We are a group of recently expelled members from the International Socialist Alternative (ISA). We are united by the conviction that liberal misleadership is holding back the power of our class, and that Marxists have to fight this misleadership, not accommodate it. In August of 2025, we formed a faction in ISA to argue for three programmatic points:

1. No support to any parties of imperialism, including (especially) reformist and opposition misleaders within those parties. When politicians like Zohran Mamdani run for office as Democrats, they are making a political choice to work within the limits of a party that breaks strikes, sends police to attack anti-ICE protestors, and provided the 2000-pound bombs that Israel used for the Gaza genocide. If Mamdani fought for the working class, he would have to break with the Democratic Party leadership; instead he has supported New York Governor Kathy Hochul, even as she sent police to protect scabs during the recent nurses strike. Similarly, if New York had elected a mayor that was truly fighting for socialism, wealthy residents would have reacted with horror and fled the city; instead they rushed to purchase new properties on the city’s booming luxury housing market. Although the independent working-class electoral campaigns that exist in the U.S. today — such as Kshama Sawant and Ed Hershey’s campaigns for Congress — are small and far from perfect, Marxists need to support these efforts on a united front basis as an intermediate step toward a workers’ party. To the extent that advanced sections of the working class actually do support Democratic politicians with an “independent” veneer, we propose a “conditional support” tactic, in which we make endorsement contingent on a genuine break with the Democratic Party.
2. No support for pro-imperialist trade union leaders; instead, fight for a counterposed revolutionary program for the immediate struggles of the working class. To make progress toward any of our goals, Marxists must build, and sink wider roots within, the workers’ movement. But how do we do this? The current approach of ISA’s leadership is exemplified by their call for Shawn Fain to form a new party — the same Shawn Fain who pays himself over $200,000 per year, endorsed Joe Biden for U.S. president, and signaled his willingness to work with Trump after the last election. We think that, although there is certainly nothing wrong in the abstract with placing demands on reformist leaders, we have a responsibility to fight for a way forward that will actually bear fruit. Powerful workers’ movements will be built through a united struggle against our capitalist oppressors, not by elevating leaders like Shawn Fain, Sharon Graham, and Andrea Egan who seek collaboration with those oppressors.
3. To combat imperialism, Marxists must fight for revolutionary leadership in struggles for national liberation, which are a motor force of socialist revolution. This means that when an imperialist power attacks an oppressed country, we do not take a pacifist position. Instead, Marxists defend the oppressed nations in their fight against imperialism. This does not mean politically supporting the government or ruling class on either side, but rather calling on the working class to bring about a particular outcome through their own independent organization and initiative. It is only by taking an active part in struggles for national liberation that Marxists can win the masses in oppressed countries to our program. Since this point has been particularly controversial, we discuss it in more detail below.

Our faction came to comprise members from ISA’s sections in the US, Nigeria, China-Hong Kong-Taiwan, and England, Scotland and Wales.

The world situation

As part of our fight for clarity within ISA, we have brought critical scrutiny to the ISA’s political analysis, and have particularly questioned the leadership’s insistence that the world situation is defined by an “inter-imperialist conflict” between the US and China. We certainly agree that the US is an imperialist power — it has been at war almost continuously since World War II, it has military bases in over eighty countries, it is the dominant naval power globally, and it has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments that threaten the interests of American capitalists. But China has not invaded another country since the 1970s, and the ratio of US to Chinese foreign military bases in the world is 200 to 1.

We contend that, in actuality, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has pursued a strategy of export-oriented economic development within the US-dominated and dollar-based system of trade, finance and military power. Although the CPC bureaucracy suffers from grave political faults, at a global level these faults manifest as a decades-long accommodation to US imperialism, rather than (as the ISA leadership claims) the creation of a competing imperialist power.

The weakness of ISA’s “inter-imperialist” “analysis” was thrown into particularly sharp relief during the war in Iran. The ISA has repeatedly sought to frame the war (along with, seemingly, every other world event) as a thinly veiled conflict between the US and “Chinese imperialism”. In reality, even as the US escalated its attacks against Iran, the CPC leadership continued to emphasize its “positive and open” feelings toward the Trump administration, and pushed for closer economic cooperation between the two governments. Trump, for his part — far from trying to push “Chinese imperialism” out of the Middle East — demanded that China send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. All of this underscores the fact that the war is not a fight between competing imperialisms; instead, what we see is the world’s dominant imperial power, the US, attacking an oppressed country, Iran.

Defend Iran!

For Marxists, the above points have an implication that is of the utmost importance. We know from history that when workers and oppressed people challenge capitalism anywhere in the world, they face a massive risk of foreign invasion, CIA-sponsored military coups, or economic strangulation by the US. This is why Marxists have always emphasized that imperialism is the chief enemy of the world working class, and have taken defencist positions in countries that fought back against imperialist powers. At issue here is the fundamental strategic necessity for socialists to weaken and defeat imperialism.

Thus, our position on the latest war in the Middle East is simple: we unapologetically call for the defense of Iran and the defeat of US imperialism. While we have no love for the Islamist state that currently rules over Iran, we believe that it matters how the regime is overthrown. If the Iranian masses mobilize to fight the imperialist onslaught through their own independent initiative, and in the process build mass organizations through which to rule the country themselves, then this would be an extremely progressive step; if instead the US overthrows the Iranian government and replaces it with a client state, this would be a blow against the interests of the world working class.

The ISA leadership would have members believe that this way of thinking is a break with ISA’s supposedly Trotskyist “tradition”. But the correctness of our positions should be judged on the strength of our analysis, not fidelity to any “tradition”. And in any case, Trotsky would agree with our position on defending oppressed countries against imperialism; in fact he was so emphatic on his point that he described his opponents as “idiots” who should “learn to think”. The ISA leadership treats our position as being scandalous, but we have yet to hear a coherent political explanation for why they feel this way.

Bureaucratic clampdown

In the months since we formed the faction, we have won over new members, and several others have demonstrated sincere engagement with our points. We were confident that, by staying in ISA and patiently making our arguments, we would eventually win majority support. Of course, we also understood that our ideas could be wrong, which is why we have always welcomed critiques and questions; we understand that we do not have all the answers, and that Marxists will only find unity around a correct program through continued discussion and debate.

Unfortunately, instead of responding to our points with rational political arguments, the ISA leadership has resorted to bureaucratic suppression. In November, a leading faction member from ISA’s China-Hong Kong-Taiwan section was expelled. Rather than answering our questions about this or providing a chance to appeal, ISA’s leaders have acted like monarchs who feel no need to explain their actions. More recently, after a member in Nigeria announced his support for the faction, the ISA fulltimers removed him from his elected position in international leadership.

Since then, the bureaucratic clampdown against us has continued, with a vote to expel our Seattle faction members en masse at a hastily organized meeting on April 1. Meanwhile, our faction’s documents have not been allowed to circulate at the international level. Comrades in the Swedish, Brazilian, and German sections appear to know practically nothing about this debate so far.

We particularly object to the treatment of faction members outside the US, who made enormous sacrifices to build ISA, only to be bureaucratically attacked after they expressed disagreements. Comrade H, who was expelled by the ISA leadership in November (without a trial or hearing), had been arrested by police while building ISA in Hong Kong, and is consequently unable to return to the area where he grew up. Daniel A, in Nigeria, who was undemocratically removed from leadership almost immediately after he came out in support of the faction, had previously been arrested for his work as a part of the ISA, and charged with crimes that could have carried the death penalty. We do not ask that these comrades be given any special privileges or consideration, but we do think it is revealing that the ISA leadership went to such lengths to block these comrades from arguing their views to the wider membership.

No more destructive splits!

The above examples are representative of a wider problem on the left. The ISA itself was formed when members were bureaucratically expelled from the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) in 2019. Because political suppression and bureaucratic maneuvering have substituted for principled debate, disagreements have consistently led to new splits, and the CWI has become fragmented into over a dozen small organizations. A similar dynamic has taken place in the rest of the Marxist left, giving rise to an alphabet soup of tiny sects.

Even in groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, which pride themselves on their “multi-tendency” ethos, there is often an aversion to principled political struggle, which means that instead of unity around a correct program, we find a proliferation of working groups that each pursue their own small projects. The bottom line is that, because so many of us are separated into our own small fiefdoms and our positions are sheltered from critique, it has become possible for bad ideas to seemingly live on indefinitely, and the left’s petty divisions have (rightly) undermined our credibility in the wider working class.

We have to fight for a different way forward. Therefore, we reject our expulsion from the ISA, because it is inseparable from the bureaucratic methods and programmatic capitulations that continue to weaken the international socialist left. With this letter, we declare our formation of an external tendency of ISA: the International Socialist Alternative (Revolutionary). Having been shut out of the ISA’s “democratic structures”, the members of the external tendency will fight for the faction’s positions publicly, while also reaching out to the wider left for principled political discussion and joint work on a united front basis.

Because we think the struggle against opportunism is so crucial for the development of the workers’ movement, and because we remain committed to winning over all of our comrades in ISA, our external tendency will gladly provide speaking rights to members of the ISA majority at any of our public events. We also offer to publish letters from the ISA majority in our paper.

Meanwhile, faction members who have not been expelled will remain in ISA, continue their efforts to build the international, and patiently work toward majority support for the faction’s positions. The faction will also continue to fight for democratic rights in the ISA, and it demands that its expelled members be reinstated immediately. Faction members have every intention of appealing these expulsions at their sections’ future national congresses/conventions, should that become necessary.

Next steps

We close this letter with a few thoughts about next steps for Marxists in the countries where the faction has a presence. In the US, we propose that Marxists work to forge communist unity by entering DSA and collectively fighting for a clean break with the Democratic Party. This would be part of a larger project to build the foundations for an independent, militant workers’ party by waging a collective struggle against opportunism in the labor movement and socialist left. Such a struggle would also help to clarify which of the political differences among Marxists are truly decisive, and help us to break through the left’s current artisanal divisions.

In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the fundamental way to push forward the immediate struggle of the working class is to harness the masses’ anti-imperialist sentiment and drive it against the treacherous complicity of the CPC leadership in conciliating US hegemony. The bureaucrats in Beijing justify their course by proclaiming that China will never again suffer a century of humiliation - yet their defense of the country is on an entirely nationalist basis that has alienated the oppressed masses of the world. The infantile and abstract state of the Chinese revolutionary left must be overcome by starting with a program - how to undercut the CPC’s claims of building socialism and their claims of fighting imperialism. For the proletariat of the PRC to move into struggle will mean a historic blow against the imperialist rulers of the world: Wall Street and Washington DC.

In Nigeria, as the working class faces an unprecedented crisis, revolutionaries face the urgent task of transforming widespread anger against poverty, repression, and bad governance into a conscious, well-organized force capable of challenging imperialism, capitalism, and the ruling elite. Achieving this requires an anti-imperialist program that can cut across the religious/ethnic/regional divisions in the working class, the informal sector, the student movement, and the peasantry. Communists must oppose the US-backed military campaign of the Nigerian state, and call on all armed groups to unite behind the working class to kick the US out of West Africa and break the colonial borders. This requires a concerted intervention against pro-imperialist misleaders in the workers’ movement, and leadership of the NGOs in social struggle.

In Britain, the Left is facing a massive crisis. The working class looks to the Starmer government with nothing but hatred and contempt, but there is no organized force of the Left they look to as an alternative. Workers either look to the right wing, fall into apathy, or look to the petty-bourgeois Green party. The Left must seek to bridge this divide between itself and the workers’ movement. The task of communists in Your Party is to fight for the party to draw a class line between the movements of the workers and the oppressed and the City of London. However, the leading Corbynite camp has refused to draw this line, and the existing YP Left has failed to politically challenge Corbyn. If this continues, the YP Left is facing disintegration, and YP is likely to form a popular front with the Green Party and a soft-left Labour party to beat Reform. This will only further alienate workers from the Left and drive them to the Right in the long term. Our program is simple: YP must be working class, socialist, republican, anti-imperialist, and must refuse to build a chain between the workers and their class enemy.

In the spirit of open discussion and debate, we call on ISA’s leadership to publicly explain their disagreements with the points in this letter. We would also welcome responses from ISA’s rank-and-file members, the socialist left, and the wider workers’ movement. Anyone who would like to contact us directly is encouraged to email us at revleadership.socalt@proton.me.

See our documents here: https://linktr.ee/int_salt_rev

With communist greetings,

The Provisional Central Committee of the ISA(R)

Sections:

- Revolutionary Socialist Alternative (US)

- 国际社会主义道路（反帝）International Socialist Alternative - China (Anti-Imperialist)

- Supporters in Britain and Nigeria