The following are very preliminary notes regarding the crisis in our former group, the International Socialist Organization. This short document does not claim infallibility. Nor does it examine in detail the specific events that led to this immediate crisis. That task is being taken up admirably by survivors, and current and former ISO members, who have exposed some of the worst abuses. Instead it begins to ask: why? Why did an organization with, on paper, a dedication to democracy and “socialism from below” go so wrong? What we describe, of course, are tendencies. There were always exceptions. There was always good work done alongside the bad. But, as demonstrated by this crisis, the “bad” tendencies won out in the end. Moreover, this document does not weigh in directly on the poverty of the old ISO SC’s understanding of socialist feminism and queer theory. Lastly, this will be an ongoing discussion and this is not the last nor the best word on the subject. We look forward to hearing from all our comrades as we move forward. – Saman S. and Adam T.

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Since 2013 our position has been, more or less, that the undemocratic aspects of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), its misunderstanding of liberalism, and its sectarian attitude to other leftists, were the main impediment to it playing a productive role as part of the left-wing of the new socialist movement. We believed that these problems were the result of a misunderstanding of Leninism and a misunderstanding of the political moment. That, were the ISO to break with these political mistakes, try to forge alliances with other revolutionary socialists, and realize that we needed to build a new socialist movement from the ground up, it could salvage the ideas of “socialism from below” and project them among a new generation of socialists.

But that moment is over – if it ever existed. There was a window in 2013-2014, after the implosion of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), to come clean. To say, we made mistakes, and open things up inside and outside the organization. Instead the old ISO Steering Committee (SC) doubled down. While publicly denouncing the SWP’s rape cover-up they engaged in their own. Instead of opening up the organization, the old leadership battened down the hatches.

It has now become clearer to us that these were not mere mistakes but the outcomes of a set of (mostly but not entirely unstated) politics. The failures of the ISO flowed from a particular kind of sect-leninism (that has little to do with Lenin or the Bolsheviks pre-1918). Therefore, in hindsight, it may have even been structurally and ideologically impossible for the old ISO leadership to make the turn made available to them in 2013 - 2014. To be sure individual personalities played their role, but it would stretch credulity to think that the SC Minority joined the socialist movement with the goal of being what they eventually became. Although there can be no doubt of their ultimate betrayals, something more “political” is at work.

At the core of the subjective problem, we think, was a mutually reinforcing dyad of “party theory” and the economics of the organization. Related to these two subjective problems, in the case of the ISO, was the objective reality that the group and its key organizers came of age politically from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, in a period of class defeat, the rise of neoliberalism, and when socialism was all but obliterated in working-class consciousness. This meant that any socialist organizing in the U.S., at that time, would necessarily be, mostly, a matter of propaganda and education, and be colored by the overall capitalist ethos of the period.

And thus the project of ISO (like that of others in the IS tendency) became one of survival. Survival, until a shift in balance of class forces, would make a return from the cocoon of the organizational safety, possible. This is ironically not that different from the failed attempt of the Soviet regime in the 1920s to hold out until a shift in balance of international class forces (revolution in Europe) would come to their aid.

The So-Called Theory of the Party