The mass atrocities over the past two years — centred on the annihilation offensive against the Palestinian people in Gaza — have sparked a stormy international protest movement and underscored all the more that the struggle against the atrocities of capitalism and imperialism, and advancing socialist change, demands an international perspective as a starting point and a united international struggle organisation.
For Socialist Struggle Movement, the practical implementation of an internationalist approach has been a central pillar from its inception. From the official founding congress in October 2002, and throughout years of preliminary activity, the movement was built in political solidarity with the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), and was recognised as its official section one month after the founding congress.
We operated as the Israel–Palestine section of the CWI until 2019. That year, our paths separated during a political split over important issues, including expressions of class orientation and the advancement of a socialist political programme — particularly the manner in which Marxist forces intervene in broad social movements. Socialist Struggle Movement was not among the actors that led that split, but continued with the bloc known as the “CWI Majority”, which went on to form a new international party — International Socialist Alternative (ISA). At the time, the bloc’s leadership presented claims — quickly disproven — of no fundamental disagreements with the then CWI Secretariat, of opposition to the split, and of commitment to continuing the “best traditions” of the CWI.
As widening generalised political divergences became increasingly apparent — especially in the shadow of the annihilation offensive on Gaza and the regional war crisis — we found ourselves in growing dissonance with ISA. This context was decisive in shaping the understanding that continuing our political path as part of ISA was not viable, and moreover, that the shaky foundations on which ISA was established in 2019 (as detailed below) constitute the most fundamental reason for the need to part ways. This does not detract from our appreciation of instances of fruitful collaboration with various parts of ISA in recent years.
Socialist Struggle Movement convened its congress on 25–27 September — following a preparatory meeting on 4 July, after the ceasefire in the war launched by Netanyahu’s government against Iran — with a follow-up session planned for 2026. The congress discussed global and local perspectives, with a focus on the war crisis, the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, and the counter-movements. It also addressed the challenges, tasks, and building in this period of an internationalist struggle organisation as a political expression of revolutionary Marxism — Trotskyism — fundamentally oriented towards the standpoint of the interests and struggles of the working class across communities in society, in the fight for socialist change. The congress officially resolved to withdraw from ISA, as part of a necessary course correction, looking ahead towards renewed international convergence of forces on a healthier basis.
Divergence Process
At times, the conjuncture of struggle creates a basis for strengthening agreements and unifying socialist forces, and at times, the only effective path forward lies in a necessary separation into different trajectories in terms of differing understandings of objective developments and the tasks they entail, as reflected in the political programme to be fought for, in strategy, tactics, and methods of building a revolutionary struggle organisation.
The gradual breakdown in our relationship with the ISA leadership over more than two years stemmed from a fundamental process of divergence. The ISA leadership itself de facto acknowledged the development of a split, including through publications addressing regional developments without basic consultation with SSM as early as the beginning of 2025 — despite formally expressing strong agreement with the global, regional, and local perspectives documents we had produced, and making use of our publications.
Global perspectives, in and of themselves, have not thus far constituted a fundamental fault line between us and ISA. However, there are differences that symptomatically reflect significant weaknesses in the ISA leadership’s approach — weaknesses of a more fundamental nature. These are expressed in a tendency towards an overly one-sided and schematic method, particularly manifesting as geopolitical reductionism — an inclination to flattening of analysis into generalised geopolitical schemas.
While this is an era of intensified militarisation and warfare, we disagree with the generalised characterisation of the current period as a “pre-war period” — that is, the eve of a third world war. A process of militarisation means heightened preparation for military clashes. Yet by that measure alone, entire decades of the historical Cold War — fought between two opposing social systems, Stalinism and capitalism, and involving bloody proxy wars — could also be characterised as a “pre-war period”. The global inter-imperialist struggle, especially given the potential of total annihilation of value embodied in nuclear weapons, is not hurtling towards a decisive “life-or-death” confrontation, so long as alternative pathways remain.
The ISA leadership’s analysis tends towards a fixed and one-sided understanding of the polarisation process within the global inter-imperialist struggle, underestimating the unstable foundations of imperialist alliances — expressed in a “multipolar” dynamic, intensified by the resurgence of Trumpism in the US — albeit with elements of “bipolarity” due to the relative weight of the US and China.
The abstract discourse on a “global pre-war period” is linked to an overly distant approach to the Gaza solidarity movement and a coarse handling of questions of national oppression — particularly the issue of occupation, oppression, and colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people.
A recent example is a piece by an ISA leader titled “A Socialist Programme for a New Age of War and Militarism”. While it includes a general democratic emphasis on the right to self-determination in the context of Ukraine, and stresses the critical need to harness the power of the organised working class in the Gaza solidarity movement, it suffers from a crude approach to national oppression — including an abstract rejection of “nationalist slogans” in favour of class unity. Given the programmatic promise in the article’s title, a direct engagement with the struggle for liberation from national oppression was required. Such a struggle cannot simply adopt abstract slogans calling for unity with workers from the oppressing and massacring nation, detached from those workers’ concrete outlook and political consciousness. A programme for full national and social liberation of the Palestinians is a precondition for unity in struggle.
Another article purported to demonstrate how Lenin’s approach to national oppression applies today, yet remained stripped of real socio-class content and failed to address a fundamental question for the Marxist left in any movement — the “property question”, i.e., ownership and control over resources. It blurred distinctions between defending and supporting the realisation — from the standpoint of class struggle interests — of democratic demands for the right to self-determination by an oppressed nation seeking autonomy or secession (e.g., Catalonia in Spain), and the circumstances of a liberation struggle against occupation and colonial oppression (e.g., the Palestinian struggle). While the article supports a socialist Palestinian state and calls for international class solidarity and for the Israeli working class to fight against war, occupation, and for socialist change, it fails to portray the Palestinian masses as an active force.
ISA’s intervention in the solidarity movement was limited. Even the leadership of the US section — at the heart of the most critical imperialist power enabling the annihilationist assault — did not lead a prioritised and developed campaign of intervention and initiative around the Gaza solidarity movement. The current ISA leadership attributes ISA’s weaknesses in responding to the historic crisis — including the lack of international statements — to the role played by the leadership of a tendency that ultimately split, led by the former Ireland section. Yet public and internal publications associated with the current leadership exhibited an inclination towards a crude approach to the Palestinian issue and an attempt to generalise the “pre-war period” narrative into overly broad slogans against militarism and war.
Despite attention to the important trend of the working class beginning to re-enter the arena, the tendency towards overgeneralisation in global perspectives spilled into a one-sided treatment of reactionary trends — particularly sweeping claims about a rightward shift of the working class, without concrete attempts to characterise the relevant layers, key issues, depth of the shifts, contradictions, and existing or potential counter-trends. This tendency, common on the left, is dangerous in itself. Historically, one-sided assessments of reactionary trends have led various revolutionary left tendencies — including remnants of the Fourth International’s cadre after World War II — into disastrous errors of orientation and tactics.
It is important to highlight the catastrophic consequences of reactionary trends — but also their limits. Trump’s election victory in the US did reflect the mobilisation of deeply rooted reactionary ideas among sections of the population. However, according to the ISA leadership, this time the results expressed a sweeping and essential rightward shift among the masses. This was an overestimation of Trump’s support base and an underestimation of polarisation processes and the potential for counter-movements — especially given that the right-wing “Democratic” administration’s campaign lost more votes than Trump gained, and that in some US states where Trump won, there were also victories for ballot initiatives defending abortion rights. Since then, millions have taken to the streets in protests across the US. Yet the response from ISA’s US leadership to Trump’s victory included a turn towards echoing an aspect of petty-bourgeois elitism — sympathising with those who express suspicion and anger towards sections of the working class, including women and immigrants, who were drawn to vote for right-wing populist promises in the face of the conservative campaign of the Biden–Harris capitalist crisis regime.
In general, the ISA leadership is characterised by an overly crude political approach to the complex phenomena and challenges of the current era, and a tendency towards manipulative and politically obfuscating leadership methods that became embedded in ISA — continuing the approaches that marked the hard core of the undeclared opposition faction within the CWI in 2019, on whose basis ISA was founded.
A sharp dispute throughout 2023–2024 over inherently problematic approaches by leadership figures in response to a safeguarding case involving top-tier allegations in a major ISA section served as a catalyst in an ongoing process of political divergence between different tendencies within ISA — including between us and ISA, as well as with other forces that split from ISA in different directions. Around safeguarding policy, a political blind spot emerged regarding the gravity of a case involving top-tier allegations. ISA’s safeguarding policy document included principled agreements that remained a dead letter. Members of the Israel–Palestine section’s leadership intervened actively in pursuit of clarity and correction — despite the circumstances imposed by the war of annihilation. The hard core of the current ISA leadership persistently resisted necessary correction, and the leadership of the relevant section, supported by its international leadership allies, failed to act with the clarity and seriousness required in formulating a balance sheet and presenting an unequivocal position.
That case also exposed a weakness in the ISA leadership’s internationalist approach. In fact, ISA has from its inception expressed a growing tendency towards federalisation — a loosening of the political and organisational cohesion of the international party as such in essential respects. Thus, the leadership of the US section — the largest in ISA — presented the international party with a fait accompli, without real reporting or discussion, in its decision to relinquish without a fight the public position of a prominent city councillor in Seattle — even after a victory confronting the tycoon Jeff Bezos. The justifications included an assessment that demographic changes would lead to the seat’s loss anyway, concern over resource strain, and an overestimation of the potential of an alternative campaign that was launched. The move set a negative precedent of voluntarily abandoning an elected public position, turning its back on the working people who had granted the mandate, and on many in the US for whom the seat was a point of reference (as the British Independent headlined: “America’s highest profile socialist won’t seek re-election”).
The debate that led to the Seattle group’s departure in June 2024 was also not reported to the official international bodies, which were not convened for months at the time, and documents were not shared. The core of the current ISA leadership operated, in the spirit of the 2018–2019 opposition, as an undeclared faction outside formal structures, avoiding the presentation of a clear political platform for a bloc that included elements leaning in different directions. While no bloc emerging from debates can be entirely “homogeneous”, a shared political basis must be clarified.
The New Era in World Relations
The era of neoliberal globalisation — which reached its peak following the collapse of Stalinism — has gradually given way, through a series of qualitative turning points, to an era of escalating inter-imperialist power struggles, led by the United States and China.
US imperialism is in relative decline within the global system. Trumpism is desperately, almost futilely, attempting to reverse this trajectory through political, economic, and military means, including the trade war that threatens to ignite a new global recession, as well as expanded military interventions, and efforts to impose political deals in Washington’s interest to freeze regional military conflicts.
Conversely, Chinese imperialism increasingly challenges Washington’s interests and global hegemony, despite facing a deepening domestic economic crisis following the end of decades of hyper-growth, and mutual dependence on “Western” economies, as well as significant limitations in power compared to Western imperialism. Its character as a unique form of state capitalism — shaped by its development out of a Maoist-Stalinist system that was based on public ownership and command economy — has aided its positioning in the power struggle with Washington.
This is an era of intensified reliance of capital on the nation-state, accompanied by rising nationalism, including economic nationalism (protectionism), accelerated militarisation, and military clashes — with an increasing threat of “tactical” nuclear exchanges.
In our region, the 21st century has been marked by a chain of bloody events: murderous assaults on the Palestinian masses, the imperialist invasion of Iraq, and the horrific civil wars in Syria and Yemen, each claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. At the same time, the systemic crisis in the region has also given rise to revolutionary processes with global resonance. Previous processes of crisis led to 7 October, the war of annihilation in Gaza, and the aggression of the Israeli state as a regional imperialist power, tending to serve as a “forward outpost” for the Western imperialist camp — yet these developments reflected and were integrated into the context of a sustained escalation in the global inter-imperialist power struggle.
The dominant trends in global relations characterise the current catastrophic phase of a generalised systemic crisis at the global level, stemming from the sharpening of capitalism’s fundamental contradictions. Thus, this is an era of deepening instability and uncertainty, even in the advanced capitalist countries, with a chain of economic, social, political, and environmental crises, mass radicalisation processes, and the development of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dynamics.
On the one hand, the past fifteen years have seen the emergence of some of the largest mass movements in history, combined with class-based actions including general strikes, alongside the development of significant international movements and a relative rise in the popularity of socialist and class-based ideas. On the other hand, the challenge of overcoming retreat of consciousness and organisation among the working class regarding the socialist alternative — under the influence of decades of disintegrative neoliberal counter-revolution, and decisively shaped by the collapse of Stalinism — remains complex. The failures and betrayals of “soft left” leaders and forces, both long-standing and new, who became mass reference points particularly after the 2008 crisis, paved the way for the rise of right-wing populist phenomena.
In view of the aversion to the role of the traditional capitalist parties and waves of mass searching for a programme that would offer a way out of systemic crisis, processes of polarisation continue to develop — with political expressions from both right and left, primarily in populist forms. This remains the age of populism. The polarisation unfolds between right-wing populist phenomena and a certain strengthening of far-right forces, and phenomena on the left — mainly left populism and soft reformism.
The complex and protracted nature of the process of building a class-based political alternative from the left — including phases of retreat in conclusions following the aforementioned failures — has been central to the development of demoralisation and fatalism/“doomism” in struggles, and to confusion regarding the necessity of a programme for revolutionary resolution of capitalism’s fundamental systemic contradictions.
Most left forces, including those who brandish slogans in favour of “revolution”, in practice reject — through “pragmatic” rationalisation — the necessity of a real struggle for a programme to overcome the capitalist-imperialist system. That is, first and foremost, to uproot the contradictions between social production and private ownership, and between the nation-state and the global economy — including not only the contradiction between capital and labour, and imperialist super-exploitation of the masses worldwide, but also between capital and ecological systems.
On the programmatic test, many forces formally considered socialist today reveal themselves — beneath the rhetoric — as agents of a thin democratic platform. These are “merchants of doubt” regarding the very possibility of resolving society’s fundamental contradictions, and purveyors of illusions about reforming and restraining capitalism, with a tendency to tail “liberal” factions among the ruling classes under the blinding logic of the lesser evil.
While the dominant trends are of populism, there is important openness to socialist ideas, and new opportunities are emerging in shifting arenas for building forces organised around a revolutionary socialist programme — albeit under highly complex circumstances, especially regarding the development stage of political consciousness and organisation among the working class. The difficult conjuncture for building revolutionary socialist forces is producing, as in the post-World War II period, a phase of intensified fragmentation among revolutionary forces and obstacles to unification.
Some forces err through oversimplified underestimation of the impact of Stalinism’s collapse on the current era, falling into the trap of ultra-left tendencies that present abstract slogans of a revolutionary programme as a substitute for the transitional method — the systematic promotion of a bridge connecting immediate demands and ideas for change in day-to-day struggles to the necessity of a comprehensive fight for root reforms and revolutionary socialist transformation.
Others tend to be ideologically swept along by trends within broad, cross-class movements (movements involving, alongside sections of the working class, middle layers and even elements of the ruling class). This includes a tendency to downplay the complicating complexity of national oppression issues, and to tail divisive “identity politics” under the guise of commitment to fighting forms of oppression. They reflect a distancing from a fundamental orientation to the working class, rooted in distrust, up to hostility, towards its capacity to develop and struggle.
Political clarity regarding key processes, tasks, and the fundamental political programme is essential, sometimes at the cost of splits. A mass international party will not develop linearly, but through qualitative leaps. Unifications on a principled basis between existing and future revolutionary forces will be required. Global upheavals and mass struggles will also give rise to new forces and can help sharpen conclusions and pave the way for collaboration and unification.
The process of divergence between tendencies within the revolutionary left — including the splits in the CWI and ISA — must be viewed in this broader context.
ISA’s Founding on an Unsound Political Basis
Every significant turning point in the global situation — the COVID-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine, the annihilation war on Gaza, and even the resurgence of Trump — accelerated a centrifugal process of divergence and splits within ISA.
This was a continuation of the divergence process that had begun earlier and led to the split in the CWI in 2019. Its roots lie in deep transformations in the global situation, beginning in the previous decade under the impact of the 2008 global economic crisis, and more sharply in the 2020s, in response to which increasingly generalised differences in approach developed. Various components of the international party, which later became ISA, increasingly gravitated towards divergent political paths — including a shift towards a logic that seeks “shortcuts” in the struggle, that is, driving for organisational breakthroughs while in practice being open to sacrifice essential political clarity, particularly through programmatic blurring and dilution.
As in any living party, the CWI inevitably exhibited imbalances and weaknesses of various kinds at different times. However, ISA was not formed as the result of a political struggle for balanced correction on any issue — it was not established as the outcome of a campaign to achieve political clarity and promote necessary corrections based on the presentation of coherent, reasoned alternatives.
Rather, it was founded, as noted, on the basis of an undeclared opposition faction, whose hard core of leaders — a bloc lacking a clarified principled basis among political tendencies pulling in opposing directions — led the political split under the guise of claims of “opposition to the split”. The architects of the opposition faction organised a campaign of obfuscation and depoliticisation, diverting the discussion away from the issues raised by the CWI Secretariat. These included generalised political concerns about tendencies towards substantial dilution of standards on both the political and organisational levels, undermining strengths and achievements of the party in Ireland, as well as concerns about specific violations of organisational democracy by the Irish leadership at the time.
The debate revolved around warning signs of the dilution of transitional and socialist demands in the forefront of the party’s public outreach during interventions, the blurring of orientation towards the working class, the abandonment of opportunities to promote activity within the organised labour movement, the neglect of aspects of building an independent revolutionary struggle organisation, and the lowering of an independent profile. Additionally, in the debate process differing approaches were expressed to intervention in broad social movements such as the feminist and climate movements, and to the treatment of ideas within the spectrum of “identity politics” in the context of struggles against forms of oppression in society.
The pre-ISA opposition leaders denounced the CWI Secretariat for pointing out the existence of fundamental differences and rightly warning of dangerous theoretical degeneration in a “Mandelite” direction (a political characterisation named after Ernest Mandel, a leader of the USFI current). In general, this refers to a drift towards centrism (vacillation between revolutionary Marxism and reformism), with a growing contradiction between a formally socialist programme and working-class orientation, and a tendency in practice to promote mainly a reformist “minimum programme”. This includes a tendency towards “movementism” — the fetishisation of protest movements as force for change, while effectively abandoning fundamental ideological confrontation over strategy and political programme. Especially, under the influence of disappointment with the level of class struggle, this meant abandoning concrete emphasis on class-based action and blurring the emphasis on the potential power of the working class in capitalist society — power that extends to a decisive potential role as an agent of revolutionary change.
Elements within ISA’s leadership who pushed for deepening political divergence from the CWI, while cultivating the misleading formalist narrative that ISA was simply the CWI “under a new name”, falsely claimed that they had fought for years to strengthen or advocate for revisions on various issues within the CWI. In most cases, there had not even been basic structured political debate on those issues, nor had they requested it.
This also applies to the important issue of socialist feminism — positive contributions at various junctures are not equivalent to political battles. Regardless of examining concrete weaknesses and strengths in the approach and analysis of either side on this issue, it was the CWI Secretariat that initiated structured deliberation for ideological clarification in this context, through international plenary discussions and the promotion of a structured debate process around “identity politics” in 2018. Likewise, at the 2016 World Congress, a concise document drafted by the CWI Secretariat addressing questions arising from the wave of radicalisation and mass-scale struggles around gender-based oppression was discussed and adopted with full support and without disagreement. In ISA positive contributions also developed, but overall, the socialist component in the equation of socialist feminism remained faded, with a lack of connection to socialist conclusions in the forefront of public activity. Accordingly, the central slogan adopted by ISA’s leadership for the last International Women’s Day was “Stand up against militarisation and the sexist attacks from the far right” — a minimal general left message, without any attempt to connect to class-based emphasis or socialist ideas.
In some cases prior to the 2019 split, limited healthy debate did develop between future ISA leaders and the CWI Secretariat. ISA’s leadership broadly claims to represent continuity with a former minority opinion, mainly of individuals based in Sweden, around a range of issues including perspectives on globalisation and the euro, the characterisation of the Chinese regime, feminism, immigration, and climate. The most developed disagreement, which was also conducted publicly by mutual agreement, concerned the characterisation of the unique process of capitalist restoration in China. Even without entering into detailed analysis of limited past disagreements, on none of these issues did ISA embody a generalised qualitative political step forward. Moreover, methodologically, it is evident that those in the ISA leadership who extol their past contribution, themselves tend towards a one-sided and overly schematic approach to analysing processes.
ISA’s leadership still clings to the artificial narrative about the 2019 split, portraying the role of the opposition bloc — composed of tendencies that have since scattered in all directions — as the side that involved leaders who were consistently seeking fundamental political clarification, while depicting the other side as having allegedly avoided engagement on core issues and replaced political leadership with adherence to administrative control of the party apparatus (i.e., a bureaucratic, non-political approach). The debate documents themselves undermine this narrative, regardless of any weaknesses within the CWI.
From Scratch to Gangrene
In 2018–2019, the CWI Secretariat warned that the opposition leaders had coalesced without a clarified principled political basis, evading the core issues raised in debate and steering towards a dangerous slope — one of capitulation under pressure in complex conditions of class struggle, including a weakening of orientation towards the working class and abandonment of systematic promotion of transitional and socialist demands. The revisionist tendencies (that is, those seeking or on a trajectory towards deep changes in political approaches) remained largely semi-concealed, “creeping”, until the outbreak of the factional confrontation.
To maintain a bloc without a principled foundation among contradictory tendencies, the opposition faction’s misleadership diverted attention from concrete weaknesses within the opposition, particularly in Ireland and Greece, which required response and correction, and instead redirected criticism towards the CWI Secretariat. This was aided by an opportunistic tactic of a catch-all appeal for harnessing any passing sentiment of dissatisfaction across the CWI against the “party regime” and in favour of “change”. The political split was masked by formal opposition to splitting, with claims of no fundamental differences, and a focus on procedural and organisational matters, including a façade of “dynamism”. The campaign sought to win support from a layer — including the Socialist Struggle Movement at the time — that was sceptical of the CWI Secretariat’s critique and which, recoiling from the damage of a split scenario, lacking sufficient relevant experience, misjudged the political character of the opposition faction.
As part of a depoliticised power struggle, the opposition leadership flaunted the formal title of “the majority” — which aged poorly even in that ISA now represents a clear minority faction from 2019. It preferred political hide-and-seek and refused to present a coherent political platform for a group seeking to offer an alternative path for the international party, and which would be requesting for that purpose special rights as an official faction for internal organisation for the ideological confrontation. Instead, it scandalised the fact that the CWI Secretariat majority did form, in response to the opposition’s offensive, a transparent democratic faction that clarified what it represented and what it fought for.
Trotsky, during an ideological confrontation at the start of World War II with a petty-bourgeois opposition in the US section of the Fourth International, warned:
“In every principled conflict, without a single exception, the Marxists invariably sought to face the party squarely with the fundamental problems of doctrine and program, considering that only under this condition could the ‘concrete’ questions find their proper place and proportion.”
Additionally, “every serious discussion develops from the particular and even the accidental to the general and fundamental. The immediate causes and motives of a discussion are of interest, in most cases, only symptomatically. Of actual political significance are only those problems which the discussion raises in its development. To certain intellectuals, anxious to indict ‘bureaucratic conservatism’ and to display their ‘dynamic spirit’, it might seem that questions concerning the dialectic, Marxism, the nature of the state, centralism, are raised ‘artificially’ and that the discussion has taken a ‘false’ direction. The nub of the matter however consists in this, that discussion has its own objective logic which does not coincide at all with the subjective logic of individuals and groupings.”
(In Defence of Marxism, 1940)
The main warning signs in 2018–2019 concerned the divergent political paths shaped by revisionist tendencies that were crystallising, in different directions, within the leaderships of the Irish and Greek sections at the time.
Important achievements by those sections over the years within the CWI were not in question — including the influential role in Ireland in the campaign for the reform to repeal the abortion ban ahead of the May 2018 referendum victory. But history shows that even more far-reaching achievements and the building of more developed struggle organisations do not in themselves immunise against errors, including turns towards destructive directions.
Already in 2021, a faction led by the former Greek section split from ISA under the banner “Tendency for Internal Democracy and Unity” (TIDU) — now Internationalist Standpoint. Cloaked in hollow formalism, as part of the legacy of the 2019 opposition faction, its consolidation reflected a liquidationist trend — dismantling revolutionary theory and cadre organisation in favour of a loose activist network, a federation of national organisations without a clear unifying principled basis, and in a drift towards NGO-style activism and theoretical poverty.
ISA’s tendency towards political and organisational softening, with dilution of a socialist transitional programme and blurring of a class approach — under the guise of a claim to more sophisticated analysis and approach regarding broad movements, unions, and special oppressions — reached an extreme in 2024, in the faction that split under the leadership of the then Irish section. Under the false title “Project for a Revolutionary Marxist International” (PRMI), this is a loose network marked by blatant demagogy and ideological eclecticism. This ‘disintegration project’, which has already managed to collapse former sections in Austria and Belgium, embodies a trend that provides ideological expression for a narrow petty-bourgeois activist layer that is masking hostility and a sense of superiority towards the working class in society and seeking ‘political convenience’, generally:
- In pursuit of legitimacy from ‘progressive’ left circles;
- In individualism combined with a weak collective approach based only on consensus, while tending towards antagonism to the necessity of leadership and centralism;
- In preference of spontaneity over real organisational efforts;
- In preferring ‘hyper-activism’ over strategy;
- In reliance on moral outrage and subjective feelings to a large extent as a basis for analysis, substituting for work aimed at analysing objective reality and clarity in the required political programme.
It is only natural that their attitude towards the historical CWI current — rooted in deep orientation to the working class — is the most toxic, while they opportunistically integrate into general radical left circles, presenting a charlatan façade of political superiority on issues of special oppressions.
The narrative of ISA’s leaders nowadays, as if they had led a sustained campaign against the opportunist trends of these splinters in pursuit of political clarity, is inflated and misleading. In the limited debates that did occur, the rigid and crude approach of ISA’s current leadership core was a complicating factor, alongside a tendency towards organisational manoeuvring, including around the international safeguarding dispute. ISA’s leadership did not degenerate politically as far as the two aforementioned factions, but it continues to justify the bloc that lacked a principled foundation on which ISA was formed in 2019, whose leaders led a campaign to scandalise the warnings about those very tendencies. Moreover, it shares, in a softened form, political features with those factions — not only in hostility towards the CWI, but also in a tendency of programmatic blurring and weakening of a socialist transitional approach.
To paraphrase Trotsky’s warning in the context of the 1940 ideological confrontation in the US: what began as a limited political ‘scratch’ raised for discussion in 2018 has developed into ‘gangrene’ in the form of the ‘disintegration project’. Yet even now, ISA’s leadership — more politically homogeneous — embodies an uncorrected ‘scratch’.
Today, ISA and the main factions that split from it hold the position that the split ISA initially opposed was necessary. Why? To clear the way for higher political quality. The ISA leadership’s attempt to present itself as representing higher political quality than the CWI of the previous decade — in orientation, analysis of global processes, programmatic development, and organisational methods — has shattered against the rock of reality. In general, ISA did not represent theoretical advancement, but regression in method and clarity on fundamental issues.
Part of a Course Correction
We have presented here a basic explanation of the background and rationale underlying our decision to withdraw from ISA, and this is not an exhaustive balance sheet of the relevant issues. The ISA leadership, with the foundations it defends and the political methods embedded within it, does not represent a generalised political approach that is sufficiently appropriate and responsible to confront the heavy political pressures and the challenges at the global and regional levels facing the forces of revolutionary Marxism in this era. We have reached the present juncture with the understanding that a correction is needed to the fundamental error of joining ISA in 2019.
The ISA leadership charts a course that represents a rupture from the political tradition of the CWI, towards a repetition of errors in terms of orientation and methods that the CWI had already corrected in relation to the USFI and other currents within the Marxist left. For us, the objective and subjective circumstances have compelled the generalised conclusion that, as the Militant tendency diagnosed regarding the USFI in 1965: “The time had arrived when we must turn our backs on this organisation and the squabbling sects who described themselves as ‘Trotskyist’”.
We remain open to developing purposeful, dedicated discussions, with productive potential, with those within and outside ISA who approach us on the basis of convergence in conclusions. It is possible that in the future, under the influence of political developments, a principled basis may be found for re-alignment with some of the forces currently organised within ISA and with others.
Our generalised conclusions regarding ISA, and our supreme commitment to internationalism in action, laid the foundation for rapprochement in political relations with the CWI. While continuing to re-examine the circumstances of the 2019 split, we initiated a structured discussion process with the CWI in January, following contacts in late 2024. The Socialist Struggle Movement congress resolved to continue this dialogue and to promote constructive collaboration where possible — in pursuit of ongoing ideological clarification, the elucidation of differences as needed, and efforts to forge fundamental agreement around political programme, perspectives, tactics, and organisational methods. The discussion process in the coming period will address, among other things: the national-colonial question, socialist feminism, safeguarding policy, the foundations of the CWI, and the perspectives and tasks of forces of revolutionary Marxism in the current era of systemic capitalist crisis.
