No sooner did the CWI under Peter Taaffe split than those who left Taaffe’s dominion decided to have a split of their own earlier this year. In a couple of articles online, here and here, those departing the new organisation give their reasons why. It seems that the leadership of the new organisation has learned little or nothing from the experience with Peter Taaffe.
From the very beginning comrades that belong to what developed into the ISA minority warned that the ISA was facing a very serious danger, that of multi-fragmentation. This was based on the experience of the many splits in the Trotskyist and anti-capitalist Left, historically, whenever a vacuum was created in the leadership core: every split had a series of aftershocks. In the case of the ISA, this danger was particularly grave because the new leading centre, created out of necessity by drawing available cadre from the sections, lacked homogeneity, sufficient experience in the working class and the social movements and in building sizeable organisations. We argued that the way to start building the ISA was to put exceptional emphasis on patient, democratic discussion, to create the necessary homogeneity while simultaneously building the sections.
Differences were soon to emerge in the ISA – this was something inevitable. Unfortunately, the majority approached these differences in the worst possible way, with direct attacks, very often of a personal character, increasing hostility and smear campaigns, instead of focusing on the political arguments and being open to correct mistakes in the light of experience, facts, reality.
Under formally democratic debates, a toxic atmosphere was created, and all those who had differences with the leading bodies were essentially being pushed out – this was applied not only on an international level but also nationally. Only in the past four months we had the split of the Australian section (a ¾ majority voted to disaffiliate), we were informed of the departure of the Taiwan organisation (again by about ¾ majority), and that of the Cincinnati branches in the US (by about 90% majority).
Here is the experience of one former leading member who resigned:
Only in the most formalistic sense “full democratic rights” were given during this debate. In reality, the leadership repeatedly obstructed a fully democratic and open debate. It did so, to start with a personal example, when it suspended my invitations to the IC meetings as soon as I expressed in our section a different view on the question of “the end of neoliberalism”. It did so when it failed to invite to the annual IC meeting from February 2021 any non-IC members of the minority, while inviting dozens of non-IC members supporting the leadership. When we raised this point, the leadership replied that it was the IC members of the minority who should have done that. But the job of a real leadership is to ensure a balanced participation and representation of all views in the most important meeting of the year rather than act in a factional way.
The leadership also obstructed a democratic debate when it repeatedly refused to publish our views on perspectives on the international website (even as part of an ‘Opinion’ section), in contrast to the Bolshevik tradition, where debates were very often public. For instance, my article was denied publication even as an opinion piece, despite being based on a contribution to the international members’ bulletin signed by three of the four leading members in the Spanish state; instead, the article of the fourth leading member, the only one supportive of the leadership position, was published on the central column of the international website. Given the lack of an opinion section, articles are read as representing the views of the author’s section, which clearly was not the case in this instance. Last but not least, what “full democratic rights” can we speak of when the leadership refused to hold a debate on perspectives at the Virtual Marxist University from early 2021, despite 27% of the IC members proposing it, on the lazy pretext that it was too late to change the agenda several weeks before the event (when, in reality, the agenda continued to be changed up to 3 days before the event)?
Of course, all of this was just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it, and away from the eye of the wider membership, there was a constant stream of character assassinations, ranging from the traditional slander of being ‘un-Marxist’, ‘pessimistic’, ‘liquidationist’, ‘academic’ etc. to the more original slur ‘snakes’ and ‘weirdos’. The latter did not come from some erratic supporter of the majority after a long night out but, even if on informal channels, from a leading member of the EWS section and of the International Executive.
Formal democratic rights are of little value in any organisation when the underlying internal culture displays such a toxic atmosphere and unhealthy methods.
The minority within the organisation disagreed with the overly-optimistic perspectives of the leadership of the ISA, preferring a more sober analysis. This goes against the tradition of Trot sects, which is to create ‘perspectives’ documents which over-hype the actual process of radicalisation:
Making mistakes, even serious ones, is not a crime and does not determine a future of doom for any organisation; but this is conditional on the assumption that they are approached with an open mind and a willingness to learn from reality and correct them. The full timers’ “sub-commission” however, with the support of the majority in the IE and IC, went on a full-scale attack on the IE/IC members who criticised their views. The minority was accused of “pessimism” and of an underestimation of the depth of the capitalist crisis. Personal motives were attributed to those who disagreed. Soon the opposition was also to be accused of “federalism” and “revisionism”. Every attempt was made to discredit the minority and polarize the membership, including that of not understanding women’s oppression.
As Vlad put it:
While we acknowledged the potential for struggle during the pandemic, we also brought up a series of obstacles that we see in the objective situation in order to balance the over- optimistic perspectives of the leadership. We were accused of “pessimism” and of “demoralising the membership”, as though the membership is like a child that has to be constantly reassured that everything is OK. Those obstacles were, once again, either overlooked or superficially acknowledged, but without any serious analysis or discussion: the absence of mass workers parties; the political and organisational weakness of the trade unions; the failure of new left parties and leaders and their impact on consciousness (especially in terms of an anti-party mood among the youth); the lack of democratic structures of movements like BLM that would enable them to develop a political alternative; the ongoing rise of populist and far right (including in countries like Spain and Portugal, where the far right was very marginal in the previous crisis); the increasing authoritarianism of the capitalist state, including police oppression as well as a wider break with traditional tenets of liberal democracy.
When events would invalidate the over-optimistic perspectives of the leadership, at best the analysis would acknowledge the obstacle but not the weakness of the perspective that had failed to truly recognise and discuss that obstacle. There never is any admission of being wrong. If events contradict perspectives, there is a way to dress it as though the perspectives had always anticipated that to happen. An example of that was the article about the crushing victory of the right in the regional elections in Madrid, written by the staunch supporter of the leadership in our sections, where he acknowledged, without conceding so, the very point that we had been making in the debate for months against his own arguments: that due to the lack of a left alternative in countries like Spain, the main beneficiary of the anti-establishment mood fuelled by Covid on a short-to-medium term would likely be the populist and even far right.
More often, though, there would be a total denial of the complications in the situation, particularly with regards to consciousness. This happened, for instance, with the failed unionisation campaign at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama, which was entirely attributed to the flaws of the union driving the campaign and the underhand methods employed by the company – both clearly significant factors but which don’t fully explain the low turnout and the categorical defeat. The previous decades have left deep marks on consciousness, which socialists still need to acknowledge and tackle despite the outstanding shift in consciousness to the left in the US over the recent years. False consciousness is not an invention of cynical Marxist academics but an obstacle that Marx and Engels noted and explained at length. We believe all socialists need to gain a profound understanding not only of the opportunities present in the situation, but also of the problems, precisely so that they don’t become demoralised when those problems will sometimes provoke defeats or retreats for our movement.
Among other things, the minority was accused of ‘federalism’ and abandoning democratic centralism, and a Facebook discussion among members of the organisation shut down by the leadership. All these contributed to a walk out of several sections.
Disaffiliating from the ISA is a decision that has been forced on our sections.After decades of working to build a mass revolutionary International, we have come to the conclusion that this historic task cannot be achieved under the present leadership of the ISA. Not so much because of its weak political analysis and lack of sufficient understanding of the complexities of the epoch that we are living through but rather because it will not accept criticism, it will not allow different voices to survive in the International. Once a criticism of the “official position” emerges, it leads to relentless attacks. On the surface “democratic debates” are organised, but beneath the surface dirty campaigns of slander and character assassination are taking place, which polarize the membership, make it close its ears to critical voices and create a toxic atmosphere for discussions.
Of course, this is not about one comrade or another in the leadership, but about the unhealthy methods and internal culture at play. It is this internal culture that the ISA inherited from the CWI but has been unable to rid itself of. While we realize that our departure may come as a shock to many comrades, particularly to those to whom the debate might still seem at the beginning, the concrete situation is that our sections can’t afford to spend more time and energy replying to all the falsifications and distortions of the full timer apparatus and the majority in the leadership in the ISA, while also trying to counter its persisting political mistakes. If we were to keep doing that, we’d severely jeopardize the actual work of building the revolutionary forces and be dragged into endless and largely meaningless controversies, which would be highly unlikely to result in the kind of change we would want to see in the methods and culture of the ISA.
In the whole history of the CWI/ISA, over nearly 5 decades, there has never been a tendency or a faction which survived. They all led to splits. In its whole history the international leadership of the CWI (IEC) had totally failed to check the international center (the full timer body called International Secretariat – IS). The IEC had played a passive role, even when it was absolutely clear that the problems with the internal regime were very serious. The only exception was the 2018 clash of the IEC majority with the IS that led to the split of the CWI.
The ISA leadership is unfortunately continuing these bad traditions of the CWI.
It is refusing to accept, actually it is distorting, the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had a very rich internal life of disagreements and factions and whose debates, in the party and the International, were very often public under circumstances incomparably more difficult than today.
The issue of the internal regime, i.e., of democratic centralism applied in a sensitive and dialectical manner, as a condition for correct political analysis and for being able to convince and involve the youth and the working class in the building of a mass revolutionary party is, in many ways, even more important today than at the time of the Bolsheviks. Moreover, the means at our disposal today, particularly with the use of the internet, are such, that internal democracy, exchange of information and discussion of ideas can reach unparalleled levels compared to any other time in the past.
Ex-member Vlad accuses the ISA leadership of failing to learn from the mistakes of the past.
…as the debate developed, it became increasingly clear that we deeply disagree over what sort of international organisation we need to build. The leadership started to shift the focus in explaining the 2019 split from the lack of internal democracy (which there was a strong consensus about within our ranks at the time of that split) to the problem of federalism, as defined in the quote above.
We could perhaps see a case of federalism, for example, in how the majority of ISA members in Taiwan suddenly left the organisation in February 2021 after almost one year of internal tensions in their section, during which there was no discussion of the matters at hand on the international bodies of the ISA. But this is in fact a symptom of a much deeper problem. Indeed, if federalism was the main problem in the CWI, then why was it allowed to take hold over the years? Why wasn’t the international leadership at the time challenged directly and openly over this.
One of the members of the current international leadership and leader of the Belgian section responded to this point by saying that “you pick the battles you can win”. This sums up perfectly the fundamental problem in the CWI and now the ISA (of which federalism is one among other symptoms): the lack of a healthy internal culture where comrades “pick the battles” because they believe they have a legitimate reason to do so and not because they are sure they can win them! The hard pill to swallow for the ISA leadership is that they assisted passively to the prolonged political and organisational degeneration of the former CWI leadership and only opposed it in the eleventh hour. There is no willingness to even acknowledge that fact, not to mention learn from it.
The idea of “picking the battles you can win” may sometimes be correct externally, in the class struggle or inside the broader movement (though not usually, as most of the battles are defensive, i.e. imposed on the movements). But it should never be a principle of action inside a revolutionary organisation, where any comrade should feel empowered to raise any criticism of the leadership, even if that leaves them in a minority of one. The entire internal culture inherited by the ISA from the CWI is ridden with instruments of class struggle that are used internally: the united fist approach, where the majority agrees in perfect unanimity on everything against the minority, which was in full display during these debates and fuelledthe polarisation; the demand for loyalty, which internally should only be to the facts andarguments that enable us to understand the objective situation and our tasks in relation to it as revolutionary socialists; the constant hyperbolic self-appraisal, where almost everything we do and say is ‘fantastic’, ‘excellent’, ‘heroic’ etc. and which betrays a fundamentally patronising attitude towards the rank and file; the obtuseness towards other ideas and practices on the left and rigid approach to our own (e.g. accusation of ‘un-Marxist’ influences for merely using terms like ‘core’ and ‘periphery’); the deep seated fear of open disagreement and exchange of views. The latter, I believe, is what fundamentally prevented the vast majority of the membership to actively engage in these debates, out of an understandable but misguided desire to avoid polarisation, which in fact only fuelled it by allowing the entrenchment of two main, opposing positions.
Of course, all of us who have been members of the ISA and before that of the CWI (or other similar organisation) embody these problems at various times and various degrees. Nobody is immune to them. The key question is whether we are in denial about it or we acknowledge it and try to build a healthier internal culture. The ISA leadership is in denial.
All in all, it seems like the ISA has replicated the cultic practices it sought to esscape.