Hello, it’s me again
This is another article that’s been going around. I talked to some comrades up in Rhode Island and apparently the author of this kind of has some eh stuff going on and was actually kind of a jerk but still here’s more kind of evidence of what’s going on.
Notably one thing is that they say that the PSL Miami branch is dissolved. I don’t know like anything about this.
It kind of feels like live archaeology at this point, just trying to archive and document the kind of discussions that have been going on. I honestly really have incredibly little faith in the party to continue to survive and end up being the party that we need. I think a new party is clearly going to need to form.
If you have any thoughts or additional points of information that can be used to, like, bring together the understanding of what went wrong and what’s been going wrong, please put it below.
Yes. There were a bunch of successor orgs after the ISO collapsed but all the momentum of the early Trump years was lost. I strongly recommend that PSL members look into how the ISO failed and what they can learn from the hasty vote to dissolve.
https://socialistworker.org/2019/04/02/the-isos-vote-to-dissolve-and-what-comes-next has a contemporary overview, and since the ISO was Trotskyist and newspaper-oriented it’s easy to find long articles with contrasting views on what happened and the aftermath.
The ISO was notorious for being personally abusive to members, particularly young women. I’ve never, never heard someone describe their own membership there as a positive thing.
In my experience, many of the ways in which they were bad are similar to the ways other U.S. left groups are bad, and we need to learn from that. PSL has better politics than the ISO did but you hear a lot of former members and just as many adjacent organizers make the same complaints about PSL as were once made about the ISO.
It’s true that the same terms are used to describe negative experiences in both but in ISO it seems to have been truly rampant and systematized via the structure of its mentor-mentee program and who they decided to fill in each role. A lot of socially maladjusted men “mentoring” college students in one on one conversations with many direct personal reviews and decision-making power over their role in the org.
Every former ISO members I’ve worked closely with seems to have actual trauma from it.
My branch didn’t have an explicit mentor-mentee program like that but the fact that there was an old guard (in every branch, as far as I saw) that relied on the constant churn of college students doing the busywork definitely made for that kind of dynamic. @PowerLurker@hexbear.net 's read of this post (“centralized leadership demanding blind faith, zero real internal democracy, and a feeling of a corporatized internal culture where rank and file cadre are treated as dutiful little employees all ring extremely true”) applies 100% to how the ISO operated. It was during the Trump years that some of these contradictions became untenable, because there were so many new members and it was a lot more clear that it didn’t have to be like that. But anytime we tried to argue against the “campus orientation” we were treated like we were bringing up a long-settled struggle session, and no more struggle on it would be tolerated, even though the times and circumstances had changed and the internal failures of it were as obvious as you say.
That tracks, absolutely. In addition to the abuse dynamic the inability to handle growing pains literally from the campus orientation, when members worked into the org discover there isn’t an internal path to influencing its direction.
My version of the story:
The ISO had a leadership clique that had been in charge for decades but they based branches on college campuses and prioritized recruiting students. Students come and go, some of them are initiated into the leadership clique, but the old guard on the steering committee stayed the same. During the first Trump term the organization saw rapid growth and everyone wanted new blood in the leadership. The 2019 convention saw the victory of the Renewal Slate which pushed out the old guard.
But then a letter was published about how one of the newly elected Steering Committee members, a Renewal guy, had committed SA and it was covered up by the old guard. Every other scandal, including the ones that had ended with the expulsion of the perpetrators, was relitigated. New accusations came to the forefront. People started having serious doubts about democratic centralism and Leninism’s ability to handle these scandals effectively. 70% of the organization (or at least of the 400-something who voted, from a membership base of 1000 or so before everything came out) voted to dissolve the ISO.
Since then a bunch of people joined DSA, a bunch more people stopped organizing, and some folk reverted to reading groups. PSL might have some ISO veterans who can weigh in on the similarities and differences between these scandals but as bad as both of them are the similarities are really bizarre. Either the U.S. left has learned nothing from how to protect comrades from SA instead of protecting the abusers, or we’ve learned nothing about how to constructively respond to such a scandal in a way that doesn’t involve giving up on years of organizational work and losing all momentum.
I swear this is a pattern that keeps popping up. It happens to left candidates too. I can’t imagine every left man that gets any traction is an abuser, right?
Is this a cultural thing or what could be the cause of all of these crises that always come up at the “perfect” times?
In the last days of the ISO everyone was passing along an academic paper about anti-racist NGOs and activist organizations reproducing patriarchy and racism in their structures and practices. We all wondered, “Why didn’t we read anything like this when we were being onboarded?”
I’m neither an anarchist nor a sociologist who’s read a lot on these issues, and although I’d like to, I don’t quite know where to begin, but I think we need to read more robust theory on how to build an organization without falling into a “the [existing iteration of the bureaucratic] organization must be protected at all costs” mentality, because the ISO and PSL both have had policies in place that should have given a better framework for how to respond to SA in the leadership.
Another problem, especially when institutional rot comes into play, is that these crises are so painful and open up so many other wounds that no one wants to study them and learn from them.
I’d be interested to read that paper, if you know where to find it
Found it: Racism, whiteness, and burnout in antiracism movements: How white racial justice activists elevate burnout in racial justice activists of color in the United States
thanks for finding that!