Thursday, June 28, 2007

Atlanta



I'm now in Atlanta, in the middle of the second day of the US Social Forum, and on the first leg of a trip which will also include Marxism 2007 in London and some time in Beirut around the end of July and the beginning of August.

So far things are looking pretty good here at the the Social Forum. A very large portion of the attendees seem to be scruffy-looking college types such as myself, but there are also a number of big delegations from workers' centers in the south and southwest, and although each is accompanied by a cluster of hangers-on that still adds up to a lot of working folks, in addition to Jobs with Justice and a few decent union delegations.

There are some surprising non-appearances, which bizarrely left Solidarity (with 3 or 4 people and a leaflet) competing with Workers' World for Most Visible Socialist Group at the opening march.

The ISO presence is quite pathetic. There seem to be only 6-8 members here, and they are wierdly hesitant about who they are. They have a big Haymarket Books table (with a pile of copies of Blue Grit), they are leafletting for meetings as CERSCThe two CERSC panels have five ISO members out of eight speakers, but only one is vaguely identified as such., and even Ashley Smith (who has been a full-time ISO organizer for I don't know how long) introduces himself as being on the editorial board of the ISR. It almost seems as though the ISO is trying to copy Freedom Road.

Hopefully that will be the last thing I'll have to say on that topic. I went to a fascinating workshop this morning on minority unionism, something I hope I'll have a chance to come back to later.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

"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.

Friday, June 8, 2007

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.