What Infoshop doesn't get about the ISO (and what the ISO doesn't get about them)

I was having a conversation today about the decision to hold the next national Campus Antiwar Network conference in Madison, and of course the subject of whether the decision had been made ahead of time to hold it at Madison, with a strong ISO presence, rather that Rutgers, which since I left has not a single ISO member. This got me thinking that I've had plenty of time to reflect on the ISO, and that I ought to put some of my thoughts down and try to correct some misconceptions.

Most of the ISOologists out there tend to conceive of their subject as a sinister, disciplined, hierarchical cabal constantly maneuvering to seize control of any coalition or organization that catches its sights. This always struck me as a pretty laughable picture, and even as an embittered ex-comrade it still does.

The first thing that tends to be missed is how much a typical ISO branch actually has in common with the the anarchoid groups which form the main habitat of the people who write on Infoshop and IMC. Almost all decisions are made informally and in effect by consensus. This is particularly the case with membership. Branches never, in my experience, formally exclude anyone for political reasons; if someone is seen as a problem, the last resort is usually to shun them, which typically leads them to leave the organization in short order. As with more explicitly "structureless" groups, those involved develop conflict avoidance strategies, which usually means avoiding any departure from an unstated, but nonetheless universally understood, set of common opinions and assumptions.

The resulting conformist political culture extends very clearly to the national functioning of the organization, where anyone who has attended one of the ISO's public conferences will probably have observed it. The ISO's conventions show a similar homogeneity - I can only think of one measure, that on the California recall election a few years back, that passed or failed with less than 90% of the vote.

The upshot is that although there is sometimes excessive pressure on members who are not seen as taking the organization seriously enough (inside the ISO this is called 'moralism'), there is very little formal pressure to "toe the line"; instead, there is an informal but solidly entrenched culture of avoiding certain kinds of disputes, and those who don't adapt find little reason to stay in the organization.

On paper, ISO members ought to be very well prepared for all this. I wouldn't have figured much of this out without the books and articles I read while I was one; in particular Jo Freeman's article The Tyranny of Structurelessness is invaluable. The problem is that, having read these materials, most members simply see the fact that they are reading them (and are part of an entity that is publishing them) as proof that there is no problem. Every year after convention, I would hear our delegates say how exciting all of the debates there had been, in spite of the fact that hardly anyone ever seemed to disagree on anything.

This goes along with something that a number of otherwise less astute critics have picked up on, the vapid and platitudinous character of the ISO's publications, which also extends to most of the internal discussion in the organization. Although each convention goes through the annual ritual of discussing perspectives and the results are usually sensible and sometimes interesting, they rarely have much to do with deciding what the organization will actually do in the coming year. This is usually figured out on the fly.

One good example of this is Todd Chretien's recent run for U.S. Senate. There was never any real discussion in the ISO of what the organization might want to accomplish in the Green Party beyond picking up a few recruits. Todd's decision to run (at Peter Camejo's urging, apparently after Cindy Sheehan turned down a place on Camejo's slate) was not even announced to the ISO's membership until after it was reported in (a handful of) mainstream newspapers. He ran a tepid and undistinguished campaign, and eventually gave up without (as far as I know) even acknowledging that he had done so. The only real accomplishment was a sort of negative proof of some things the ISO had said about the 2000 election: even in a race where the result was known years in advance, with an electorate far to the left of the Democratic candidate, a Green candidate can do much worse than Nader.

Although there are many other things that could be said about it, this experience is a good example of how limited the ISO's ability to make and carry out political plans is: Chretien ran when the nomination was offered to him, did very little with the campaign, and then wandered off to do something else. In the nearly nine years that I've been closely acquainted with it, the ISO has not taken a single political initiative of any note that was not someone else's idea. Even the Campus Antiwar Network, a very pedestrian organizational initiative, was (as the story came to me) the idea of a few unaffiliated students in Washington DC, although of course it would never have gotten off the ground without the ISO's heavy participation.

This relates to the biggest misconception about the ISO, that it is constantly trying to take over other groups and impose its agenda on them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course everything ISO members say on this score is true - there is a residual prejudice against 'reds', there is a lot of malicious gossip, and they're not detached from reality enough to think that the kind of things people accuse them of would actually achieve anything. Most importantly, though, an actual rule-or-ruin operation of the kind that I've seen Workers' World or some anarchist grouplets carry out just takes more forethought, competence, and just plain gumption than 10 ISOs would have.

But that leaves a question which I think most ISOers haved in the back of their head somewhere: why do they hate us? The ISO, after all, has very, very few friends, even compared to ANSWER.

When you see over a thousand enthusiastic, mostly intelligent people extolling the virtues of strategy, centralized organization and serious political thinking, which seems to show a lot of organizational muscle (all sorts of publications, conferences, meetings, and so on) but keeps its own company and only admits to the most banal activities, you'd be forgiven for thinking that things don't add up. You might imagine that all those would-be revolutionaries are up to something dramatic, something that it would be exciting to expose and try to do something about. I think even a few people who spent some time in the ISO convince themselves of it to make the time they spent there seem more worthwhile. The truth is that there's nothing behind the curtain.

Unfortunately there has been a lot of unnecessary grief spread, particularly in the antiwar movement, by both uncomprehending (if not entirely incomprehensible) hostility towards the ISO and to a much lesser extent by its clumsy responses. Over the last few years the ISO has I think been groping with the problem, but a lack of understanding of the nature of it has meant that the responses have mostly been ineffective. I think the best example of this has been the Socialism conference. Over the last few years the ISO has tried to attract people from outside its immediate orbit but has been mainly unsuccessful, with attendance still growing at about the same rate as the previous several years. The tone of the talks have been adjusted, the posters have been redesigned, there are a few more outside speakers, but no one sees it as anything except an ISO conference - but now looking vaguely ashamed of it.