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Why did ISO hijack Berkley CA Schools Anti-War Conference?

by Carmenita Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001 at 11:09 AM

Why did the ISO lie to us all and bring us up here this weekend, only to push and build and ISO coalition. if I wanted to be in the ISO i would have joined the organiziation.

This weekend I attended the CSAW (California Schools Against War) Conference held in Berkley. I go to school in Santa Barbara. I came to this meeting thinking that I was going to work with other schools and help in regard of making solid plans to bring to our campus and help to plan. I was looking for ideas, for suggestions, a bit of suggestion and also I wanted to know where other students stood on the Anti-War stance.

What ended up happening was just this enormous and very upsetting event. The conference started with a panel on Saturday morning. No other students from other schools spoke during this time, mainly people from Berkley. Lunch was served.Workshops were held and I viewed the workshops as the best thing that came out of my traumatizing weekend. The next day on Sunday there was a delegation meeting. The Berkeley group without asking any other schools had decided to only allow 5 delegates from each school to be involved in the voting and decision making process during this conference. So 5 delegates from each school who basically named themselves delegates were picked to make choices for their entire school without even having a chance to speak with the other members from their school. From the time the process of the delegation meeting started it was doomed to fail. In NO WAY was there talk of process, all 190 people were basically TOLD that we would have to be in a majority voting process without it EVER being discussed. We were just told this was how things were going to be, no discussion was even held about this. Please remember that we have 45 schools present at this conference, non of which were told that they had a choice between consensus decision making process, majority voting, or other forms of decision making. There was no access to a list server or phone conference calls by schools, we were told that there were email list servers, I know my schools and a few others who tried numerous times to contact The Berkley Stop the War Coalition but our emails went unanswered. Nothing about the process and the format of this conference regarding how we were going to make decisions were known, and there were many people there who were very young, and this was their first event like this who expressed over and over they did not understand the process and felt like they were shut down, glossed over or just plain ignored.

Back to the conference, they asked the schools to put forth proposals that we wanted to be voted on. There were 25 proposals in all and we had from 10:00 AM

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love to hear the ISO response to this....

by curious Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001 at 8:15 PM

interesting to note the lack of transparency, process, etc.

wonder what they would say to these charges.....

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I want to hear what they have to say too

by jam Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001 at 9:58 PM

most likely they will totally go on the defensive and make all types of wonderful excuses as to why this happend. They'll shift the blame all over and blame it on a lack of communication. The fact remains their memebers took on leadership positions, once you do that you to suffere the consequences of the decisions those leaders made, that's part of being accountable which is something that the ISO is not. They like to dictate to others what to do free of any responsibility. And w/ this conference they beacame a bit too greedy in their way of thinking and a bit too hasty in control, their tactic has backfired on them, they will try to get out of the responsibility of it in any way that they can, but like Carmenita said You can only fool people for so long before you see them for who they really are. They are politicians like she said, and they need to be seen for that, and they also need to be treated like the reformist politicians that they are.

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Went to a very similar northeast conference

by Chris Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001 at 10:05 PM

I went to a similar northeast regional conference in Boston last weekend. We all know that the ISO is a large and powerful group but I doubt that they ran the group. And people deciding to have the voting process on a majority voting rather then consensus may not be some ISO conspiracy or even undemocratic. People simply know majority voting and don't know consensus. For a viable movement we can't have consensus. One person can stop the whole group from continuing. An infiltrator can damage the whole groups objective. Consensus may work in small affinity groups but not in large coalitions where you have many groups like the ISO represented. Furthermore people who threaten to leave a meeting like this over small issues like consensus or majority are being coercive and are not puting the first goal first, ending the war. If the queer groups or the women don't feel like they are being represented then vote. At the Northeast Regional convention a few anarchists wanted the Coalition to be non hierarchical and with no committees something that you seemed to be hinting at when you did not want a larger working group. The whole group voted and decided that committees are important but with less power then was originally planned. The anarchists walked out. It is undemocratic and coercive to walk out. Our first goal in the coalition is ending the war. We all need to put aside our small ideological differences and focus on ending the war. This doesn't mean that we need to compromise our values but division amongst us will only hinder the ability to succeed in our objective. Cointelpro ( the counter intelligence wing of the FBI) in the sixties divided groups in the sixties in an effort to hinder their effectiveness. Let's make sure that we don't do the FBI's work for them.

Chris

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response to chris

by anti-imperialist Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001 at 10:49 PM

The idea that you can not walk out of a meeting where your voice is not being heard is simply absurd. I agree with you on the point that we shouldn't be letting small ideological divides derail the anti-war movement. But from the many people I've heard talk about this conference it wasn't a small ideological divide it was a a group engaging in total control of an agenda and facilitation and content. That doesn't sound very democratic to me regardless of whether there's voting or not. Refusing to participate is not coercive, it is a choice. It may be that whatever it is cannot function if enough people refuse to participate but if this is the case then it would seem that the original thing did not speak to the people who supposedly would be involved and something needs to be changed.

As for the idea that if women of color or queer folks weren't heard they should just vote. What kind of sense does this make. If voting worked why would be in the mess we're in today? And gee, the power to vote sure has done a lot for people of color, women and queer folks in this society huh? Racism, sexism and homophobia all don't exist because of voting I guess.

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Response from Northeastern attendee

by JB Thursday, Nov. 15, 2001 at 3:59 AM

I'd just like to counter what was said by Chris. As a person who attended the Northeastern Conference, I can attest to how the ISO came to Boston with ulterior motives.

First, this whole "consensus" bullshit - the proposal for process that was put forward wasn't for absolute consensus, it was for MODIFIED consensus. Now I'm not a psychologist, but I know when folks are against something because it's the party line and this was ISO's party line; the whole COINTELPRO/provocateur argument against consensus seemed drilled into ISO members, and was used to stir up suspicion however irrational. It's funny to, because ISO's provocateur angle conveniently forgets that under the modified consensus proposal, votes to block would have to exceed 25% of the delegates. So there would have had to been TWENTY-FIVE agents in a room at once for there to . Is ISO so smug as to think it's so scary to the government to be worthy of that many agents?

In reality, the ISO feared our consensus proposal because it took the power away from simply whoever had the numbers to those who had something to say for the movement. The twenty-five percent mark balanced the will of a majority with the needs of a minority, basically so that no one could use chauvinism to win a vote; we wanted to make sure that white chauvinism wouldn't force people of color, Boston-centrism wouldn't drive out New Yorkers, et c.

Second, this whole "anarchist-walk out" thing is a farce. The ISO came in knowing that the whole consensus phobia is rooted in political disputes between various party groups and anarchist groups, but these folks tend not to care if politics are respected. The ISO realized this and manufactured a spat between "anarchists" (and those who were for the modified-consensus were all lumped in this boat) and party groups, so as to divide and conquer. This sort of fear mongering was compounded by the ISO's sectarian language when describing consensus process to others, asking non-sectarian delegates whether they wanted "democracy or consensus" - as if consensus is undemocratic in some way. The fact is that consensus was easy enough for most any of the delegates to understand; it was the insistence that consensus somehow meant corruption or non-democracy that scared a lot of folks off.

Third, I find the ISO suspicious in that in both Boston and Berkeley they not only pushed for but demanded simple majority process over calls for consensus-based process. This points to me that they came in prepared and coordinated, which to me completely defeated the purpose of these conferences, which was to allow individual schools to come together and flesh out the movement. This can't be done when only 51% of folks can agree on some platform, even if ISO is 100% agreed on its own.

Fact is that if the ISO already had a national (if not international) platform, then they didn't need these conferences and were only going through the motions so they could achieve whatever petty objectives they came in with. So I feel more than justified in feeling that the ISO was not interested in fighting the war and keeping unity as they claimed whenever they wanted to shut up someone with a process question; in fact, I'd go so far as to say they'd be willing to turn the movement into a do-nothing group so long as they controlled it. A shame, to say the least.

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