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What happened to the International Socialists (U.S.)?

 

What happened to the International Socialists (U.S.)? 

The 1970s still looms large in the imagination of the dwindling numbers of veterans of the New Left in the United States. The generational shift from campus activism and labor support work in the latter years of the Vietnam War to “industrializing” in the big factories, assembly plants, and mills was an important political development. Inspired by the strike waves and rebellion in the trade unions, thousands of former students, many of whom were members of a bewildering array of competing Stalinist, Maoist, and Trotskyist groups, including the International Socialists (IS), sought to build revolutionary parties in the U.S. working class.

Yet, despite the enthusiasm and political commitment of many talented people, this political project was a failure. By the late 1970s, the rank-and-file rebellion was over, and the “party-building” projects of many groups had collapsed and disintegrated, in many cases with great regrets, anger, and bitterness among people who only a few years earlier had been committed comrades. There are many lessons for today for from this era, both good and bad, but to mine the past requires honesty, sometimes brutal honesty to assess what happened and why, and what were the political consequences.


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