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@ActionLA.org

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peace, No War

War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate

Information for antiwar movements, news across the world

www.PeaceNoWar.net

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 when they figured out how they were being lied to.



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

The ISO is interested fundamentally in building the ISO.

they are classic opportunists and seize on any movement

they think has "legs" and the opportunity for them to

dominate through well placed apparatchiks. They have been

in and out of police brutality work and anti-death penalty

work and they were all over the D2K and R2k actions all

with same M.O.

This is not just happening in the student anti-war movements. Perhaps they are moving on to the student coalitions now that they've made local coalitions unbearable and have driven people away. In my coalition, I missed one meeting only to find out a couple of weeks later that the whole direction of that coalition had been re-routed in accordance with ISO's agenda. As a result, I found myself on a working group whose mission was not the one I'd signed up for. I also found out that some of these people used the language you described above, saying in effect that the working class are too dumb to understand anti-capitalism or other ideas of the left. There is one ISO person in our coalition who is particularly unpleasant and unfailingly rude and ill-tempered. At one meeting, I overheard this person telling a defender of civil disobedience, "you're basically saying that you don't want to bring the working class in here!" When, in fact, one of these "dumb" working-class people (i.e., me) was sitting ten feet behind her. Other ISO people made vicious insinuations to the effect that the anarchists and direct action people were just "spoiled brats" who do what they do because it looks "cool". How dare they. I've known many of these people for years, and they couldn't be more wrong. If anything, ISO plays a game that is very obviously bourgeois to anyone who grew up working-class.

Let me tell you something. I grew up in a very nearly homogenous working-class community. I was exposed to activism and leftist viewpoints in that community, by people who had worked with Saul Alinsky. We had people who opposed the Vietnam War. We had hippies teaching in the schools. We were all hit by the recession and many of us hated Reagan. Many of the youth who came out of this environment were attracted to radical culture, i.e.: punk and anarchism. In my experience, there are many more working-class anarchists or anti-authoritarians than working-class members of "vanguardist" groups. My parents were treated like dirt by bosses - who needs another boss? So, I got a full ride to an elite private school and here is this stupid, lying socialist group who is too good to recruit people like me. And they say it's a matter of "consciousness". I say it's more a matter of being on to their game.

Meanwhile, my working group, which had been huge, has all but disintegrated. It started when ISO got wind that there were no ISO people on our group. At our first large WG meeting, an ISO person showed up who was actually the representative for another WG. She basically lied and said she'd been in our WG all along, and that she just couldn't come to the meetings in the past, because she was busy. This was a lie because there had *been* no other meetings. She was clearly sent by ISO to make sure that ISO people were on that WG. Now there is another new person from ISO who is supposed to be the rep for another WG who is also being a pain in the ass to our WG. And these people are telling me what I should do - in the middle of the day, when I work full-time and am putting myself through school. They should know that they're not going to get the working class "in here" when they maintain this rigid, demanding and overzealous stance.

I am really pissed off at all this bullshit being spewed by everyone about the berkeley conference. The ISO were the ones who organized the conference and were the ones who ran most of the panels, I agree on that part and maybe it should have been more democratic, what I do not agree with is th ecomment that people's voices were not heard. The call for consesus would not have worked in the voting methods because there were over 400 people in the auditorium. If we were all to agree on something, given the diversity of people in there, it would have taken all night and next day to get through the proposals. I do not belive that over half of the people walked out in frustration over the people who organized the conference. There were a few people but not over half. I think that calling ourselves by parties and shit like that only gets the issue more complicated. It seemed to me that the calls for action were not about you had to do this as much as these were the things that were going to happen on these days. It seemed self defeating to walk out of the conference because then the dissident voices were no longer heard. I know that a lot of the people walked out and said that they were part of some other coalition so it really did not matter, but I think it did. I believe when we keep fragmenting over certain little disputes like this we are only hurting ourselves. We are in a situation right now where further fragmentation is only going to cause a bigger failure on all our parts. It seems that people were pissed because their voices were not being heard, which may be the case, but it also seemed like we were acting like spoiled children in a way because the conference was not going the way that we wanted it to go for oursleves. Of course the ISO is going to be oppurtunists just like anarchists are taking this as an oppurtunity to incite revolution. They are different than each other. We all know what is wrong with this war and by separating ourselves we are only going to create more of a problem for each other, maybe that is what we want to do or maybe we have no fucking idea. WHO THE FUCK KNOWS? ALL I KNOW IS THAT THE WAR IS FUCKED UP MORE THAN ANY LITTLE ASS PARTIES!!!

I am really pissed off at all this bullshit being spewed by everyone about the berkeley conference. The ISO were the ones who organized the conference and were the ones who ran most of the panels, I agree on that part and maybe it should have been more democratic, what I do not agree with is th ecomment that people's voices were not heard. The call for consesus would not have worked in the voting methods because there were over 400 people in the auditorium. If we were all to agree on something, given the diversity of people in there, it would have taken all night and next day to get through the proposals. I do not belive that over half of the people walked out in frustration over the people who organized the conference. There were a few people but not over half. I think that calling ourselves by parties and shit like that only gets the issue more complicated. It seemed to me that the calls for action were not about you had to do this as much as these were the things that were going to happen on these days. It seemed self defeating to walk out of the conference because then the dissident voices were no longer heard. I know that a lot of the people walked out and said that they were part of some other coalition so it really did not matter, but I think it did. I believe when we keep fragmenting over certain little disputes like this we are only hurting ourselves. We are in a situation right now where further fragmentation is only going to cause a bigger failure on all our parts. It seems that people were pissed because their voices were not being heard, which may be the case, but it also seemed like we were acting like spoiled children in a way because the conference was not going the way that we wanted it to go for oursleves. Of course the ISO is going to be oppurtunists just like anarchists are taking this as an oppurtunity to incite revolution. They are different than each other. We all know what is wrong with this war and by separating ourselves we are only going to create more of a problem for each other, maybe that is what we want to do or maybe we have no fucking idea. WHO THE FUCK KNOWS? ALL I KNOW IS THAT THE WAR IS FUCKED UP MORE THAN ANY LITTLE ASS PARTIES!!!