Madison, Wisconsin cracks down on state capitalists

“City of Madison cracks down on socialists,” proclaims a recent headline in the Madison-area weekly Isthmus. A provocative headline indeed (I flipped straight to the article), but certainly not an accurate one.

While the police may be targeting certain politicos by enforcing, apparently selectively, a city ordinance banning the placement of “articles on sidewalks,” the fact remains that the article in Isthmus ought to be title “City of Madison Cracks Down On Left-Wing of the Democratic Party.” How come? The “socialists” in question are members of the International Socialist Organization, a reformist political sect that preaches a hazy vision of socialism while shepherding college students into struggling for meaningless reforms in the U.S. and defending barbaric capitalist regimes abroad (like Zelaya’s Honduras and Chavez’s Venezuela).

Consider, for instance, the response of ISO apparatchik Chris Dols to the police officer who asked him to stop selling the paper on a crowded street: I asked her if she feels comfortable doing her job, even if it’s giving tickets to people engaged in constitutionally protected activity.

The bourgeois nature of the ISO is reflected in its uncritical acceptance of and appeal to bourgeois rights. Contrast the pathetic plea of Dols to the 1916 manifesto of the Socialist Propaganda League, which with great clarity declared that When the workers seek shelter in constitutional guarantees and essay to use these rights for the betterment of their conditions, they too often find that rights and guarantees are mere ‘scraps of paper.’ The capitalist class, with political governments and judicial courts conniving, will tolerate no interference with their class schemes for world domination. (The truth of this statement was verified a year later when the U.S. Government, upon its entry into the the First Imperialist World War, effectively outlawed socialist speech; over a dozen socialist publications, with a combined circulation of a million, were banned, and almost every major leader of the Socialist Party was arrested.)

When ISOites aren’t vainly defending the Constitution, they’re doing things like defending the Iraqi insurgency in articles like “Iraqis Have a Right to Resist,” drumming up proletarian support for the twin slaughterhouses of national liberation and anti-imperialism (national liberation, we are told, is a basic democratic demand – an eternal good – and must always be supported), supporting the electoral campaigns of Ralph Nader and other Green Party capitalist liberals, and building a vanguard party of college undergrads.

Oh, and they campaign to end the death penalty (and weep at the executions of convicted quadruple-murderers):

For more on the origins of the hundreds of bourgeois Trotskyist sects in existence today (and, in the cases of many of those sects, only for today), see the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party’s excellent pamphlet on Trotsky’s abandonment of Marxism.