Independent Socialist Clubs/International Socialists

INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST CLUBS/INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS. The tradition of dissident revolutionary socialism associated with the Workers Party in the 1940s and carried on by the Independent Socialist League in the 1950s was revived in the early 1960s by Hal Draper and an energetic cohort of young recruits in Berkeley, California. Although the movement’s revolutionary expectations failed to materialize in the 1970s, Third Camp socialists helped build major rank-and-file movements in the trade unions and upheld a serious intellectual alternative to social democracy in a period of wholesale retreat from revolutionary politics.

The first Independent Socialist Club (ISC) was formed in Berkeley in September 1964 by Draper, Joel Geier (leader of the Young People’s Socialist League), and other left-wing dissidents from the Socialist Party milieu. The ISC played a catalytic role in the development of radicalism on the Berkeley campus, influencing the free speech movement and aiding the creation of union locals among faculty and teaching assistants. Although its opposition to the authoritarian features of Castroism, Maoism, and the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) placed limits on the group’s capacity to grow at a time when much of the student Left was increasingly enthralled with Third Worldism, the ISC’s analytical sophistication and revolutionary politics enabled it to recruit many high-quality activists. It supported black power, aided California farm workers’ struggles, and spearheaded the ballot drive of the Peace and Freedom Party, a Left alternative to the Democratic Party, in 1967–1968.

As additional ISCs sprang up, a loose national federation headquartered in New York coalesced in 1967 and began publishing a quarterly, Independent Socialist (1967–1969), from Berkeley. By recruiting some prominent student radicals—including Jack Weinberg, whose arrest for civil rights activism sparked the free speech movement—the Independent Socialist Clubs of America could boast a modest growth. In September 1969, with 180 members in ten clubs, the group voted to become the International Socialists (IS). The new name signified the group’s alliance with a larger, dynamic British organization of the same name led by Tony Cliff, as well as its intention to construct a more coherent, active organization. After Students for a Democratic Society imploded (a self-destruction that IS tried to prevent) IS attracted several new clusters of student radicals. By 1970, the group had 275 members. Half resided in the Bay Area.

IS called for unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While politically opposing what it considered the NLF’s Stalinism, IS supported military victory for the NLF on the grounds that all popular Vietnamese sentiment against imperialism and Saigon had been channeled into the NLF. IS argued that North Vietnam and all comparable regimes, including the Soviet Union, represented a new type of class system. Most members viewed the Communist regimes as “bureaucratic collectivist,” but some called them “state capitalist.” All agreed that revolution from below would be necessary to replace the new forces of class rule with workers’ democracy.

The creation of IS marked a conscious turn of what was mostly a student group, albeit with working-class politics, toward concerted activity within the American working class. In 1970, the national office was moved to Detroit, International Socialist was replaced by a more frequently published tabloid, Workers’ Power (1970–1979), and Geier became national secretary. The group began to “industrialize”—which it defined as IS members’ taking jobs in strategic industries in order to help organize worker opposition to both the corporations and bureaucratic union leadership. An early strategy of supporting “struggle groups” independent of the unions and modeled on black revolutionary workers’ organizations rapidly gave way within a year to the labor strategy that IS would pursue throughout the 1970s: building and supporting rank-and-file opposition caucuses within existing trade unions. As a resolution adopted at the 1972 convention put it, “We proceed from the class struggle as it really is today, and not as we wish it. We propose directions for the growing rank and file movement without making sectarian demands on that movement.”

This approach to the labor movement distinguished IS from much of the New Left, which wrote off the unions as hopelessly privileged and conservative. IS upheld the classical Marxist position that labor was revolutionary in potential and that workers comprised the only class capable of overturning capitalism. Against social democrats and Communists who sought leadership influence, IS dedicated itself to the union ranks and to uncompromising “class struggle unionism.” Unlike organizations which interpreted Leninism as a license to constitute small, self-declared “vanguards” and instruct the masses by socialist evangelicalism—an approach that tended “to increase the number of socialist organizations rather than the number of socialist workers,” as Kim Moody put it—IS sought to enter into the ranks of the industrial working class and connect workers’ concerns to socialism in a direct and non-manipulative fashion.

In the early 1970s, however, IS suffered some important losses, including the resignation in January 1971 of Hal Draper and others in Berkeley over trade union policy. The largest split was the 1973 expulsion of the Revolutionary Tendency. Led by Chris Hobson, Ron Tabor, and Sy Landy, the Revolutionary Tendency—which had one third of the 350 IS members and temporarily led a majority bloc in 1972–1973—came to advocate a more orthodox Trotskyist approach, including use of the transitional program. After the expulsion, the tendency created its own organization, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which suffered many splits of its own and eventually dissolved into the anarchist Love and Rage milieu.

IS supported gay liberation and feminism, and it maintained a youth group, Red Tide. But it focused primarily on labor. During the 1974–1975 downturn, the first significant American economic stagnation in decades, IS turned leftward under the expectation that the labor bureaucracy would be unable in a period of economic decline to satisfy the needs of rank-and-file workers. IS leaders predicted that the resulting crisis within the labor movement would present an enormous new opportunity for a class-conscious rank-and-file upsurge, and they considered the development of a “workers’ combat organization” a real possibility. Accordingly, IS turned toward a highly disciplined organizational model, centralizing power in the executive committee, using Workers’ Power as both an agitational paper and organizer of the group’s work, and appointing Glenn Wolfe, a transplanted British IS dissident, to the position of national secretary in 1975 with the aim of “Bolshevizing” the organization. Membership, however, peaked at five hundred in late 1975 and fell from then on. Voluntarism chiefly produced factionalism and burnout. At the 1978 convention, therefore, IS voted to drop its party-building and centralism (a policy that in practice had been abandoned by late 1976).

Despite these organizational difficulties, the rank-and-file labor approach pursued diligently by the members of IS throughout the 1970s and 1980s produced many constructive, long-lasting institutions that promoted rank-and-file interests in an unfavorable period. In 1976, such IS members as Ken Pfaff were pivotal in the creation of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, an amalgamation of earlier reform efforts among truckers. Teamsters for a Democratic Union eventually recruited ten thousand rank-and-file Teamsters, helped to upend the mob-influenced bureaucracy, created a new atmosphere of militancy and fightback in the ranks, and spearheaded the 1991 election of outsider Ron Carey as Teamster president. Similar rank-and-file initiatives in the automobile and steel industries, while not as spectacular, were aided and influenced by IS. In 1979, Kim Moody, Jane Slaughter, and Mike Parker, IS members, helped found Labor Notes, which through numerous books, semiannual conferences, and the monthly paper itself became a powerful magnet for reform tendencies in the trade union movement.

The fallout from the overblown expectations of the mid-1970s, however, resulted in two damaging end-of-decade splits. The first took place after Cleveland staffers Barbara and Cal Winslow organized a secret faction at the instigation of the IS’s British sister organization. Tensions had emerged between the U.S. and British leadership, in part because of differences over Portugal, where a Proletarian Revolutionary Party nearly led a Portuguese revolution in 1974–1975. The American IS supported the party, but the British leadership came to consider it inadequately committed to mass party-building. Debate within the IS, however, centered primarily on labor policy. IS voted at its 1977 convention to expel the minority faction, which had contested the validity of industrializing middle-class students, and it went on to form the International Socialist Organization (ISO), remained loyal to the British Socialist Workers Party (as the British IS had redesignated itself), and published Socialist Worker. While the Winslows were forced out in the early 1980s, several other IS veterans—including Peter Camarata and Geier—joined the ISO. By the early twenty-first century, the ISO, led by Ahmed Shawki and Sharon Smith, had a presence in the movement against the Iraq War through its Campus Antiwar Network, hosted thousands at its annual Socialism conferences, and launched the well-received Haymarket Books, but in 2019 the organization came to a spectacular end, dissolving itself over demoralization at revelations of the leadership’s handling of rape charges in the context of the #MeToo moment.

As for IS, a minority that had resisted the expulsion of the ISO nucleus in 1977 grew increasingly critical of what it viewed as an increasing leadership accommodation of left-leaning officials and union opposition campaigns unconnected to rank-and-file movements. In 1979, cumulative frustrations finally led this tendency, which included Steve Zeluck, Robert Brenner, Johanna Brenner, and Joel Jordan, to resign from IS and form a new group, Workers Power. Workers Power launched the magazine Against the Current (1980–1985), which sought to address the challenge that American history and conditions pose to socialist theory.

Both Workers Power, with about fifty members, and the IS, with 150, faced difficult conditions: economic hard times, the near-collapse of the Left, and the rightward turn of bourgeois politics. Some, including Wolfe and Weinberg, dropped out of organized socialist politics. IS found it hard to maintain industrial concentration, although both Labor Notes and Teamsters for a Democratic Union provided homes for broad collaboration on the labor Left. In its activism and magazine Changes (1979–1985), IS supported the Polish trade union movement Solidarność and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. From 1979 on, IS tried to initiate “regroupment” discussions within the broader revolutionary Left, but the desired unity, especially with Maoists beginning to accept work within the Democratic Party, remained elusive because IS, Workers Power, and the ISO all continued to insist upon the need for a labor party independent of the Democrats. In 1986, regroupment proved successful when IS recombined with Workers Power and Socialist Unity—formed in 1984 by a group of revolutionaries expelled from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party and sympathetic to Ernest Mandel’s neo-Trotskyism—to create a new, multi-tendency revolutionary socialist organization, Solidarity.

Solidarity declared in its founding statement that it had no pretense to being “the vanguard” but that it hoped through experimental activism to contribute to the rebirth of revolutionary democratic socialism in the United States. Beginning in 1986, it sponsored a new series of Against the Current, intended to be a freewheeling forum for Left analysis and debate. While Solidarity absorbed several smaller groups and provided a site for a band of sixties with a radical labor perspective to stay the course, it never exceeded a few hundred members and faced new challenges in the twenty-first century over how to relate to the emergence of a youthful socialist generation that viewed contestation within the Democratic Party as worth waging, as manifested in the rise of Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

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Fisk, Milton. Socialism from Below in the United States: The Origins of the International Socialist
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Fitch, Robert, “Revolution in the Teamsters.” Tikkun 8, no. 2 (March–April 1993).

Lichtenstein, Nelson. “Assessing 40 Years of Labor Notes.” Jacobin, April 7, 2019

Phelps, Christopher. “Port Huron at Fifty: An Interview with Kim Moody.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas  9, no. 2 (summer 2012).