Skip to main content

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.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

...AND RUMORS OF WARS - deportations, tariffs and the sea lanes of the South China Sea - a world war may be coming, can we stop it before it starts?

…AND RUMORS OF  WARS –  deportations tariffs and the sea lanes of the South China Sea – a world war may be coming, can we can stop it before it starts?   For the last few years, the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China and the United states Department of Defense have been quietly but deliberately preparing for a world war in and around the South  China Sea, the Straits of Taiwan and the island of Taiwan itself   The world’s two main imperialist powers – America and China – have come to conflict for the reasons that imperialist countries always do – conflict over who’s billionaire investors and multinational corporations will get to exploit and plunder the world   China rose rapidly in the last century – from a backwards Third World semi feudal state plundered by every imperialist power to being the world’s leading manufacturing nation (30% of all the manufactured goods on the face of this Earth were MADE IN CHINA) – the br...
Post a Comment
Read more

¡AMNISTÍA GENERAL YA! or, the necessity of making a better America, for our immigrant fellow workers and ourselves

  ¡AMNISTÍA GENERAL YA! or, the necessity of making a better America, for our immigrant fellow workers and ourselves   Early in the morning of Tuesday January 7, 2026 in Minneapolis, MN, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37 year old poet and mom of 3 was shot and killed in her family car in her own neighborhood, while trying to avoid a confrontation with a band of armed men. This foul murder was allegedly committed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Officer Jonathan Ross (who, of course, is constitutionally presumed innocent until proven guilty in a federal or state court of law, for the record). The video instantly went viral, what happened is quite clear in the court of public opinion, and to any person with functional eyes not willfully blinded by bias and propaganda.   Be that as it may,  according to statements in the media by officers specially trained as firearms instructors, standing in front of a moving car and firing up...
Post a Comment
Read more

WHAT DO WE DO NOW? the crisis of the American working class and what we can do to fix it

  WHAT DO WE DO NOW? the crisis of the American working class and what we can do to fix it America is a country where citizens have more civil liberties than anywhere else on the planet, yet we are politically voiceless. We have a very narrow political spectrum; a multicultural, socially radical but fiscally conservative, center right party of the billionaires (the preferred party of that class) and an openly racist, socially and fiscally conservative far right party of the billionaires. The Democratic Party has its mass social base among a portion of the nation’s affluent professionals, corporate executives, small business owners and the more privileged and affluent layers of the working class – among African American and Jewish professionals, executives, businesspeople and affluent workers, support for the Democratic Party is almost unanimous, due to the open racism of the leaders of the other major party The Republican Party has it’s mass base among a portion of the nati...
Post a Comment
Read more