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People who know me on here will know that I have no sympathy whatsoever with the ISO, yet this thread is almost making me develop a little.
What I get from this thread from looking from afar is that the CWI stood a candidate who the ISO didn't support. The CWI are now whinging about this.
Anybody who had even the vaguest knowledge of these two international tendencies would know that they have two completely different attitudes toward electoral politics.
I don't know the specifics in the US, but basically 'Cliff' organizations fluctuate between setting up fronts where they are the dominate partner and calling for a vote for mainstream parties they view as somehow more 'progressive', which usually means social democrat, but can go as far as Islamicist. The CWI have a more consistent long term tactic of trying to build a mass 'left' social democratic Party.
Given this I fail to see how anybody could think that the ISO were being sectarian over this. It is not what they do, and I don't think anybody, including the CWI, actually expected them to do it.
To me it just seems like taking an easy opportunity to take a very easy cheap shot at them, and is more than a bit pathetic.
Why should they support the CWI? Perhaps they think this election was all rather pointless.
What next, Sparts criticizing anarcho-pacifists in being sectarian in refusing to back North Korea's right to nuclear weapons?
As I said at the start I don't have more sympathy for the ISO. Nor do I have any for the CWI. This is suppose makes me sort of objective in this case, and to me the CWI come out of it looking worse.
Devrim
What is silly is tracking another's posts. Talk about too much time on your hands.
The anti-capitalist movement, yes, it's about socialists not working together, not unique with your sect, others don't do it either,that is what this is ultimately about.
"a group that works with other groups in coalitions and in shared projects almost constantly." Do you really want to go down this path? You think there are complaints on this thread about your sect now, just open up this can of worms. I don't want to go down this path because talking about your sect is old.
The rest of your hyperbole is just canned response.
The path of some anonamous poster with no accountability or even a social reputation on this website to maintain slinging mud and making accusations that would be hard to either prove or disprove? No thanks. If you want to debate if a socialist movement was created in the Pacific Northwest through this campaig or why the ISO didn't feel that supporting protest candidates would gain much traction or move things forward in this election, then fine, let's debate it - although I think I have laid out my argument already.
Considering that I worked with people from PSL (who I disagree with politically) spent months in Occupy Oakland working with anarchists and other lefties as well as small-"l" liberal activists in the movement (all of whom I have various degrees of disagreement with), your claims of our sectarianism don't jive with my experiences one bit.
It's totally absurd. I have argued exactly why we decided - a little less than a year before the election - that general austerity pressures would not manifest as an electoral revolt in all likelyhood and that the small more direct activities of workers would be more benificial for the development of class fight-back. WE DISAGREE, so fine. I still think the election results show that WE were correct about the overall political consiousness. Sometimes we are incorrect but we try and learn from things like that.
If Sawant had emerged as a 21st century Debs, then we probably should have come, hat in hand, and said, gee we were wrong this is a rallying point for a new left. But sorry, I do not think that was the case - Occupy was something more of that and we particupated in that - but none of the protest candidates really made much traction and I don't think that Washington voters are 30% socialist now.
For the life of me I don't see how disagreeing over something like this could possibly be seen as sectarian. And I don't know what you see "Socialists working together" as, but if we were brought in at the end of the campaign - weeks before the election after the platform and strategy and debates had all been settled - how is that working "together" and not us "working for"? I'm all for working with other people on the left of all stripes and I have done so and our organizationd does so as well. We helped create Labor Solidarity campaigns in my local Occupy and most of the other organizers were members of other organized groups from IWW to other Trotskyists. Some of it was hell frankly and some old-timers just couldn't resist diving into their old sectarian grandstanding against everyone else in the room, but overall for a time we and other radicals could get people with a general agreement about how radicals should relate to labor struggles into a room together and work on this common project. What we didn't do was set up a committee run by our members and tell others to join and if they didn't then dennounce them for "being against rank and file organizing". Some other leftists in Occupy who I respect wanted to make a splinter committee of just radicals and we declined because we thought that would be too insular and the project we wanted to work on involved building up links beteen Occupy activists and local labor struggles. Does it make us sectarian for working with some socialists and not others? Or does it just mean we saw what needed to happen differently?
Last edited by Jimmie Higgins; 17th February 2013 at 09:27.
Update, the ISO in their latest piece on Sawant, "Election breakthrough for a Seattle socialist," by Chris Mobley offered ZERO criticism--a complete puff piece complete with endorsement of Sawant. When their eldest member in the city was asked on the steps of the SEIU headquarters in Seattle, "What is the difference between the ISO and the SA?" the reply was a disappointing but predictable, "We're revolutionary, and they are not!"
Neither the SA nor the ISO have bothered to respond to our criticism of Sawant titled, "We need an Alternative to Socialism on a Leash"
-AF
I really do detest the ISO for that, but what else can you expect from the Amway of Socialism?
You all have probably seen me argue in favor of Tito and Trotsky, but im not one of those guys anymore.
Marxism-Leninism, Feminism and RuPauls dragrace!
Why would you detest the "Amway of Socialism" for not supporting the campaign and wish that the group had? Would you not detest our group if we had been volunteers for SA's effort?
You could also read what I said about her first election campaign.
In retrospect to the election win this time, I have to say I'm surprised the campaign was as successful as it was, and it's pretty great that even if she hadn't won, she had actually helped shift the debate to the left.
Internally people in our group have been debating this and some think we were too skeptical because of our own past experiences in this sort of thing (which I am), but I'm not convinced of that at this point even though I do think that SA deserves credit and the election victory helps raise the legitimacy of Socialism, if only because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom in the US about "alien socialism".
Again I don't have a wooden stand against any involvement in elections, but I'm still skeptical of the long-term or strategic orientation of something like this right now. I think in that sense, being able to rally around the Seatac thing was a way to actually help build something real in class terms (as opposed to symbolic or just electoral...). I think that (building something around a tangible class demand), more than Socialists running for election, is the real positive example to take from this.
Anyway I was pleasantly surprised by the results this time around and was wrong to be as pessimistic, but I still don't know if it's the right strategy for radicals to take right now and I worry that with the election over and Sawant actually in that position will be isolated, marginalized maybe resulting in pessimism about insurgent campaigns from people who took a chance and voted for her. The important factor IMO will be if the actual forces brought together can maintain an actual street and grassroots thing that would give real power and weight to this.
ISO's behavior predictable. Though they say they support left-independent electoral challenges to the Democrats, they don't support Sawant because she's from another socialist group (hence they would be giving free publicity to the others, and they would not be able to control the campaign's message, etc.) Then when she wins, write some articles trying to get high off it, to build excitement and recruiting.
The US state doesn't have any rights except for being abolished and replaced by a socialist state. - azula
