Dissolution and Gravedigging
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes. - V.I. Lenin, Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement (1910)
Recently the International Socialist Organization’s remaining ~600 members voted to dissolve. For those who are not familiar with the US Left, the ISO was a Trotskyist sect that organized on a rhetorical base of “socialism from below.” During the 80s and 90s, during a period of retreat of The Left, the ISO could have been considered its only potential hegemon. By the time I had joined, the org’s central mission remained “training Marxist cadre” for the future socialist movement coupled with a righteous abstention from the current historical moment.
At the start of the eventual dissolution process, I was shocked at the possibility that our project may fail, and with it, similarly retire an equally anachronistic revolution. We had modestly tasked ourselves as a gamete for the future embryo of the revolutionary movement to challenge capitalism. It had been tried and failed before, but we were learning our lessons and we looked to the Bolshevik party as the most insightful of these lessons. Reading history was a matter of realizing the necessity in transposing their times to ours and subsequently assigning different political players in the 20th century to those of today. Naturally, when the ISO died, the first place I looked for answers was What is To Be Done?—which we had never actually read in my two years of the ISO. As I immersed in the debate of the time I found myself struggling to avoid reading the Russian Economists as the “class-reductionists” in the DSA (as I had once been praised to do at an ISO study group) and cheering on Lenin’s principled “socialism from below.”
Ultimately, Lenin concludes Economism to be quite a silly position and the following activity of the Russian social-democratic movement asserts it. But the Economism debate belonged to Lenin, Iskra and Rabocheye Dyelo; 2019 is not 1902, and neither is it the rearrangement of elements. There is no cutting edge socialist movement coming to age alongside capitalism. We belong to a now fully globalized capitalism, one that has proven incredibly flexible. The gate still teeters but the old holes are obscured.
When confronted with the failure of what I believed to be a legitimate revolutionary vessel, I was right to look to “theory.” Where I failed was treating Lenin’s grotesque corpse: it ought to be buried and rot.
When confronted with the failure of what I believed to be a legitimate revolutionary vessel, I was right to look to “theory.” Where I failed was treating Lenin’s grotesque corpse: it ought to be buried and rot.
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