democracy

What is the crime? To publish internal documents–or to criticize them?

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A common “charge” against the ISO Renewal Faction–popular with the leadership faction especially, as it avoids engaging in politics–is that we have not respected the organization’s Pre-Convention process inasmuch as we have published internal documents. But in fact the faction has not published anything that can be credibly interpreted as internal, as Nurit T has explained.

The leadership faction has an amusing rejoinder to this: they consider it an offense to publish anything submitted to the Pre-Convention Bulletin, including our own writings. This (improvised) “norm” is said to apply even if we redact all internal material. Continue reading →

A guide to bad arguments and distractions

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One of the elements of the degeneration of our democratic structures has been an infestation of distractions and bad arguments, sometimes called logical fallacies, that have all too often replaced reasoned debate. If we are to renew our democratic culture, we need to recognize these problems in both other comrades’ arguments and our own. It must be emphasized that while this document was written in preparation for debate around the ISO Renewal Faction criticisms, most of the these have been going around for years, and they aren’t acceptable in any debate.

  1. That’s not Leninist
  2. That’s anarchist
  3. That’s anti-leadership
  4. The ISO is under attack!
  5. These criticisms should have been brought up earlier
  6. This is the wrong way to bring these issues up
  7. They’re on their way out of the ISO
  8. Why should we care, they’re just ex-members
  9. They want to destroy the ISO!
  10. Of course they would say that, they’re middle class
  11. Here’s a list of exciting things!
  12. That’s factionalizing
  13. Other problems

Continue reading →

A note on the Faction Rules

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Several comrades have asked why the Faction Rules are so strongly centralistic, with so much decision-making power invested in the Faction Committee. This is a good question that reflects some real shortcomings in our current approach; but also demonstrates some misunderstanding of what the faction is trying to do.

Let’s start with the latter point. It should be kept in mind that we are a faction within a larger organization–not a new organization. As our Organizational Perspectives make clear, we advocate a far more democratic and less centralized regime within the ISO, which flows out of our understanding of the conjuncture. However, in order to fight for our views, we felt that it was necessary to organize ourselves in a very disciplined way.

We emphasize the necessity of a fight precisely because of the ways in which we have seen the leadership increasingly act to undermine our political positions by way of maneuvers, and to use that same method of bureaucratic maneuver to exclude members with critical views from the ISO. Comrades need to understand that an argument over the political direction of the organization is not a simple matter of the exchange of differing views, eventually reconciled through detached reflection. It is in fact a struggle over the character of our intervention in the class struggle. Our leadership self-consciously (and wrongly) acts as a permanent faction for its own preservation; we refuse to close our eyes to these facts.

Continue reading →