Power and the fledgling ISO.

The ISO Without Strategy or Program.

The ISO inherited its blindness to questions of revolutionary strategy and transitional politics from both of its parents. Which was not a problem when the organization was too small to do much other than make socialist propaganda and engage in the primitive accumulation of cadre. But once Third Party initiatives began to appear, with Nader’s run in 1996 being the first, and when more recently a reformist organization of modest scale, the Democratic Socialists of America, developed the ISO simply did not know how to orientate itself to these new political phenomena. But these were not new problems for Trotskyists in the USA which had faced the challenge of the Henry Wallace[34] presidential bid in 1948 for the short-lived Progressive Party which the Stalinists and radical liberal types backed with great enthusiasm. The basis of the case made against joining the Wallace movement was that it was a campaign not for a workers party, could not be converted into a labor or workers party and reduced those workers who did join it to mere foot soldiers in a third bourgeois party.

At bottom the same is true of the Green Party today for which some members of the ISO have not only been enthusiasts for in the past but have also run as candidates on its ticket. At the time of writing the Green Party is beginning the process of selecting a candidate for the 2020 presidential election. Without a shadow of a doubt the best candidate declared thus far is Howie Hawkins.[35] But despite declaring his politics as being based on working class independence, by which he means from the twin parties of capital rather than independence from all wings of capital, he has a record of supporting bourgeois Third Parties. Were it not for the far greater gravitational pull of the Sanders campaign one cannot but wonder whether the ISO would have developed a crush on the Greens this election cycle.

The root of the problem posed by giving electoral support to the Green Party or to Third Parties in general is not the problem of revolutionaries being drawn into electoral adventures as such but that of substitutionism and the lack of an independent strategy. Electoral work as such always runs the risk of not only degenerating into reformism but it also tends to elevate the candidates and elected delegates above the class which they represent. This is a particularly dangerous tendency where there is not an established reformist party that is organisationally independent of and counter-posed to the more open bourgeois parties as is the case in many developed countries. Where such a party does not exist there cannot but be a danger that the elected representatives come to be seen as a substitute for the self activity of the working class and its own independent party. Without such a party participation in electoral work potentially becomes a substitute to the struggle for a workers party independent of all factions of the ruling class which must be at the centre of any revolutionary strategy in the USA today. If only because the formation of such a party however it might come about poses the question of which class must rule which is the question that any program based on transitional politics raises as its central thrust.

The Last Supper of the ISO.

It is no great revelation that the ISO killed itself but at the moment of its suicide declared that a new revolutionary organization would be built using a better model of organization. But revolutionary suicide, which demands that others take the place of the fallen in the revolutionary struggle, cannot be reduced to organizational models but must be firmly based on a revolutionary politics or rather on a revolutionary program. The suicide of a revolutionary organization is also an admission that the organizations leaders have become convinced that they cannot, as a collective, offer any kind of leadership in terms of offering an alternative strategy that can triumph in the struggle between the classes. Such an organization once it has dissolved cannot be recuperated regardless of whatever organizational forms it might adopt without a deeper analysis of why it failed in the first instance. One must stress that those who have led any such organization to even consider revolutionary suicide are not fit to play any leadership role in any new organization.

The irony of the revolutionary suicide of the ISO is that it need not have happened as it was contradictory to the aims it was meant to accomplish. This is best understood if we take a short look at the events that led to the dissolution of the ISO and ask at each stage what its political meaning was. The first stage of the final act of the ISO cannot be dated, other than by participants, but it is possible to assert that from roughly 2008 onwards some members of the ISO were concerned that the orientation of the group to the campuses was not enabling them to build either roots in the working class or to recruit young people. This in turn led to a questioning of the democratic structures of the ISO and its long established leadership. Regrettably some of the comrades raising such concerns acted in a destructive and overly factional manner, as discussed above, with the result that they were expelled from the ISO.[36]

As the leadership doubled down on the campus orientation and that orientation still did not yield the desired results more comrades became critical and ominously divisions began to open up within the core of the Steering Committee although these divisions did not appear until discussion before the 2018 Convention. That Convention did however lay some of the groundwork for the contested Convention of 2019 and saw the leadership openly challenged as to the importance of the organization being implanted in the working class by a number of district level cadre. When a year later the ISO met again in Convention it would prove to be the last the organisation would hold.

For a small organization the members of the ISO wrote a prodigious quantity of material in the pre-Convention Discussion Bulletins that prepared the 2019 Convention with a total of 10,143 pages being published in 45 bulletins. Before taking a brief look at the political contents of the bulletins this writer cannot but comment that, other than in conditions of illegality, revolutionary communist organizations historically conducted their discussions in their public organs in full view of the working class. It is to the credit of the ISO that in recent years some of their discussions, both internal and with other socialists, have taken place in Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review. Why today small revolutionary organizations still persist in the outmoded practice of restricting their internal discussions to the chosen few belonging to the group and those who know where to look for such material baffles this writer. Do we not trust our allies in the movement and those we wish to recruit?

As one might expect the subjects covered in the bulletins vary from the mundane but important, finance for example, to questions concerning revolutionary strategy and discipline. The last named will not be discussed in any detail here as it is the opinion of this writer that small revolutionary organizations are not able to treat this question properly when the full cooperation of all parties concerned is not forthcoming. In such circumstances where serious offences against a person are alleged we cannot proceed but have no other recourse than to recommend that the matter be subject to the usual legal process and where a comrade is alleged to have offended that a court of honour be convened consisting of respected individuals who are not members of the organization in question. Neither recourse can be considered satisfactory but are there any outcomes that would be satisfactory to all concerned?

The main areas covered in the discussions were internal democracy and related to that organizational functioning, work among and aimed at the recruitment of oppressed groups and the groups perspectives. While many individual documents and statements were published the discussion centered around positional documents produced by four Platforms representing four very different ideas of the way forward for the organization. These Platforms being the outgoing Steering Committee Minority, the Steering Committee Majority, the Independence and Struggle Platform and finally the Socialist Tide, Revolutionary Current Platform. For the first time in the history of the ISO all leading committees were to be elected on the basis of individual candidacies not on the basis of a recommended list. This change a result of the previous Convention would result in an internal revolution. None of the contending platforms would over more than a partial list of candidates and a number of other members stood as individuals.

The first of the Platforms, the SC Minority, represented the historic leadership of the ISO around Ahmed Shawki, Sharon Smith and a small number of their closest associates stood on the basis of a deepening of the campus orientation and other than producing or rather republishing a number of documents from the ISO’s founding presented no new arguments in favour of its perspectives. Despite their pre-eminent place in the group’s history not one person on its list was elected. The second platform, the SC Majority, was also formed by long standing leading members of the ISO who until only months before had been closely associated with Shawki and Smith. Like many converts to a cause they had once opposed they argued forcibly for a greater democratization of the ISO and for a more interventionist stance in social movements and the unions. It is interesting that one of their leading figures, Todd Chretien, also argued for support for independent socialist candidates in elections.

Based more on experienced cadre at branch and district levels the Independence and Struggle Platform also and more convincingly argued for a greater democratization of the ISO, and a more interventionist stance. It was the core of the I&S Platform that had been pressing, with increasing support from much of the group’s members, for such a change of regime and perspective for some years. The fourth platform, Socialist Tide Revolutionary Current, made similar arguments but also added arguments for using the ballot line of the Democratic Party in elections. This last position cannot be interpreted as anything other than a timid move towards open support for Bernie Sanders run for the Democratic nomination for President and a move towards membership of the Democratic Socialists of America the fake socialist auxiliary to the Democratic Party. It is indicative of the confusion in the ISO that a proposal from Socialist Tide for a Special Convention to decide the groups attitude towards Sanders and the Democrats was passed.

The result of the election for the senior committees was that the SC Minority was left without even a single supporter on those bodies and its leadership of the ISO since 1984 ended. The SC Majority and the I&S Platforms emerged with roughly 40% of seats with the rest split between Socialist Tide and a number of independents. A workable majority leadership should have been able to coalesce around the shared aims of a more democratic regime and a more interventionist stance towards the movements. To speculate for a moment it is also more than possible that debate around the projected Special Convention that was planned for September 2019 would also have won for the group a far greater degree of clarity as to the position to be adopted towards bourgeois political formations such as the Democratic Party. That this might have led to the loss of a numer of cadre although regrettable would have been a price well worth paying. As to whether such clarity could have been extended to smaller bourgeois formations, as for example the Green Party, or to the Janus like role played by the DSA is to be doubted given the vacillating position of some long-standing leaders of the ISO as for example Todd Chretien.

The Revolutionary Suicide of the ISO.

Whatever might have happened we cannot know because within a few weeks of the Convention it was sunk by the weight of its own weaknesses. It is important to understand that after the Convention the small apparat of the ISO continued to work as if nothing significant had taken place and given the continuity of leading figures in a certain sense nothing of importance had occurred. Socialist Worker continued to appear, ISO Notes an internal newsletter was distributed as usual and some of the branches met to conduct business. Others, mainly those based on campuses, were not to meet again until the ISO had dissolved. On the surface everything appeared to be normal as ISO members and members of the radical public waited for reports of the Convention to appear.

Then in early March a document was presented to the incoming leadership that came to be known as the Former Member document. The FM document detailed, from the point of view of a former member of the ISO National Disciplinary Committee, how an investigation into an alleged rape years earlier had gone terribly wrong due to the direct intervention of members of the Steering Committee. Full details of the case cannot be given here as it is the contention of this writer that it was not the undoubted miscarriage of justice that took place that destroyed the ISO but rather the arbitrary and bureaucratic practices of the leadership that led to its indecently swift collapse. Suffice it then to say that as a result of their alleged involvement in the case Ahmed Shawki and Sharon Smith were suspended from membership of the ISO. The alleged perpetrator, a member of the I&S Platform, was summarily expelled and a close friend of his, both newly elected to leading committees, was suspended as were other senior figures including Joel Geier a nominee of the SC Majority but also known to be a backer of the I&S Platform.

Such a dramatic blow to the incoming leading committees could not but have serious repercussions but it is doubtful that had there been an established or determined leadership in place that the organization needed to collapse at this point. Nonetheless the internal distribution of the FM Letter and its call for the dissolution of the ISO found an echo among the shocked members of the group. Most strikingly the call in the FM Letter to dissolve the ISO was taken up by many comrades who now resigned from the organization. As events began to unfold further revelations deepened the sense of moral outrage that many rightly held leading to a spiralling of despair and disillusion. On the basis of personal communications I would go as far as to say that some comrades experienced clinical shock, others were panicked by events and all of the active members were thrown into a state of despair.

As the leading committees discussed the situation they found that events dictated that yet more of their number be suspended from their roles as when Alan Maass and Joel Geier came into conflict over conflicting interpretations of the role of the latter in the cover up of the scandal discussed in the FM Letter. Once that dispute came to light both Maass and Geier were suspended the latter resigning from the ISO soon after. A letter received from a long time organiser detailing her affair with Shawki and alleging abuse by him further damaged the new leadership as younger members like Akua Ofori resigned taking the time on the way out to raise the call that the ISO dissolve. One of the earliest resignations being that of Keeanga Yamahatta-Taylor who resigned from the SC and the ISO. A collective resignation letter was drawn up by members of the Socialist Tide Platform and other comrades, including Tithi Bhattacharya, who shared their liquidationist positions. A small number of branches disaffiliated with Berkeley dissolving itself. Meanwhile a small grouping around Ahmed Shawki also resigned their membership further increasing the sense of crisis that now swept through the organization.

So sudden was the momentum of the crisis that on 3/13/19 a letter from the SC to the ISO membership was discussing the next steps for the organization in the light of the FM Letter.  A week later, 3/22/19 to be precise, the surviving members of both the SC and NC again wrote to the members this time to notify them of a national call on which a number of propositions were to be tabled for discussion preparatory to a vote. Ominously dissolution, in a number of forms full and partial, was suggested as an option. It is important to realise that at this point, despite the loss of a number of members of the SC and NC as well as members of the groups apparatus, that the organization was continuing to function except where branches had disaffiliated and even they were still holding meetings! Despite the depth of the crisis which was sucking all life out of the organizations new leadership the smaller branches and twigs were less affected with the crisis most intensely felt in the larger districts such as Chicago, New York and the Bay Area. It was of course in these areas that the arbitrary hand of the old leadership had been felt most leading to recriminations and bitterness as members of the new leadership, especially those affiliated with the SC Majority, were implicated in the heavy handed leadership style of the old regime.

The national call took place as scheduled and a number of propositions were voted on subsequent to it. Even before the call took place a call to dissolve the ISO and form a new revolutionary organization based on an unspecified new model of organising had been circulated winning over one hundred signatures. Whether the drafters of the propositions that were to be adopted realized it at the time there was a great deal of ambiguity even when all the propositions were considered as a whole. The discussion revealed that the surviving leadership was completely disunited with many members in shock expressing doubts about any of the options presented to them. At the same time differences of emphasis were revealed in the comments of the comrades speaking on the call. One comrade commented that not all of the branches had been able to meet since the Convention despite which the members were asked to vote without face to face meetings as is the democratic tradition of the revolutionary movement. In another breach of tradition comrades who had resigned from the organization, thereby expressing a lack of confidence in the politics and remaining members, were to be re-enfranchised!

The result was a forgone conclusion with an overwhelming decision to dissolve the organization, liquidate its assets and construct a new revolutionary socialist organization on a new organizational model. Of the 474 current and past members who voted 245 voted to construct a new organization with 63 voting to table major organizational decisions until Socialism 19 in July. In the short period allotted to winding up the ISO the Crisis Leadership Team, the survivors of the wave of resignations of the elected leadership bodies, carried out its mandate to dissolve the organization and then disbanded itself. As far as this writer is aware no actions were taken and no discussions took place concerning the decision to found a new revolutionary socialist organization on the basis of a new model. One cannot but ask why it did not fulfil this particular part of its mandate?

Conclusions.

The attempt of the ISO to commit revolutionary suicide failed, as it was proclaimed but not attempted, with the upshot that its constituent parts are now little more than soldiers from dismal defeated army wandering the battlefield looking for something living to follow. Former officers wonder where their erstwhile followers are to be found and the most dynamic elements are those that have abandoned the social revolutionary project in a quest to win an audience or become integrated into the Berniecrat swamp that is the DSA. Meanwhile on the fringes of the battlefield lurk carrion crows looking to pick up those looking for a comfortable home safe from the contradictions between a living movement and dry arid dogma. As we know a corpse cannot be reanimated, except as a mindless zombie, but new struggles are forced on the working class and other oppressed groups as capitalism twists into ever more parasitic arbitrary forms under pressure of a worsening economic situation. The question then is how are the remnants of the ISO to construct a new organisation to fight for socialism and on what political basis can this struggle take place?

Zinovievite and libertarian digressions.

The original model for the ISO, both organizationally and politically, although the former should always be regarded as an expression of the latter, was as is well known the SWP. Scaled down from the model provided by the SWP it more or less fit the ISO during a period of retreat when the group was small and the level of open class struggle was low. As a result of the modest growth of the group in the 1990s its drawbacks began to negatively impact the functioning of the group and became an impediment to recruitment and retention of members. From 2008 onwards with the leadership becoming increasingly conservative and bureaucratised the arbitrariness of decision making and functioning was the key cause for sections of the membership to become oppositional seeking ways to reform the group and possibly remove the leadership. As forms of organization have not been unique to the SWP and ISO however and can be easily, all too easily, observed across a range of Trotskyist groups with sometimes very different politics to those of the IS tradition. Historically this form of bureaucratically centralized politically arbitrary organization has been dubbed Zinovievite[37] as it has similarities with the forms adopted by the mass Communist Parties in the first phase of the degeneration of the Communist International under the aegis of Zinoviev. The argument that this form of organization is either an inheritance from the SWP or a variant of the Zinovievite model must be rejected as it can be observed in a series of revolutionary groups which lack any roots in the Fourth Internationalist movement of Leon Trotsky. It is only as a result of the dissolution of almost all of the soft Maoist groups of the early 1970s and the minuscule size of the Left Communist organizations that gives rise to the belief that bureaucratic centralism is a form unique to organizations derived from the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky.

Rightly many revolutionaries including many from the IS tradition have in recent years jettisoned the bureaucratic centralist model common to the SWP and ISO preferring to substitute looser study circles and editorial collectives. Such forms of organization have great advantages for participants in that they remove the burden of having to follow a democratically agreed upon course of action and leave decision making to the individual militant. As such they have a very limited capacity for collective functioning especially with regard to intervening in struggles and providing newly recruited revolutionary socialists with a basic education in Marxism. Such loose organizational forms are also easily assimilable to mass reformist organizations and academia where a veritable archipelago of journals and conferences allow prominent intellectuals to become stars without the burdensome responsibilities incumbent on elected leaders of revolutionary socialist organizations. Working class leaders, especially emerging leaders at a rank and file level, are in this way placed at a disadvantage denied equal status with those who already possess a developed knowledge of Marxism, often gained during a period of membership in one of the disdained sects, effectively ensuring that younger workers are excluded from leadership for lack of the proper qualifications. In a period characterised by increasing levels of social and class struggles such loose forms of organization can only inhibit the growth of a revolutionary communist current and elevate professional ideologues over workers.

If the choice is between bureaucratic centralism or a looser grouping the social revolutionary project might well not have a future. Or at best a future that is limited to the campuses drawing in only those rare workers who have developed a revolutionary consciousness apart from the struggles of the mass of workers. Such a future would condemn those who advocate it to a political life permanently on the margin with no possibility of connecting to wider and larger layers. Another way in which such sects survive is as a grouping of advisors to forces more powerful as is the case with many leftist sects which function in practice as a cross between a think tank[38], albeit one with grand pretensions, and a band of mercenaries dedicated to a war lord lacking principles but replete with pleasing rhetoric[39], such groups cannot thrive. This adaptation is usually accompanied by the sect becoming an organic part of a reformist party or where such parties do not exist integrating their own organisation into the body of a left nationalist or populist party.[40] Such adaptations have been common in countries as diverse as Argentina, South Africa and Pakistan and have always led to the defeat of those who utilise such tactics. Something similar can be observed in those countries where Trotskyist sects have attempted to become part of broad left parties to the left of the traditional reformist party of any given country.

A Revolutionary Program is the Keel of the Revolutionary Organisation.

The key to the construction of a revolutionary socialist party must then be a consistent orientation on the working class given our understanding that it is the self-emancipation of that class which can achieve socialism. Any strategy or tactical turn must place such an orientation at its centre even if the revolutionary organisation consists of no more than a handful of comrades. Such an orientation to be effective must be expressed in the form of a transitional program that summarises more expansive and detailed theoretical explorations of bourgeois society and the struggle of the classes within it. At all times it must be kept in mind that such a program is not a substitute for the historic program of the Communist Party.

In short a transitional program, which is not the program of the party but rather a time limited supplement to our program, can act as the backbone around which the body of a revolutionary organisation can be grown. Within its pages there must be a short explanation as to the revolutionary nature of the imperialist epoch, our understanding of the period and the basic long term perspectives that flow from this understanding. It follows that a transitional program would then describe the balance of class forces and draw up in outline form the strategic aims of the workers movement and the tactics required to achieve those aims. Such a program would then be an action program to be placed before the class and other oppressed groups.

A transitional program also provides a reference point for party members and their periphery to hold the party leadership to account. Alongside a revolutionary organizations constitution and rules, which exist in part to limit the rights of the leadership not in order to provide them with a cudgel with which to bludgeon factional enemies, such a program can enable the party to take stock of its losses and gains over a given period of time and assess whether or not the party is functioning in a healthy manner. By healthy we mean is the party democratic and making its best efforts to orientate on the more politically advanced layers of the working class and oppressed. As a constant reference point for militants the program also removes the false alternatives posed by many of either a broad party that contains a number of tendencies and is as a result politically heterogenous or an organization that is built on a single tendency by allowing the utmost internal democracy for all comrades and tendencies that accept the program of the party as binding on them.

In a sense this is the essence of a Leninism that is based not on the forms of a long passed moment in history but is rooted in the needs of working people today. A transitional program and the maximum of internal democracy that does not inhibit the activity of the organization in the class struggle. Exactly what such an organization might look like tomorrow we cannot know today as it must be built in the struggles of tomorrow. But we do know that an organization with the maximum of internal democracy will be one that allows the formation of tendencies and factions, of caucuses, of specialist affinity groups, and which demands the formation of specialized committees at every level above that of the branch that direct the work of party militants in a variety of areas. A party if not of leaders but of those socialist militants who aspire to lead the class from within its ranks not from above.

An Open Party is needed.

In the last few years a new radicalization has developed across most of the developed countries. Generally, as a consequence of the retreat of working class consciousness and as a result of that the marked decline of working class organization, this new radialization has been ideologically shallow if widespread. In the USA this radicalization is to some considerable degree canalized within the Democratic Socialists of America and the related electoral campaigns centered on the personalities of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and a small number of local electoral campaigns. Although still small by historic standards this movement can be fairly said to represent the consolidation of a reformist socialist tendency in the bowels of the Democratic Party a development most unexpected in light of the death of so many insurgent movements at the hands of that party. It is also related to a significant if small rise in the level of strike activity generated from the workplaces especially the ongoing teachers revolt. All of which makes the DSA a very attractive bolt hole for long isolated socialist veterans and refugees from the implosion of the ISO.

The growth of the DSA has proven to be very attractive to a number of small isolated socialist tendencies in the USA most prominently Socialist Alternative currently the American franchise of the Committee for a Workers International. Similarly the DSA was more and more an attractive prospect for the right wing of the ISO prior to the collapse of the group. Even before the collapse a small number of leading ISO members had resigned in order to militate within the larger organization and have since been followed by a layer of the group that goes far beyond the old right wing. It can be predicted with absolute certainty that none of the tendencies currently lining up with the DSA will win anybody to revolutionary socialism as a result of their liquidation into class collaborationist reformism regardless of their formal politics and any number of articles published in Jacobin.

The comrades now making a home in the DSA have lost confidence in revolutionary socialism becoming an attractive force within the working class as a result of the defeat visited on them and some have also overestimated the possibility of the DSA breaking with the Democratic Party in order to form a new socialist party. We can also project a deepening and development of the current radicalisation bringing new layers into play and providing a new audience for revolutionary socialist politics as a result of the impact of the unpredictable economic position of capitalism. In such circumstances an open revolutionary socialist organization could find a new audience that would substantially enlarge the weight of our tendency in the working class. But this can only be done if comrades begin the painful process of rebuilding an open organization that is based on the principle of working class independence from all wings of the bourgeoisie especially the Democratic Partgy.

Baby Steps.

It is the belief of this writer that the comrades in the USA must begin the process of constructing a revolutionary socialist organization immediately. The aim must be the foundation of a national individual membership organization within a set period of time be it a year or a lesser period. That organization must be constructed not on the basis of a series of federated discussion groups lacking a common platform and discipline but on the acceptance by all of a political statement in lieu of a more developed program. The comrades in those still functioning local collectives that were once ISO branches and the many scattered former members, especially those in NYC, Chicago and the Bay Area, must begin a discussion as to what must be done immediately.

It is not the place of this writer to suggest what must be done concretely but it would be remiss no to point out that the IS tradition, considered in the loosest sense, developed a project that came far closer than any other Marxist current to developing a revolutionary understanding of contemporary class society in the post 1945 world than any of its many rivals. To a considerable degree the problems that caused its implosion and attempted revolutionary suicide are also to be found in the ranks of the so called orthodox Trotskyists often with additional problems unique to them. That said there are many fine revolutionaries to be found in such organizations some of whom might find their way into a new organization if the will is to be found for such an eventuality on both sides. It would then be foolish of this writer to make concrete suggestions as to a course of action of which he can be no more than a concerned and sympathetic observer from afar but comrades at very least call a meeting, set up a discussion bulletin, get some money together for a war chest, but whatever you do start the process now.

Neprimerimye.

96/07/19