ISO’s Quandary:

On One Knee or Two Before Obama?

Two years ago, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) celebrated the election of Barack Obama as the new Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism as a “transformative” event in American politics. Pondering “how Obama and the Democrats will use their power,” an editorial in Socialist Worker (7 November 2008) breathlessly asked if Obama would “fashion an economic program that puts the interests of working people at its center,” “use government ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shares in big banks in order to halt mortgage foreclosures,” and institute “an economic stimulus program that creates secure, long-term jobs.” While cautioning that Obama’s “powerful message of hope” had not been “matched by a commitment to radical policies,” the ISO nonetheless promised that with sufficient pressure “we can make the Obama years an era of struggle and political progress” (Socialist Worker, 19 November 2008).

Amid the carnage of mass joblessness, poverty and destitution, rising racist reaction and a full-bore assault on public sector unions, the escalation of the murderous occupation of Afghanistan—all hallmarks of the “Obama years” so far—it is hard to sell such political snake oil today. But ISO leader Lee Sustar was undeterred. In the face of a nationwide union-busting offensive against teachers unions by the Obama administration, Sustar opened an article in the 19 August Socialist Worker with the incredible statement: “Your president wants you to save teachers’ jobs”!! As evidence of the Democratic Party president’s “unequivocal” defense of teachers’ jobs, Sustar pointed to Obama’s cynical, get-out-the-vote promotion of a $10 billion education jobs bill passed in August.

This drew a mild, if remarkably public, rebuke from Sustar’s fellow ISO leader, Paul D’Amato (author of Socialist Worker columns that occasionally endeavor to provide some Marxist veneer to the ISO’s abject reformism). In a 25 August letter to Socialist Worker titled “Don’t Let Obama Off the Hook,” D’Amato chastises Sustar for shining “a too-positive light on the Obama administration.” A letter in the same issue from one Andy Libson was rather more harsh in taking Sustar to task, while professing his understanding that “Sustar and Socialist Worker are trying to use the words and deeds of our president to spur a quiescent working class into action.”

Libson’s telltale reference to Obama as “our president” gives the measure of the ISO’s rare public “debate.” At issue is not the fundamental Marxist principle of working-class independence from all the parties and agencies of the capitalist class enemy. Rather, it is simply a question of how far to go in selling out to parties of the bourgeoisie.

In any case, Sustar, having been slapped on the wrist, has obviously been rehabilitated and is once again plying his pen for the cause of making the Democrats “fight.” In a 4 October Socialist Worker article titled “The Change We Didn’t Get,” Sustar contrasts Obama’s record with that of liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “managed to turn a far worse economic crisis into a political opportunity, locking in Democratic dominance of Congress for most of the next six decades.”

And what a six decades it was. To take just the first two, under the rule of FDR and the subsequent Democratic Party regime we had: World War II, from which the U.S. emerged as the world’s predominant imperialist power; the internment of Japanese Americans; the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the launch of anti-Soviet Cold War I and the domestic anti-Communist witchhunt, which purged the unions of Communist Party (CP) and other militants who led the class battles of the 1930s; the slave-labor Taft-Hartley Act. These are but a few examples of the assaults on the working class and oppressed under “Democratic dominance of Congress.”

But for Sustar, the nub of the problem is that “Roosevelt faced something Obama didn’t: an insurgent working class.” The 1930s was a period of tumultuous class struggle—from pitched battles with scabs and cops to sit-down strikes—when many militants were open to the need for a workers party. But in the ISO’s eyes, the purpose of insurgent working-class struggle is not the eradication of capitalist exploitation and oppression but the consolidation of the rule of the class enemy in its Democratic Party face.

Nothing new here, and hardly just the view of Sustar—this was the line of the Stalinist CP as well as the social democrats of that day. For its part, the ISO was born locked in an anti-Communist embrace of imperialist “democracy” against Stalinist “totalitarianism,” promoting the cause of any and every imperialist-inspired counterrevolutionary force whose aim was the destruction of the Soviet Union—a program the ISO continues to champion against the remaining states where capitalism has been overthrown, such as China.

The only reason Sustar got in some temporary trouble is that his declaration that Obama was defending teachers’ jobs couldn’t have been sold to extraterrestrials. It had to be cleaned up for the ISO to soldier on in trying to convince young radicals, workers and others not to give up on the idea that under sufficient pressure “from below” the Democrats can be made to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. Exposing the reformist opponents of proletarian socialist revolution is part of the struggle to break the chains that have shackled the working class and oppressed to the Democratic Party and to forge a multiracial revolutionary working-class party.