Taken From ISO Pre-Convention Discussion Bulletin #21

January 21, 2019

Response to the Platform of the SC Majority

Ahmed S., Elizabeth S., Lance S., Lee S., Paul D., Sharon S., SC

Dear comrades,

We write to express our concern at the issuance of a “Platform of the SC Majority,” submitted simultaneously to the
ISO Steering Committee and to the ISO pre-convention bulletin without time to discuss or debate it prior to
publication.

We are concerned that this Platform—which, for all intents and purposes, amounts to the announcement of a faction
in the ISO—was proclaimed without any attempt to invite the so-called SC “minority” (i.e., the signatories of this
letter) to review it, to comment on it, and possibly even to sign on to it. This is obviously the product of planning
and organization carried on outside the Steering Committee, with the express intent of excluding part of its duly
elected membership from the discussion. For a platform that asserts its commitment to champion democracy in the
ISO, this seems a curious way to practice it.

The ISO faces a number of political challenges today that can only benefit from a wide and open debate about our
future. We know that wide layers of members are rightfully concerned with the ISO’s culture and organizational
practices. We are wholly in favor of having those discussions about how the ISO functions and how it should change
its political culture. While there are crucial political issues that we must decide, we need to make room for comrades
who have criticisms of past practice in order to find solutions for the future. It is certainly true that the organizational
norms of the past do not fit the needs of newer generations of revolutionaries in the present day. Having survived the
bruising 1980s, we realize that our approach to arguments as an embattled and tiny minority on the left that helped
us to survive those difficult times is no longer part of radical political culture, and we must adjust to meet the needs
of our organization’s membership today.

We believe that the ISO should remake its political culture to meet the political demands facing revolutionary
socialists today, with a priority focus on debate and democratic decision-making by the membership. We further
support making organizational changes that the ISO membership deems necessary to facilitate this change. We do
ask, however, for comrades to also recall the many times over the years when we have readily admitted our own
mistakes. In 2010, for example, following a discussion at the fall NC, the SC considered suspending the print SW,
with SC members on both sides of that question. Had we carried through on eliminating the print SW, it would have
been one of our worst mistakes. However, over the course of the 2010 pre-convention discussion period—which
elicited a number of contributions on various sides of that question—the SC proposed to retain, and the convention
approved, a monthly print edition, to encourage the member distribution of the print paper to co-workers,
classmates, etc. (i.e. five-for-me) and to institute a more stable way for branches to order and to pay for the paper.
An organization-wide discussion, and a debate in the NC and SC, produced a better decision.

Unfortunately, however, the SC in recent months has not operated on the basis of the democratic culture that the
signers of the Majority Platform document claim to support. For example, the final draft of the “Retooling the ISO”
document, which proposed a number of major revisions to the way our organization operates, was sent to the SC on
December 15, was voted upon at the December 16 meeting, and published in the December 17 PCB. Those of us
who raised objections or requested more time for discussion before making such a major decision were brushed
aside. We believe the SC could have benefited from more in-depth discussions of the political period and what those
mean for our organization before endorsing the organizational changes in the “Retooling” document.

The Majority Platform signers’ labeling of an institutionalized “majority” and “minority” on the SC is based
predominantly on the votes on two documents—a perspectives document by Danny K., Ashley S. and Elizabeth T.,
and the organizational proposals put forward by Todd C. and Jen R. It should be further noted that three members of
the supposed “minority” were inactive for two and a half months, and another for a full month, due to a medical
emergency and could not take part in SC meetings or any votes taken during that time.

On other SC decisions, such as those involving the creation of a new legal status and financing system for the ISO,
the creation of a convention planning body, the approval of international guests, and many other issues over the last
four months, SC votes have been unanimous, or close to it. This is hardly an indication of hardened divisions on the
SC, or an intractable and obstructionist “minority”.

We are perplexed because the political positions advanced in the Majority Platform are neither new nor substantial
enough to draw a bright line between an SC majority and minority. Do the authors of the Platform truly think that
we oppose the ISO playing “an influential role in shaping this new generation’s politics,” that we aren’t for the ISO
recruiting “significantly,” or that we oppose developing a “new generation of cadre” or are not for prioritizing
“recruitment, training, and promotion of comrades of color, women, and LGBTQ people?” Moreover, we note that
the platform’s proposed areas of work for the ISO (i.e., “focusing on critical areas of resistance such as anti-racist
and immigrant rights, feminism, ecology, anti-fascism, and student struggles.”) are in line with those the SC has
proposed for the last several years. The terminology has shifted—from national fractions to working groups—but
there is more continuity than divergence in the actual work proposed.

In some cases, the Platform’s assertions are more rhetorical than real—unless what lies behind them is a conception
that is largely unstated. For example, since when has the ISO not been an organization committed to struggle?
Reframing the ISO as a “campaigning” or “struggle” organization doesn’t change that, except that it tends to
underplay other major contributions the ISO can make to the socialist left. Those contributions are our politics as
reflected in our Leninist conception of organization and our projection, most centrally carried out through Socialist
Worker. We don’t believe these contributions should be dismissed as “propagandist.”

Moreover, the ISO has a strong record of initiating and building local and national efforts throughout its history.
These include: anti-apartheid work in the 1980s, anti-war efforts from Central America to the Gulf Wars (including
the formation of the National Network of Campuses Against the War in 1990, and during the second Gulf War,
Campus Antiwar Network), Afghanistan and beyond; labor solidarity (e.g., the Staley workers’ solidarity committees
or support for the Charleston Five); anti-racist and anti-fascist work, such as the Midwest Network to Stop the Klan
and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and a consistent engagement with defense of abortion rights and
women’s rights throughout our 42-year history, LGBTQ, gender justice from the 1970s onward, and more. The ISO
played a central role in organizing the 2009 national demonstration for marriage equality in Washington, D.C. It has
always sought to engage with other activist forces on the left whenever possible. The ISO has never been a purely
“propagandist” group but has embraced every opportunity for struggle, often initiating it ourselves, even when we
were much smaller than we are today. As our organization grew in size and experience, we were able to play a more
sustained role in other areas of work, such as within trade unions, even as our work on the campuses provided an
avenue of growth. Meanwhile, other revolutionary groups declined or disappeared altogether.

However, we do believe that there is one important, though not insurmountable, difference between us and the SC
Majority Platform. It is the question of how the ISO Convention should address the question of endorsing and
supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose announcement of a 2020 presidential campaign will most likely take place
before or shortly after the 2019 ISO convention. Given this—and given a debate in the ISO about supporting
socialists on a Democratic “ballot line” stretching back at least to last summer—we think it is time for the
convention to exercise its collective authority to reaffirm the ISO’s position on the Democratic Party that it has held
since its inception in 1977.

Of course, like the SC majority platform, we defend “comrades’ rights to openly state their views” in favor of
supporting Democrats. We hope for a full debate. But we also look to a conclusive resolution that will provide ISO
members with a clear perspective on the Democrats and Bernie 2020. So far, no member of the ISO SC (either
“majority” or “minority”) has called for abandoning our traditional position of opposition to Democrats and
Republicans. However, we think that members of the Majority Platform who have treated this question as merely
one of socialist strategy are not addressing it as the serious challenge to the ISO that it represents. As comrade Keith
R’s contribution in PCB #18 “Against Blurred Lines and Reformist Tailism: ISO, DSA, and the Democratic Party”
explains, ISO support for candidates in the Democratic Party “logically spells the end of the ISO as a distinct
organization on the left.”

This brings us to another “elephant in the room.” Clearly, the DSA has grown to more than 50,000 while the ISO has
had a membership of 900 for more than a year. This has created a sense that “something is not working” in the ISO,
including in its leadership. Moreover, this is a time in which a generational change in the leadership of the ISO is
both necessary and desirable. Yet the SC has not genuinely grappled with these questions in the fullness that they
require. We have not discussed what the current “social democratic moment” means to us today. Nor have we had a
full discussion of the broader radicalization outside of the DSA. Nor have we discussed what it means to build an
organization committed to a Leninist conception of party-building today. Instead, the SC has substituted these big
picture questions with exhortations for greater engagement with the new socialist movement, and has confined our
discussion of “Leninist norms” to internal questions such as how we elect leadership bodies or report leadership
body votes. While these are crucial issues, the Leninist conception of party-building extends beyond these questions.
It should be noted that there was no majority/minority split on a motion to move away from a slate-based method of
nominating leadership bodies (a vote on this measure on December 16, 2018 passed 17-1). Yet, the Majority
Platform appears to us to be proposing itself as a slate for the SC to be elected at the 2019 Convention.

The September 2018 SC/NC/NBC meeting began to take steps toward a collective assessment and approach to these
questions. But the SC majority soon short-circuited this process with a series of major proposals, from a timetable of
three to five years to form a “new socialist party,” to lowering the requirements of ISO membership and frequency
of branch meetings, to calls for “national strategic initiatives.” Our concerns about these proposals were not due to
our alleged patent opposition to them but because major proposals such as these, in our opinion, required more
careful consideration, more debate and more evidence to support them before we were willing to endorse them as
our future organizational and political perspectives.

Nevertheless, the SC did not agree to postpone these votes. The SC took a consultative vote to support Todd’s
publication of the “Prospects for an Independent Socialist Party” proposal and voted to support Jen and Todd’s
“Retooling the ISO” documents immediately after being presented to the SC, i.e. before such careful consideration
and debate was allowed to take place. Do we favor efforts to investigate the possibility of forming a future broad
socialist party? Of course. But do we accept the timeframe of three to five years that Todd proposes for the
formation of such a party? Not without evidence as to why this is the timeframe—requiring such urgency—which
requires concrete evidence. Jen and Todd also claim in “Retooling the ISO,”

The future of the socialist left, the politics it adopts, and its capacity to become a force capable of
addressing the interlocking ecological, economic, social, imperial, and political crises may well be
determined in the next few years. The future of the ISO and our ability to infuse that left with the principle
of working-class self-emancipation, the strategic legacies of the Comintern and the revolutionary
movement, and the need for a mass, revolutionary party may also be determined in the next few years.

But Jen and Todd do not offer any evidence in their document to support these assertions, which underlie their
proposals. Surely, it is not unreasonable to ask for more evidence before we agree to their proposals. When we raised
concerns about these proposals, the SC majority dismissed them as reflecting a conservative and “stand pat” posture.
We differ with that assessment.

We believe that the political challenges facing the ISO cannot be addressed by purely organizational formulas. On
the question of a new socialist party: we note that Todd C.’s proposal was made by an individual, but now seems to
be part of the Majority Platform. The ISO from its inception has been in favor of a new revolutionary socialist party.
Those of us who criticized Todd C.’s proposal did so on the basis that it was insufficiently developed and too closely
tied to negotiations with existing groups on a fixed timeline.

In any case, the creation of a small new socialist party would not change the balance of the independent socialist left
in relation to the DSA. We must contend with the difficulties inherent in being a revolutionary Marxist element
amidst a rapid growth of social democracy, in which the DSA has grown to be more than 50 times the size of the
ISO. We must welcome and engage with the new social democracy and collaborate with its active elements to build
the fighting capacity of the entire socialist left in the labor and social movements. This united front method has, and
will continue to have, an electoral dimension in working to support socialist candidates independent of the
Democratic Party.

Engagement with the DSA and those it influences so far has proved to be often quite fruitful on a local level across
our branches, but is also a highly uneven process in terms of building the struggle. Nevertheless, we are still in the
early stages of this collaborative process and should not draw premature conclusions about the outcome over the
longer term. Complicating this work is the need to maintain that relationship even when we part company with DSA
on support for Democratic Party candidates. On that score, however, we can draw upon the ISO’s experience as far
back as the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of the 1980s and as recently as the Sanders campaign of 2016.
Since the 2000 Nader campaign, the ISO has also accumulated experience in building electoral efforts independent
of the Democratic Party. We solidarize in struggle and work alongside DSA comrades and others on the left while
making the arguments, both theoretical and practical, for independent, revolutionary socialist organization.

Unfortunately, the “Platform of the SC Majority” defers the question of how the ISO should relate to an expected
Bernie Sanders presidential campaign—an immediate focus of the U.S. left right now—to sometime in the future.
Instead, the Platform aims to distinguish itself from an “SC minority” that the majority has created through its own
precipitous, exclusionary, and factional methods.

This is not only a poor substitute for revolutionary leadership in the ISO. It is deleterious to the democratic culture
that the platform claims to uphold. For our part, we will continue to argue our views on the issues as they develop,
without prejudging any on the basis of “majority” or “minority” grounds. Unfortunately, it appears that the signers
of the “Platform,” in their effort to unnecessarily polarize the situation, are intent on doing the opposite.

We encourage comrades who have questions or want to discuss these issues further to contact any of the signers of
this statement.

Comradely,

Ahmed S. [redacted], Elizabeth S. [redacted], Lance S. [redacted], Lee S. [redacted], Paul D. [redacted],
Sharon S. [redacted]