12 thoughts on “More leaked ISO documents [UPDATE]”

1. Organisation is always a political question, it concerns how members relate to each other & to non-members. Secrecy, or not, is at the core of this. To be, or not to be. Opaque or transparent.

   This institution of the internal bulletin is un-Bolshevik, Lenin never wrote a word in such a thing, & it was something Cliff argued vehemently against.

   1) Joaquín Bustelo
   It should be borne in mind that neither the Bolsheviks, nor the dastardly Mensheviks, ever had an internal bulletin. It was instituted in autumn 1920 by the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) – yes, lower case in the Russian. Lenin never, ever, wrote in it. The early notable author who took advantage of this opportunity to conceal both views & analysis from the class was the headmaster-to-be, Mr Steel. Lenin, on the other hand, carried on in the traditional way, expressing his opinion in newspapers & at public meetings. Hence the title of Joaquín Bustelo’s piece on the topic, ‘Lenin Was Not a Leninist’:
   http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7727 (March 2013; mbr. of Solidarity [USA])

   2) Palestine’s Top Cat
   The openness of the 1960 version of Cliffyism has passed the ISO by:
   “The party has to be subordinated to the whole. And so the internal regime in the revolutionary party must be subordinated to the relation between the party and the class. The managers of factories can discuss their business in secret and then put before the workers a fait accompli. The revolutionary party that seeks to overthrow capitalism cannot accept the notion of a discussion on policies inside the party without the participation of the mass of the workers – policies which are then brought ‘unanimously’ ready-made to the class. Since the revolutionary party cannot have interests apart from the class, all the party’s issues of policy are those of the class, and they should therefore be thrashed out in the open, in its presence. The freedom of discussion which exists in the factory meeting, which aims at unity of action after decisions are taken, should apply to the revolutionary party. This means that all discussions on basic issues of policy should be discussed in the light of day: in the open press. Let the mass of the workers take part in the discussion, put pressure on the party, its apparatus and leadership.”
   http://marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1960/xx/trotsub.htm (@ the end)

   So the ISO is securely bunkered, insulated, surrounded by a series of not-in-front-of-the-class defences. What’s within is policed by the praetorian guard, privileged class monitors, the teachers, the headmasters & headmistresses (raceplay optional: it too is an individual intersectional dimension).

   3) Although PCB #1 didn’t have on its cover or first page a British SWP-style ‘DO NOT DISTRIBUTE ON THE INTERNET’, it did have this:
   “Please be sure, however, to limit all pre-convention discussions (and documents) ONLY TO DUES-PAYING MEMBERS OF THE ISO. If you believe that close contacts will benefit from the pre-convention discussion, then encourage them to join the ISO and take part!” (#1:1, original empha$i$)

   So Stalin’s love of the IB is used as a moneymaking scheme to tempt peeps to join, ‘come-on-in, see-what-we-have: secret-discussions!’, filling the coffers along with the tax on earnings, & the mandatory copyrighted official merchandise.

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2. Who cares about the ISO!

   And what do you have against martinis?

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   • Indeed, who cares about this absolutely irrelevant bunch. It’s more like the people who reenact historical battles, dressing up with lengthy texts and pretend they are Lenin or Trotsky or whoever. Probably reenactment is more fun, though most will be military types, being outdoors and getting some exercise and without the illusion that you are ‘changing the world’ or whatever.

     Surprised, though, that this blog hasn’t got anything on the use of constructivism in the Olympic opening ceremony!

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     • It’s on the way.

3. “It is not an artificial gathering manufactured by our conference committee. The men and women who are here to make the Workers Party are the men and women who, for many years past, have been in the vanguard of the movements that have led to it. They have struggled and suffered and they bear the scars of baffle, and that is the guarantee of the revolutionary integrity of this organization.”

   From the Founding Convention of the Workers Party 1922
   James P. Cannon

   http://rawlinsview.com/2014/02/09/speech-at-the-first-workers-party-convention-james-p-cannon-1922/

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5. “Thus, the demand for a decisive turn from revolutionary Social-Democracy to bourgeois social-reformism was accompanied by a no less decisive turn towards bourgeois criticism of all the fundamental ideas of Marxism. In view of the fact that this criticism of Marxism has long been directed from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets and in a series of learned treatises, in view of the fact that the entire younger generation of the educated classes has been systematically reared for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the “new critical” trend in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jove. The content of this new trend did not have to grow and take shape, it was transferred bodily from bourgeois to socialist literature. “

   http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm

   Jara,
   “Bustelo” 2′ (Joaquin Bustello is borrowing the pen name of SWP-US leader and Militant Newspaper editor and writer Joseph Hansen (1910–1979) –“Jack Bustello”–author of among other things “The Leninist Strategy of Party Building” http://www.marxists.org/archive/hansen/1971/indef.htm ) Joaquin’s #2’s comments ought to be discounted on the basis of their very soft historical veneer. While it may be true–I confess not to have perused the nearly 50 volumes of the complete works of Lenin to verify or disprove the claim–that there were no internal bulletins amongst the Bolsheviks, It must also be clear that there were not allowed under Lenin’s watch to perpetuate within bolshevism uncontested theoretical-academic talk shops of the nature of North Star or the ISO who float freely between bourgeois academia, the trade union officialdom and left middle class socialism.
   Lenin strove at every turn for a disciplined party of action and on the whole he built one. The Bolsheviks maintained throughout their existence a substantial extra-legal underground conspiratorial organization in most cases organized in a cell structure.
   Preobrazhensky writes :
   “My activity in the Urals continued until March 1908 in ever worsening conditions, amidst growing arrests and intensified repression. In March I was arrested at the Chclyabinsk town conference. I swallowed the agenda and coded addresses, and escaped the same night from the police station. “ Preobrazhensky’s autobiography which details his experience as a Bolshevik cadre from 1903 to 1917 is valuable to understand the reality of their conditions. ( see http://rawlinsview.com/2013/11/10/e-a-preobrazhensky-autobiographical-sketch-part-3-of-5-with-link-to-complete-text/ )
   In other words. The internal bulletin is only possible in the context of either state power by a worker’s party or a sufficiently stable bourgeois order to allow for an avowedly –if in the case of the ISO only nominally– communist organization to exist and conduct business along formal democratic procedural lines. Whether those procedures follow the accepted norms of “Democratic Centralism” or other forms is less relevant. In all cases the specific organizational forms should be subordinate to objective conditions and strategic priorities.
   Lenin took advantage of whatever means was available to communicate both to the working class broadly, to the socialist movement as a whole, and to the disciplined cadre of his organization. For the most part the “internal bulletins” of the Bolsheviks during the revolutionary period were written in invisible ink and in code on scraps of cigarette paper and such. Public documents were often written in such a way as to allow the avoidance of censorship. Such publicity as could be obtained in the legal–which generally meant bourgeois or reformist–media was precious under the conditions of the Tzar’s rule. Lenin was one person. The Bolsheviks had close to 30,000 active cadre on the eve of the February revolution. They were well enough organized to explode by a factor of 10 between February and October.
   The current low level of the class struggle and the immersion of the ISO in a middle class social milieu makes the norms of democratic centralism seem extraneous or irrelevant.
   At a higher level of the class struggle a party involved in mass class combat and major political interventions would come to value the opportunity to maintain a level of privacy in terms of tactical disputes or theoretical contests. Comrades in struggle working together would recognize both the need for unified action and time out for debate in order to return to unified action. That certain discussions would take place without the pressures of publicity should not seem either bureaucratic or oppressive. It is theoretically pure of Cliff to say that this should all take place in public, but in reality less confident cadre might feel restricted by such a demand. Democratic centralism in its revolutionary and democratic form creates space for younger or newer comrades to feel out their ideas more or less free from consequence. In this way it is a mechanism for the development and renewal of leadership.
   Cliff’s comments above are symptomatic of his ambivalence when it comes to building a revolutionary organization such as that for which Lenin strove, one which is actually prepared to fight for the political power of our class.

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8. Many broken links for 2011-2012-2013, diminishing the leakiness of your efforts.

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10. Thanks for posting these, very interesting reading! I’m particularly interested in the 2012 convention documents but there are many broken links… Any chance of getting those fixed?

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