Recently, I’ve felt nostalgic for the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a defunct Trotskyist sect that existed from 1976 to 2019. It’s a strange feeling, since I was a frequent critic of the group. I suppose that’s how nostalgia works. It’s an irrational idealization of the past.
The ISO wasn’t my first encounter with the organized socialist left, but the group was close. It was the fall of 2005 and I was a freshman at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. I initially came across ISO members selling their newspaper, Socialist Worker, at a local event. As I recall, they were denouncing the federal response to Hurricane Katrina as representative of capitalist priorities, an opinion I fully agreed with. I stopped to talk with them, trying to suss out their precise ideological orientation, something which seems obvious in retrospect.
Not long after, I spotted a notice of their meetings in Seven Days, a Vermont alt-weekly: “Marx-minded activists strategize about the labor, feminist and anti-war movements. Room 100, Lafayette Hall, UVM, Burlington, 7 p.m. Free. Childcare and info, 864-9678.” I soon began attending their gatherings on a semi-regular basis. I’d either take the bus to the University of Vermont or an adjunct English professor from SMC, who I learned was an ISO member, would drive me there. I don’t believe she was much older than me.
If memory serves, at each meeting, there was a table draped with an ISO banner, stacked with the latest titles from Haymarket Books, the group’s publishing arm. The press is arguably the ISO’s most enduring, positive legacy. Thankfully, it still exists today.
The gatherings followed Robert’s Rules of Order. As I remember it, we’d often discuss the most recent issue of Socialist Worker or new releases from Haymarket Books. There would be updates on local and national activism. The Iraq War was the most frequent subject of conversation. However, there was also a great deal of focus on campaigns which have long since been forgotten. For instance, we frequently talked about preventing the execution of Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams. A former gangster, Williams was killed by lethal injection on December 13, 2005. Sometimes, there would be visiting speakers. These included members of the ISO’s Chicago-based leadership, who were treated like rock stars. After meetings, we’d all go out to a local restaurant and eat together. The Burlington chapter was filled with nice people.
They tried to get me to formally join, but I never did. Noam Chomsky was my guide to socialism. He had little positive to say about the Russian Revolution. Chomsky identified as various things, but could perhaps be most accurately described as a social democrat.
The emphasis the whole 2000s left placed on having the correct interpretation of the Soviet Union was a symptom of our irrelevance. It felt important at the time. In an effort to win me over, ISO members would recommend Vladimir Lenin’s most civil-libertarian works. On at least one occasion, I bought a bundle of ISO newspapers and tried to sell them at SMC. That was a failure. I managed to sell a single copy to a friend who took pity on me. It was George W. Bush’s second term. I’m not sure I could have given them away if I wanted to.
After a year and a half, I dropped out of SMC, largely as a result of undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. I took a step back from politics as I attended Paul Smith’s College for a few semesters and finally graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh. That’s when I started to pick up where I left off. I asked my hometown library if they would stock Socialist Worker if I took out a subscription. They said they would, so I ordered the publication. The ISO website even published some of my writing.
This stopped abruptly when I criticized the group. The ISO leadership was OK with a piece I wrote taking issue with an editorial dismissive of animal rights. They published it on their website, which prompted what I thought was a productive discussion. But when I wrote an article saying the the ISO should set aside its ideological and organizational baggage—in the interest of creating a nonsectarian, democratic socialist movement—they never considered my writing again.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wasn’t what it is now. After Occupy Wall Street, there was an open question of what leftist organization would take advantage of the movement’s energy. I thought it could be the ISO, if the group was willing to change.
In my online life, I began associating with a lot of former members of the ISO. I wrote for Pham Binh’s North Star blog and supported the ISO Renewal Faction when it emerged and was later expelled. I grew increasingly cynical about the Trotskyist group’s willingness to adapt. The question became moot as DSA took off after Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong performance in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. The ISO felt irrelevant when compared to DSA’s nearly 100,000 dues-paying members. That level of success was unimaginable in 2005.
My focus increasingly shifted to animal rights, but it says something about just how much the ISO had been left behind that I didn’t learn about the group’s 2019 dissolution for a couple of years after the fact. The organization imploded following accusations of a rape cover-up.
So why do I feel nostalgic about such a deeply-flawed group I frequently criticized in public? Obviously, my personal history is intertwined with the organization in a limited way. But I also think I miss the moral clarity I felt the ISO provided. It was frequently said in the group that the Democratic Party was the graveyard of social movements. The ISO would support Green Party candidates, but in the United States’ two party system, that effectively made them an anti-electoral organization.
Of course, since Bernie Sanders’ historic campaigns, the left has been increasingly drawn into Democratic Party politics. I think the upsides of this outweigh the downsides, but there are certainly moments when I wonder if we’ve conceded too much. The perspective I’ve come around to is, yes, the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements—but there’s no alternative. Progress for the foreseeable future runs through the Democratic Party. Trying to reform it is the worst option, except all the others.
I believe my nostalgia for the ISO’s uncompromising stance toward the Democrats is an irrational idealization of the past. You can’t wash your hands of complicity in war and capitalist exploitation by voting third party or not voting at all.
