I'll post the three notes but not the comments on them (one has like 200 comments). In order of appearance:
I was expelled from the ISO for oppositional activity
Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 11:27am
After nearly seven years of dedicated work as an ISO member I was summarily expelled about a month ago. The tensions had been building for well over a year, but I was still surprised by the response, as all tensions were around political (mostly tactical) disagreements that I believed to be well within the confines of democratic centralism. A year and a half ago myself and one other comrade voluntarily left the branch committee because of ongoing disagreements with other local leaders. Our intention was to focus on doing the work and concede the running of the branch to others, but the disagreements continued. Recently we began to clearly articulate an alternative perspective for our branch's work. 8 comrades in the branch contributed to a document that outlined how our branch could be more effectively relating to the broad left in DC. The document also articulated a criticism of dogmatic, rigid tendencies in the ISO and attempted to explain the origins of this rigidity.
Shortly after the publishing of this document a member of the ISO steering committee arrived in DC and kicked out me and one other comrade. The reasons were either vague or false (in different cases), but it was clearly a response to us openly and democratically organizing an opposition. Since our expulsion, 7 other members of the branch (and counting) have resigned in solidarity. We are now an independent group of socialists operating in the DC area. I feel many things about this experience, sadness, betrayal, but more than anything, I think I feel relieved that the whole ugly experience is over. Maybe liberation can be handed down from above (lol). I am still committed as firmly as ever to the theory that the self emancipation of the working class is the path to a better world. I also am convinced that the ISO has distortions in its practice that will prevent it from playing its intended role. I believed that these distortions could be corrected by internal debate and struggle, but the degeneration has apparently set in quite deeply. Below is an excerpt from our document in which we attempt to apply a dialectical analysis to the historical experience of the ISO with the intention of explaining the distortions.
I am appealing my expulsion as a matter of principle. I was never given any warning that my activities (which were open) of organizing an opposition could lead to expulsion. I was also never warned that any other non political activity I was supposedly involved in could lead to expulsion either. I know that a number of other people have been expelled from the ISO in other cities, it seems the leadership is tightening their grip and purging the organization of impurities. This is very sad as it seems that the objective conditions for socialist action are ripening. The ISO is well positioned to lead in some areas, while they are simultaneously withdrawing into more and more sectarian behavior. The process will be mixed and uneven, but it seems that the trend is clearly towards sectarianism. This saddens me as I gained so much from my membership in this group and had such high hopes for its potential, but the struggle continues.
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Historical Context of Our Method of Organizing
The past 30 years have been a very bad time for the left and the working class in this country. The far left groups that came out of the 60's and 70's with momentum all withered, splintered, or evaporated during the 1980's. The ISO, an upstart from 1977 scoffed at by many other revolutionaries at the time, proved the most resilient through the lean political years, more able to flexibly apply Marxism than any other group. In the 90's and 2000's the objective conditions for building revolutionary organization (so absent in the 1980's) improved somewhat and the ISO grew accordingly. The ISO is now the largest and most exciting revolutionary group in the US and the credit for this fact can be laid squarely at the feet of the committed longtime leaders of our group. What these comrades accomplished by carrying the torch of revolutionary politics through the dark years of Reaganism is an impressive and likely historically significant achievement.
Yet, these adverse objective conditions in which the ISO evolved its internal culture and organizational habits have left their mark. To continue to build a revolutionary organization in conditions so hostile and alien to this project required a certain amount of rigidity. To come through a period like that without some entrenchment of leadership would have been nearly impossible. Also, it would be difficult for comrades, no matter how brilliant, to fully comprehend their own shortcomings and know how to address them. No historical comparison is perfect, but a dynamic from the early years of Bolshevism is relevant here. In Building the Party, Tony Cliff describes the years before 1905 and the period of reaction that followed it:
"During the period of reaction, 1906-1910, it was not the committeemen who deserted the party in large numbers; they mostly remained loyal....Unfortunately, however, self-sacrifice and special abilities do not provide a guarantee against conservatism of the party machine...Lenin, who knew how to recruit, train and keep the loyalty of the committeemen, had to oppose their conservatism during the revolution of 1905...To survive during the difficult years of illegality and suffering, they [the committeemen] had had to evolve a discipline, which now became an impediment," (p. 146, Building the Party).
The ISO as a young group in the 1980's was by far more flexible and dynamic than the older groups around at the time, but the ISO in turn has developed its own rigidity of practice in order to stay grounded in hostile terrain. What was once necessary for progress has become a fetter; this is a historical dynamic that not even a Marxist organization is exempt from. The objective conditions inevitably led to distortions in our practice; the difficulty here is that these distortions are often exhibited more through an internal culture or leadership style than through problems with the actual structure of the organization (the latter would be far easier to clearly identify).
Lenin writes again on February 11, 1905, "Really, I sometimes think that nine-tenths of the Bolsheviks are actually formalists... We need young forces" Later in the same quote Lenin declares, "Get rid of all the old habits of immobility, of respect for rank, and so on." And finally a few sentances later, "Allow every subcommittee to write and publish leaflets without redtape (there is no harm if they do make a mistake; we on Vperyod will "gently" correct them)." (p.147-148, Building the Party).
This was Lenin's approach as the partial revolution of 1905 got underway. We have no illusions that we are entering a pre-revolutionary situation, but we are coming out of a peroid of reaction and into a period were the left can advance. Therefore, there are significant parrellels in the dynamics at work.
Several decades later, Gramsci writes, "This order of phenomena," being the actions of a leadership to maintain control, "...is connected to one of the most important questions concerning the political party — i.e. the party's capacity to react against the force of habit, against the tendency to become mummified and anachronsitic. Parties come into existence, and constitute themselves as organisations, in order to
influence the situation at moments which are historically vital for their class; but they are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and to new epochs, nor of evolving pari passu with the overall relations of force (and hence the relative position of their class) in the country in question, or in the international field. In analysing the development of parties, it is necessary to distinguish: their social group; the mass membership; their bureaucracy and General Staff. The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force; if it ends up by constituting a compact body, which stands on its own and feels itself independent of the mass of members, the party ends up by becoming anachronistic and at moments of acute crisis it is voided of its social content and left as though suspended in mid-air." (Antonio Gramsci, State and Civil Society: Observations on Certain Aspects of the Structure of Political Parties in Periods of Organic Crisis.)
Practices pointed out in earlier branch discussions such as repeated calls from different cadre members to younger members who raise innocent arguments either in the moment or in the days that follow, which we argue are common and systematic, stifle debate, lead to stale discussion, and scare newer members from clarifying points and moving forward in their understanding of Marxist politics and method. In other cases dissenting members are not browbeaten but are decidedly ignored instead. In either case, these members are alienated and the ideas they bring to the table are not given proper consideration. Within the context of recent issues inside the British SWP earlier this year when internal disputes led to leading members being pushed into resigning from the party, a British blogger wrote in a critique of the SWP (an organization from which the ISO inherited much of it internal culture), "Patterns of bad behavior... [are] a learned behavior, traceable back to the left’s social isolation but also ensuring it can’t escape that isolation." [1] The legacy of the ISO is deeply intertwined with that of the SWP and while the distortions in the SWP are far more severe than those in the ISO, they are relevant to us. The SWP has been shedding members and loosing credibility on the broad left for some years, we advocate for a changed course in the ISO to avoid these dynamics playing out in our group.
Entrenchment is a type of organizational conservatism that reflects a fear of losing control and a mistrust of those outside the leadership. The BC's opposition to working within Empower DC and stated mistrust of their own comrades reflect entrenchment. Our view is that these distortions in the Leninist practice of free and open debate are reversible, but a correction will only be achievable by some significant alteration of leadership bodies. The "committeemen" of early Bolshevism were the professional revolutionaries who, due to years of hardwork, false starts, and defeats, were hardened and conservatized in their expectations. Lenin often sided with critical views that emanated from the ranks of the party and against leaders in the party, many of whom were in turn displaced from leadership. These events were seen as normal workings of internal democracy and not as "toxic" or "poisonous disturbances," as our organizing has been described by BC.
Why I Left the ISO and What's Next
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Wednesday at 5:35pm
Why I left the ISO and What’s Next
I left the ISO after being a dedicated member for 6 years for a number of reasons (none of which are political), and I want to share some of my experience and what’s next. Leaving the ISO was one of the most difficult decisions I had to make in my life and in no way was it taken lightly. The reason why I am publicizing this note some months after the fact is that it has taken a while to process the decision. Also, I’ve recently heard from other similar experiences of people who were forced out (like Zach M, David T, Donna and the folks in DC, http://tinyurl.com/expelledfromiso and Troy from Ithaca/Chicago, http://tinyurl.com/2bcrsv3) that have only confirmed my conclusion that the ISO is not able and/or interested in taking on the process of internal transformation that would be necessary to make it an effective revolutionary organization. And I'm now ready to connect with others who have had similar experiences and talk about what's next...
===My recent experience in Boston===
Ever since I came to the Boston branch from Ithaca in 2006, there were various things that I had noticed in the branch that I wanted to improve and during my 3 years in it, I noticed quite a few things more:
1. The branch had unaccountable leadership roles. There was no system for people with leading roles to report back on their area of work and who was doing what. This meant that generally the branch as a whole had little to no holistic conception of what the branch was actually accomplishing. For example, as a treasurer or literature coordinator of the branch I was rarely, if ever asked to report on our finances or literature. Same with many other branch roles. And in general, I had no idea what was going on in the areas of branch work that I was not a part of.
2. We had a culture as a branch where the leadership and older members diminished (often unintentionally) the growth and development of new members. The branch committee (the official branch leadership) gave almost all the public talks and chaired the majority of the meetings. They also created an intimidating atmosphere where any perspective that wasn’t in line with theirs was relentlessly attacked by a barrage of more experienced members. This stifled new ideas, induced rank-and-file passivity in the members, and fear on the part of newer activists to speak up or raise questions.
As another example, last year I spent about months working on a proposal for how to transform our branch building method. I surveyed comrades on and off the branch committee, modifying things based on all the feedback I got, and incorporating a model with ideas from one of the fastest growing organizations in the country. When I finally completed the detailed 10-page proposal, the leadership first tried to convince me to abandon it. Then they tried to co-opt and neutralize it. When I finally presented it to the branch they all spoke against it, essentially convincing the branch to completely reject it in toto. It felt like they took the project into which I had poured my blood, sweat, and tears for so many months and just dumped it in the trash.
3. The branch (and national organization) also was quite stagnant, growth-wise. Comparing my first day in Boston to my last one, I calculated that the branch had gained 6 new people, but that it had lost 6 people as well. Its not that we didn’t recruit more people in the 3 years I was here. It is that the vast majority of those we recruited just didn’t stay. In retrospect, I don’t blame them…but the branch committee usually did. (The rank-and-file were rarely told when all these people actually left—let alone encouraged to seriously consider why.) I wish this was only a Boston problem, but nationally, the organization appears to have basically stayed the same size for the whole 6 years I was in it. Not a good sign.
===What happened when I questioned these kind of things?===
The leadership always responded to any criticism or questioning about any of these issues by blaming objective factors that no one can control. Arguments were always made that “There is no struggle, and we can’t expect to grow very much without struggle” or “there has been a 30-year class attack from above” or “the left is really weak” etc. These are indeed some of the objective factors limiting the growth of socialist organizations, but they’re beside the point because they are out of our control. If someone raises a criticism about things that ARE in our control(whether we had accountable leadership roles, how the organizational culture stifled new ideas, whether we have consistent reports about our work, etc.), it does no good to blame things that are NOT in our control (e.g. the left is too weak or the weather sucks)—unless the goal is to avoid the difficult task of actually confronting and working on one’s weaknesses.
Eventually, my constant raising of new perspectives, dissident ideas, and proposals that weren’t “pre-approved” led to a personalistic campaign of persecution against me by the branch committee. It got really ugly and I began to feel uncomfortable in branch meetings—even though I was still bringing as many as 6 contacts at a time to them.
Meanwhile in Cambridge, I was organizing large meetings with a handful of contacts about socialism, LGBT equality, student activism, and other topics that were consistently drawing 10-20 people. These contacts actually wanted to start an ISO branch in their own city, but I took the more moderate approach of proposing a fraction in the Boston branch devoted to developing the potential in Cambridge more fully. On the day of the branch vote, I found out that my proposal had been undermined in a secret meeting with my contacts THE DAY BEFORE the vote was to be taken. The Boston leadership lied to them about the nature of the branch and about me and my intentions, effectively sabotaging the proposal behind the back of the branch. This kind of back-room secrecy, malicious intrigue, and dishonest treachery is what you might expect from a drug cartel or mafia movie, but certainly not a revolutionary organization that takes its goal or its members seriously. At the same time, it was only the last straw in a long train of abuses and usurpations.
===Steering Committee Intervention===
The coup de grace came when I met with the northeast regional organizer, who requested a meeting as a ‘representative of the steering committee’. I was told there was a “crisis of my membership” because the “consistent pattern” of my wrongdoing had gone too far. The regional organizer somehow never ONCE contacted me before about this “pattern”. And as soon as I tried to explain my unease with the pattern of personalistic attacks against me in the branch, I was abruptly interrupted on the grounds that it didn’t exist or was a diversion.
I was accused of ‘dehumanizing’ comrades, ‘ridiculing the branch’ and ‘discouraging contacts from joining’, violating democratic centralism, and other lies and myopic distortions. He didn’t seem to ask himself: why would I work so hard to build large meetings about socialism that engaged new people with our ideas if I didn't want them to join? Why would I give rides to multiple people to branch meetings every week on my own time and dime if I wanted to discourage people? Why would I push for the branch to relate to them more systematically?
Another charge against me: I was accused of having a “secret” plan to start a branch in Cambridge. What a crime! As I said openly in the branch, not secretly, I did think that the large, consistent meetings on socialist themes I had organized did demonstrate the potential for a branch in Cambridge. But this was, undoubtedly, the “wrong” perspective.
After some wrangling, I was given an ultimatum: apologize to the branch committee, the branch, the contact coordinator, and my contacts(!) for all my wrongdoings, or else my case would be “referred” to the steering committee (i.e. I’d be expelled). So as I suspected, the meeting with the steering committee ‘representative’ was basically an ambush. It felt like I was being told to apologize to my bureaucratic persecutors…for my persecution. So I had no real choice but to resign. They basically forced me to quit so that they wouldn’t have to expel me.
===What next?===
To be fair I must say that I think there is much good work that has been done by the ISO, and it was not an easy decision to leave it. The ISO does have a national organizational infrastructure (experienced activists, multiple branches, strong publications, etc.) that have been built over years of hard work by genuine and committed people. This is a serious accomplishment, particularly in the US, which is the most sophisticated, powerful, violent, repressive, vicious, reactionary, and hypocritical empire in world history.
And I learned a great deal in the ISO, even in my last battle within it (which gave me a concrete experience with which to understand Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy). But for all the reasons above and many others, I just could not continue to devote my time and energy to it. Here’s what I’m taking from the experience:
1. If you have an issue or criticism to raise about the operations of your political organization, I would suggest raising it as PUBLICLY as possible as soon as possible, especially in meetings or venues that are open for the whole membership to see. That way those with bureaucratic tendencies can’t hide or run away from it, and the rank-and-file (particularly those who have been thinking the same thing but have remained silent) will be stimulated to engage the issue too. When you take your issue privately to one or more ‘leaders’ it is too easy for them to brush it aside—or to just disagree with you without consulting the membership. Taking a shortcut around the rank-and-file is a top-down conception of how to bring about changes within an organization, which is probably one of the biggest mistakes I made (and I made many) in the ISO. Under capitalism, corporations, national states, and even most trade unions, operate in leader-centric ways that train their members in passivity and deference to a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Hence, this method of organizing must be fought against tooth and nail in the vanguard of the working-class movement.
2. Because of their institutional role, people entrenched in leadership positions often develop a tactical conservatism, in the interest of not ‘risking’ the health of the organization by trying new things. Lenin called these people the ‘bureaucratic committeemen’ of a political party. And had Lenin given up on his April Theses after they were voted down by the Bolshevik central committee and the Petrograd district committee, there would be no October revolution in 1917. Lenin went public especially to the rank-and-file of the party and by winning his case there, he was able to pressure the Bolshevik leadership and conservative committeemen from below. Of course, my former persecutors probably think this is an anti-leadership or maybe even anti-Leninist(!) argument.
3. The ISO is not the be-all and end-all of socialist organizations in the US, and there is no better time to build a new one. In a world racked by economic crisis, endless war, and environmental destruction, 36% of Americans (100 million people!) now view “socialism” positively (Gallup poll, Feb 2010). Even if most of them have only a vague idea of what socialism is, we still have a historic opportunity to build the socialist movement in the US. Even if we aim at only 1/4 of these people (25 million) who are seriously interested in socialism and we only recruit only 1/4th of those people (6 million!), we can transform this country from bottom to top.
Of course, this is a monumental task that will take a bold new approach to building social movements and socialist organization. I have many big ideas about this, but we also need not start totally from scratch. I am in touch with a network of people including many with the experience of being in socialist organizations. What we need is an organization that is democratic, with a growth mindset, one that fights for members of color and working-class members, welcomes new ideas, critical feedback, and that does not tolerate unaccountable and bureaucratic forms of organization.
In addition, unlike the ISO, I believe we will need a sense of humility and interest in learning from others, a rigorous system for imparting our strategies, methods, and skills to every member, and the commitment maintaining honest alignment between what we say, think, and do. In short, we need to build a revolutionary party worthy of the name.
I invite you to join in this project.
Sincerely,
Brian Kwoba
[email protected]
p.s. feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks!
Why I Got Kicked Out of the ISO—And Why it Doesn't Matter
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Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 11:34pm
So, this morning, I woke up, checked my email, and found the following email:
Subject line: Your membership status
Content: Hi Troy,
I wanted to let you know that I'm removing you from the internal ISO discussion [email] list, and putting you onto our announcement [email] list. As a result of the failure to implement the agreements which were reached during your meeting with Shaun and Lauren earlier in the semester we can't consider you a member at this point. If you want to follow up about this feel free to contact Shaun.
Please do keep me posted on things that you're involved in, as I look forward to continuing to collaborate going forward.
Best,
John
Now, I could inquire into how the decision to kick me out of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) was made and who made it. I could challenge this decision, too.
For example, I could point out that there were no “agreements which were reached” at the meeting referred to in the above email. In fact, I entered this meeting between myself and two Chicago ISO leaders with an idea of what activism I’d be participating in over the coming month and, though I shared my plan with them and asked them several times for their input, they offered no suggestions. The only “agreement” which I can imagine having come out of that meeting was the agreement that I should “think about whether the ISO is the right organization for me.” I agreed to this suggestion. But shouldn’t every person think about this? That’s not much of an agreement—and it’s one that I implemented! Anyway, the fact that these two ISO members had nothing to contribute to my plan for activism and only wanted to get me to “think about whether the ISO is the right organization for me” obviously indicates that they did not want any substantive “agreement" to come out of this meeting; they wanted me to voluntarily leave the ISO.
I could also point out that this meeting was called for basically nonsense reasons. At the meeting, I was charged with (a) not wanting to participate in this pointless meeting, (b) going to an LGBT rights activist meeting that an LGBT rights activist who had recently joined the ISO invited me and all other Chicago ISO members to, (c) making “reformist” arguments in a book discussion (though, neither of the two people I met with had been at this book discussion and they didn’t know what the arguments I made were—they just had “trusted sources”), and there might have been a few other charges that I can’t recall at the moment—but I think that’s basically it. I should also explain that I knew that this meeting would be pointless because it wasn’t the first such meeting I had participated in: a year or so ago I was charged with sending four separate “unacceptable” emails to the Pilsen, Chicago ISO list-serve. (The emails I had sent: one had a link to Earthlings, an animals rights video [I guess this was “bad” because animals aren’t important to some ISO members]; one had a link to a Todd Chretien Socialism 2009 talk about State and Revolution and a link to a piece by some anarchist on State and Revolution [I guess this was “bad” because we shouldn’t read diverse perspectives]; one had a link to a book about the development of global political economy in modern times [I guess this was “bad” because it was written and published by a member of some other socialist group]; and, finally one had a piece I had seen written about the Henry Louis Gates incident that I wanted commentary on [I guess this was “bad” because, again, we shouldn’t read diverse perspectives]. I have a whole document that details this episode, if anyone is interested.)
So, I could talk more about these incidents. But I won’t. Because it doesn’t matter whether I’m in the ISO or not—and this is what I really want to talk about.
I guess I’ll talk about what it means to be a “member” of the ISO. Membership requirements basically include:
a. going to meetings
b. paying membership dues
c. weekly tabling/public outreach
d. following superiors’ orders
I stopped going to meetings a few weeks ago. They were pretty useless. I was often one of a small group of members actually getting new people to come to the meetings; sometimes I was the only one bringing new people. I’m too busy to waste time at these meetings anymore but, if I wanted to start going again at some point, I wouldn’t need to be a member to do this.
Same thing with paying dues: whether you’re a “member” of a group or not, they’ll usually take your money, if you’re willing to give it to them. (Though, I’ve heard a few members take the bizarre position that they wouldn’t want “non-member” money… just an example of the sorts of wacky ideas you can come up with when you start with an irrational premise like “’membership’ is all-important.”) And the ISO does some good stuff with the money they collect; however, I don’t think I’ll be giving much more to the ISO since they waste a lot of it paying people to do things like set up nonsense membership meetings where they charge members with laughably trivial offenses.
Weekly tabling and public outreach I’m cool with. I like doing it daily. Some ISO members take weeks or months off. But it doesn’t seem to matter to ISO leaders: as long as those people are “members”—and following orders—all is well. Whatever. My point is that you don’t need to be a member of the ISO to interact with people.
That leaves following superiors’ orders. Some might ask: How can one not willing to use force and with no economic or social power expect to have their orders followed? Some might ask: Why would progressive people seek to be giving orders and forcing compliance instead of persuading people? Those are good questions—and I can’t think of how any rational and progressive person could imagine that such orders should be given or expect that such orders would be followed. Persuasion and voluntary compliance have always worked for me when it comes to organizing progressive social movements. (I wrote a national ISO leader about this topic but I never got a response; I posted the email on facebook here, y’all can take a look if you’d like further info/discussion about this topic: http://www.facebook.com/notes/troy-pasulka/democratic-centralism-in-the-case-for-socialism/377109914217)
So, I guess I’ll stop there. Not much else worth saying about the subject at this point; I’ve got more important things to talk about. For instance, everyone in the Chicago-land area should consider joining the Green Party float at the Gay Pride Parade this Sunday and check out Rich Whitney’s website (WhitneyforGov.org—he’s the Green Party 2010 candidate for Illinois Governor)! I’ll be at the parade at 9:30am with a bunch of other people talking to the crowds!