undefined
Comrades, on July 5, the
International Socialist Tendency will vote on a resolution to expel the
International Socialist Organization (US) from the IST. The vote is merely a
formality. The decision to purge the ISO - and this term is used with care -
was made by the leadership of the SWP some time ago.
In February 2001 - before any split
in Greece and before Ahmed Shawki had even been invited to speak in Athens by
DEA - the SWP CC wrote to the ISO informing us that it chose to recognise six
former ISO members as members of the IST in the US.
Since then, the SWP CC has vigorously
campaigned against the ISO - both inside every group in the tendency and to the
world, in what amounts to a sectarian rant against an organisation that has
been an integral part of the International Socialist Tendency since it was
founded in 1977. The SWP has conducted an ever shifting campaign against us for
a simple reason: we did not accept everything that emanated from Britain as
gospel. Worse, our experience and ideas on a number of questions proved to be
at odds with those of the CC. This is apparently unacceptable behaviour and is
incompatible today with membership in the IST.
This campaign began in the aftermath
of Nato’s war in Serbia, and resulted in a meeting of the British SWP CC and
the ISO’s steering committee at ‘Marxism 99’. That attempt to paint us as
sectarians unwilling to conduct joint work with others failed. At the
international meeting in November 1999, some members of the CC initiated efforts
to foment a split in our leadership. This also failed. In the spring of 2000,
the SWP leadership circulated an open letter over the heads of our steering
committee and directly to our membership. But they failed to win any
significant support. Finally, by October 2000 six ISO members out of a
membership of 1,000 signed up with the SWP’s factional intervention.
The International Socialist Tendency
that once proudly proclaimed itself as different from various toy-Bolshevik
‘internationals’, which claimed that it was not an international, but a
tendency composed of autonomous groups united around the politics of
international socialism, has become a mere shadow of its former self. It is now
characterised by a high degree of commandeerism and political amateurism. But
it now can no longer cover for its repeated and systematic failure to accept or
understand the 1990s - or the present. The perspective developed by the SWP
over the latter half of the 1990s - summed up in the phrase the ‘1930s in slow
motion’ - and the political and organisational conclusions that were derived
from this view, have been a disaster in Britain and internationally.
Rather than face up to this fact, the
SWP has zigzagged blindly. Instead of encouraging a debate on these questions
which would have strengthened the tendency, it has pursued a policy that has
created split after split. Each split is justified by an immediate tactical
turn. The split in tendency groups over the last few years includes France,
Turkey, New Zealand, Belgium, South Africa and Greece ….
The SWP tried to give a theoretical
gloss to its penchant for splits in an embarrassing article by Alex Callinicos
posted on the SWP’s website. But the idea that every turn requires a split - a
policy justified with various references to the Bolshevik tradition - is just
nonsense. Not to put too fine a point on it, it shows a complete (or wilful)
ignorance of the Bolshevik tradition that we stand in.
What Trotsky wrote in 1931 against
Stalinist monolithism remains valid for us today: “This unanimity is
represented as a sign of the particular strength of the party. When and where
has there yet been in the history of the revolutionary movement such dumb
‘monolithism’? ... the whole history of Bolshevism is the history of intense
internal struggle through which the party gained its viewpoints and hammered
out its methods. The chronicles of the year 1917, the greatest year in the
history of the party, is full of intense internal struggles, as also the
history of the first five years after the conquest of power; despite this - not
one split, not one major expulsion for political motives…”
Because of our relative size and
historical relationship to the tendency, the SWP was not able this time to
conduct its ‘international work’ in the same manner in which it has grown
accustomed - quietly and behind the scenes, and with little information to the
rest of the tendency as to why things went so wrong. This time, the SWP
leadership has been compelled to orchestrate a campaign, complete with lies and
slander, in preparation of a vote for our expulsion at an international
meeting. How IST representatives vote on this question will help determine the
fate of the tendency.
The SWP’s ‘case’ against the ISO,
such as it is, has been constructed on a mountain of lies. We have been accused
of everything from “failing the test” of the 1999 Kosovo War, to “failing the
test of Seattle,” to engaging in thuggery against ISO members, to authoring
splits in other IST organisations. In fact, it has been hard to keep up with
the changing stories as they have flown out of Callinicos’ e-mail box1....
The charges stated in the SEK/SWP
resolution presented to the July 5 meeting are a perfect example of this school
of falsification. We will take them up one by one.
Myth: The ISO “has failed, despite repeated
promises, to produce its contribution to the proposed international debate.”
Fact: ISO representatives have argued our case at
four international meetings (at ‘Marxism 1999’, the 1999 and 2000 international
tendency meetings, and the specially convened May 2000 meeting). We have
written voluminous exchanges that have been circulated to the tendency.
(Unfortunately, we fear that in many cases much of this material was not
distributed to the tendency memberships by their respective leaderships.) Our
views on all of the disputed questions - from the ‘1930s in slow motion’ to the
‘90-10 formula’ to ‘anti-capitalism’ - and the documentation of our practice is
well known.
Comrades can also now read a full
statement of our perspectives in Ahmed Shawki’s article ‘Between things ended
and things begun’ in the June/July ISR at
www.internationalsocialistreview.org. In fact, when the SWP central committee
wrote the letter announcing the SWP’s break with the ISO (see ‘Statement on
relations between SWP (GB) and ISO (US)’, March 12 2001), it asserted that,
“The differences [between the ISO and the IST] were thoroughly debated at two
tendency meetings in May and November 2000, at both of which the ISO’s position
was overwhelmingly rejected.”
Now the SEK and SWP dredge up the
rather flimsy charge of our failure to submit a document to the ISJ as grounds
for our expulsion. This is nothing more than a scholastic debating point and an
absurd grounds for casting the ISO out of a tendency of which it has been a
member since its founding in 1977. Before last year’s meeting of the IST in
May, we wrote to Callinicos proposing a formal debate of the questions and also
raised the ISO’s attending the upcoming SWP party council. Callinicos wrote
back rejecting our suggestions:
…. “I’m surprised that you should say
that several ISO comrades are ‘planning to attend the party council’. I’m sure
that you would expect us to ask to be invited to any comparable ISO event such
as your national committee meetings: surely the same courtesy should apply to
us. What is the purpose of your wishing to attend the party council? The issues
between the two organisations will have been fully aired at the international
meeting; the party council will focus on SWP perspectives after the London
elections, on building the anti-capitalist mood after May Day, and on building
the biggest possible campaign in defence of asylum-seekers.”
Callinicos forgot to mention, or
perhaps didn’t remember, that he was set to introduce a major session at the
party council devoted to the debate with the ISO. Two ISO comrades put in slips
to speak during this session, where Ahmed Shawki was given four minutes to
respond, and the other comrade was not called on. Then at the SWP conference in
November 2000 Callinicos gave another lengthy presentation, this time
announcing his intention to “save” the ISO. Again, Ahmed Shawki was given three
minutes to respond.
Far from being “unwilling” to debate
our views, the ISO has published numerous and extensive discussions, related
not just to general perspectives but specifically to the question of the global
justice movement. The International Socialist Review magazine published
two special issues devoted to the global justice movement last year. The ISR
also ran an issue devoted to the Nader campaign, including an interview
with Nader himself and a major article that, to our knowledge, first
generalised the idea that the new radicalisation can be described as “the birth
of a new left” - which we’re happy to see is the theme of this year’s
‘Marxism’.
Socialist Worker has published special features for each major
demonstration of the global justice movement, as well as supplements to relate
to the anti-death penalty movement, the new struggle around civil rights and
police brutality, the Nader campaign and the protests against Bush’s
inauguration. The list of prominent figures in the movement interviewed in Socialist
Worker is simply too long to list, but let a few names suffice - Dennis Brutus,
Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Kevin Danaher, Boris Kagarlitsky, Medea Benjamin,
Njoki Njoroge Njehû, Manning Marable, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Moore and
Alexander Cockburn. And we are pleased to report to the tendency that SW has
produced its first ever Spanish-language supplement for the anti-FTAA
demonstrations in April. It sold several thousand copies, including at the
bi-national demonstration at the Mexico-US border.
All these publications are available
from our websites. Yet we are still charged with having failed to argue our
case. Indeed, throughout this debate, there have been no references to what we
actually say in our publications.
In reality, it’s the SWP that is
afraid of an open debate. It has tried - quite successfully, it appears - to
quarantine the rest of the IST from the ISO. What other purpose can we ascribe
to Callinicos’ May 25 2001 note to tendency organisations encouraging them to
reject the ISO’s invitation to attend the 2001 Socialist Summer School? This is
not the action of an organisation that is confident in its ideas and practice.
Callinicos and other members of the
British CC have spent quite a bit of time lobbying other organisations to break
with the ISO and to vote to expel us at the July 5 2001 meeting. Callinicos
devoted more than one half of his talk at a publicly advertised meeting at the
German organisation’s Rosa Luxemburg Tage to an attack on the ISO. Most of the
audience had left the room by the time Callinicos finished his remarks. In the
run-up to ‘Marxism 2001’ Chris Bambery gave a members-only meeting to the
French organisation laying out the SWP’s case for our expulsion (where, we are
told, he made the absurd claim that the ISO opposed taking down the perimeter
fence in Quebec).
At neither of these meetings did the
organisation’s leadership invite us to attend to present our case. ISO members
who attended the Rosa Luxemburg Tage received only a few minutes’ rebuttal to
Callinicos’s 30-minute tirade ...
We are willing, no matter what the
outcome of the IST meeting, to debate any comrade from the CC or from SEK on
these questions. Indeed, we challenge the SWP to organise such a session at
‘Marxism’ - on their own terms, with their own party members there to ensure
that their position is well represented. Of course, arranging such a meeting
might create one or two organisational problems. But as comrades who remember
the many ‘Marxisms’ of the past well know, such debates and discussions have
been organised quickly on questions of political importance.
The quarantine has also extended to
our joint work with other tendency organisations. For months in the
preparations for the anti-FTAA demonstrations, our East Coast organiser worked
closely with IS Canada members in Quebec. We proposed on several occasions joint
meetings with IS Canada to plan our tendency’s intervention in the events. The
IS Canada refused ...
Unfortunately, this policy now
extends to the most basic questions of international solidarity. While IST
comrades from Canada, Australia and New Zealand collaborated with us on efforts
to obtain the release of the 32 detained foreign activists in Indonesia, most
IST groups never responded - most seriously, the SWP.
Myth: “The steering committee’s failure to make a
priority of mobilising for the biggest anti-capitalist demonstration in North
America, at Quebec City on April 20-21"; and the ISO opposed the direct
action to take down the perimeter fence in Quebec.
Fact: The entire ISO mobilised in three countries
(US, Canada and Mexico) to participate in protests against the Free Trade Area
of the Americas. In Quebec City, more than 100 members - not “mobilising less
than 30”, as claimed in the IS Canada’s report of the event, nor Callinicos’s
more generous 60 “ISO members and supporters”, claimed in his May 25 2001
letter to the tendency - took part in all of the week’s events, from the
teach-ins to direct action …
Nor was our mobilisation that weekend
limited only to the issue of the FTAA. ISO trade unionists participated in the
biannual conference of Labor Notes, the main rank-and-file activist
network in the labour movement. More importantly, we helped to organise - and
spoke from the platform of - the Emergency Mobilisation for Women’s Lives in
Washington DC. This demonstration of 15,000 marked the first major mobilisation
of domestic opposition to Bush’s rightwing agenda.
And, far from counterposing the two
demonstrations, we initially argued with the National Organization for Women
(NOW) to change the date of their demonstration and, after that failed, we
proposed and got Njoki Njehu, head of ‘50 Years is Enough’, to speak from the
platform, in an attempt to bring the two struggles together.
The fact that we are able to
intervene simultaneously in many different arenas is a strength, not a
weakness. Compare the ISO’s mobilisation on April 21-22 to Left Turn’s - only
three of whose members got up the energy to travel to Quebec City. No one from
Left Turn’s closest branch to Quebec City (New York) managed to attend the
Quebec City demonstration. Might it be said that Left Turn “failed the test of
Quebec City”?
Finally, the idea that mobilising for
an abortion rights demonstration - when abortion is a key flashpoint for
building an opposition to Bush - raises a question of principle. Since when is
mobilising for a fundamental demand of women’s liberation a diversion from
other pressing political questions?
Myth: “The steering committee expelled on trumped
up charges a minority within the ISO who came to agree with the resolution
passed by the IST in May 2000.”
Fact: The ISO steering committee expelled these
members because they continued factionalising after they were outvoted at the
convention, lowered or refused to pay dues, and convinced other members to quit
the ISO. After the convention, they boycotted branch meetings and sales of Socialist
Worker and continued to operate as a faction, refusing to work with, or
under the direction of, the local and national leaderships. They refused to
meet with our leadership, tampered with our website and declared themselves
hostile to the ISO even while their appeal was pending. These members were
given a right to appeal the steering committee’s decision. The ‘appeal’ they
wrote included this line: “We therefore demand that this disciplinary action be
completely repudiated, although it has now become impossible for us to rejoin
the ISO, unless and until it is able to resolve its differences with and resume
its place in the International Socialist Tendency.”
These former members made a mockery
of the appeal and the ISO appeals committee upheld their expulsion. Their
appeal document, and the appeals committee decision, was distributed to the ISO
membership by our national office. Throughout this dispute the ISO has made
sure to distribute all documents to our membership - unlike other groups in the
tendency who now feel they can vote to expel the ISO from the IST without their
own memberships knowing the issues involved. Nevertheless, before their appeal
was even completed - Callinicos and Bambery, writing for the SWP central committee
on February 15 2001, told the ISO steering committee: “We wish to make it clear
that we regard these comrades as members of the IS Tendency and that we will
provide them with such help as we can.” In other words, the SWP recognised
another IST group (of six people) in the US weeks before the Greek organisation
split and the SEK/SWP charged the ISO with the crime of recognising a splinter
group in Greece.
Myth: “The steering committee privately encouraged
and publicly supported a breakaway faction from the Greek Socialist Workers
Party (SEK).”
Fact: Aside from the SWP’s hypocrisy on this
question (outlined in the point above), this charge is again absurd. First, the
ISO is charged with “privately encouraging” a split in Greece. How the charge
of “privately encouraging” a split can hold any credibility is beyond us. More
to the point, the main proof of this charge (now that all references to Ahmed
Shawki’s alleged role in writing the DEA’s split document have been dropped) is
Ahmed Shawki’s acceptance of an invitation to speak at the founding conference
of the International Workers Left. We attended the conference for the simple
reason that, after fending off two years of SWP fabrications about the ISO, we
do not accept the judgement of the SWP on questions of the tendency. Therefore,
we sent a representative to the DEA conference to investigate the ‘facts on the
ground’ for ourselves. And for this we were effectively expelled from the IST.
If we “publicly supported a breakaway faction” from the SEK, we had a lot of
company - 11 other far left organisations in Greece, including a representative
of the Greek section of the Fourth International.
The roots of this crisis in the
tendency are the failure of the SWP’s perspectives over the last decade -
perspectives that were imposed on the rest of the tendency to disastrous
effect.
The SWP leadership characterised the
1990s as the “1930s in slow motion” - prolonged economic crisis, a sharp rise
in class struggle, the rise of the far right and the rapid growth of
revolutionary socialist organisation. Cliff put the case emphatically following
the French public sector strikes of 1995: “The situation there [in France] is
extremely volatile, with very big strikes going on at the same time as support
for the right. When Blair comes to office here we will see similar volatility.
There will be a race between the far right and the far left to win workers to
their politics.” In 1999 Cliff went even further, declaring: “Capitalism in the
advanced countries is no longer expanding” so that Trotsky’s Transitional
programme, “that ‘there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms
and the raising of the masses’ living standards’, fits reality again” (Trotskyism
after Trotsky pp81-82).
As anyone who even glances at the
statistics will know, this was not the case. The US economy alone expanded by
one-third in the 1990s. Unemployment in Britain and France dropped to its
lowest level in more than two decades. Blair’s election was followed not by
“volatility”, but by the lowest level of strikes on record. His was the first
full-term re-election ever for Labour. Of course there is disillusionment and
bitterness with Blair, reflected in part by the abysmally low voter turnout.
This created the opening for an electoral challenge from the left. But the
situation bears little resemblance to the explosion in struggle repeatedly
predicted by the SWP leadership in 1997.
Then, SWP branches were instructed to
hold branch meetings on the June 1936 mass strikes in France that followed the
election of the Popular Front government. There was an explicit prediction of
similar developments in Britain. Can anyone seriously argue today that this
perspective was correct? More to the point, has the SWP leadership ever
bothered to reassess this mistaken perspective?
As Lenin said - and Cliff always
emphasised - revolutionaries should not fear to make mistakes. The danger is
failing to admit and correct them. Tragically the SWP leadership has never done
this - even though its catastrophist perspectives led to a massive decline in
its membership. The SWP years ago stopped its claim to have 10,000 members
(such figures are no longer given, not even in internal tendency meetings). By
contrast, the ISO has in the last decade grown more than fourfold to more than
1,000 and our influence has grown as well. Our magazine has moved from
quarterly to bimonthly, and Socialist Worker will go weekly in the
autumn. To be sure, we have many problems and shortcomings that must be
addressed, as do all revolutionary organisations. But the SWP only looks
foolish on the left in the US and internationally when it denounces us as an
“ossified sect”. The SWP has tried to use its factional attack on the ISO as a
distraction from own failed perspectives.
Unwilling to come to terms with its
failed perspective - with its catastrophism - the SWP leadership has pushed a
series of organisational formulas to try and solve its problems. You can put
pond water in wine bottles, but it won’t taste any better. The party moved
first to small branches, and then to still smaller “campaigning branches”, in
the desperate hope that this would somehow lead to growth.
Now in an internal document
(published in another organisation’s newspaper [Weekly Worker June 21 -
ed]), the CC states: “We have abandoned the old party branches, which only
involved a minority of comrades, because these have often been in practice
sectarian barriers to our wider intervention”. This is a stark admission of
failure. Yet it still does not come to terms with the SWP’s underlying crisis
of perspectives. On the contrary, the SWP hasn’t take responsibility for how
its drive to impose its perspectives on other groups in the tendency led
directly to splits in half a dozen countries.
Now, the SWP-SEK motion for the ISO’s
expulsion from the tendency prominently mentions the resolution adopted by the
IST in May 2000. That document - which we voted against - called for the very
same organisational formulas that the SWP now claims are “sectarian”. The May
2000 resolution also put the tendency representatives on record as opposing the
concept of “cadre members” - yet the SWP’s own conference documents in November
2000 specifically called for training cadre. Will anyone argue that the SWP
should be expelled from the tendency for violating the tendency’s resolution?
When the ISO-US assessed our work in
the 1990s, we recognised that we had adjusted our perspectives to take account
of the economic boom - and that the ‘30s in slow motion’ analogy didn’t fit
this situation. Given the obvious reality of the boom, we did not expect this
to be controversial. Yet the SWP leadership clung to the ‘1930s in slow motion’
slogan as a sectarian shibboleth in its relentless factional war on the ISO.
But as far as we know, it wasn’t good enough for the Socialist Alliance or
other political work - and it didn’t even rate a mention in the SWP’s recent
perspectives documents. Nor did it figure in the party’s dissolution in
Scotland into the Scottish Socialist Party.
The other shibboleth is the
characterisation of the new radicalisation as ‘anti-capitalist’. We have dealt
with this point at length in other documents. In our view, the global justice
movement is still in its early stages and has many ideological currents - which
even writers in SWP publications acknowledge. Characterising it as
anti-capitalist today confuses one current with the movement as a whole. It
confuses the movement’s potential for its actual stage of development today.
Nor does the ‘anti-capitalist’ label clarify the task of revolutionaries in the
movement or provide a perspective to guide them.
It’s also worth noting that the term
‘anti-capitalism’ is practically nonexistent on the website for Globalise
Resistance, an organisation initiated by the SWP. The Globalise Resistance
newsletter describes itself as a publication for those “opposed to corporate
power” - not “anti-capitalists”. Yet the SWP leadership has centred much of its
attack on the ISO for our characterisation of the movement as “anti-corporate”.
Of course, there should be room in
the tendency to debate these different characterisations as our organisations
intervene in the movement. Instead, we have been subjected a torrent of false
accusations about our work from the SWP leadership in order to provide the
pretext for a split.
The SWP leadership has proven that it
is incapable of working with others in the tendency with which it has a shred
of disagreement. It has fomented split after split throughout the tendency, so
that in several countries there are competing, hostile organisations which
share the same fundamental politics. With neither debate nor consultation, the
SWP has unilaterally decided in each case which is the ‘anointed’ organisation.
As a result, the tendency is smaller than it was at the beginning of the 1990s,
not larger, as it should be.
The SWP CC made an immediate decision
to consider the six members expelled from the ISO as part of the tendency,
without bothering to discuss the question with us. Yet no one in the tendency
has questioned the SWP’s right to make this unilateral judgement. On the other
hand, our decision to consider the DEA in Greece as part of the tendency is the
main grounds for our expulsion! In common language, this is called a double
standard. It gives the lie to Callinicos’s claim that the tendency consists of
“autonomous” organisations that share a common set of politics. The truth is
that there is no quid pro quo.
Why should the SWP have the right to
unilaterally decide that the DEA is not part of the tendency? Leaving aside the
fact that the ISO neither supported nor encouraged a split in the SEK. As we
said - our position all along has been that these are not split questions. But
why, when presented with the split, should any organisation simply take at face
value Callinicos’s announcement that when an organisation splits in half one
side should be shunned and the other embraced? This is a sectarian method which
has led our tendency down a disastrous path.
A double standard has also been
applied in relation to the SWP’s approach to regroupment. In one breath, the
ISO is to be expelled for failing the test of war during the Kosovo war,
failing the test of Seattle and Quebec. Simultaneously the IST is presented
with a regroupment proposal with forces the SWP blithely describes as “at best
centrist”: the SSP, who “failed the test of war” by being “defensive and
hesitant”; the FI during the Balkan War “failed miserably to mobilise for
Prague or (worse still) for Nice”!
If, as Callinicos has written,
regroupment should be based on “a shared appreciation of the significance of
the movement against capitalist globalisation”, but that “it would be sectarian
to insist that we will only work in the same organisation with revolutionaries
who also accept the theory of state capitalism”, then he is standing things on
their head. Differences of perspective - over the precise character of the
radicalisation, for example - are not grounds for organisational splits. On the
other hand, principled differences - such as the class nature of Cuba or the
two-stage theory of revolution - are much larger barriers, certainly not to
joint work or collaboration, but to organisational unity.
The formula of unity above principle
and splitting on perspective differences allows Callinicos to adopt a sectarian
posture toward the ISO (and other groups no longer in the tendency but who
share its fundamental politics), and a much more friendly posture toward
“centrists” who fail all manner of “tests”. Yet, ironically, such an approach
must give pause to organisations that may consider joining forces with the SWP
- is it really capable of honest, open and democratic collaboration? The
question is a valid one.
We believe that it is not only
possible, but also necessary to both build the growing new movements and build
a revolutionary organisation. We believe it is possible to have healthy
collaboration with organisations with which we have principled disagreements,
and organisational unity with those with whom we have “90%” agreement (and, in
circumstances of mass and rapid radicalisation, sometimes even less). This
method is not sectarian, but Leninist.
The SWP has devoted enormous time and
energy in its campaign against the ISO. Simultaneously, it has been carrying
out the most significant turn in the tendency’s history with scarcely the same
openness. Is half a century of the development of the IST independently of the
mainstream Fourth International to be liquidated - with only a fraction of the
‘debate’ used to drive the ISO from the IST? There is, we believe a connection
between the SWP’s turn to regroupment and its attempts to expel us. Our
expulsion is regularly offered up as proof that the IST has abandoned its old methods,
now dubbed “sectarian”.
Far from the ISO being afraid of
debate, it is clear that the SWP wants no challenge to its authority in the
IST. We believe that the current perspective and its accompanying
organisational prescriptions - dissolution of branches, to name the most
obvious - are mistaken. We furthermore continue to hold to the view that the
current radicalisation internationally poses enormous opportunities and real
problems for revolutionaries, but these opportunities can only be seized by returning
to practices and methods that used to be the stock and trade of the IS
Tendency. This must begin with telling the truth to our members.
In 1976, a letter from the central
committee of the IS-GB urged the then IS-US to re-examine its perspective. It
read in part: “The truth is that we are still very small and weak in relation
to the British workers’ movement. We know it and we tell the truth to our
members. Because that is the only way a movement can be built on solid
foundations. To build on the politics of bluff, of chest-beating and
high-pressure salesmanship is to build on sand. We are, perhaps fortunate in
having an example before our eyes - the Healey organisation, the SLL/WRP, which
has tried for years to build on bluff, bluster and bullshit - with disastrous
results.”
That kind of realism has been lost to
the politics of bluff, chest-beating and high-pressure salesmanship.
The charge that the ISO has “set out
to split the tendency” is a complete fabrication. We challenge anyone to
produce evidence of this. Moreover, we can say categorically that we have urged
those sympathetic to our views in IST groups not to split or leave their
respective organisations. The decision to split the IS Tendency - an utterly
irresponsible and unnecessary split - is contained in the resolution put forth
by the SEK and SWP. We propose the following resolutions be discussed and voted
on by this international meeting of the IST: By contrast to the SWP/SEK
proposal, we argue for a different course that we think will strengthen and
expand the influence of the IST.
We propose the IST meeting of July 5
2001 vote to:
ISO steering committee
July 2 2001
Since Seattle the International
Socialist Tendency has developed an analysis of the anti-capitalist movement
and of the tasks of revolutionaries within it. This was affirmed in the
resolution passed at the special international meeting of May 8 2000, against
the sole opposition of the International Socialist Organization (US). It was
also agreed at that meeting that the debate over international perspectives
should be pursued through, for example, an exchange of articles in International
Socialism and International Socialist Review.
Since that meeting the steering
committee of the ISO (US) has systematically violated the spirit of that
agreement. In particular,
By these actions the ISO steering
committee has shown that it does not regard its disagreements with the IST as a
matter for open debate among revolutionaries. Instead, it has set out to split
the tendency. This amounts to a break with the tendency, and accordingly we no
longer regard the ISO as our sister organisation and as a member of the IS
Tendency.
Moved: Sosialistiko Ergatiko Komma (Greece)
Seconded: Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
