Now that the ISO has disbanded, its veterans can reach into the rapidly growing ideologically diffuse world of Democratic Socialists of America, using platforms like Socialism 2019 to infect DSA’s youthful core with the imperial politics of regime change – but always “from the left,” and always “from below.” ....The GrayzoneThere were estimates that 300 former ISOers were at the socialist conference in Chicago. Here's an article that raises important issues about sectors of the left and how some organized groups operate. Note this excerpt which has relevance to events that occurred in MORE since the leaders of the split came from ISO, Solidarity and people they recruited from the Democratic Socialists.
This March, the ISO voted to dissolve — in a decision some former members joked was the most democratic act ever undertaken by the organization, which had been dominated by an unelected leadership of veteran Trotskyite activists.I joined DSA and have some hopes they can be a counter force to the Democratic Party machine as I've been reporting. But I don't want to end up in another MORE-like situation where there is a group that is meeting privately out of sight plotting.
The dissolution was prompted by evidence that the ISO’s steering committee mishandled sexual assault allegations. It also came as the ISO’s membership was shrinking and rapidly being absorbed by a newly burgeoning anti-communist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.
Now that the ISO has dissolved, some of its past prominent members have entered the ranks of the DSA, burrowing from within to inject their anti-anti-imperialist politics into the group.
Because Trotskyites are so sectarian and notoriously incapable of holding together organizations, they are infamous for infiltrating larger, more popular groups and trying to take them over, in a tactic known as entryism.
This is precisely the strategy being used by former members of the ISO — and by another tiny US Trotskyite organization, Solidarity, which was led by anti-Nicaragua regime-change activist and Socialism Conference speaker Dan La Botz, now a leader in DSA.
Democratic Socialists of America is the largest self-described socialist organization in the United States, with more than 60,000 card-carrying members. It is also very heterogeneous, with many internal contradictions and conflicting political views.
The 2019 Socialism Conference, sponsored by American leftist juggernauts the DSA, Jacobin magazine, and ISO’s Haymarket Books, features regime-change activists from multiple US government-funded NGOs.
By Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal
Socialism is now apparently brought to you by the US State Department.
From July 4 to 7, thousands of left-wing activists from across the United States are gathering in Chicago for the 2019 Socialism Conference.
At this event, some of the most powerful institutions on the American socialist — but avowedly anti-communist — left have brought together a motley crew of regime-change activists to demonize Official Enemies of Washington.
