A recurring complaint of the Renewal Faction, and before that me personally, regarding the political method of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) was that the group rarely assessed its own activity. It seemed, therefore, that it would be gauche for me not to attempt an assessment of the faction itself. I should stress that these are my views as an individual on questions that were more often than not disputed within Renewal itself–the ISO leadership faction’s image of us as a clique ruled by one person (me) notwithstanding. I think other Renewal comrades would (and should!) produce different assessments.
cersc
A new publication policy
The ISO Renewal Faction announces that it is abandoning its policy of redacting “internal” material from its documents for publication on External Bulletin. From this point forward, all of our documents will appear in public, in full. We will also begin to unredact currently-posted documents.
We have decided on this course because the permanent faction that controls the ISO Steering Committee (SC) has refused to publish our full, unredacted document on the ISO and CERSC. We submitted the document on February 1; on February 10, we received the following email from ISO Treasurer Ahmed S, written on behalf of National Secretary Sharon S:
Sharon asked me to write back to you as she has been traveling for preconvention discussions. We did receive the document. It’s posted on the internet, so yes, we’ve seen it. We will not be publishing it in the internal bulletin.
Questions and concerns about the ISO and CERSC (Unredacted)
[Unredacted as of 12 February 2014; see our revised publication policy.]
The Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization legally independent of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), but to which ISO members have contributed significant time, money, and talent. The success of CERSC, especially its Haymarket Books project, is due in great part to ISO members. Some of us in the Renewal Faction, for example, have supported CERSC since its foundation in 2000. We have a sense of investment in the nonprofit, and consequently a sense that we ought to understand and influence its direction, especially as it intersects with the life of the ISO.
Through our experiences and a study of the publicly-available information about the finances of CERSC (available here), we have become concerned that the development of the nonprofit may be a force tending to undermine democratic accountability and control in the ISO. It occurs to us that the membership of the ISO ought to know much more about CERSC and the relationship between the ISO and CERSC given the contribution that the former makes to the latter. This document therefore poses a series of questions about the leadership, finances, and apparatus of the nonprofit. It concludes with further considerations of the importance of the questions we raise in the general context of the left today.
This document is based overwhelmingly on material available to the public–most of it filed with the state and/or federal government. In the rare instances where we use internal material, it is redacted for external publication.
External Bulletin 