ISO Debates Pro-Capitalist Hunter Economics Club...and Loses

Eyewitness Report from the Slops of the Post-Soviet Trough

(Young Spartacus pages)

The December 3 event was billed as “Capitalism vs. Socialism: The Great Debate at Hunter College”—talk about false advertising! It featured economics professor Mark Weinstock and the International Socialist Organization’s Petrino DiLeo as well as three student panelists from the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and three from the Hunter College Economics Club. The ISO undoubtedly lost the debate. It was no small feat for “socialists” to go down in flames at a debate during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression when faced with arguments like “The U.S. is one of the most equal countries in the world!” and “Anyone sitting here can be a capitalist!” The ISO’s pathetic performance was a real indication of the deep historical trough following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union.

The word “Obama” did not escape the ISO’s lips once. Yet they complained that this government—whose CEO they toasted in Harlem on his election!—is bought and paid for by Wall Street. They ludicrously cited capitalist France and Canada as models of how to run the multi-billion dollar health care industry “for people, not profits.” They professed their deepest desire to see our tax money go to health care, not to the military. One ISO speaker ever so delicately suggested, “there is already something very strange about a system” that opens the borders for corporations to plunder poor countries while restricting immigration for working people. For the ISO, defending “socialism” amounts to acting like “responsible” advisers with modest suggestions on how to reform the bankrupt capitalist system. As if the capitalist rulers were moved by anything but defending their rule and profits!

The ISO tried to motivate “socialism” by whining about light bulbs and planned obsolescence. They ludicrously debated whether a baby is generous or greedy before being socialized—talk about infantile disorders! In a scene strangely reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year” race, the Economics Club student panelists ran circles around the ISO, while ISO members protested their concern for humanity in ever-shriller tones. When Professor Weinstock baited the ISO that people who are really concerned about making change become “social entrepreneurs” in non-profits and don’t just sit around and talk, the ISO pleaded that they run around at a lot of protests!

In vain the ISO sought convergence with the Economics Club’s pro-capitalist toadies by disavowing the Soviet Union not once but three times, taking the side of “democratic” U.S. imperialism against the former degenerated workers state. “That had nothing to do with socialism...Stalin’s brutal totalitarian dictatorship...mass slaughter...work camps...,” and so on. (They dodged Professor Weinstock’s foam-flecked denunciations of Cuba entirely.) But Weinstock would hear nothing of it, growling that you can’t deny what socialism meant in the USSR, China and Cuba!

He could have added North Korea and Vietnam, which are also not capitalist. The October 1917 Russian Revolution was a beacon of hope for workers and the oppressed around the world. But the Soviet Union never achieved socialism: Marxists understand that socialism is based on a higher level of economic development than the most advanced capitalism and cannot be achieved in one impoverished, isolated country. Instead, the failure of the Russian Revolution to be extended internationally and the consequent restabilization of world capitalism gave rise to a privileged, parasitic caste atop the Soviet workers state. Despite its degeneration under the anti-revolutionary bureaucratic caste represented by J.V. Stalin, until the capitalist counterrevolution of 1991-92 the Soviet Union remained a workers state with a planned, collectivized economy far superior to capitalist Russia.

We Marxists fought to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution, to extend the revolution internationally, and for workers political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy. In contrast, the ISO called the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union—which was a devastating defeat for working people and the oppressed around the world—“a step sideways” (see “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class Theories’,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999).

A Spartacus Youth Club speaker said from the floor:

“We are communists, socialists—we use the two terms interchangeably. There’s no difference between the two. Rather than a debate on capitalism versus socialism, this is more like a debate on capitalism versus warm and fuzzy reformed capitalism. [To the ISO:] You have actually taken your sub-reformist speech a peg lower than usual. I’m not going to address the pro-capitalists, I’m going to address the people in the audience who are on the side of the working class against the capitalist class. Now, the Spartacist League is in favor of building a workers party to fight for the dictatorship of the working class. Democracy is not a classless warm and fuzzy thing. It’s which class rules—democracy for the working class or democracy for the capitalist class?

“I want to touch on what the ISO, these State Department socialists, said: that the Soviet Union and China have nothing to do with socialism. The fact is, they spit on every country that has managed to overthrow capitalism in history. They have sided with the camp of U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union, against China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam.”

At this point a huge commotion ensued at the front of the room. The ISO managed to form a successful “united front” with the advocates of capitalism—against the communists. Amid the anti-free-speech petty bureaucrats’ most unoriginal cries of “What’s your question?” the SYC speaker pointed to the ISO panelists and said, “The answer they have is abject servility to the class enemy. So I don’t have a question for them. What I’m trying to give is answers here.” Predictably, the savants on both sides of the panel howled that they did not want the Spartacists’ answers.

Our speaker continued: “Now, the ISO, what they don’t talk about is Obama. Just to wrap it up I want to talk about Obama, because nobody here talks about Obama. Obama is the capitalist class enemy.” Both sides of the panel cried that they did not want to hear about Obama. Our speaker said to the students in the audience, “The ISO are cheerleaders for Barack Obama. You need to break with the Democrats and the Republicans and fight for a workers party that fights for socialist revolution. Being a cheerleader for the Democrats, trying to reform capitalism, will not work.”

The ISO could not respond to our speaker. Just two days prior to the debate, Obama had announced he would send 30,000 more troops for the imperialist slaughter in Afghanistan. After nearly eleven months of celebratory, post-inaugural drunken stupor, the ISO had woken up with a tremendous hangover to crash out an editorial headlined, “It’s Obama’s War Now” (Socialist Worker online, 2 December 2009). It came nearly a year late, but they finally managed to choke out the words (and it wasn’t even posed as a question).

The ISO’s editorial hypocritically chides the imperialists for “historical amnesia about the bitter fruits of U.S. policy in Afghanistan since the 1970s.” But the ISO’s feigned amnesia about who they were sleeping with at the time did not play so well at the Hunter debate. After our intervention, we sold copies of our article “Charlie Wilson’s War Was the ISO’s War” (WV No. 921, 26 September 2008), informing students that the ISO championed the CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan as freedom fighters, while we supported the Soviet Army’s efforts to crush these woman-hating butchers and opposed the U.S. imperialists’ proxy war against the Soviet degenerated workers state.

The ISO easily lost the debate because their politics are premised on fighting for the reformist “improvement” of imperialism. The anti-communist advocates of capitalism easily triumphed over the anti-communist reformist “socialists” because the former could more effectively defend the camp in which both sides actually reside. We spent about three hours at this debate in what might be described as the slops of the post-Soviet historical trough—not our idea of an enjoyable way to spend the evening. But we stuck it out because we didn’t want students fed up with this depraved capitalist system to think that the ISO’s masquerade has anything to do with socialism.