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	Workers Vanguard No. 865	3 March 2006

ISO: It's So Easy Being Green

"Socialist" Chretien's Capitalist "Peace" Campaign

We print below an edited February 18 leaflet distributed by comrades of the Los Angeles Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth Club at an “Elections 2006” event at Bethel AME Church on that day. This public event was held mainly to promote Green Party candidates in California, including members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who are scandalously running in the June primary election for the capitalist Green Party nomination. Well-known ISO supporters, who did not publicly identify themselves as such, ran the meeting and orchestrated the “security.” During the discussion, a Spartacus Youth Club member was granted the microphone and attempted to speak from the floor to denounce the ISO’s latest betrayal of class principle. He intended to present our position against all capitalist parties and for a workers party that fights for socialist revolution. Our attempt to counterpose revolutionary Marxism was suppressed. “Security” for the event grabbed the microphone and pushed our comrade and another SYCer out of the room.

International Socialist Organization (ISO) leader Todd Chretien is running on a bourgeois liberal platform seeking the capitalist Green Party’s nomination for Senate in California. This is the logical extension of the ISO’s political support to the Green Party, beginning with presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2000. The Green Party is a small-time capitalist party with a thoroughly bourgeois program extolling the virtues of local business enterprises. As revolutionary socialists, we oppose political support to any capitalist party or candidate on principle and stand for the complete and unconditional independence of the working class from all parties and agencies of the capitalist class enemy.

The main focus of Chretien’s Green campaign is an attempt to channel antiwar sentiment into a “Million Votes for Peace.” However many (or few) votes Chretien gets, pushing bourgeois pacifist illusions in the possibility of peaceful capitalism is perpetrating a fraud. Unlike the ISO and Greens, we Marxists in the Spartacist League tell the truth: the only way to end this system of imperialist war and colonial occupations, like in Iraq, is through socialist revolution to do away with capitalism that generates racism and war. The ISO’s strategy of pressure politics and class collaboration, whether in the streets or at the ballot box, is an obstacle to fighting for the necessary mobilization of independent working-class struggle against imperialist war and the capitalist rulers.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the ISO simply called to “stop the war” and refused to take a side in defense of Iraq. As revolutionary internationalists, the Spartacist League called for the military defense of Iraq against the U.S. invasion and for class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers. With the continuing imperialist occupation, Chretien’s yellow-ribbon appeal to bring “our troops” home is aimed at “peace is patriotic” liberals, including sections of the bourgeois establishment who are worried about how to get out of the Iraq quagmire. For its part, the Green Party’s call for United Nations “peacekeepers” to replace U.S. troops in Iraq is an attempt to give a “humanitarian” facade to what would be an equally imperialist occupation. The ISO claims to oppose U.N. intervention, but in seeking the Green Party nomination, Chretien proves just the opposite. The Spartacist League says: All imperialist troops out of Iraq now! Every blow inflicted against the U.S. occupiers in Iraq is in the direct interest of workers and the oppressed.

The ISO’s pursuit of the Green Party nomination stands in blatant contradiction to its paper position of opposing capitalist parties. To maintain this fiction, the ISO must deny that the Green Party is indeed a capitalist party. But, in the real world, the Greens serve as a liberal pressure group on the Democratic Party. Chretien himself makes this clear when he explains that the purpose of his campaign is to “demonstrate to [Democratic] Sen. Feinstein and the world that we, the California anti-war movement, mean business.” Indeed, the historic role of capitalist “third party” movements in the U.S. is to divert anger among the masses away from social protest and back into bourgeois electoral politics. It speaks volumes that the Greens’ leading candidate in California is ex-socialist Peter Camejo, now a “progressive investment banker,” who is also Chretien’s main endorser. The Greens’ “anti-corporate” posture is nothing more than the desire to tinker with capitalism in the name of small business. To see what the Greens would do in power, one need only look at the Green Party in Germany when it controlled the foreign ministry and ordered German imperialist troops into the Balkans for the first time since WWII during the U.S./NATO bombing and invasion of Serbia in 1999.

Joining the camp of the capitalist class enemy is nothing new for the ISO, an organization that has been the “socialist” handmaiden of liberal anti-communism for decades. Its political forebears were renegades from Marxism who refused to defend the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states during the Korean War. These days the ISO builds class-collaborationist “peace” coalitions, joining with “antiwar” liberal Democrats who criticize the Bush administration for wasting time in Iraq instead of going after the “real threat” of nuclear-armed North Korea. When it comes to fighting communism, the ISO has no “antiwar” pretensions. They did their utmost to assist the U.S. imperialists in their drive against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and cheered the destruction of the Soviet workers state in 1991-1992. In the 1980s, the virulently anti-Soviet ISO sided with the CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin against the Red Army in Afghanistan. In contrast, we hailed the Red Army in Afghanistan, which was fighting on the side of social progress, and called to extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. We fought to mobilize Soviet workers to defeat the Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution. Today we call for the unconditional military defense of those states resulting from the overthrow of capitalism in China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. Our fight for workers political revolutions is premised on our defense of the social gains of those revolutions and our fight for international socialist revolution.

The working class and the oppressed cannot take a single step toward liberation if locked in an embrace with the political parties of the class enemy—whether Democrat, Republican or Green. What’s needed is to build a revolutionary workers party, based on the political independence of the working class, which would have as a crucial task the fight for all of the oppressed, not least the liberation of black people. Workers have the social power to overthrow capitalism and establish a collectivized, planned economy as the basis for socialism. But they must first be won in the course of hard class struggle to a Marxist understanding of their historic task. A key part of that fight is combating illusions in the reformability of capitalism fostered by today’s misleaders of the working class. The Bolshevik-led workers revolution in Russia in 1917 opened up the perspective of international socialist revolution to put an end to imperialist war for good. In opposition to Chretien and the ISO who, at bottom, defend capitalist rule, we fight for the program of new workers revolutions across the globe. No vote to the Green Party! No vote to Chretien! Break with the Democratic Party of racism and war! Join us in the struggle for socialist revolution!