Latest International Socialist Review

[Lucretia]

I have been a long-time reader of the ISR, which along with Haymarket Books is the greatest contribution the International Socialist Organization makes in my opinion. Even people who are dismissive of the International Socialist Tendency generally understand the value of the magazine. I was particularly encouraged a few months ago when I noticed that the magazine is now being published on all-glossy paper, hoping that this would be a sign of even greater attention to the quality of the magazine in terms of editorial improvement. :thumbup1:

This is why I was dismayed by some of the content in the latest issue. Dismayed not because the ISO doesn't have the right Marxist or socialist line on some obscure issue, but because I noticed the content was providing a platform for liberalism.

One example of this is the John Nichols piece, an excerpt from his recent book The S Word. For those who aren't aware, Nichols is an explicitly liberal writer for The Nation and The Progressive. The central argument of his book about socialism is that, although it has been caricatured in the public mind as the equivalent of Stalinist authoriatarianism, "socialism" (in his understanding) has contributed a lot to the United States by providing a social safety net and regulating otherwise out-of-control industries. But by failing to cede socialism its due in contemporary politics, the American public is unwittingly undermining the successful functioning of American democracy. In other words, the stigmatization of "socialists" and "socialism" have left the field open for a rightward drift and electoral politics and economic policy. The implicit message seems to be that we can have an equitable, functioning democracy again if we can restore the previous equilibrium, if we can once again have "socialism" contending openly and without shame against laissez faire on the ideological battlefield. Without getting into his conflation of socialism with state control, I think it's fair to say that his argument is a thoroughly reformist and liberal one. Not surprising in light of Nichols' professions that he is a liberal.

The excerpt in the ISR is, in a way, a microcosm of the argument in his book, praising a time when bourgeois politicians like Abraham Lincoln were able to draw from the socialist toolbox to improve capitalism (or as Nichols phrases it "a time when men such as he were familiar with the writings of Marx and ... sifted and winnowed the radical ideas of his day.") Now the question I have is why the ISO thinks it is appropriate for its in-house magazine to showcase such a thoroughly liberal-reformist praise of Lincoln and understanding of how revolutionary politics ought to function in society? At the very least, this editorial judgment reinforces leftists' view that the ISO's goal is just to pressure the democrats to be more left-wing. I know the ISO members on this board disavow this perception, but then why have an article like this in the magazine?

The other instance where I noticed an issue was in a book review of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. All I am going to say here is that at no point does the reviewer take issue with the concept of "middle class" -- which is one of the most effective ways of dividing the working class and convincing its members that they are being rewarded through consumption rather than exploited through their labor.

I would genuinely like to hear some sort of rationale from members in the group for why these things, but particularly the first, are permitted to be printed in the flagship publication of the ISO.

[syndicat]

i pick up ISR frequently, as i do Against the Current also, but ATC has been tending to be overly academic in recent years and ISR has been tending to be very much lowest common denominator and articles that are very vague or superficial...sort of hack writing.

[DaringMehring]

I hate garbage like that. "Left pressure" on the Democrats is a failed idea, period. An argument like the one presented is technically true --- when socialism was more accepted and socialists more numerous and influential, the capitalist democracy was better -- it is presented as a gift to radical students that the ISO base itself on, so they can make nice with their bourgeois democrat parents. We need an American Tahrir, not the bourgeoisie to look kindly on socialism because it helps the functioning of their system.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I would genuinely like to hear some sort of rationale from members in the group for why these things, but particularly the first, are permitted to be printed in the flagship publication of the ISO.
Not that it matters to the "critics" like the one above who baseless makes straw-man arguments about appealing to the Democrats and being students with ruling class parents (:rolleyes:yeah come and visit me in Oakland or on my graveyard shift and tell me how rich I am motherfucker) but the ISR's audience is meant to be a general left audience, people to the left of the Democrats who maybe do read the Nation or listen to Pacifica. We frequently publish Chomsky and many other people of the broad left in the ISR and part of the goal of the publication is to interject socialist ideas into that general political sphere. Nothing published there is the "party-line" and even things written by our members are debated by other members. The ISR has partly a function of publishing our own theoretical or historical articles but also to bring in other left-voices like Chomsky, Roy, Zinn, John Pilger etc... all of whom we'd have disagreements with on some level.

We have the newspaper, Socialist Worker to give our generalized perspective on current events and the audience is people in our communities, other activists, and co-workers or co-students. People who disagree with us politically disparage that too. Frankly I'm not too bothered - it's like groups of tens of people criticizing a group of a few more tens of people for "deceiving" or causing the passivity of millions of workers. When it's the NY Times that's complaining about Z Net or ISR, then the left will actually be getting somewhere.

[graymouser]

the ISR's audience is meant to be a general left audience, people to the left of the Democrats who maybe do read the Nation or listen to Pacifica. We frequently publish Chomsky and many other people of the broad left in the ISR and part of the goal of the publication is to interject socialist ideas into that general political sphere. Nothing published there is the "party-line" and even things written by our members are debated by other members. The ISR has partly a function of publishing our own theoretical or historical articles but also to bring in other left-voices like Chomsky, Roy, Zinn, John Pilger etc... all of whom we'd have disagreements with on some level.
On the whole, in terms of simply left magazines, the ISR is better than the other ones you're going to find when you walk into Barnes & Noble. It's further to the left than In These Times or The Nation and less impressionistic than Z, which are probably its closest competition. But I really feel that this attempt to have some kind of "mass" appeal has diluted the quality from the very earliest issues, when it read closer to a theoretical journal than a popular magazine. I've read the ISR for over half of its existence and have a collection of back issues going back to the early days, so I'm familiar with its evolution.

It's kind of shocking that the current issue doesn't have a single feature article by an ISO member. Likewise I don't see a name of any significant ISO figure in any Haymarket books in the ad on the back cover. That's not to say I'm unhappy about some of the people who ARE featured - John Riddell and Ian Angus for instance are people who I think have important contributions to make. But the ISO's actual contribution through their journal and book publisher has diminished significantly. There are definitely signs that the ISR and Haymarket are outgrowing the ISO.

This is a political question. The ISO has been something of a lightweight in terms of Marxist theory, and the ISR has really ceased to be a theoretical organ for the development of a Marxist analysis of the current period. The same goes for Haymarket. What has changed is that the ISO (technically CERSC which is behind the ISR/Haymarket) is no longer putting forward its own ideas but is instead putting out the ideas of the broader currents in which it exists. This is a definite adaptation to the left-liberal circles that the ISO recruits out of. The Nichols article in particular, published without a broader criticism of his book which attempts to synthesize American liberalism with social democracy, should be simply beyond the pale for a revolutionary socialist group. I'm not saying that the ISR should carry nothing but dry-as-dust theoretical articles, but even a popular magazine should be trying to carry the group's ideas into its milieu instead of trying to sell them magazines by adapting to the milieu's ideas.

None of this is meant to be carping for the sake of factionalizing; I think it's a radically different concept of a publication than the Leninist model. This is upheld to some degree in the newspaper, but the idea of a popular magazine in a Leninist organization is to popularize your own ideas, not to publish those of people around you. The ISR is edited by the top people in the ISO, so it's not like the magazine has slipped away from discipline; if anything, it's the ISO leaders who have made this adaptation to the left-liberal world they work in.

[Lucretia]

but the ISR's audience is meant to be a general left audience, people to the left of the Democrats who maybe do read the Nation or listen to Pacifica. We frequently publish Chomsky and many other people of the broad left in the ISR and part of the goal of the publication is to interject socialist ideas into that general political sphere. Nothing published there is the "party-line" and even things written by our members are debated by other members.

I understand this and agree with it totally. My criticism of this latest issue has been not that it is including voices from outside the party, or that it is discussing broader left ideas. But that it is doing these things without interjecting its own socialist ideas. As I said, the Nichols article is pure liberal reformism, and rather than providing a nuanced critique of it, pointing out its strengths and its weaknesses, the ISR simply chose to publish it and let it stand on its own. Like graymouser above, I think that's a terrible mistake and seems to reflect some kind of tacit capitulation to the liberal left. While I might not feel uncomfortable being part of an organization that put out a publication with that kind of content, I wouldn't hold any illusions about its revolutionary aspirations.

[Jimmie Higgins]

None of this is meant to be carping for the sake of factionalizing; I think it's a radically different concept of a publication than the Leninist model. This is upheld to some degree in the newspaper, but the idea of a popular magazine in a Leninist organization is to popularize your own ideas, not to publish those of people around you. The ISR is edited by the top people in the ISO, so it's not like the magazine has slipped away from discipline; if anything, it's the ISO leaders who have made this adaptation to the left-liberal world they work in.

Can you demonstrate that the editorials have "adapted" to the broader left? Otherwise this charge is nothing but "guilt by association" and an attempt to raise unwarranted doubt on the ISO's politics... such as...


I wouldn't hold any illusions about its revolutionary aspirations.

Anyway greymouser you hit the nail on the head when you say it's different than a Leninist paper, it's not supposed to fill that function of centralizing and generalizing the experiences of members involved in struggle. We have that paper and it's still our main organizing tool. The ISR is not just a glossy version of that, but is a different tool for a different function: i.e. helping to build a broader left and working class struggle outside of just our own radical group.

Sometimes comrades act like we have a huge left in the US and all the other organizations are the mensheviks, but their traddition is the true holder of the flame when in fact really right now we are more like the US left before the long depression of the 1800s or Russia in the time of socialist reading circles. If all the active revolutionary socialists in the US all organized together, we'd still only be in the thousands and still not able to really be a "vanguard" in the sense of really being organically connected to working class struggle - if only because our class hasn't been fighting back much fro the last generation. We need to help build a fighting left in the US right now and publications like the ISR and Z mag do that - we also need to build revolutionary organizations within the core of that to tie struggles and experience of the class struggle together and more specific "Leninist" papers and publications help to achieve that.

[graymouser]

Can you demonstrate that the editorials have "adapted" to the broader left? Otherwise this charge is nothing but "guilt by association" and an attempt to raise unwarranted doubt on the ISO's politics... such as...
I think the publication of a big chunk of The "S" Word without critique is a step in a slow process of adaptation that the ISR and Haymarket have been going down. Similarly, the lengthy Robin Blackburn pieces on slavery. Similarly, the books Haymarket has been putting out - a few authors that stick out in my mind are Amy Goodman, Wallace Shawn, and Arundhati Roy, who may have "progressive" or "radical" orientations but are not revolutionaries. Perhaps the majority of recent Haymarket releases are not by people who would identify as revolutionary socialists. And I see the ISR as slowly but steadily moving in the same direction.


Anyway greymouser you hit the nail on the head when you say it's different than a Leninist paper, it's not supposed to fill that function of centralizing and generalizing the experiences of members involved in struggle. We have that paper and it's still our main organizing tool. The ISR is not just a glossy version of that, but is a different tool for a different function: i.e. helping to build a broader left and working class struggle outside of just our own radical group.

Sometimes comrades act like we have a huge left in the US and all the other organizations are the mensheviks, but their traddition is the true holder of the flame when in fact really right now we are more like the US left before the long depression of the 1800s or Russia in the time of socialist reading circles. If all the active revolutionary socialists in the US all organized together, we'd still only be in the thousands and still not able to really be a "vanguard" in the sense of really being organically connected to working class struggle - if only because our class hasn't been fighting back much fro the last generation. We need to help build a fighting left in the US right now and publications like the ISR and Z mag do that - we also need to build revolutionary organizations within the core of that to tie struggles and experience of the class struggle together and more specific "Leninist" papers and publications help to achieve that.
A theoretical organ is not supposed to be the same as a newspaper - they fill substantially different roles. The newspaper is the propaganda organ by which the organization's line is put forward. It carries the burden of being the "collective agitator, organizer and propagandist." And I wouldn't suggest that the ISR should be a "glossy version" of that. (I actually dislike the glossy inside, it was nicer when it was plain paper. Same for Z.)

What a theoretical organ is meant to do, is to give a revolutionary Marxist view of the current period, the tasks, the situations that face the proletariat and attempt to deal with them in more depth than is possible in a propagandistic article in a paper. It also takes up historical questions and asks what lessons can be learned from them. These are things that the ISO has been very bad at.

Your conception of the ISR above is a very peculiar one. I am very big on rebuilding the social movements; I spend a good deal of time in the antiwar movement and have been an activist in this arena for years. And I am part of Socialist Action because it has put a lot of effort into that movement. We were a lot of the organizing force behind the National Assembly and are a lot of the force behind UNAC, which the ISO participates with us in. But when Socialist Action puts out books and pamphlets, they reflect our views, and it would be the same if we had a bimonthly magazine.

I don't see it as the job of revolutionaries to put up a "big tent" publication, and I see it as missing the point entirely to do so. To put it bluntly, reformists and radical liberals already have enough of a bullhorn, you don't need to give them the only one that says "Socialist" on it as well. By doing this, the ISO legitimizes reformist ideas. For instance, I have John Nichols's book on my shelf - I have no problem with reading what he has to say. But it's not a book I would say represents my views well enough that I would recommend it. His idea of socialism and revolutionary Marxism have nothing in common. When the ISO runs a chunk of his book in the ISR it legitimizes his ideas, and running it without comment means that there is no clarity between his left-liberalism festooned with the word "socialism" and the revolutionary socialism that the ISO talks about.

This is particularly dangerous for a group that recruits college students at a low level like the ISO does. You can do mass recruitment but the people you bring in need to be trained and steeled as solid Marxists. When you use your magazine to present the liberal ideas that these students are already swimming in, you're blurring the distinction badly and you are adapting to their liberalism.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

I would actually agree with Graymouser's critique of the ISR, though I don't think the ISR is used to develop our new members as cadre. We typically utilize Haymarket texts for that and have reading groups. This "S" word-guy sorta pisses me off, he spoke at a meeting in wisconsin and it was filmed and he kept making cracks about the ISO and Phil Gasper had to subtly smack his liberal-nonsense down.

[Lucretia]

Anyway greymouser you hit the nail on the head when you say it's different than a Leninist paper, it's not supposed to fill that function of centralizing and generalizing the experiences of members involved in struggle. We have that paper and it's still our main organizing tool. The ISR is not just a glossy version of that, but is a different tool for a different function: i.e. helping to build a broader left and working class struggle outside of just our own radical group.

But what do you mean by "build a broader left"? Does this mean converting people to liberalism or reformist social democracy? If not, why in the world would you publish an article making these kinds of arguments?


Sometimes comrades act like we have a huge left in the US and all the other organizations are the mensheviks, but their traddition is the true holder of the flame when in fact really right now we are more like the US left before the long depression of the 1800s or Russia in the time of socialist reading circles.

Sorry, but I am calling bullshit on this attempt to subtly suggest that the critics in this thread are uptight purist sectarians. My problem was not that the isr contains an article written by a liberal and therefore violated some kind of imaginary socialist blacklist. It's that they published, without any qualifiers, commentary, or criticism, a thoroughly reformist liberal argument about socialism. This doesnt magically become a good way to build a revolutionary movement just because the revolutionary left is small right now. Though it does help to explain why such a left is small right now.


We need to help build a fighting left in the US right now and publications like the ISR and Z mag do that - we also need to build revolutionary organizations within the core of that to tie struggles and experience of the class struggle together and more specific "Leninist" papers and publications help to achieve that.

Huh? Again, please explain to me how providing a platform for liberal reformism in one of the few self-identified revolutionary leftist publications with a significant reach will help build anything but monumental defeat? It seems you think that making pals with reformist liberals is something worth undertaking for its own sake. If the goal isnt to win them to revolutionary socialism, then why not just simplify things by joining the democratic party? Otherwise shouldnt the isr be critiquing their understanding of socialism and political change, rather than echoing it?

[Lucretia]

I would actually agree with Graymouser's critique of the ISR, though I don't think the ISR is used to develop our new members as cadre. We typically utilize Haymarket texts for that and have reading groups. This "S" word-guy sorta pisses me off, he spoke at a meeting in wisconsin and it was filmed and he kept making cracks about the ISO and Phil Gasper had to subtly smack his liberal-nonsense down.

Ive seen that video, which is why I was shocked by the inclusion of the Nichols article. When I briefly perused the issue before buying it, I seriously thought it was going to include a scathing review of the book. Imagine my surprise when I realized they were publishing a large excerpt from it!

I seriously wonder what the rationale of the editors was. Isn't Gasper on the editorial board? Perhaps this has something to do with that supposed "partnership" between the ISR and The Nation, which I believe employs Nichols.

[Binh]

Is there a table of contents for the issue anywhere online? The website isn't updated yet. It's hard to get a sense of what the issue is like based on this thread.

Lucretia, I think you should write the ISR a letter (not that that solves the problem or the issue you raise).

Higgins (who shares his username with an I.S. U.K. leader who slammed Tony Cliff in his book, "More Years for the Locusts", not sure if it's an ironic reference to that or not) says that one of the purposes of the ISR is to help build the broader left in response to Lucretia's criticism. I think this may be a case of starting with a correct and undisputable premise and reaching the wrong conclusion, but I'm not sure without seeing the issue.

What is the argument for publishing this article, with this content, without any editorial lead-in to "counterbalance" Nichols' arguments? Where does one draw the line?

Lucretia, what is this about a partnership between the ISR and The Nation? This is the first I've heard of it.

[Lucretia]

Is there a table of contents for the issue anywhere online? The website isn't updated yet. It's hard to get a sense of what the issue is like based on this thread.

The Table of Contents are as follows.

Page 1: Analysis in Brief ("The Politics of Famine" about Somalia)
Page 6: Interview (with Noam Chomsky titled "Hopes and Prospects, from Madison to Cairo")
Page 11: Cover Feature ("Unfinished Revolution" about Egypt since Mubarak's fall)
Page 30: Slavery and the US Civil War (Interview with Anthony Arnove titled "The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery")
Page 40: Slavery and the US Civil War (Nichols excerpt)
Page 56: The Socialist Tradition (John Riddell article titled "German Workers and the Birth of the United Front")
Page 70: Reviews (Featured Review is Sam Farber's review of Toscano's Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea)
Page 74: Reviews (Miscellaneous)

[Jimmie Higgins]

Lucretia, I think you should write the ISR a letter (not that that solves the problem or the issue you raise).

I agree, Lucretia, write a letter to the editor and maybe they will respond with their reasoning for putting the excerpt in. Did you read the editorial at the beginning of the issue, does it give an explanation?


Sorry, but I am calling bullshit on this attempt to subtly suggest that the critics in this thread are uptight purist sectarians. Subtle? I thought I was being overt. DaringMehring said that the ISO members were ruling class, if that's not sectarian bullshit, then I guess sectarianism doesn't exist. Disapppointingly, graymouser has been posting a more eloquent version of Mehring's post by throwing in superfluous straw-men designed to suggest that we only recruit students and whatnot (it's disappointing because he has valid arguments peppered-in too). And then you said yourself that publishing this excerpt nullifies any claim to "revolutionary aspirations". How are we supposed to have a discussion of this if the argument is basically boils down to people basically saying that either: I am not sincere about revolution and am therefore a liar or that I am a dupe.

So sorry for getting pissed, but I've been upfront in explaining how I see the ISR functioning, how Haymarket is explicitly NOT a party press, etc. I don't expect everyone to agree with what we are doing, but when people are making accusations of liberalism, then the actual discussion is over and we are in sectarian point-scoring territory - a bleak and trollish land I have little interest in spending much time in.


Page 30: Slavery and the US Civil War (Interview with Anthony Arnove titled "The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery")
Page 40: Slavery and the US Civil War (Nichols excerpt)Well it would seem that the reason for putting this excerpt in is not to promote democratic-socialism but to talk about the origins of racism in the US which the ISR has been doing for the past couple of issues. This context makes the argument that the ISO through an article in the ISR of a book by someone else means that the ISO is pro-liberal even more paper-thin IMO.

At any rate, my sub ran out a couple of issues back and I'm still on the previous one and haven't picked up the new one, but I'll take a look as soon as I get it.

[Lucretia]

I agree, Lucretia, write a letter to the editor and maybe they will respond with their reasoning for putting the excerpt in. Did you read the editorial at the beginning of the issue, does it give an explanation?

Do you not read your own group's publications? There is no "editorial" in the beginning of the excerpt, or of the publication, which explains why the piece was published, criticizing the piece, or offering any commentary on it.


Subtle? I thought I was being overt. DaringMehring said that the ISO members were ruling class, if that's not sectarian bullshit, then I guess sectarianism doesn't exist. Disapppointingly, graymouser has been posting a more eloquent version of Mehring's post by throwing in superfluous straw-men designed to suggest that we only recruit students and whatnot (it's disappointing because he has valid arguments peppered-in too). And then you said yourself that publishing this excerpt nullifies any claim to "revolutionary aspirations". How are we supposed to have a discussion of this if the argument is basically boils down to people basically saying that either: I am not sincere about revolution and am therefore a liar or that I am a dupe.Look, I know you're doing your best to defend a group you're a member of and clearly feel strongly about. But there's a right way of doing it and a wrong way. And there's also a way of admitting mistakes, because not every group is perfect. Just like not every one who criticizes a group you're affiliated with is by definition unreasonable. You seem to think that if I question whether your group will ever realize its revolutionary aspirations because it is openly providing a platform for liberal reformism, then I must be a sectarian (this, by the way, is what I mean when I said "having illusions about revolutionary aspirations" - I did not mean that I questioned the fact that the group had these aspirations, just that I held no illusions about the group ever realizing them). So does this mean that everybody who criticizes liberal reformism is now a sectarian? I think your arguments in defense of this decision to publish the article, that you apparently haven't read, judging by your lack of knowledge of the content in the issue, have been confused. And I am not saying that in a mean spirited way.


So sorry for getting pissed, but I've been upfront in explaining how I see the ISR functioning, how Haymarket is explicitly NOT a party press, etc. I don't expect everyone to agree with what we are doing, but when people are making accusations of liberalism, then the actual discussion is over and we are in sectarian point-scoring territory - a bleak and trollish land I have little interest in spending much time in.Nobody here, including me, is saying that the ISO is a "liberal organization." I noted that the group's latest issue of ISR, whose content is selected by leading ISO cadre, is unabashedly echoing thoroughly liberal-reformist arguments about socialism and its proper political role in society. Graymouser said the ISO recruits primary among college students, which judging from the videos of rallies held at the Socialism conventions does not appear to be an unreasonable conclusion to draw, and at any rate certainly does not mean the group is fundamentally liberal. He used this observation to say that the ISR's decision to publish an article in which socialism is understood in thoroughly liberal and reformist ways can confuse somebody who, like a university student, probably tends to move in highly liberal reformist circles. Neither of these statements is unfair or sectarian. They are substantive critiques about political practices, not underlying political sympathies.


Well it would seem that the reason for putting this excerpt in is not to promote democratic-socialism but to talk about the origins of racism in the US which the ISR has been doing for the past couple of issues. This context makes the argument that the ISO through an article in the ISR of a book by someone else means that the ISO is pro-liberal even more paper-thin IMO.The major problem with this explanation is that the article does not talk about the origins of racism at all. The main argument is about how slavery was abolished, so yes it is in keeping with the broad theme of slavery. The problem, though, is the explanation for why slavery was abolished. The argument in Nichols' book, which is similar to James Oakes' recent book The Radical and the Republican, is that slavery was abolished because socialists and assorted other radicals on the ground were influential enough to pressure Lincoln to do something (free the slaves) that he otherwise would not have done. In other words, the proper role of socialists in society, and what they can reasonably hope to achieve in their politics, is to pressure bourgeois politicians to enact reforms. Just because this liberal reformist understanding of socialism is embedded in an argument about the civil war, which happens to be theme the ISR has chosen to publish about in the past two issues, does not mean that it magically ceases to be liberal reformist.

By the way, I find Steve Hahn's work on emancipation, which argues that slaves are basically the people who forced Lincoln's hand by fleeing their masters and the confederate camps en masse, to be both more accurate and more appropriate for publication in the ISR. He calls the actions of slaves during the Civil War "the largest slave uprising in the New World."


At any rate, my sub ran out a couple of issues back and I'm still on the previous one and haven't picked up the new one, but I'll take a look as soon as I get it.I strongly encourage you to do so with an open mind, just as people here who pick up and read every issue of the ISR despite not being members read it with an open mind.

[thriller]

Well, anyhoot... as far as "The 'S' Word" goes and John Nichols, I see him around town a lot. And have spoke to him on many occasions. I was at the Capitol before a rally and he came up and started talking to me about his new book. He thought I would be interested in it because I had my red flag and "Workers of the World Unite!" SP-USA shirt on. He asked if I was a 'real socialist' by which he meant non-Stalinist, and I said yes. He then stated that I should come by to one of his book readings to talk about some 'social-democracy'. Well at this point I had to call bullshit. I told him that social-democracy never was and never will be socialism. It is just capitalism with a plastic face lift, but the inards are the same. He seemed to be dismayed by this. John Nichols is active in the labor movement which is good, but he's an apologist for the ruling class and fails to realize those with capital are opposed to those who produce (and vice versa). Many of my comrades here are giving lectures and stuff on his book and how much we can learn from it and such forth, which I'm not too happy about. I did not read the ISR article, but anyone or any organization that thinks that "The 'S' Word" is an important read for the working class is just trying to use popular media to support their cause, rather than trying to get their cause to become the popular media.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Nobody here, including me, is saying that the ISO is a "liberal organization."

I am.


DaringMehring said that the ISO members were ruling class, if that's not sectarian bullshit, then I guess sectarianism doesn't exist.

Sectarianism means putting the political line or interests of your sect above those of the working class as a whole. You can accuse him of being dishonest for making this statement if you'd like, but whether it's false or true, it's not "sectarianism."

[graymouser]

Disapppointingly, graymouser has been posting a more eloquent version of Mehring's post by throwing in superfluous straw-men designed to suggest that we only recruit students and whatnot (it's disappointing because he has valid arguments peppered-in too).
I didn't say the ISO "only" recruits students. It also recruits workers, and even the occasional former member of the American SWP. But to deny that the ISO recruits college students, and even probably as its primary source of recruits, is false. My concerns with the ISO are serious and they are among the reasons I left it. (Aside from the fact that I'm an orthodox Trotskyist, more or less, and couldn't convince myself of the whole state-cap line.) I was concerned about this in 2007 and I see things going in the wrong way today.

This is why, when the Socialist Workers Party was recruiting large numbers of students in the 1960s and 70s, it had them go through the Young Socialists Alliance first. The YSA provided experience in political life, gave them a basic grounding in Marxist politics, and allowed freedom to experiment and drop out if they wanted. The ones who were serious went into the SWP. Those who weren't, didn't. The ISO has no such levels - you are either in or out. And that places a high burden of cadre education on the whole group, which I feel it does not meet. And when I see Haymarket and ISR becoming more of some kind of broad left instead of revolutionary leftist, that has me worried even further.

One more thing, on class composition. I remember when I was in the ISO it was with the branch in Philly - which at the time had followed a number of grad students to the University of Pennsylvania. Now, THAT was a ruling class college, and the members were all well aware of it. Only a couple of people actually went to Penn as undergrads, and they were basically the children of staff (not faculty, workers at the campus). The preconvention discussion was held jointly with the branch at the College of New Jersey (my alma mater), a longtime teachers' school that is slowly trying to make itself a "Public Ivy" college. Someone described Penn as a ruling class college, and the TCNJers objected strongly that students weren't ruling class. They asked if the people at Penn were the future bankers and politicians and intellectuals - and the Philly comrades laughed and said yes. The moral of the story is, I don't see the ISO as particularly "ruling class" as much as attracting a type of student who fits a certain left-wing liberal mold.

[Lucretia]

I am.



Sectarianism means putting the political line or interests of your sect above those of the working class as a whole. You can accuse him of being dishonest for making this statement if you'd like, but whether it's false or true, it's not "sectarianism."

I think it is important to be very careful before accusing an entire organization of being liberal. If you mean that they sometimes unwittingly provide a platform for liberal ideas that actually set back the revolutionary caused, then I agree with you. What I dont agree with is the notion that the ISO secretly love capitalism and are just putting on a deception to deliberately derail the socialist cause.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Nope. I mean they are an out and out liberal reformist organization. I don't think it's a dishonest or secret thing. If you follow their publications, their actions, their statements, etc., you will see what they are. If there was ever any question, their full backing of Green Party candidates and Ralph Nader should have removed all doubt.

I don't think they have much of anything to do with the "revolutionary cause."

[Lucretia]

Nope. I mean they are an out and out liberal reformist organization. I don't think it's a dishonest or secret thing. If you follow their publications, their actions, their statements, etc., you will see what they are. If there was ever any question, their full backing of Green Party candidates and Ralph Nader should have removed all doubt.

I don't think they have much of anything to do with the "revolutionary cause."

Again, I think it's important to be specific when making such accusations. Where have you seen any ISO member openly state that they are liberal reformists or that their goals are just to reform capitalism? You might have a problem with their tactics or strategy, insofar as you might think they are functionally liberal in their consequences. But that is different than being "openly liberal."

[Binh]

The best thing to do with the "ISO = liberals because they backed Nader" posts is just ignore them and continue the discussion without responding.

I think the content of the issue, judging by the table of contents, makes it clear that ISR is indeed a Marxist publication, but on the other hand, if this was the first issue you picked up it would definitely seem like a random grab-bag politically.

The concerns Lucretia raises are entirely valid and your arguments are rigorous and consistent. I have yet to hear a strong counter argument defending what was printed and why.

[Lucretia]

and the TCNJers objected strongly that students weren't ruling class. They asked if the people at Penn were the future bankers and politicians and intellectuals - and the Philly comrades laughed and said yes. The moral of the story is, I don't see the ISO as particularly "ruling class" as much as attracting a type of student who fits a certain left-wing liberal mold.

Technically, the students were correct. Students who are not formally employed, but are receiving an education, at best occupy what Erik Wright calls a "mediated class location" in which their interests are likely to be similar to those of the people they are dependent upon for their livelihoods. But technically speaking, being a student at a Umass does not place one in a different class than being a student at Penn, according to a Marxian understanding of class. Neither occupies a formal class location in capitalist relations of production.

But anyhow, I agree totally with your assessment of the problems of internal democracy in an organization where membership levels aren't staggered in a reasonable way, and where benchmarks for ensuring requisite levels of knowledge do not exist. It's very easy in such situations for the party elite to just browbeat and intimidate others into accepting whatever line they want to pursue. Not that I am saying this sort of thing happens in the ISO, since I have never been a member.

[chegitz guevara]

If ISR is taking a turn towards less rigorous, lest rev Marxist offerings, that's very saddening news. After Monthly Review, it was/is the best Marxist journal easily produced in the US.

[andrewsplane]

This thread is absolutely hilarious.

Nichols' piece in the ISR is referenced several times as yet another morbid, distressing symptom of the ISO's slow-- or perhaps rapid!--descent into reformism-- or perhaps outright liberalism!-- ....but the actual substance of the article is discussed, well, not at all!

Comrades, before discussing this article, maybe you want to take the chance to put your animus towards the ISO aside and actually read it? Yes, Nichols is a social democrat. Who cares? The Nichols article is not an argument for why we should embrace social democracy. It's a well-researched and lively historical piece about the influence of Marx's writing among American abolitionists and the concrete intervention of Marx's US followers in the Civil War. It helps demolish the myth that Marxism is somehow alien to US politics and shows how early Marxists helped shape the most titanic event in this country's history.

Anyone who thinks that is not relevant history to have in a Marxist magazine is a sectarian, period.

The idea that the rest of the current issue of the ISR is not r-r-r-revolutionary enough is equally comic. There is a brilliant 18-page analysis of the Egyptian revolution by one of our comrades in the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt, a group that is playing a critical role in the struggle there.

Robin Blackburn is among the leading Marxist scholars on slavery and abolition in the world. The interview is an introduction to groundbreaking work he's done on the political economy of the Atlantic slave trade.

John Riddell is the world's foremost historian on the Communist International and his article on the birth of the united front is incredible. And the issue has several articles written by ISO members-- on Somalia, imperialism, the environment, and other issues. "Lucretia" is spinning yarns.

What the issue shows is that the ISR is consistently bringing together the sharpest Marxist intellectuals in the world to analyze critical historical and contemporary events in an accessible way, and connecting this project to building a revolutionary socialist organization in the US. If you wish to get out of the sectarian ghetto and actually influence wider intellectual and political layers in society, this is part of how revolutionaries do it.

Comrades, why not work on your own publications and websites? It looks like Socialist Action's could perhaps use some upgrading? And in the meantime let's have honest debates about politics, not let ourselves get consumed by organizational ressentiment. :)

[Lucretia]

This thread is absolutely hilarious.

Nichols' piece in the ISR is referenced several times as yet another morbid, distressing symptom of the ISO's slow-- or perhaps rapid!--descent into reformism-- or perhaps outright liberalism!-- ....but the actual substance of the article is discussed, well, not at all!

If this thread is hilarious, your reply adds a depressing footnote remind us of how blind socialists often are to the flaws in their own organization, and how desperate they are to defend the organization even when it's plainly obvious they made a mistake. (There's a word for groups which do not make mistakes: cults.) I have addressed both the content of the argument contained in the Nichols' excerpt, directly citing the conclusion of the excerpt where Nichols makes his argument clear, and addressed how that argument relates to the larger work from which it is drawn. Where on Earth do you come up with the idea that the substance of the article is not discussed? It looks like you need to read more carefully.


Comrades, before discussing this article, maybe you want to take the chance to put your animus towards the ISO aside and actually read it? Yes, Nichols is a social democrat. Who cares? The Nichols article is not an argument for why we should embrace social democracy. It's a well-researched and lively historical piece about the influence of Marx's writing among American abolitionists and the concrete intervention of Marx's US followers in the Civil War. It helps demolish the myth that Marxism is somehow alien to US politics and shows how early Marxists helped shape the most titanic event in this country's history.I really don't care what Nichols claims he is. I am just annoyed that the ISR chose to publish an article with a reformist liberal understanding of "socialism" and the role "socialism" has played (and implicitly) ought to play once more in American society. If you read my posts as carefully as you at least claim to have read the Nichols excerpt, you would see that I have no problem with the ISR or any other revolutionary socialist group publishing articles by liberals or anybody else -- just as the long as the content of the article is useful for advancing a revolutionary socialist cause or vision.

As for your take on the reading, I find it a rather incomplete one. Nichols does want to emphasize the history of socialists in the Civil War, and the role of Marx's ideas in shaping the U.S. past, but you conveniently ignore the primary way he does this -- by arguing that it shaped this past by shaking up bourgeois politicians and institutions enough to adopt reforms (such as the abolition of slavery). The larger argument of the excerpt is clear: socialists are great and historically significant because they make our bourgeois democracy work by adopting needed reforms. In fact, according to Nichols's book, which is entirely consistent with the excerpt the ISR chose to publish, some of these reforms actually constitute socialism! Forget all that stuff you read in Marx and Lenin about socialism being the abolition of class society. It turns out it's really the abolition of slavery.


Anyone who thinks that is not relevant history to have in a Marxist magazine is a sectarian, period.This is just the boilerplate response I have now grown to expect from anybody whose group's actions or motives are being questioned in any way. At this point is has become a meaningless charge intended to evade discussion of what you might call "substance."


The idea that the rest of the current issue of the ISR is not r-r-r-revolutionary enough is equally comic. There is a brilliant 18-page analysis of the Egyptian revolution by one of our comrades in the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt, a group that is playing a critical role in the struggle there.

Robin Blackburn is among the leading Marxist scholars on slavery and abolition in the world. The interview is an introduction to groundbreaking work he's done on the political economy of the Atlantic slave trade.

John Riddell is the world's foremost historian on the Communist International and his article on the birth of the united front is incredible. And the issue has several articles written by ISO members-- on Somalia, imperialism, the environment, and other issues. "Lucretia" is spinning yarns.You might have a legitimate reason to accuse me of "spinning yarns" if I said the entire magazine was worthless and liberal in content. Unfortunately for your credibility, that's not what I said. I raised concern about two specific parts of the magazine, explained what those parts said, and why I had a problem with them. I fail to see how these issues are resolved by bringing up parts of the magazine that I have no problem with and never claimed to have a problem with.


What the issue shows is that the ISR is consistently bringing together the sharpest Marxist intellectuals in the world to analyze critical historical and contemporary events in an accessible way, and connecting this project to building a revolutionary socialist organization in the US.The Haymarket/ISR marketing department couldn't have said it better! :rolleyes: In all seriousness, though, this claim is way over the top. While the ISR publishes some good, occasionally great, things, its sister publication in the UK - International Socialism - is far, far more impressive. Especially when it comes to developing explicitly theoretical analysis.

[DaringMehring]

I do not take back my comments on the ISO. I am calling it like I see it. I have been to several ISO meetings, I like the politics in general and worked with the SWP(UK) for a while. But the base is students. Their "business model" is to have a core group of leaders, and under them, the main group is a constantly cycling group of students, who come in, do stuff for a couple years, then get burnt out and drop out.

For example, when I met ISO people in my new city, what were they talking about? Recruiting on the local campus. They themselves were obvious college grads.

Petit-bourgeoisie are not the end of the world. My background was petit-bourgeoisie. Of course I think they should be part of the revolutionary movement. But, the ISO turns them into its core force. They turn a necessary but dangerous element, into the main one. You can even see it in the above post, where the ISO guy claims ISO is about "bringing together Marxist intellectuals." What about the working class?!

I like Hossam el-Hamalawy, he's great. And I saw him speak at an ISO meeting. As I said, I like the politics in general. But the group is now based in the petit-bourgeoisie, and nobody should think that isn't a problem, but some kind of a virtue. It is something that needs to be corrected.

Remember Trotsky's last controversy with Max Schachtman and others. Remember Trotsky's attack on the petit-bourgeoisie elements in the Party. Remember him say, that any non-worker who can not recruit an actual worker in a year, should be expelled from the Party.

[Lucretia]

I do not take back my comments on the ISO. I am calling it like I see it. I have been to several ISO meetings, I like the politics in general and worked with the SWP(UK) for a while. But the base is students. Their "business model" is to have a core group of leaders, and under them, the main group is a constantly cycling group of students, who come in, do stuff for a couple years, then get burnt out and drop out.

For example, when I met ISO people in my new city, what were they talking about? Recruiting on the local campus. They themselves were obvious college grads.

Petit-bourgeoisie are not the end of the world. My background was petit-bourgeoisie. Of course I think they should be part of the revolutionary movement. But, the ISO turns them into its core force. They turn a necessary but dangerous element, into the main one. You can even see it in the above post, where the ISO guy claims ISO is about "bringing together Marxist intellectuals." What about the working class?!

I like Hossam el-Hamalawy, he's great. And I saw him speak at an ISO meeting. As I said, I like the politics in general. But the group is now based in the petit-bourgeoisie, and nobody should think that isn't a problem, but some kind of a virtue. It is something that needs to be corrected.

Remember Trotsky's last controversy with Max Schachtman and others. Remember Trotsky's attack on the petit-bourgeoisie elements in the Party. Remember him say, that any non-worker who can not recruit an actual worker in a year, should be expelled from the Party.

Are you now conflating the SWP with the ISO? If so, I don't think that's fair to do. Unless you think that the theory of state capitalism somehow leads to recruiting among students, which as popular as the idea seems to be among ISO critics, makes absolutely no sense to me.

[DaringMehring]

Are you now conflating the SWP with the ISO? If so, I don't think that's fair to do. Unless you think that the theory of state capitalism somehow leads to recruiting among students, which as popular as the idea seems to be among ISO critics, makes absolutely no sense to me.

No.

They are semi-fraternal groups.

I am saying, I was able to work fine in the SWP(UK) but the ISO(USA) is a different story in terms of member composition and model.

In other words, a lot of the politics are similar and I agree with them to enough degree to work with them to some degree on a political basis, but the organizations themselves are different.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

No.

They are semi-fraternal groups.

I am saying, I was able to work fine in the SWP(UK) but the ISO(USA) is a different story in terms of member composition and model.

In other words, a lot of the politics are similar and I agree with them to enough degree to work with them to some degree on a political basis, but the organizations themselves are different.

It's a generalization which doesn't, at least in my case, hold water. Our branch has had to split into two branches because we did such a good job of recruiting working-class youth, the unemployed, and immigrants - NOT students. Our campus branch is half the size of our community branch.

[DaringMehring]

It's a generalization which doesn't, at least in my case, hold water. Our branch has had to split into two branches because we did such a good job of recruiting working-class youth, the unemployed, and immigrants - NOT students. Our campus branch is half the size of our community branch.

I am glad! Good luck to the organization as a whole in developing in that direction.

[andrewsplane]

Sorry, Comrade Lucretia, but you do not discuss the substance of the Nichols piece. You cursorily summarize it, then proceed to provide your own peculiar interpretation. And here is that interpretation:

"The larger argument of the excerpt is clear: socialists are great and historically significant because they make our bourgeois democracy work by adopting needed reforms."

I will leave Comrade Lucretia's frothing about "cults" aside and simply encourage others to read John Nichols' valuable piece in the new ISR (which I don't mind "marketing").

Comrades can then decide for themselves if Lucretia is being honest about its "larger argument," or if he is, to put it bluntly, simply splashing around in the sectarian swamp.:)

[andrewsplane]

Originally Posted by DaringMehring
You can even see it in the above post, where the ISO guy claims ISO is about "bringing together Marxist intellectuals." What about the working class?!

I was specifically talking about the ISO, not the ISR. But who said intellectuals can't be working class, Comrade Daring Mehring? Did I say that or is that your view?

[RedTrackWorker]

My subscription ran out and I must've missed the renewal notice so I haven't gotten the current issue, but another example of what Lucretia is talking about would be running Arundhati Roy's piece on the Maoists in India without any kind of commentary from ISR when some of them are people that would kill us Trotskyists (without differentiating between LRP, ISO, whatever). Now Roy's piece was a great piece of writing, informative and important--but letting it stand alone with no follow-up at all seems to me to lay the basis for a dangerous political confusion in its audience. Same with running Chomsky and others with no commentary.

I don't understand Jimmie Higgins distinction between SW as the "line" paper & ISR as a "non-line" journal. I think that if the basis of a program is a "common understanding" of the world, a Marxist group's theoretical journal has a higher standard for working out that common understanding--I fail to see how a newspaper is adequate for arming the vanguard. How does running Chomsky, etc. without any debate with them raise our understanding of this miserable class society and how to get out of it?

And even when the articles are seemingly "line" I find they do not put much effort into asking difficult questions facing the movement. Take eduction, which was a major part of issue 71 (http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/)--it seems to me a big question is how to build unity between public sector workers and other workers and unemployed who have been hit worst. The article talks about "teachers, parents, and students" uniting but no real specifics and instead has a photo of a teacher holding a sign:


Layoff the Con$truction, Not the Teachers.

which is a way of saying "Cut that not this" which is one of the major problems when dealing with the labor bureaucracy (here, the UFT making a deal that gets DC37 employees laid off from schools but not their own). The three feature articles on education have a lot of great information but what do they do to help us figure out how to build a struggle against these attacks? Maybe I missed it but in trying to work out how to propose stuff for the transit union in our struggle, I didn't learn anything about uniting public sector workers with other layers of the class.

On students, Shawki wrote in ISR in 2006 (http://www.isreview.org/issues/50/organization.shtml):

When the movements of the 1970s hit their peak and were looking for new departures, there were choices to make. One choice was to retreat from the project of building a directly working-class organization into an emphasis on labor work. Another was to build an organization committed to working-class power, but in the main looked toward youth and students.

He was at least unapologetic about the ISO's student orientation.

[andrewsplane]

Excuse me, correction to above: the ISR, not the ISO. They are connected but distinct entities.

[andrewsplane]

The threat of reformist deviation emanates from every page of the ISR! Yes, perhaps the ISR should write a short "Leninist" correction to every article written by others on the radical and revolutionary left.

Perhaps then the ISR could gain the sort of mass audience the League for the Revolutionary Party's publications have accumulated over the years?

But RedTrackWorker, I notice your contribution to this discussion did not once call for a general strike or socialist revolution. Don't you think you may also perhaps be "laying the basis for a dangerous political confusion" in your readers minds?

[Lucretia]

Sorry, Comrade Lucretia, but you do not discuss the substance of the Nichols piece. You cursorily summarize it, then proceed to provide your own peculiar interpretation. And here is that interpretation:

"The larger argument of the excerpt is clear: socialists are great and historically significant because they make our bourgeois democracy work by adopting needed reforms."

I will leave Comrade Lucretia's frothing about "cults" aside and simply encourage others to read John Nichols' valuable piece in the new ISR (which I don't mind "marketing").

Comrades can then decide for themselves if Lucretia is being honest about its "larger argument," or if he is, to put it bluntly, simply splashing around in the sectarian swamp.:)

I agree. I encourage everybody to read the article and decide for themselves if they think my interpretation is a fair one. I will simply say two things. One is that my supposedly "cursory" interpretation directly quotes from the conclusion of Nichols' excerpt, wherein he clearly summarizes the crux of his piece. Against your attempt to present Nichols' piece as some feel-good couple of snapshops of Marxists in action "making interventions," I would like to reiterate Nichols' argument, which Nichols does not hide. He asserts that the abolition of slavery was facilitated by a political culture in which even people who were not Marxists or socialists were able to draw on Marxist and socialist ideas in thinking through the issues of the day. That is the pay off to his piece, what Nichols was building up to. The ISO might want to ignore that part of it, while playing up the snapshots and pretending those biographical snapshots aren't part of a reformist argument. But let's be honest: Nichols is making the argument, whether some people want to pretend it exists or not. And if the ISR enjoys the vignettes of Marxists in the Civil War, but not the argument it's building up to, they should publish a qualifier/comment stating as much, and being clear about where they fall on the same question that Nichols is addressing.

The second thing that I will point out that this is entirely in keeping with his reformist understanding of socialism and socialism's role in society, that he spells out in the book that the excerpt is drawn from. Again, this argument is clear: for democracy to work again, a revolution does not need to happen, but what does need to happen is that the "s" word become an understood and debated part of the political culture. It's not like I am suggesting an interpretation of the excerpt that is directly at odds with the project it is a part of, or vice versa. Others here who have read the book can vouche that this indeed Nichols' argument.

I will also reiterate that, whatever value you think the piece might have in its discussion of what Marxian socialists did or did not do during the US Civil War, that value is more than offset by the fact that these portraits of Marxists are being harnessed to make a thoroughly reformist argument about socialism. I stand by my judgment, rooted in a thorough reading of the excerpt in question and the larger book of which it is a part, that the decision to publish this article is absolutely counter-productive and ill advised for a revolutionary socialist group.

[andrewsplane]

Lucretia writes:
"I would like to reiterate Nichols' argument, which Nichols does not hide. He asserts that the abolition of slavery was facilitated by a political culture in which even people who were not Marxists or socialists were able to draw on Marxist and socialist ideas in thinking through the issues of the day."

Well summarized. You did read the article after all! And guess what: Nichols' argument is absolutely correct. Only a complete sectarian would object to printing a well-researched, fascinating piece about this crucial, little-known early chapter in the history of Marxism in the United States.

Enjoy the swamp, Comrade Lucretia.

[RedTrackWorker]

The threat of reformist deviation emanates from every page of the ISR! Yes, perhaps the ISR should write a short "Leninist" correction to every article written by others on the radical and revolutionary left.

Perhaps then the ISR could gain the sort of mass audience the League for the Revolutionary Party's publications have accumulated over the years?

You think ISR should avoid clarifying important questions in order to build a bigger audience?

[Martin Blank]

Lucretia writes: "I would like to reiterate Nichols' argument, which Nichols does not hide. He asserts that the abolition of slavery was facilitated by a political culture in which even people who were not Marxists or socialists were able to draw on Marxist and socialist ideas in thinking through the issues of the day."

Well summarized. You did read the article after all! And guess what: Nichols' argument is absolutely correct. Only a complete sectarian would object to printing a well-researched, fascinating piece about this crucial, little-known early chapter in the history of Marxism in the United States.

I haven't been able to read Nichols' article in ISR (it's not on the website and I don't have a subscription), but if Lucretia's summary is correct, then I have to side with andrewsplane -- and, by extension, Nichols -- here.

I've been working on a book about the role of communists in the Civil War and Reconstruction for the last two years, and there is a great deal of documentary evidence to show that "Red '48ers", former Communist League members and supporters of the IWMA in the U.S. played a decisive role during the War and Reconstruction, both as military commanders and as political advisers to the "Red" wing of the Radical Republicans. If Nichols' was able to write about even half of what I've been compiling into my book, then he's done a great service, even if he is a liberal shit on everything else.

[andrewsplane]

RedTrackWorker, please-- there must be something in your political make-up capable of rising above this sort of silliness. I know from comrades that you are a very good trade union militant.

But take a hard look in the mirror. Your organization's publication is called "Proletarian Revolution." Have you ever considered that workers in the United States don't use the term "proletarian" in place of "worker"? And that, barring some divine Lexical Enlightenment, they never will, not even after the revolution? It's like calling your newspaper "1917"— your organization consciously, aggressively markets its own marginality and obscurity.

You have assimilated a completely sectarian political method. But don't tell me you are pleased with the measly results for all the hard work you do-- you can't be. I know you aren't. Which is why you prate at those of us who reject this sectarian method and seek to make revolutionary Marxism a living force. We are making mistakes, but we're on the right track imo.

Do a serious re-think, is my fraternal advice. Or do you forever wish to remain the Little League for the Revolutionary Party?

[Lucretia]

Lucretia writes:
"I would like to reiterate Nichols' argument, which Nichols does not hide. He asserts that the abolition of slavery was facilitated by a political culture in which even people who were not Marxists or socialists were able to draw on Marxist and socialist ideas in thinking through the issues of the day."

Well summarized. You did read the article after all! And guess what: Nichols' argument is absolutely correct. Only a complete sectarian would object to printing a well-researched, fascinating piece about this crucial, little-known early chapter in the history of Marxism in the United States.

Enjoy the swamp, Comrade Lucretia.

You're hilarious. I write basically the same summary of Nichols' argument, this time without including a direct quote from his excerpt, and suddenly I've been upgraded from "cursorily" talking about his piece in a non-substantive way, to providing a good summary of his argument. This odd and inexplicable re-evaluation of my analysis, combined with your decision to call the LRP names, is quickly turning what I hoped would be a serious discussion into a parody that could only be taken seriously (dare I suggest it?) in a freshman college seminar.

What there is to object to first and foremost is the historically false notion that Lincoln, like a beneficent master, freed the slaves. As if they were his to free. But let's leave aside that fundamental premise to Nichols' argument, and pretend that the slaves were indeed freed because assorted Marxists and socialists provided intellectual equipment Lincoln used in becoming a beneficent, slave-freeing patriarch. The remaining major problem is that this historical vignette does not discuss the balance of class forces that were responsible for the outcome of America's second bourgeois revolution, and he therefore is utterly clueless in discussing the class content behind the decision to (very timidly) acknowledge emancipation -- a fact that the slaves were fighting to make real without Lincoln. As a result, it makes the later retreat from protecting freed people's rights at the end of Reconstruction, an issue that Foner artfully describes in a basically materialist fashion in his well-known monograph on the subject, seem mystifying. Were there not still socialists pushing for reforms in the mid-1870s? In other words, Nichols' civil war is a war with a lot of "socialist" ideas being read and talked about by various (mostly isolated) historical actors, but with no balance of class forces to explain the historical trajectory of how events unfolded. It's warmed over liberalism with some bad history thrown in.

On top of all this, there's the implicit message in Nichols' excerpt that the success of socialism = political reforms within the framework of capitalist relations of production. And that is what socialists can reasonably expect: not revolution, but reform. This comes through much more loudly in the book, but it's still present, if more implicit, in the excerpt published in the ISR. The ISO should have published their own commentary making clear their differences on this issue in particular.

[andrewsplane]

Keep digging, comrade, keep on digging.:)

[andrewsplane]

Miles, I'm glad to hear you're writing about this topic and would love to hear more about your book project. There's always a lot to read, but as a recommendation to comrades who enjoy John Nichols' piece in the ISR, Robin Blackburn's opening essay in his new "Unfinished Revolution" provides a fantastic overview of Marx and his comrades' contribution to abolitionism and the Civil War.

[RedTrackWorker]

The remaining major problem is that this historical vignette does not discuss the balance of class forces that were responsible for the outcome of America's second bourgeois revolution, and he therefore is utterly clueless in discussing the class content behind the decision to (very timidly) acknowledge emancipation -- a fact that the slaves were fighting to make real without Lincoln. As a result, it makes the later retreat from protecting freed people's rights at the end of Reconstruction, an issue that Foner artfully describes in a basically materialist fashion in his well-known monograph on the subject, seem mystifying.

I wish I had that article in front of me. If this part Lucretia says is accurate, it means the ISO is publishing a piece that is politically and theoretically worse than CLR James's piece on the civil war (http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1943/12/negroes-civil-war.htm) published over 60 years ago. One of the key theoretical contributions of Trotskyism is that of combined and uneven development and permanent revolution--James does not use those terms but his essay is a beautiful explication of those ideas applied to the civil war focusing on the self-activity of the slaves. Note his comment on the Northern bourgeois: "They will have to be forced to lead. The first standard-bearers of the struggle are the petty bourgeois democracy, organized in the Abolition movement, stimulated and sustained by the independent mass action of the Negro people." If the Nichols article does not convey this but rather obscures it, it seems like a real failure to contribute to theoretical conversation about the civil war.

As for andrewsplane's claim that
You have assimilated a completely sectarian political method., I hope he makes a thread explaining mine and the LRP's "completely sectarian" political method so the board can learn from that discussion.

For the topic of this thread, I would think it would be more helpful if instead of sweeping generalizations, name calling and irrelevant asides, he would explain to us how we're wrong about ISR and its role.

Is it that ISR isn't supposed to work out a "common understanding" of the world and how to change (in order to have a bigger audience)?

Is it that ISR is "really" working out that "common understanding" but graymouser, Lucretia and I just don't see it?

Or what?

I gave a concrete example of the attack on teachers, in which none of the three articles even asked the question of how to unite with private sector workers and even made that task harder by positively featuring a sign calling for cuts to construction and they only referred to the goal of uniting teachers and parents and students. Andrew or Jimmie Higgins could simply quote parts of the article to show I'm wrong or refer to other articles that do work out such questions of strategy. Instead, we've have the word "sectarian" thrown around as a shield against any kind of criticism or even against just probing discussion. Just like I was called a sectarian for pointing out that it appears a union official affiliated with the ISO in San Francisco is pushing an anti-worker concessionary deal (http://www.revleft.com/vb/isos-position-san-t160945/index.html) and also got called a sectarian for pointing out how the ISO covered up for the Chicago Teacher's Union sell-out (http://www.revleft.com/vb/iso-abets-teachers-t154001/index.html) ("covered" is too kind: "covering up" is more like it as they just posted another piece (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2241303&postcount=18) that uses badly done deception to explain what happened). I fail to understand how I am the one putting the interests of my group before the interests of the movement in this thread or those.

[andrewsplane]

Redtracker, you have now weighed in trenchantly about an article you have not read.
And you are badgering me about a protest sign in a photograph that you disapprove of. But what you have not yet done is call for a general strike or the socialist revolution in any of your posts. I am very disappointed. But I do apologize for calling your organization the Little League For the Revolutionary Party, that wasn't very nice of me.

[RedTrackWorker]

Redtracker, you have now weighed in trenchantly about an article you have not read.

I said "If this part Lucretia says is accurate" and "If the Nichols article does not convey this but rather obscures it", I think that is clear enough, unless you think it is wrong to draw tentative conclusions based on others' reviews, which would make the whole book review section of the ISR a bit weird, no?


And you are badgering me about a protest sign in a photograph that you disapprove of.

I am asking what ISR has contributed to the question of how to stop the attack on public workers by putting forward a strategy to unite public and private workers, public workers and the poor, etc. I said it "even made that task harder by positively featuring a sign calling for cuts to construction"--do you disagree with me? Why?

Again, this could be easily resolved if you simply posted a link or quote or reference showing me and the board otherwise. Instead, you still resort to petty "debate" antics. I had hoped the Egyptian revolution would raise comrades' standards, increase respectful debate in the movement and decrease the tolerance for posts like the ones andrewsplane has contributed to this thread. I guess I was a bit over-optimistic there.

[andrewsplane]

RTW writes:
"I had hoped the Egyptian revolution would raise comrades' standards"

It has raised my standards. I now take a bit more time to ridicule sectarians. I consider this a modest but useful political task. Why? Because those who seek to make socialism appear to new, radicalizing young people and workers as a bizarre, isolated, scholastic exercise instead of the growing, dynamic movement we desperately need are an obstacle to the working class.

First I see if the sectarian is willing to change. If they don't, I simply ridicule them.
So RedTracker perhaps you haven't thought about why you're up at all hours on a Friday night attacking an article in the ISR you haven't read? I'll tell you what you're doing, because I know why. You're doing your sectarian thing. As I stated, you belong to a group with a newspaper called "Proletarian Revolution," ie. you consciously market your own marginality. You work to make Marxism seem inaccessible and weird. You can accuse me of name-calling all you like, but the truth is the following: you are a hardened sectarian.

[black magick hustla]

oh shutup the ISO wingnut brigade of a few thousand (but with probably only a few hundred active cadre) hardly constitutes a success in "making socialism more accesible", the revolution is not a matter of PR work, and socialist organizationsa re not pedagogic organzations. RTW[s group is miles ahead more principled than whatever you guys can come up with. socialism won't become hot if we suddenly drop the word proletarian and use college artsy hipsters to design nice glossy magazines

[RedTrackWorker]

RTW writes:
"I had hoped the Egyptian revolution would raise comrades' standards"

It has raised my standards. I now take a bit more time to ridicule sectarians. I consider this a modest but useful political task. Why? Because those who seek to make socialism appear to new, radicalizing young people and workers as a bizarre, isolated, scholastic exercise instead of the growing, dynamic movement we desperately need are an obstacle to the working class.

First I see if the sectarian is willing to change. If they don't, I simply ridicule them.
So RedTracker perhaps you haven't thought about why you're up at all hours on a Friday night attacking an article in the ISR you haven't read? I'll tell you what you're doing, because I know why. You're doing your sectarian thing. As I stated, you belong to a group with a newspaper called "Proletarian Revolution," ie. you consciously market your own marginality. You work to make Marxism seem inaccessible and weird. You can accuse me of name-calling all you like, but the truth is the following: you are a hardened sectarian.

I am embarrassed to have read this.

[graymouser]

I just read through the whole Nichols article, and Lucretia's analysis of it is spot on. There is not one shred of historical materialism in the piece. In fact, Nichols is arguing a fundamentally liberal point that some of the socialist ideas in Fourier and Marx rubbed off on people like Greely and Lincoln, who were then able to harness those ideas during the Civil War. It is not fitting these figures into a Marxist history but rather doing the opposite - showing the place of Marxism in an ideologically liberal history.

Now, you can argue that this is an important historical vignette because it says some nice things about Fourier and Marx. But it is one hundred and eighty degrees from a materialist, Marxist analysis of history. Yet this is something that andrewsplane would say that any revolutionary Marxist organization should be willing to publish. I'm not really sure why.

This idea of a "broad left" publication is precisely wrong. The role of a revolutionary party is not to find all of the self-styled Marxist intellectuals and publish their work, but itself to concretely use the method of Marxism to analyze ongoing events and theorize both the history and the future of revolutions. The broad method produces a mishmash of ideas. These are not people who are dying for an audience; Robin Blackburn could certainly publish anything he wants in the New Left Review, and I believe a chunk of Nichols's book was actually put up in the Nation. But by putting them as equals of the handful of attempts by the ISO at revolutionary socialist analysis, you are practicing an ideological eclecticism, where the best ideas are scattered about and it's the role of the party to gather them into one place, rather than to criticize them (in the Marxist sense) and put forward in your journal a consistent Marxist analysis.

To parody this as saying that a Marxist journal should be "r-r-revolutionary" is asinine and beside the point. The ISR is the only magazine published by a self-described Leninist organization that you can find in a major bookstore. It has bigger responsibilities than what it is producing.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Which is why you prate at those of us who reject this sectarian method and seek to make revolutionary Marxism a living force. We are making mistakes, but we're on the right track imo.

The ISO always rationalizes it's opportunism, liberalism and anti-communism with claims about popularizing "Marxism."

1. You can't "popularize" revolution by promoting reformism, reformists, and moving toward "acceptable politics." Publishing liberal authors known for their work in The Nation might get you more sales than putting Lenin on your masthead, but it won't bring us any closer to revolution. It will pull you further away from it.

2. You can't "popularize" revolution. It's not something you "market."

"...Communists know only too well ... that revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily, but that everywhere and at all times they have been the necessary outcome of circumstances entirely independent of the will and the leadership of particular parties and entire classes." - Engels

"Marx believed that the conditions of life and work of the proletariat would force the working class to behave in ways that would ultimately transform society. In other words, what Marx said was: We’re not talking about going door-to-door and making workers into ideal socialists. You’ve got to take workers as they are, with all their contradictions, with all their nonsense. But the fact that society forces them to struggle begins to transform the working class. If white workers realize they can’t organize steel unless they organize black workers, that doesn’t mean they’re not racist. It means that they have to deal with their own reality, and that transforms them. Who were the workers who made the Russian Revolution? Sexists, nationalists, half of them illiterate..... That kind of struggle begins to transform people." - Martin Glaberman

3. The ISO should join up with the DSA and CPUSA to form a new mass lefty grouping. That would really up your popularity and exposure. You'd pull in more college students than ever. Plus your magazine would sell more copies. And you'd may even be better able to influence bourgeois politicians!

[Lucretia]

I am embarrassed to have read this.

I will not lower myself to respond directly to it. We once again see the "sectarian" charge being used to try to claim blanket immunity from any criticism, friendly or unfriendly, no matter how substantive or important, of his group. That in itself resembles a sectarian approach more than anything anybody else in this thread has written.

It's hard for me to be a sectarian if I am not a member of a sect, no?

[andrewsplane]

Note: I don't plan on responding to illiterate gurgling from the lower depths of the swamp, so "Nothing Human," "Magick Hustla," etc. I encourage you to keep typing but
be aware you are only communicating with other stagnant vegetation.

1. RedTrack, I think that embarrassment and even humiliation can perhaps be positive first steps to change. Your League for the Revolutionary Party has existed for 35 years. Now, be honest with your readers here and tell us how many members belong to it? I will then explain to them why you spend some much time "strategically orientated" on slandering the ISO.

2. Graymouse writes:
"There is not one shred of historical materialism in the piece. In fact, Nichols is arguing a fundamentally liberal point that some of the socialist ideas in Fourier and Marx rubbed off on people like Greely and Lincoln, who were then able to harness those ideas during the Civil War. It is not fitting these figures into a Marxist history but rather doing the opposite - showing the place of Marxism in an ideologically liberal history."

Graymouse, I think I am going to have to call Jeff Mackler up and recommend Socialist Action have a day school on the American Civil War. Because you see, Marxists did not lead the Civil War. The civil war was the second part of America's bourgeois revolution. Abraham Lincoln was in charge of prosecuting it. But Marx and his followers did everything possible to influence its course of development in a revolutionary direction; that is, in the direction of destroying the slave system and clearing the way for multiracial class unity. This included Marx (and Engels) writing many articles for the Tribune, Marx penning a personal letter to Lincoln congratulating and encouraging him after Lincoln won the presidency, and Marxists fighting bravely for the Union Army. Marx and his followers played a modest role in the Civil War, a subsidiary role politically, but an important role nonetheless.

To show what impact Marx and his followers had in a revolutionary war they did not lead is not a "liberal point" as you state but an absolutely crucial but largely forgotten chapter in the history of Marxism in the United States that Nichols' piece helps to rescue. Is it the Final Word on the topic? No. But plenty of non-Marxist historians who are political liberals/social democrats have made extremely valuable contributions to helping us understand the Civil War, contributions that are compatible with Marxism or can be integrated into it-- James McPherson is a shining example.

Keep up your work in UNAC but get out of the sectarian swamp, GrayMouse— as this thread demonstrates, it's not a very healthy place to splash around in.

[HEAD ICE]

"how many members you got" the psl wants to have a word with you

[Lucretia]

Note: I don't plan on responding to illiterate gurgling from the lower depths of the swamp, so "Nothing Human," "Magick Hustla," etc. I encourage you to keep typing but
be aware you are only communicating with other stagnant vegetation.

Paraphrase: "I don't like a lot of the people here because they criticize the group I belong to."

1. RedTrack, I think that embarrassment and even humiliation can perhaps be positive first steps to change. Your League for the Revolutionary Party has existed for 35 years. Now, be honest with your readers here and tell us how many members belong to it? I will then explain to them why you spend some much time "strategically orientated" on slandering the ISO.Paraphrase: "Instead of responding to your questions about the substance of our approach to specific issues relevant to revolutionary socialist strategy, I'll just point out that my group has a lot more members than yours!"


Graymouse, I think I am going to have to call Jeff Mackler up and recommend Socialist Action have a day school on the American Civil War. Because you see, Marxists did not lead the Civil War. The civil war was the second part of America's bourgeois revolution. Abraham Lincoln was in charge of prosecuting it. But Marx and his followers did everything possible to influence its course of development in a revolutionary direction; that is, in the direction of destroying the slave system and clearing the way for multiracial class unity. This included Marx (and Engels) writing many articles for the Tribune, Marx penning a personal letter to Lincoln congratulating and encouraging him after Lincoln won the presidency, and Marxists fighting bravely for the Union Army. Marx and his followers played a modest role in the Civil War, a subsidiary role politically, but an important role nonetheless.This is all a very lovely, if superficial, run-down on what various Marxists and socialists tried to do during the Civil War. However, it doesn't move us one iota closer to explaining why slavery ended in the U.S., which was the question the Nichols excerpt was addressing. You can keep spitting out over and over again that Marxists should be proud of previous Marxists getting involved in abolitionism, etc. But the fact that Marxists in the U.S. fought for Marxist-type things during the Civil War is hardly a groundbreaking revelation. Not even Nichols, a liberal journalist with only a superficial understanding of US history, is content just to make that observation. He at least packages it in an actual argument, as ridiculously inaccurate and liberal as it is.


To show what impact Marx and his followers had in a revolutionary war they did not lead is not a "liberal point" as you state but an absolutely crucial but largely forgotten chapter in the history of Marxism in the United States that Nichols' piece helps to rescue. Is it the Final Word on the topic? No. But plenty of non-Marxist historians who are political liberals/social democrats have made extremely valuable contributions to helping us understand the Civil War, contributions that are compatible with Marxism or can be integrated into it-- James McPherson is a shining example.Nobody is saying that Nichols is terrible for being a liberal, or that because of his political identification, he is hardwired not to write anything of value, ever. What we're saying is his specific argument in the excerpt printed in the ISR is not only wrong, but is thoroughly liberal. The argument is liberal, whatever the author of the argument happens to identify as. Got it now? Good. I won't bother posting why the argument is liberal and reformist for the third time in this thread, because I understand that if you had either the inclination or the ability to respond to it with anything more than a glib "Nichols is right, and you're wrong!" gesture, you would have done so by now.


Keep up your work in UNAC but get out of the sectarian swamp, GrayMouse— as this thread demonstrates, it's not a very healthy place to splash around in.Parapharse: "You're a sectarian because you criticized something my group did."

[andrewsplane]

Yawn

[andrewsplane]

What on earth does the Stalinist PSL have to do with this thread?:confused:

[graymouser]

2. Graymouse writes:
"There is not one shred of historical materialism in the piece. In fact, Nichols is arguing a fundamentally liberal point that some of the socialist ideas in Fourier and Marx rubbed off on people like Greely and Lincoln, who were then able to harness those ideas during the Civil War. It is not fitting these figures into a Marxist history but rather doing the opposite - showing the place of Marxism in an ideologically liberal history."

Graymouse, I think I am going to have to call Jeff Mackler up and recommend Socialist Action have a day school on the American Civil War. Because you see, Marxists did not lead the Civil War. The civil war was the second part of America's bourgeois revolution. Abraham Lincoln was in charge of prosecuting it. But Marx and his followers did everything possible to influence its course of development in a revolutionary direction; that is, in the direction of destroying the slave system and clearing the way for multiracial class unity. This included Marx (and Engels) writing many articles for the Tribune, Marx penning a personal letter to Lincoln congratulating and encouraging him after Lincoln won the presidency, and Marxists fighting bravely for the Union Army. Marx and his followers played a modest role in the Civil War, a subsidiary role politically, but an important role nonetheless.

To show what impact Marx and his followers had in a revolutionary war they did not lead is not a "liberal point" as you state but an absolutely crucial but largely forgotten chapter in the history of Marxism in the United States that Nichols' piece helps to rescue. Is it the Final Word on the topic? No. But plenty of non-Marxist historians who are political liberals/social democrats have made extremely valuable contributions to helping us understand the Civil War, contributions that are compatible with Marxism or can be integrated into it-- James McPherson is a shining example.

Keep up your work in UNAC but get out of the sectarian swamp, GrayMouse— as this thread demonstrates, it's not a very healthy place to splash around in.
You don't seem to understand the difference between what Nichols wrote and historical materialism, which is worrisome. It is simply not comparable to McPherson's work, whose book on the Civil War was a badly needed refutation of pro-Southern historiography and an excellent factual look at the war and its roots. The Nichols work is primarily an ideological one, attempting (and, I think, failing) to draw a connection between socialist ideas and the main actors in the Civil War.

In fact, you are so far off I have to question your reading comprehension. What I wrote has nothing to do with the idea of Marxists leading the Civil War, and I have no clue where you got that idea. When I say "Marxist history" I mean a class analysis of historical events, of which the Eighteenth Brumaire is probably the foremost example. There is not a shred of this approach to history in Nichols. Where Marx and the best of his followers ripped away the ideological veil over history and laid bare the class struggles beneath it, Nichols is at work restoring the veil with a vaguely "socialist" cast. The Civil War was a conflict between the increasingly dominant bourgeoisie and the southern slavocracy, which turned despite the intentions of its protagonists (including Lincoln) into a war of liberation because the force of the very possibility of emancipation was an irrepressible wave. It took fifteen years to put that genie back in the bottle, when the Republican bourgeoisie betrayed their temporary Black allies, and reconstituted the Southern landowners as a subordinate class.

This is the kind of analysis you would have gotten from the theoretical journal of the old Socialist Workers Party, which by an odd coincidence was also called the International Socialist Review for a period. A Marxist analysis is always based in historical materialism. Nichols's piece, whatever superficially nice things he might say about Marx, is fundamentally anti-Marxist in that it views ideas, not social classes, as the primary movers in history. It sees the ideas that people like Lincoln and Greely were influenced by as primary, rather than the objective social classes that drove their movement. As I said, it is fitting Marxism into a liberal ideological history. If you don't understand this, then the state of internal education in the ISO is sorrier than I thought.

This is not sectarianism. The Nichols piece is an attempt to appropriate Marxism into a liberal historiography and I find it objectionable, and I think it calls the judgment of the leadership of the ISO into serious question that this was published. The book should be opposed in strong terms, because it is not a contribution but a co-optation of socialist history into liberalism. I also see the drift of the ISR and Haymarket into "broad left" publishing as worrisome. These niches are already well enough covered, and what is needed is not, for instance, more books by Amy Goodman (however much activists may watch Democracy Now, she's not a Marxist) but more books by Marxists featuring a class analysis of the current period.

[Jose Gracchus]

I'm in total agreement with greymouser. There's a veritable plethora of "broad left" or "progressive" outlets and media. We don't need to spend our very limited manpower, time, and energy lending even more assistance to the 'broad left'.

[black magick hustla]

What on earth does the Stalinist PSL have to do with this thread?:confused:

same breed of wankers that ramble about the numbers game, leftists going off about their membership numbers is isomorphic to college broes going about how many girls they banged

[Binh]

I'm in total agreement with greymouser. There's a veritable plethora of "broad left" or "progressive" outlets and media. We don't need to spend our very limited manpower, time, and energy lending even more assistance to the 'broad left'.

Nichols writes for The Nation. He already has a platform.

If anything, the Nichols article gave a platform for liberalism within the radical/revolutionary milieu of the ISR's readership.

[andrewsplane]

Graymouser, you wrote the following:"In fact, Nichols is arguing a fundamentally liberal point that some of the socialist ideas in Fourier and Marx rubbed off on people like Greely and Lincoln, who were then able to harness those ideas during the Civil War."
This is not a "liberal point" Graymouser it is accurate history. Miles is writing a book about this chapter in history and I'd ask him to back me up. You provide a standard Marxist summary of the class dynamics of the civil war. But please prove, rather than simply assert, that it is at odds with Nichols' piece? They are not at odds. You are either grinding the sectarian ax or you have a completely mechanical conception of Marxism.
Nichols writes for The Nation, he's a social democrat, blah blah. Who cares? So did Daniel Singer. It's a great piece, a short discussion of some fascinating history of Marxists in America. Bihn have you read it? Read it first, then attack it dude. I just responded to you on Louis' blog btw. At length.

To those reading this trainwreck of a thread, ask yourselves: why have so many weighed in on this thread about a single ISR article, many of whom have not read it? Why has only a single phrase of this article been quoted? What has provoked all this sound and fury? ...... Splash, splash.......:)

[andrewsplane]

Originally Posted by Jose Gracchus
There's a veritable plethora of "broad left" or "progressive" outlets and media. We don't need to spend our very limited manpower, time, and energy lending even more assistance to the 'broad left'.

The ISO had a meeting in Wisconsin with John Nichols and Phil Gasper of the ISO. The topic was "The Return of Socialism." You can find it on Youtube. 200 people attended and there was a lively discussion, all recorded. Gasper put forward an argument for revolution and socialist organization. What a fucking waste of time! Why waste any time with the "broad left," sowing reformist illusions? Social Democrat, Nation-writing scum!

[Lucretia]

Graymouser, you wrote the following:"In fact, Nichols is arguing a fundamentally liberal point that some of the socialist ideas in Fourier and Marx rubbed off on people like Greely and Lincoln, who were then able to harness those ideas during the Civil War."
This is not a "liberal point" Graymouser it is accurate history.

The important question is, "Harnessed those ideas to do what?" If Nichols' point is that Lincoln read widely and was familiar with ideas and literature being discussed in radical circles, then Nichols is certainly correct. But his larger point, consistent with the argument in his book, is that this broader familiarity with radical intellectual currents was crucial to and continues to be vital for democracy in the United States, as can be seen in the outcome of Lincoln's presidency -- namely the emancipation of slaves. The agency of slaves, the interests of the Northern capitalists, etc., are all shunted to the side. And instead we get such wonderful revelations as, "Yet, it is reasonable to suggest that the Lincoln of 1854 was in the process of becoming the president who would--pressured by Greely--finally sign an Emancipation Proclamation."

Catch that? Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (implied to be a major democratizing moment, as if it freed the slaves) because he was pressured to do so under the onslaught of radicalism from socialist ideas. Sorry, but that is flatly historically inaccurate. Lincoln and his administration were compelled to do so by an increasing pressure from Northern industrialists to end a destructive war that was disrupting business, wanted to punish the south for its intransigence, and tended to view free labor as more efficient than slave labor. Lincoln was adamant about not making emancipation a war aim, and only did so under the intense political pressure of the moment, not because of some radical ideological commitment that developed in his mind for over a decade. Again, this is now consensus history, even among bourgeois historians. Try reading Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet, and Ira Berlin's Slaves No More which he edited along with the Marxist historian Barbara Fields. Hell, even read WEB DuBois's very early work from a century ago. It's light years ahead of Nichols' analysis.


You are either grinding the sectarian ax or you have a completely mechanical conception of Marxism.Or they have done some reading in history beyond listening to their high school football coach give a poorly prepared lecture on the Civil War.


Nichols writes for The Nation, he's a social democrat, blah blah. Who cares? So did Daniel Singer. It's a great piece, a short discussion of some fascinating history of Marxists in America.I think their point wasn't that, because he's a social democrat, there's no value to what he's saying. Their point was that he already gets enough exposure in more mainstream venues, so that the attempt by ISO to make the ISR "broad left" is redundant: that niche is already more than capably filled by other publications -- like the ones Nichols writes for. What the ISO does by publishing Nichols' piece in the one purportedly Leninist publication that has any substantial reach into the mainstream through outlets like national chain bookstores, is to muddy its own political waters and miss a singular opportunity to bring an authentically revolutionary perspective on current and historical events into people's consciousness.


To those reading this trainwreck of a thread, ask yourselves: why have so many weighed in on this thread about a single ISR article, many of whom have not read it? Why has only a single phrase of this article been quoted? What has provoked all this sound and fury? ...... Splash, splash.......:)It's all a great conspiracy to degrade the ISO. Or it's a reflection of the fact that a lot of revolutionary socialists here are absolutely fucking frustrated that the ISO insists on squandering opportunities to contribute effectively to the struggle all of us here want to succeed. Because, yes, we want the ISO to succeed! As I have said on this forum several times, I actually sympathize more with the ISO's theoretical framework, as developed in the UK's SWP (since, to be perfectly frank, the ISO tends to republish simplified versions of the British theorists rather than to develop theory of their own), than I do with any other currently existing Marxist group today. This is why I expect more from it than the nonsense it chose to publish in the latest issue of the ISR.

[Lucretia]

Nichols's piece, whatever superficially nice things he might say about Marx, is fundamentally anti-Marxist in that it views ideas, not social classes, as the primary movers in history. It sees the ideas that people like Lincoln and Greely were influenced by as primary, rather than the objective social classes that drove their movement. As I said, it is fitting Marxism into a liberal ideological history. If you don't understand this, then the state of internal education in the ISO is sorrier than I thought.

I also think its worth noting that the historical figure who stands in for the most praise in Nichols' excerpt does so not for espousing Marxism, but for "winnowing" radical ideas and being open to all ideas. Nichols' work is basically praising the tired postmodern (essentially liberal) trope of multiculturalism, except that it's a kind of multiculturalism of ideas. Good people don't actually make firm intellectual judgments, whether or not based on a solid foundation of research and analysis. Instead, in Nichols' view, the Enlightened People are those who celebrate and draw from a diversity of ideas, those wonderful moderates who always sample ideas from across the political spectrum. As he puts it, "Presidents who choose to dismiss individuals, ideas, and ideologies with which they do not fully agree take too many options off the table; in so doing they ill serve the republic." That's right. Obama shouldn't take neoliberal ideas off the table when formulating his tax plan. He should sample broadly into the ideas of the left and right, and come up with a "balanced approach."

What a fucking joke.

[Comrade-Z]

I agree with this talk of not needing more Amy Goodmans...which got me thinking:

How useful would it be to have a news show like "TheYoungTurks" or "Democracy Now" on youtube, except from a thoroughly Marxist perspective? That's something that we're really missing. Especially something that went into the news stories of the day with some theoretical depth. I'm usually disappointed at the theoretical depth of the newspapers of most "socialist" groups like, for example, Socialist Alternative (the one I have the most experience with). I definitely get a vibe with their paper "Justice" that it is more of a propaganda piece aimed at wooing reformists to become members than it is a publication aimed at using current events to demonstrate historical materialist approaches to politics.

Actually, something I would experiment with, if I were editing a paper, would be to have an article, and then below that article an editorial debate around that article supplied by the organization's members with at least just as much space on the page. Outsiders would read the article and the debate around it and get drawn into Marxist ideas by reading the debate--a bit like with these threads on revleft. Learning through debate is always more interesting and salient than learning when there's no contention at stake, when you are just being given a flat party line outside of any context of what other theoretical lines it is implicitly competing against.

This measure would also democratize the publication of the paper. That said, I'd always give the paper's editorial board the last word to try to rebut any reformist arguments expressed in the published comments section (but if the cadre education is of good quality, that shouldn't be an issue anyways).

[graymouser]

This is not a "liberal point" Graymouser it is accurate history. Miles is writing a book about this chapter in history and I'd ask him to back me up. You provide a standard Marxist summary of the class dynamics of the civil war. But please prove, rather than simply assert, that it is at odds with Nichols' piece? They are not at odds. You are either grinding the sectarian ax or you have a completely mechanical conception of Marxism.
Quite honestly, Nichols's work is flimsy. In the whole piece he makes one real connection and one unfounded assertion. The connection he makes is that Lincoln was reading the Tribune at the time when Karl Marx was writing for the paper, so it's likely that Lincoln read some articles that Marx (and Engels) wrote. The assertion that he makes, which is entirely unfounded and essentially wrong, is that some bits of Fourierist socialist ideology worked its way into the top levels of the Republican Party. It makes a mountain out of the molehill of a couple of comments by Lincoln on labor and capital, and for a few propaganda points buries the fact that the Republican Party represented not the working class, but the bourgeoisie leading all the anti-slavery classes in the world-historic final revolutionary act of the capitalist class.

It is the essence of the liberal concept of history to look at ideas over material circumstances as the motor engine of history. Maybe you don't grasp that this is essentially what Nichols is doing; that's a problem you need to work out with education. I appreciate that you have enough "party patriotism" to stand by the ISO leadership that puts out this kind of thing, but the people who run the ISR are not green political novices and should know better.

I've been in the ISO. There are people in it I work with day to day in the antiwar movement, and on other social justice issues. I left on good personal terms with everybody in the branch and have worked to keep things that way. I think that when we have a mass working-class revolutionary socialist party, many of the people who are today in the ISO will be in it. So please don't go on about sectarian axes to grind. I am bringing this up because I think it represents a failing and a general political drift on the part of the ISO's top leadership in Chicago, where it is more important to cultivate friends on the liberal left (not just Nichols, but also people like Amy Goodman) than to use the limited resources they have to advance revolutionary socialist theory.

[HEAD ICE]

andrewsplane has a weird conception of what sectarianism is. criticizing, or even falsely attacking another organization, is not in itself sectarian. a small grouping can spend their whole entire existence solely "attacking" other organizations, but that doesn't make them sectarians.

marx and engels used the term "sectarian" in a very specific way. in fact if you ever read their personal correspondence it is almost entirely filled with them "attacking" other people and groups whom they don't consider to be sufficiently socialist, with some snide jabs thrown in. in fact they deliberately engineered splits. i'm not going back to marx like some reference to holy scripture, rather they used a precise definition of what 'sectarian' means which is helpful, rather than it being a term synonymous with "they are being mean to my group :crying:"

Sectarian, as used by Marx and Engels, meant putting down a set of eternal principles that would "shape and mold" the class struggle. This often manifests itself by "anti-sectarians" and people who oppose "mechanical marxism" who believe that communism will be won through a clever marketing campaign and energetic propaganda rather than the self-movement of the class. People who are often they criers for "unity" are often the most sectarian:


One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for "unity." Those who have this word most often on their lips are those who sow the most dissension, just as at present the Jura Bakuninists in Switzerland, who have provoked all the splits, scream for nothing so much as for unity. Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition because they are now all together in one pot (you have a fine example of this in Germany with the people who preach the reconciliation of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie)--or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously (like Mühlberger*, for instance) want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the greatest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues are at certain moments the loudest shouters for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the unity shouters.

What communists should be more interested in is unity of the class, not unity of the sects (the ISO is a sect, as is the LRP, as is the SWP, as is the ICT, as is the ICC, as is the PSL etc).

Another way sectarianism is manifested is the myriad of groups calling themselves the working class vanguard party completely divorced from historical factors. This either results in what I just described, groups who consider communist consciousness to arise through marketing rather than the class struggle itself and thus moan for "unity", brag about how many members they have, and are more focused on increasing membership of their sect rather than trying to push the class struggle forward.

On the flip side, you have people calling themselves the working class party who refuse to engage with any other sect because they are the holders of the pure communist programme, and when the historical situation comes around they will be thrusted into the fold by the class and then lead them to victory. This is how the large number of Bordigist "International Communist Party" groups view themselves. Again, they are not sectarian because they don't engage in dialogue, but because they view themselves as the pure future communist party.

[andrewsplane]

Lucretia writes:
"That's right. Obama shouldn't take neoliberal ideas off the table when formulating his tax plan. He should sample broadly into the ideas of the left and right, and come up with a "balanced approach."

What a fucking joke"


Workers' Vanguard is calling, Comrade Lucretia-- they want your full scoop on the ISR/Nichols/Lincoln/Obama/Neoliberalism Affair!

[andrewsplane]

GrayMousewrites:
"I am bringing this up because I think it represents a failing and a general political drift on the part of the ISO's top leadership in Chicago, where it is more important to cultivate friends on the liberal left (not just Nichols, but also people like Amy Goodman) than to use the limited resources they have to advance revolutionary socialist theory."



Ah yes, such as the revolutionary socialist theory your organization, Socialist Action, recommends on its website ... History Will Absolve Me by Fidel Castro?
No thanks, comrade— we'll take a pass!

[Lucretia]

I think the inability of "andrewsplane" to consturct anything even remotely resembling a substantive response to the criticisms leveled in this thread is telling. I would like to hear from other ISO comrades who are interested in having a dialogue about this issue.

[Martin Blank]

Miles is writing a book about this chapter in history and I'd ask him to back me up.

I still cannot vouch for anything that Nichols wrote, because I have yet to read what was printed in ISR. Perhaps if someone could scan it in and PM or e-mail me, I could write a proper commentary on it. In the meantime, what I can do is provide a small vignette of some of the information I've uncovered.

There is documentary evidence to show that Lincoln was more familiar with Marx's writings than many think. It is not because of Marx's articles in the New York Tribune, but because of two men: Joseph Weydemeyer and Friedrich Sorge.

During the Civil War, Weydemeyer was a colonel in the Union Army, operating in Missouri. However, he had close ties with the "free soil" wing of the Republicans through his commander and friend, John C. Fremont. Through Fremont, Weydemeyer was able to reach prominent Radical Republicans, like Senators Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Wade (more on Wade below), and Secretary of State William Seward. Through these connections, Weydemeyer was able to communicate with Lincoln. When Marx sent Weydemeyer four copies of his Inaugural Address of the IWMA in 1864, one copy went directly to the White House. (Through Weydemeyer and August Willich, both high-ranking officers in the Union Army, copies of Marx's Inaugural Address made it into the hands of thousands of soldiers.)

However, while Weydemeyer was able to communicate indirectly with Lincoln, it was Friedrich Sorge that made the largest impact in Washington. In 1857, Sorge helped found the Club of Communists in New York, which was acted as an "inside-outside" movement on the left of the Republican Party (similar to how DSA functions today). The role of the CofC was to intersect the growing labor presence in both the abolitionist and "free soil" movements. The CofC was successful beyond its own expectations, and Sorge became an adviser to many leading Radical Republicans and abolitionists. (It is believed that Wendell Phillips' becoming a communist was Sorge's work.) During the Civil War, Sorge was a regular at Republican events in Washington and was regularly sought out for the "communist opinion" on events by Congressmen, Senators and members of Lincoln's Cabinet. In 1864, Sorge was asked to become a leading adviser to the Radical Republicans in Washington.

After Lincoln's assassination and the end of the Civil War was really the time when communists had their greatest influence in 19th century America. The CofC soon became Section No. 1 of the IWMA in North America, with Sorge at its head, and including among its members Horace Greeley (editor of the New York Tribune), Senator Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips. At the same time, more Radical Republicans were being attracted to the IWMA, including many of Sumner's colleagues in the U.S. Senate. One of these was Senator Benjamin Wade from Ohio. In 1867, Wade became President Pro Tempore of the Senate. This put him as next in line to become President of the United States, since the sitting chief executive, Andrew Johnson, who assumed office after Lincoln's assassination, had no vice president.

Johnson, a "popular sovereignty" Democrat from Kentucky, defended the "Black Codes" that post-war Southern governments first adopted; the "Black Codes" effectively returned African Americans to a position akin to slavery. As well, he opposed Radical Reconstruction and voiced support for re-admitting the states of the ex-Confederacy as they were. This conflicted with the view of the Republican-led Congress, where the Radicals had come to dominate. These differences led to Johnson's impeachment in 1868. However, Johnson avoided conviction and removal from office by one vote in the Senate. The reason? As one newspaper put it, "Andrew Johnson is innocent because Ben Wade is guilty of being his successor." Had Johnson been convicted in the Senate, Wade, a member of the IWMA who had Sorge as a leading adviser, would have become the 18th President of the United States.

There is so much more on this topic I could write about, but you'll just have to read my book when it comes out to learn more. :D

[thriller]

One more point. I don't need someone else to analyze a piece of writing for me. I don't need an organization to break down what someone is writing. If I am smart enough to understand "Das Kapital" I can understand what a liberal author is hinting at. I'm sick of the groups 'breaking down' the hidden message in books, magazines, articles, and such forth. I am capable of understanding things on my own figurin out the truth for myself.
Note: not aimed directly at the ISR because we all know many leftist magazines do this.

[graymouser]

Ah yes, such as the revolutionary socialist theory your organization, Socialist Action, recommends on its website ... History Will Absolve Me by Fidel Castro?
No thanks, comrade— we'll take a pass!
So rather than talk about the substantial issue at hand, you dodge and move into the issue of Cuba. I'll take that as meaning that you have nothing to offer and simply want to retreat into territory you would prefer. It's funny that someone with so much to say about "sectarianism" turns around to take digs. I guess it's only sectarianism if it's aimed at the ISO.

SA's position on Cuba is well documented, and comes out of serious debate on the question of the Cuban revolution in the Trotskyist movement. You seem pretty resourceful, you should be able to find it. It's off topic in this particular thread though, and I'm not going to take it further here.

[Olentzero]

It's kind of shocking that the current issue doesn't have a single feature article by an ISO member.I'm waiting for my copy of the latest issue to get here to Sweden, but I can say for an absolute fact that this is false. I know James Illingworth personally. He's a member and has been since I knew him in DC from 2005-2007.

[Olentzero]

On second glance, comparing to the TOC that got posted on Page 1, it looks like #79 is out on the stands already but the ISR homepage hasn't been updated yet. That would explain why people trying to find it there aren't having any luck.

[Binh]

So rather than talk about the substantial issue at hand, you dodge and move into the issue of Cuba. I'll take that as meaning that you have nothing to offer and simply want to retreat into territory you would prefer. It's funny that someone with so much to say about "sectarianism" turns around to take digs. I guess it's only sectarianism if it's aimed at the ISO.

He seems constitutionally incapable of doing anything else except this sort of thing. He's like a parody of a Spart.

[Olentzero]

I woke up a few minutes ago thinking about this, and I hit on a question that is aimed primarily at Lucretia but is also for the rest of you on that side of the issue:

If the political direction of the ISO is so all-fired important to you, why are you not a member of the organization fighting to change that direction from the inside?

[graymouser]

I woke up a few minutes ago thinking about this, and I hit on a question that is aimed primarily at Lucretia but is also for the rest of you on that side of the issue:

If the political direction of the ISO is so all-fired important to you, why are you not a member of the organization fighting to change that direction from the inside?
Personally I'm a member of Socialist Action, which is much closer to the ideas and methods that I believe are correct in the long run. But I think that there are people now in the ISO who I would be in the same mass Leninist revolutionary party with as the class struggle heats up and we face new revolutionary situations. And, frankly, the ISO is the only self-proclaimed Leninist organization that has a professional publishing house and magazine at its disposal.

The ISO has never been good at putting out Marxist theory. Initially they mostly reprinted the work of their British cothinkers, which may have been thin but offered at least some attempts to capture important theoretical points. (There was a series of little books from Haymarket that I remember quite well, Party and Class and a few others, plus Cliff's bio of Lenin, Hallas's book on Trotsky, etc.) Haymarket did put out some good books, including one by a late member of Socialist Action - Paul Siegel's The Meek and the Militant, a Marxist analysis of religion that is well worth reading.

Even so, why wouldn't it be worth questioning where one of the largest socialist organizations in the country is going? If comrades feel like they would be part of the ISO except for X, Y, and Z - or if they feel that their groups might someday find themselves in a common party with the elements that currently make up the ISO - but they see it moving in the wrong direction, why wouldn't we speak up? I don't think that the people in the ISO are a lost cause but I'm not optimistic about the direction the organization is going.

[Lucretia]

I woke up a few minutes ago thinking about this, and I hit on a question that is aimed primarily at Lucretia but is also for the rest of you on that side of the issue:

If the political direction of the ISO is so all-fired important to you, why are you not a member of the organization fighting to change that direction from the inside?

One major reason is that they do not have a branch where I live.

[Lucretia]

The ISO has never been good at putting out Marxist theory. Initially they mostly reprinted the work of their British cothinkers, which may have been thin but offered at least some attempts to capture important theoretical points.

This is where I disagree. I think the SWP-UK has produced a lot of important theoretical material. Not just the state cap stuff that has been refined over the decades by Harman, Callinicos, and others. But just look at the most recent publication of their theoretical journal -- it contains a rejoinder in a nuanced and in-depth exchange about combined and uneven development, its relationship of that theory to permanent revolution, and implicitly (neither author says this directly, but this is the crux of their disagreement) how we should conceptualize these terms in relation to the concept of mode of production. All of this theoretical back-and-forth is connected to what is going on in Egypt. It's high-level stuff, but it's directly relevant to revolutionary strategy. And it's the kind of thing that the ISO simply does not do and hasn't done in recent memory. I don't know if the reason is lack of capability or just plain disinterest, but the only theory they publish tends to be simplified restatements of what has originated in the UK (as in Phil Gasper's little "Critical Thinking" vignettes), when they are not literally republishing stuff from the SWP directly.

Not sure why there this is huge gap in theoretical output across the oceans. Though I do think it's interesting that one of the leaders of the ISO is a British expat. One reason may be the lack of decent cadre development that graymouse has speculated about in this thread. There just doesn't seem to be the focus on preparing members to offer substantive theoretical contributions. And the ones who do have that background seem to be too busy "intervening in struggles."

[Olentzero]

One major reason is that they do not have a branch where I live.Start one, then!

graymouser, the point is more that starting a debate like this on a message board where the majority of ISO members - up to and including the editorial board of the ISR - are not around to discuss the issue is pointless at best and sectarian at worst. It's not going to accomplish much of anything beyond what it's already done, which is rub board members the wrong way through turning into a multi-page flame fest.

Seriously, Lucretia, what is it you expect out of this thread? Do you really think any ISO members are going to take up your half-baked ultraleft arguments with their branch committee or - if your wildest dreams come true - the editorial board in Chicago? Or are you just getting personal satisfaction out of baiting the few ISO members who are on this board and who have no hand in the editorial decisions of the ISR?

In the former case, you're getting others to make your arguments for you while you can safely hide behind the anonymity of an Internet message board. They bear the brunt of the friction that gets stirred up through an argument like this while you remain just something they read. Intellectually and politically dishonest.

In the latter case, you're just being a sectarian jerk whether you're a member of a sect or not.

If you have a real problem with the stuff that's getting published in the ISR, take your criticisms to the editorial board. Write them a letter - quick hint: avoid a multi-page rant - expressing your concern. If you manage to keep the ultraleft garbage to a minimum they'll likely even consider printing it and responding to it.

[RedTrackWorker]

Seriously, Lucretia, what is it you expect out of this thread? Do you really think any ISO members are going to take up your half-baked ultraleft arguments with their branch committee or - if your wildest dreams come true - the editorial board in Chicago?
[snip]
Write them a letter - quick hint: avoid a multi-page rant - expressing your concern. If you manage to keep the ultraleft garbage to a minimum they'll likely even consider printing it and responding to it.

What did Lucretia post that was ultraleft, half-baked or garbage? Intellectually and politically dishonest? If you have time to throw out so many pejoratives, perhaps you could take some time to actually respond to the question Lucretia raised and back up what you're saying.

Otherwise, it seems like you can only answer criticism by slinging as much mud as possible and calling other people "sectarian!"

[Lucretia]

Start one, then! ... Seriously, Lucretia, what is it you expect out of this thread? Do you really think any ISO members are going to take up your half-baked ultraleft arguments with their branch committee or - if your wildest dreams come true - the editorial board in Chicago? Or are you just getting personal satisfaction out of baiting the few ISO members who are on this board and who have no hand in the editorial decisions of the ISR?

Come again? You think it's realistic of me to change the direction of the entire ISO by starting a one-man chapter, but it's unrealistic for me to ask questions about the content of the latest ISR in order to get several, perhaps many of its members here, both active participants and lurkers, to begin to re-evaluate and perhaps begin to work toward some minor changes to their organization?

What I expect of this thread is a civil discussion about substantive issues. If people of any revolutionary socialist organization are unwilling or unable to participate in that, then I think it reflects poorly on them as individuals and on the organization they are members of.


In the former case, you're getting others to make your arguments for you while you can safely hide behind the anonymity of an Internet message board. They bear the brunt of the friction that gets stirred up through an argument like this while you remain just something they read. Intellectually and politically dishonest.Everybody on this forum is anonymous, so we're all on an equal playing field. Even then, anonymity doesn't provide an excuse for refusing to participate in civil, polite, substantive discussion about important issues. It certainly doesn't mean that all our discussion is "intellectually and politically dishonest." And it certainly doesn't indicate that anybody here is "getting others to make my arguments for me." Each of us here speaks for themselves. To be honest, your argument baffles me.


In the latter case, you're just being a sectarian jerk whether you're a member of a sect or not.I raised issues I had about the latest issue of the ISR as a sympathetic outsider, with an interest in discussing them seriously. How does this make me sectarian? Because I am not a member of the group? Or because I am anonymous posting on the Internet (we all are - including you)?

Sorry, but your response here is just a more polished version of the "you're being a sectarian for criticizing the ISO" accusation that has been made continuously throughout this thread. Instead of just calling me a sectarian and being done with it, though, you're trying to provide a tortured rationale of how I'm sectarian because I refuse to join the group, or because I am anonymously posting on a message board. Does this mean if you criticize me from an anonymous Internet account, but refuse to start a socialist correspondence committee with me, that you're a sectarian, too, and that I should be able to discount everything you're saying (instead of systematically addressing its substance as I have in this response)?

[Olentzero]

It's sectarian to consistently harp on what you perceive as the failings of the ISO and yet refuse to become directly involved in the organization. You're shouting from the sidelines, moreover in a milieu that actually won't yield the results you hope for.

As for substantive issues, this one doesn't even rate a blip on the political radar. How we relate to the ongoing protests in New York is a substantive issue. How we organized to fight around the execution of Troy Davis is another. Opposing NATO intervention in Libya - and opposing Qaddafi - is a third. The Arab Spring. Madison. Tapping into the disillusionment and anger around Obama's (all too easy to foresee) betrayal of the American working class. There's a whole lot out there of much more substance meriting discussion than a magazine article that you think wasn't critical enough.

Picking out one small detail and trumpeting it as ironclad proof that the ISO is a sellout organization, in deliberate ignorance of the actual day-to-day work we do, is sectarian. It displays a tremendously warped set of priorities and, frankly, has barely been worth the effort already put into it. If you really have a criticism of the ISR, take it to the ISR. You're accomplishing nothing here except irritating people.

[Lucretia]

It's sectarian to consistently harp on what you perceive as the failings of the ISO and yet refuse to become directly involved in the organization. You're shouting from the sidelines, moreover in a milieu that actually won't yield the results you hope for.

I think youre conflating sectarianism with the more general category of things you don't like. By your odd standard, somebody who criticizes US foreign policy from France is sectarian by refusing to move to the US to, as you say, "make things better." In case you did not realize it, I intended my criticisms to make things better by drawing comrades' attention to an aspect of their organisation they might want to work on improving. It is not my fault if the group's members on this forum, with the exception of one fair comrade upthread, responds to any and every criticism with cultlike lockstep suspicion of sectarianism. Moreover, it is my business, and mine alone, why choose to join or not to join the ISO. And that reason or set of reasons is irrelevant to the substance of the criticisms I raised. We call this ad hominem, by the way.


As for substantive issues, this one doesn't even rate a blip on the political radar. How we relate to the ongoing protests in New York is a substantive issue. How we organized to fight around the execution of Troy Davis is another. Opposing NATO intervention in Libya - and opposing Qaddafi - is a third. The Arab Spring. Madison. Tapping into the disillusionment and anger around Obama's (all too easy to foresee) betrayal of the American working class. There's a whole lot out there of much more substance meriting discussion than a magazine article

Whether a group chooses to parrot reformist understandings of politics and socialism very much has a link to its overall political strategy and how it relates to movements. Your attempt to divorce theory from practice is absolutely shocking for a marxist.


Picking out one small detail and trumpeting it as ironclad proof that the ISO is a sellout organization, in deliberate ignorance of the actual day-to-day work we do, is sectarian. It displays a tremendously warped set of priorities and, frankly, has barely been worth the effort already put into it. If you really have a criticism of the ISR, take it to the ISR. You're accomplishing nothing here except irritating people.

Where did I say the ISO was a sellout organisation? I made substantive criticisms of an issue of the ISR. You have not even attempted to refute these criticisms. Instead, you have accused me of being a sectarian by constructing a highly imaginative definition of the term, have tried to claim that the criticisms are irrelevant, and are now arguing against a criticism I have not made - that the ISO is a sellout. That the one self-avowed Leninist organisation with any significant resources chooses to publish reformist and liberal arguments in its flagship publication, where people who might otherwise be interested revolutionary socialism will be exposed to it in a way that reinforce their own wavering reformist ideas, is a huge issue. Please explain to me how it isnt.

[Comrade-Z]

How busy an organization is is not necessarily a good measure of that group's worth to the revolutionary movement. Many liberal groups are very busy. For example, any liberal group can oppose the anti-union legislation in Wisconsin.

What matters is how many struggles an organization is involved in in which the organization explicitly relates that specific struggle to the class struggle generally. So, did the ISO explicitly explain how the capitalist class has an interest in passing such legislation, and how the only ways we can keep such legislation from being passed is to either scare the bejeezus out of the ruling class so that it will try to grant us reforms to calm us down, or overthrow this ruling class? Or did ISO talk about meaningless abstractions like "justice"? (These are not rhetorical questions. I actually have no idea what ISO's role in the Madison protests might have been. Please explain if you like).

Anyways, that's just an example.

[Binh]

It's sectarian to consistently harp on what you perceive as the failings of the ISO and yet refuse to become directly involved in the organization. You're shouting from the sidelines, moreover in a milieu that actually won't yield the results you hope for.

According to your logic, the ISO is guilty of this in regards to PSL, CPUSA, Workers World, Progressive Democrats of America, Code Pink, and just about any group whose name appears in the pages of its publications that the ISO hasn't joined in order to change. This is the socialist version of, "well if you don't like Obama's policy why don't you run in the primary against him?"



Picking out one small detail and trumpeting it as ironclad proof that the ISO is a sellout organization, in deliberate ignorance of the actual day-to-day work we do, is sectarian. It displays a tremendously warped set of priorities and, frankly, has barely been worth the effort already put into it. If you really have a criticism of the ISR, take it to the ISR. You're accomplishing nothing here except irritating people.

Nowhere did Lucretia say the ISO was a "sellout organization." You are the one who is engaging in deliberate ignorance here.

The notion that political criticism of or differences with a magazine available at Barnes and Noble should be confined to private emails and possibly the pages of the ISR (if the editors decide to print it) is ludicrous.

If you can't take a little internet heat, why call yourself a revolutionary?

[Lucretia]

I see that nobody is capable of offering any kind of satisfactory rationale for the publication of the Nichols article. How disappointing.

[Lucretia]

I'd like to note that the latest ISR, including the Nichols piece, is finally available on the ISR website. Everybody can now see for themselves the message of the piece.

[RedTrackWorker]

Link: http://isreview.org/issues/79/feature-marx-lincoln.shtml

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

Sorry Lucretia, I honestly intend to read the piece and address your concerns, however, I've been a bit busy writing my thesis.

To address Comrade-Z's question about our involvement in Madison, I can address this partially as I was there for one weekend from Atlanta. Basically, from what I saw and and was told, we helped to organize a "No Cuts" coalition which intervened pretty heavily in a lot of the marches and also had an explicitly ISO contingent, leading fellow revolutionaries and workers in chants of "Hey Walker Take A Hike, We Need A General Strike!" and "This Is Class War!" Through our activity in the protests we were able to start either two or three new branches across the state and helped expand the base of the revolutionary left in Wisconsin from the traditional areas of Madison and Milwaukee to other areas which aren't the traditional urban and liberal havens. We sold a LOT of Haymarket publications and were giving out SW's like hotcakes. I think we were pretty heavily - and effectively - involved in advocating for revolutionary organization and a break with the Democrats.

[Martin Blank]

The excerpt in the ISR is, in a way, a microcosm of the argument in his book, praising a time when bourgeois politicians like Abraham Lincoln were able to draw from the socialist toolbox to improve capitalism (or as Nichols phrases it "a time when men such as he were familiar with the writings of Marx and ... sifted and winnowed the radical ideas of his day.") Now the question I have is why the ISO thinks it is appropriate for its in-house magazine to showcase such a thoroughly liberal-reformist praise of Lincoln and understanding of how revolutionary politics ought to function in society? At the very least, this editorial judgment reinforces leftists' view that the ISO's goal is just to pressure the democrats to be more left-wing. I know the ISO members on this board disavow this perception, but then why have an article like this in the magazine?

I read the Nichols piece twice -- once on its own, and a second time with the notes and fragments I have for my book. While my emphasis in subject is different from his, and he missed a couple of connections I've noted (e.g., Friedrich Sorge), I cannot find anything in his piece that is factually inaccurate or portrayed inaccurately.

I do not understand how you can call this a "thoroughly liberal-reformist" piece. Yes, Nichols praises Lincoln, but he does so for all the right reasons -- not the least of which is Lincoln's friendliness to Red '48ers, exiled communists, utopian socialists, anarchists and trade unionists. What I find most interesting is that the article frames its argument in extraordinary terms; it points out the extraordinary character of Lincoln as a man and a political figure, and, more importantly, the extraordinary time in which he was existing. This framework is confirmed with Nichols' comparisons of Lincoln with Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, the two literary pillars of the First American Revolution. Marx himself saw Lincoln as an extraordinary figure, and he understood that this was due in many ways to his relationships with the German exiles and Horace Greeley. I think Nichols does a good job explaining this in the article.

I tend to think that calling this article "thoroughly liberal-reformist" is more a case of guilt by association than anything else. Yes, Nichols is a reformist liberal, and the overall message of his book, The 'S' Word, is to make social-democratic reforms more palatable to the ruling classes. But that's what makes this article so interesting: he could have stopped at the Fourierian and Proudhonist influences, glossed over Greeley and the Tribune, and then simply mused about the role of social reformers in Lincoln's time. But he didn't. In fact, I would argue that this chapter actually undermines the overall message of Nichols' book, since it actually points out, through the words of W.E.B. DuBois, that Lincoln's shortcomings and failings, most notably his views on slavery, existed because he did not embrace radical views completely and only dabbled in them. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for "liberal-reformist" politics, if you ask me.

That said, if I had to make the choice of running this article or not, I would have run it, but only with a strong preface by the editorial board that pointed out all of the above about Nichols and the intent of his book. In the end, I think that was ISR's mistake: running the article without its own comment on it.

[Lucretia]

I read the Nichols piece twice -- once on its own, and a second time with the notes and fragments I have for my book. While my emphasis in subject is different from his, and he missed a couple of connections I've noted (e.g., Friedrich Sorge), I cannot find anything in his piece that is factually inaccurate or portrayed inaccurately.

I've already explained a glaring inaccuracy upthread. There is nothing factually wrong about the empirical evidence Nichols includes. He gets all the names and dates right. His error is in his laughable interpretation of emancipation. As I said in that earlier post, if Nichols' point is that Lincoln read widely and was familiar with ideas and literature being discussed in radical circles, then Nichols is certainly correct. But his larger point, consistent with the argument in his book, is that this broader familiarity with radical intellectual currents was crucial to and continues to be vital for democracy in the United States, as can be seen in the outcome of Lincoln's presidency -- namely the emancipation of slaves. The agency of slaves, the interests of the Northern capitalists, etc., are all shunted to the side. And instead we get such wonderful revelations as, "Yet, it is reasonable to suggest that the Lincoln of 1854 was in the process of becoming the president who would--pressured by Greely--finally sign an Emancipation Proclamation." Lincoln, in other words, signed the Emancipation Proclamation (implied to be a major democratizing moment, as if it freed the slaves) because he was pressured to do so under the onslaught of radicalism from socialist ideas.

I repeat: this is historically inaccurate. And if you "cannot find anything in [t]his piece that is factually inaccurate or portrayed inaccurately," I suggested you open up any history monograph on emancipation written in the past thirty-five years.


I do not understand how you can call this a "thoroughly liberal-reformist" piece. Yes, Nichols praises Lincoln, but he does so for all the right reasons -- not the least of which is Lincoln's friendliness to Red '48ers, exiled communists, utopian socialists, anarchists and trade unionists.No, he does not praise Lincoln for all the right reasons. His explicit reason for praising Lincoln is that Lincoln was not among the "Presidents who choose to dismiss individuals, ideas, and ideologies with which they do not fully agree." The reason it's bad to dismiss individuals who disagree with you ideologically is that, according to Nichols, doing so takes "too many options off the table" and therefore "ill serve[s] the republic." To repeat once more: Nichols believes Lincoln is a good president for pragmatically drawing from a wide range of ideas, and "winnowing" them (channeling them) into reforms.

I am surprised that after two apparently close readings of the text, you seem to have a hard time picking this argument out. After all, Nichols does not try to hide it. And it is indisputably a liberal-reformist argument. It says that neither the left nor the right have all the right answers, and that the health of the republic depends upon a wise, "pragmatic" leader bridging ideological divides, transcending partisanship, etc. (sound familiar yet?).

It seems you are so transfixed on the trees, many of which you claim to be studying yourself, that you are losing sight of the forest Nichols is constructing. Just because Nichols mentions a Marxist here, a revolutionary there, does not mean he advocating revolution or Marxism. Far from it.



What I find most interesting is that the article frames its argument in extraordinary terms; it points out the extraordinary character of Lincoln as a man and a political figure, and, more importantly, the extraordinary time in which he was existing. This framework is confirmed with Nichols' comparisons of Lincoln with Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, the two literary pillars of the First American Revolution. Marx himself saw Lincoln as an extraordinary figure, and he understood that this was due in many ways to his relationships with the German exiles and Horace Greeley. I think Nichols does a good job explaining this in the article.The article is framed in terms of what historians call "great man history." Personalities drive events and historical processes. Class warfare, capitalism, and all those other unpleasant things that matter in a Marxist understanding of large-scale historical processes - like emancipation and bourgeois revolutions - disappear in great-man narratives, and what readers are left with are entertaining but misleading narratives about Lincoln choosing to free the slaves because he read a leftist newspaper or writer decades before.


I tend to think that calling this article "thoroughly liberal-reformist" is more a case of guilt by association than anything else. Yes, Nichols is a reformist liberal, and the overall message of his book, The 'S' Word, is to make social-democratic reforms more palatable to the ruling classes.My problem with the excerpt is not that it is written by a reformist, or even that it comes from a book promoting reformism. My problem is with the excerpt itself, which praises a liberal-multicultural "draw from all sides" kind of approach to political decision-making. The article's argument is a microcosm of the book's argument.


But that's what makes this article so interesting: he could have stopped at the Fourierian and Proudhonist influences, glossed over Greeley and the Tribune, and then simply mused about the role of social reformers in Lincoln's time. But he didn't.It's obvious why he chose not to "gloss over" Greeley. (In fact, the whole book is just one long, superficial gloss.) By including Greeley, Nichols is strengthening his message of letting a thousand ideological flowers bloom, of demonstrating that Lincoln strength as a leader lay in his willingness to dabble in various ideas and ideologies. His argument wasn't that we should embrace Fourierian socialism. Including the Marxists helps him bolster his argument. The reason you don't seem to understand why Nichols includes these more radical writers, and thinks that it contradicts his main point, is that you still don't seem to get Nichols' main point.

[CornetJoyce]

Miles, is your book coming soon?

[Veovis]

Miles, is your book coming soon?

Yes, I'd like to read it too.

[Martin Blank]

Miles, is your book coming soon?

I need to make a few out-of-town trips and spend some time in some historical archives. I'm chasing an interesting lead. Once that's dealt with, I'll be able to finish the manuscript.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

I need to make a few out-of-town trips and spend some time in some historical archives. I'm chasing an interesting lead. Once that's dealt with, I'll be able to finish the manuscript.

Looking forward to it.

[Connolly Was There1916]

I am not familiar with this publication however it seems rather hypocritical that it is named the 'International Socialist Review' yet it implies that Socialism should not be fully implemented, but rather used as a way to augment the current system.

[Lucretia]

I am not familiar with this publication however it seems rather hypocritical that it is named the 'International Socialist Review' yet it implies that Socialism should not be fully implemented, but rather used as a way to augment the current system.

I'm not sure what you mean. Where do you see any suggestion in the ISR that socialism "should not be fully implemented"?