-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [ACC] More on ISO & antiwar conference Date: 13 Nov 2001 23:56:14 -0000 From: liz at black-rose.com Reply-To: acc at vhost.twowrongs.net To: acc at vhost.twowrongs.net, acc at vhost.twowrongs.net
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 08:45:55 EST
From: SIUHIN at aol.com Subject: About last weekend's UC Berkeley, CA USA student antiwar conference
Hi everybody:
This is Lee Siu Hin from ActionLA and PeaceNoWar.net from Los Angeles--put this way--I didn't go to UCB antiwar conference last weekend because for the past few weeks I knew the UCB antiwar coalition and the conference had been completely hijacked by ISO, the meeting will be sucks and I don't want to waste my time to come.
Few weeks ago, I had talked to some UCB students, they told me the UCB antiwar steering committee had been completely controlled by either: ISO UCB student chapters, left turn, Palestine coalition, or friends of above, no independent voices can be exist, and no official decisions can be made without steering committee approval (For example: few weeks ago, when a group of student start a student antiwar newspaper, the ISO SC members didn't show too much interests, but when the newspaper concept was very successful, ISO SC members suddenly demand a control, created a newspaper 'work group', put some of their people who never work on the paper before, and require each article must be pre-approved before publishing).
after I talked to several organizers across the country, their goal is clear, try to use current student antiwar activism to control student activism across the country. Like, IAC, which they want to control mainstream left nationwide antiwar activism (they did a great job to destroy LA antiwar movements), like a franchise, ISO want to focus on campus wide antiwar movements. It also cannot underestimates that ISO involvement on San Francisco Global Exchange's antiwar campaigns and promote themselves to be THE Bay area's labor spokesperson--keep in mind, many of them (I personally known) just two months ago before S11, they were busy want to control California-wide anti-sweatshop, immigrant rights and labor campaigns, right after S11, they switch their tasks!
As a former LA DAN member (completely destroy due to ongoing stupid internal struggle) and long several major antiglobalization and antiwar activist, struggle between political parties and selfish personal dynamics are so intense that sometimes I want to give up activism work. For the past few years, many socialists, Maoists, Troskists, Communists, anarchists' personall/political dynamics had destroyed many community/immigrant/anti-globalization movements. Again, the same negative political/personal energy come-in to this antiwar movement, and I am really worry this student antiwar coalition will not have enough credibility to service for too long.
Lee Siu Hin ActionLA/PeaceNoWar.net 4167 S. Normandie Ave., Los Angeles, CA 91030 Tel: (323)389-4593 e-mail: ActionLA at ActionLA.org ----- Berkely Anti-War Conference, I was there and yes the ISO did Hijacke it by JA November 13 2001, Tue, 1:54am
> >> This is an email from a very well respected friend who is a highly
>> intelligent, articulate person who was there all weekend at the
>> ISO/Berkely Anti-War conference. She said it was evident that the ISO
>> played a complete control role in all of this, and it made people go nuts
Hi all, I just got back from the CSAW conference in Berkeley. It was one of the most awful organizing experiences in my life, and I wasn't the only one. I know this is long, but if you are interested in organizing on campuses, please read this. Something really fucked up is happening in anti-war groups all over the country and we as anarchists and sane, nice people need to figure out how to deal with this.
(Please note that what I am saying, "never" & "always", really means "almost never" and "almost always" - I'm sure there are exceptions, but I don't know of them. I am speaking from the position of having talked to probably a hundred different people from all types of political persuasions and levels of experience, as well as my own observations.)
Saturday was all workshops. I don't think even one of them were mainly about or involving "revolution". Not one was about a specific political analysis of the war, or the anti-war movement. There were panels/workshops on the history of the Middle East, environmental impact of the war, how to make newsletters, etc., but very little that was "political". Despite the revolutionary politics of many of members of the Berkeley anti-war group (anarchists, communists, and others), none of that was represented in the workshops. In many workshops, whenever a person would raise a point about revolutionary analysis (i.e. that capitalism causes wars and that's what we need to fight), the panel or workshop leader would cut them off. Apparently this kind of stuff smacked too much of party-politics, even if people saying these things were anarchists or unaffiliated. There were probably a few exeptions to this, but I talked to people who attended almost every workshop and they all said the same thing.
Later, I found out the reason for the narrow range of workshops and weird behavior of the workshop leaders. Students from the Berkeley group said the speakers were organized by a very small group of people, mostly ISO. These people did not take suggestions fron non-ISO people (I know anarchists and communists who tried to suggest and conduct workshops and were blown off and ignored). The Berkeley organzers said their schedule planning was not open to anyone, and no one outside of the tiny group knew what was going on. Two people proposed a workshop on the Hart-Rudman report (the US gov't master plan for Homeland Defense) a couple of weeks ago, and constantly reminded the organizers to put it on the schedule. In the end, it was not put on the schedule, not coincidentally because that workshop would have been the only one with leaders from a "rival" party. I realize that many political parties use workshops and panels to say really horrificly long speeches about Trotsky or Mao, disguising the speech as a question. I didn't hear of any of that going on. One example I know of was a woman from PLP (a rival of the ISO) tried to simply say "I don't agree that people who don't go to college are too stupid to learn about imperialism, and we need to organize based on knowing that all people are capable of understanding," and the workshop leader cut her off in mid-sentence, saying we "didn't have time for arguments". The workshop was on "talking to the unconvinced", a workshop on tactics!
Anyway, the workshops that did take place were OK, but politically elementary. A lot of people at the conference were disappointed that deeper political discussion was not allowed, and that the workshop topics in general were very "apolitical", something which seemed pretty silly considering the people who were attending. Another fact to note was that many schools had at least one or two ISO members in their delegation.
Five delegates from every school would be allowed to vote and speak at the meeting the following day. These delegates registered Saturday night, and all proposals to be discussed and voted upon were due by 7pm Saturday. This was so we would have a set list to get through and an infinity of new proposals wouldn't bog us down on Sunday. On Saturday night as we were signing in and submitting our proposals, we were told "One delegate from every school needs to go to the agenda-setting meeting tonight". At my school, we had two ISO people, a PLP guy, me, and an unaffiliated anti-authoritarian. I was standing there thinking "Oh god, the ISO has probably already signed themselves up as the one delegate and is going to go set a fucked up agenda". Oddly to me, the ISO allowed the PLP guy to go in there. The agenda was set in this meeting, but there was no discussion of how decisions would be made the next day.
Sunday morning began with Snehal, an ISO member declaring himself the facilitator for the day. (We were given no choice on this.) The meeting began using Parlimentary Procedure, with all speakers being allowed two minutes to talk. Parlimentary procedure was not explained to the attendees, so many people had NO idea what was going on or how they could participate. Usually, questions from the audience about changing the procedure or asking what was going on were dismissed with Snehal saying "we don't have time for that".
We started to go through the agenda. When we got to the proposals, the moderator began to allow new proposals to be put forth. This frustrated many of the delegates, because we began to see that new proposals would not allow us to have time for the proposals we brought from out schools or local coalitions of many schools. Whenever a proposal was put forward, the moderator clearly had a side. He would allow people on his side to speak for their two minutes, but dissent was cut off with "we don't have time for this". If dissent was allowed, somehow an ISO member would speak soon afterward against whatever dissent was raised. Snehal called proposals very quickly he and ISO members in the audience would use Roberts Rules of Order to quickly push through proposals, leaving the audience in confusion and unhappy with whatever had just happened. An anarchist woman I know constantly raised her hand and was put on the list of speakers, but out of five times during the day, she was not called on. I heard the same from other anarchists, women especially.
After a couple of hours, the hero of the day, Kyle, stood up and said that this was very undemocratic and we need to change the process. He got a lot of emphatic applause but the moderator ignored him. Tensions started to run very high as the delegates realized they weren't alone in getting frustrated and pissed off about how things were going. We broke for lunch, and after we returned, more people challenged the process. I missed out on an hour of the conference at this point, but I heard that Michael Novick proposed that we not have time limits on agenda items because quality was better than speed. This got shot down. I don't really know the rest of what happened during this hour. When I got back, people were still challenging the process. Unfortunately, they mostly didn't understand that it was the ISO controlling everything and blamed the problems on sexism and racism of the moderator and other delegates. This got nowhere, except with the promise that "women and minorities would have priority in the speaking order". Soon after this, the moderator decided "we didn't have time" for the remainder of the proposals - the proposals were the whole reason we were there at all. We had only gotten through six proposals, three of which had not been on the list from the previous night. There were about 20 remaining, which is a lot, but certainly possible. Another HUGE problem was a list of proposals or an agenda had not been given to any of the delgates, so no one knew what was on the table for the day. The only proposals discussed were about specific "days of action", and a national conference with vague goals and only ONE delegate allowed to ATTEND from each school. (An ISO member later said privately that one of the ISO's three main goals was to create a national conference and try to dominate the delegation from it.)
The Southern California Schools Against War had a great proposal that we "oppose war research and recruitment on campus and challenge racism in our curriculum and campus practices". This was a proposal which about twenty schools from SoCal agreed upon. I overheard the ISO the day before telling people "they wouldn't vote for it because it was too vague, because it didn't have specific day of action". This made me furious - they were saying opposing our school's racism and warmongering should be limited to a certain day! This proposal was not raised ever by the moderator.
At this point, probably a third of the people walked out in frustration.
Most of these people didn't see any reason to be there, if making plans was no longer allowed. Many took off, but about fifty people gathered in the hallway and started talking. We met outside and had a discussion about what was going on and how frustrated we were. When people mentioned that the ISO were the people who organized, moderated, and dominated the discussions during this whole conference, people got PISSED. Most of them had just thought that this was a convergence of random jerks, but when people realized that certain individuals were members of the ISO, they realized how screwed up and controlled everything was. Two guys from Berkeley said something like "the Berkeley group worked really hard on this so please don't give us a hard time". They were ISO, but didn't say it!!! Another ISO member sat there silently taking notes. Not once did anyone from the ISO say who they were during this discussion.
We made a plan to go back into the conference as a group and voice what had happened. By this point, most people had left and there were only about 100 left in the audience. The organizers said this was because people had to leave, but I think people would have stayed if it were worthwhile. We got up as a group and stood at the front of the room.
Our main points were: - the decision-making process in the conference was not agreed upon by the attendees, nor explained to us at any point - the decision-making process before the conference was completely hidden from view - no one, including many Berkeley activists, had any idea what was being planned or had any input, even when they tried to participate. - the ISO dominated many school delegations, dominated the speakers, dominated the planning, and completely controlled the moderation. - opposing views were almost always cut off "because we didn't have time" (At this point, an ISO woman named Leticia stood up and said "we don't have time for this, people want to go home. We can discuss this later! It's too late to bring this up anyway." Later? When would that be? It was the very last hour of the very last day of the conference! When she make this comment, a few people got furious and the rest tried not to laugh hysterically.) - speakers were often interrupted by ISO members - an agenda for proposals was not public and information in general was tightly controlled by a few people, mostly ISO, who made little effor to get outside input or even let other people know what was going on. During our little presentation, we allowed the audience to speak in the way that we had wanted to be treated. Questions were taken in order, there were no time limits on speeches, etc. ISO members were the only people who spoke defensively about the organization of the conference members. Other delegates offered some good points, one saying that the decision-making process isn't accidental, but political.
Anyway, people left the conference feeling much better since we had that ad-hoc meeting to discuss what went wrong. However, out of 400 or so people, I would guess that at least 300 of the people were very unhappy with what happened. A lot of our campus anti-war groups are controlled by the ISO, and we are still struggling with how we can make the groups grow and flourish when the leadership is very tight and has a very narrow agenda.
Many of our campus groups are run in the same way the conference was run, with a tight control of information and the excuse of "we don't have time for this" when people would like to discuss alternate proposals.
There are dozens more little examples of my wild accusations to back up what I'm saying, but I don't feel like writing ten more pages. Please understand that throughout this whole conference, we tried to discuss the ISO's *actions*, not their politics. Other 'sectarian' groups were in attendance, but they did not cause these problems: it was not a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that they are a trotskyist party. One thing about their politics: this weekend, I heard ISO members repeat many times that "people who aren't college educated can't understand..." and I think this has a lot to do with why they dominate on college campuses, why their decision-making is hidden, and why everything is so sneaky in general - they think we're all idiots.
The main point of all this is that clearly the ISO is vying for a dominant position of campus anti-war groups across the country (they held identical conferences in Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta this weekend). Their tactics include using Roberts Rules of Order to manipulate meetings, assuming leadership roles in campus groups, and not disseminating information to non-ISO members of groups. (There are LOTS of examples on many campuses where it is known they had information on agendas, events, etc and did not share this with the larger group.) Another sad fact is they almost *never* say they are ISO when doing all these things, which particularly misleads new people in groups.
Across the state, college groups are having splits right now to make sure the ISO doesn't take control of the anti-war movement. I don't know if this is a good tactic - I'm not sure what else we can do at this point, especially when we are not allowed to speak during campus meetings. I'm inclined to say we should simply bring in lots of honest people to the meetings and challenge the ISO based on their undemocratic practices, but this clearly didn't work during the conference.
If anyone has any ideas about what to do, I would much appreciate it, and I will pass it along to other frustrated people. I know some people on this list went through similar bullshit in SDS - I would really like to hear their perspectives in particular.
-Anne _______________________________________________ ACC mailing list ACC at lists.2wrongs.net http://www.2wrongs.net/mailman/listinfo/acc Free hosting for radical projects - http://www.2wrongs.net