I’m gonna keep this short because everyone is way too lengthy these days.

I was an ISO member for 5 and a half years — for you greenhorns, that’s the International Socialist Organization. I joined as my Leninist mentor/professor slowly opened my eyes to the idea that maybe the final form of my anarcho-communist politics was something like the workers’ councils of the 1917 Russian revolution. I hadn’t even read Marx for fear that it would turn me into an evil dictator, and well — point taken, but let’s not blame Marxism for that, it was always in me.

It’s astounding to me that the ISO basically just destroyed itself over identity politics. Make no mistake, that’s what it did. When I joined (2007), the ISO did an extremely good job of centering the capitalism/socialism conflict as the keystone of all other struggles, which other struggles could nonetheless contribute to. They certainly were never class reductionist, but they centered class once upon a time. But by now, for example, if you look at any branch news feed, most of their news feed content is about identity. I felt their politics beginning to shift this way in the 2011-2013 time period, but I canceled my dues over perceiving them as a top-down dictatorial group with no serious strategy to engage electoral politics.

Basically socialist groups all over the spectrum have been succumbing one by one to identity politics. This trend started in 2011, when Occupy got flooded with liberals, and in 2016, when the Democrats used hyper-identitarianism both to repress Bernie and to attack Trump. As we’ve seen a million times (Trump, Kavanaugh, Biden, Bill Clinton), these attacks fail even when they’re not pure opportunist slander by corporate Democrats or various ultraleft cult-builders. These attacks fail even when they’re probably true accusations, precisely for the Marxist reason that culture reflects material power relations more than it affects it. I’m still working on the Class Reductionist Manifesto, so more on that later.

The problem is that the groups which resist identity politics are only able to resist it due to their anti-democratic natures. It’s precisely the repressive nature of Leninism which has allowed groups to maintain a class-first orientation despite the endless floods of hyperventilating liberals under Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is why, I suspect, the rather party-line-oriented IMT has kept its class politics, and the Marcyite-Stalinist PSL has kept its class politics as well. DSA and Socialist Alternative have been taken over by identity politics precisely because they are fairly open and democratic groups, with Solidarity going that way ages ago, whereas the ISO was able to resist the wave because it’s one of the most, ironically, Stalinist of the Third Camp groups.

This is a problem. We made mistakes somewhere along the way. There is a dual problem.

Firstly, there HAS been an interpretation of Leninism as a party-line model. Groups practicing this will say “we don’t expect everyone to agree with everything” but in practice, they absolutely do. They conflate political speech with political action, demanding all their members make the same political speech. This aspect of modern “Leninism,” which is not even really an accurate interpretation of the Leninism of 1917, has to be abolished completely. No more party-line Leninism!

This is the key to the “Stalinists of the Third Camp” analysis. So in its ideology, the ISO was anti-Stalinist, but in its organizational practice, it had all the same cult dynamics as a Stalinist government. Why? Because it was working off a “Leninism” that had already been corrupted by the degeneration of the USSR during the Russian Civil War. Prior Leninism had been more democratic.

Secondly, there is an actual need to maintain a certain minimal ideology within the anticapitalist Left. Basically this is the ideology that class is the central struggle. But because the only people capable of enforcing this were the top-down apparatchiks, this idea got discredited along with the old sect boss regimes.

Obviously we need a group that can balance keeping class as its primary orientation while not being a party-line cult. This takes a combination of boundary-policing and openness, a balance.

So yeah, of course all of this was triggered by abuse accusations. But socialist groups kind of need to get real that any and all political groups will continuously be facing abuse accusations, and they cannot function if they make this something they are unable to face honestly and function throughout. Life under capitalism is abuse, it’s an entire culture of abuse. This isn’t to minimize the abuse, but to say we have to fight it intelligently, strategically, at the systemic level, where we have the most leverage. Really, the way to stop the most abuse would be to nationalize the largest companies, key industries, and private wealth under democratic workers’ management.

As far as my emotions around this, it’s complex. I was basically a victim of ISO gaslighting as much as everyone else, but I was probably also a perpetrator of it as well. That being said, the ISO had huge upsides to its existence. The ISO was around before DSA got taken over by more hard-left, Jacobin-esque forces than its pure Democratic-capitulatory old guard. They had a lot of damn good theory on economics and geopolitics. It’s not like those things aren’t needed to fix everything.

And they were important because they introduced the Third Camp socialist tradition to a large audience, putting forth the idea that we can do better than the simplistic capitalism-versus-Stalinism dichotomy, and seek better forms of radical democratic socialism.

Third Camp politics is important to keep asserting and maintaining in this landscape where the only other Third Camp group, the DSA, has extraordinarily volatile internal politics and it could abandon long-held principles at any moment.

So while the ISO had its upsides, and the abuse definitely precipitated the crisis, the ISO’s real problem was fundamental: there is a huge contradiction in both the theory and practice of “Cliffism.” It combines things that aren’t supposed to be combined. The Third Camp was supposed to be anti-dictatorship, but the group functioned like the dictatorships it critiqued in practice.

Finally, we all know that this move is essentially a “rebrand.” The ISO is going to continue. It’s just going to rename itself, keep its same nonprofit institutions (Haymarket Books, CERSC), and keep chugging along after giving itself a huge self-flagellation, and then it will be another empty identitarian group of radlibs posing as anticapitalists.

The end.

PS: Wait! It’s not the end! Maybe people should start a class-centric non-Stalinist anticapitalist group.