"We're seeing the rebirth of liberalism, and that's a great thing"

So said Sharon Smith, national organizer of the ISO, commenting on a speech by Laura Flanders. This was one of a number of strange notes struck during Socialism 2007, the ISO's annual public conference, which Smith and others on the ISO's Steering Committee used to roll out their new "agree to disagree" perspective.

The gist of the new line is that, since the new congress was sworn in this year, enormous numbers of democrats have started down a road of disappointments that will eventually make them available as recruits to the revolutionary socialist movement, but only - and this is the key - if there is a 'revolutionary' organization out there that "goes through the experience with them" (a phrase I have been hearing quite frequently from the ISO of late) and doesn't alienate them by carping too much (hence "agree to disagree").

There is a lot here that is reasonable, true, and not particularly novel. It's the United Front, or at least the ISO's traditional take on it: we want to stop the war, rank and file democrats (mostly) want to stop the war, the leaders of the Democratic Party don't; so we work with some democrats to try to do something about the war, and show (as well as tell) them that we're on their side and the politicians aren't.

The thing is, this is more or less how the ISO has operated since time immemorial. This seems to have confused at least a few comrades, who are scratching their heads and trying to figure out whether anything new is actually going on. This is exacerbated by some of the problems with the way the ISO operates, which I've talked about before. This new perspective is being sprung on the organization in the middle of the year: on paper the convention (usually held in January) is supposed to discuss and decide on where the organization is going, but apparently it didn't occur to anybody six months ago that this might happen, and it's too urgent to wait another six months. In principle the ISO's national committee is supposed to deal with this sort of situation, but about two years ago it shifted from a representative body that met in person in Chicago to a more loss appointed body that only meets via conference call. The result is much more of an announcement of a new policy than a discussion. This is not to say that the old national committee would have actually criticized the proposal like this, but if there had been a discussion in the end people might actually have ended up understanding the decision added been made.

That said, there is something new here although I don't think it's nearly as deep as Sharon et. al. seem to believe.

One superficial (and still uncertain) part is that it's unlikely that the ISO will support any third party candidates in 2008. In a way this is not such a bad thing; I have thought for while that most of what the ISO has done in green campaigns, with the partial exception of Nader 2000, has been pointless (particularly in California in 2006) and that some kind of reassessment is needed (ditto). But it seems to me that by claiming that we're in some sort of new period the ISO is just going to short circuit any kind of serious thinking about what they have and haven't accomplished, and probably make a lot of unnecessary mistakes the next time around.

Another aspect is that it may mean a different tack in talking to people. To be sure socially awkward comrades such like myself have been known to pursue arguments in a less than endearing way, but this is again nothing to do with any new political climate.

The important part is a bit more subtle. It's about this: what does it mean to "go through the experience" with ordinary democrats? In what I heard at the conference, as well as the conversations I've had with ISO members recently, there seem to be two main elements: occupying congressmembers' offices, and downplaying criticism of Democrats qua Democrats.

The first part of the idea is that flashy actions pushing democratic politicians will attract disaffected democrats (not only them, but it should have a particular appeal for them); and in the course of it they will "learn through struggle" that democratic politicians aren't on their side. Then who would they turn to except the amiable Marxists who have just "gone through the experience" with them?

Hence the second part. There was a great deal of making nice at the conference. I began this post with some words spoken in response to a talk by Laura Flanders, an Air America personality and an outspoken advocate of, as the subtitle of her book puts it, "True Democrats Tak[ing] Back Politics". Judging from that talk (the source of virtually all I know about her) Flanders is a sincere and dedicated leftist who has worked very hard to find a lot of like-minded people all around the country. She also has some very good things to say, for example about regional prejudice of the What's the Matter with Kansas? variety. In other words, she's certainly someone it makes sense for radicals to be in a dialog with, and at previous iterations of Socialism the response to her talk would probably have been fifteen people saying the same thing (Democratic Party = capitalists = bad) in slightly different ways; I've seen that sort of response even to people with much more innocuous things to say. Instead we had fifteen people, selected by SharonThe usual practice in ISO events of more than about 30 people is to use a 'speaker slip' system; attendees write their name and a summary of their intended remarks on a slip of paper, and the chair selects and calls on them.

At this year's Socialism most of the meetings had a Steering Committee member, regional organizer, or similar person vetting the slips., fawning over her; if I remember correctly, Sharon called Flanders an "inspiration to all women".

The problem with this new style is that it's not any more of a dialog than the old one, and I think that there is an underlying problem: the ISO has nothing of much interest to say, and "agreeing to disagree" won't help that. This is a difference from the ISO's experience in the early 90s, which I suspect is where the germ of the idea came from. This was the most important period of growth and recruitment in the ISO's short history, the time when it became what it is today. Among the key events which brought in the people who are now most of the organization's mid- and high-level cadres were Clinton's election and the profound disappointments of his first year in office. The difference is that the ISO had a great many distinctive and important things to say: about the USSR (still a very timely subject in 1993), about 'humanitarian' imperialism, and about the democrats; and from what I've heard from the people who joined the ISO then, it was no more shy about the last point than anything else.

This matters: if you voted for a democrat hoping that they'd get real about stopping the war, if you sat in in their office and they still hemmed and hawed, you could draw any number of conclusions; supposedly there was no commitment to withdraw so that the funding bill wouldn't be vetoed, so maybe that would be different with a Democratic president, even if they weren't particularly enthusiastic about it. Maybe the answer, as Laura Flanders seems to think, is basically to get more people like you in office. Even if you get along well with some Marxists you met at the sit-in, they don't seem to have much of an alternative, or maybe they don't seem to mind. Maybe you'll still do a few things with them while you're campaigning for Obama, Kucinich, or whoever, or maybe not.

Of course it's not enough to tell people they're wrong, and this made the way the ISO used to do things rather difficult. But it could be the beginning of something else: the antiwar movement could do great things in the next few years, but only if people who aren't satisfied with how it's gone so far get organized and come up with a plan, and start showing people that even though it will take a lot of hard work and preparation we do have a way to end the war. The ISO is perfectly right about the basics for it -- a well-integrated, democratic organization; political clarity; and an appeal to workers and soldiers. The problem is that they don't seem to take it seriously enough to develop those ideas into something viable and compelling, and instead run around in the hope that if they're in the right place at the right time people will fall into their lap.