Ahmed Shawki, 1960-2023

Ahmed Shawki, formerly the most prominent leader of the International Socialist Organization in the USA, died on 22 January at the age of 62 after some years of ill-health.

With maybe 900 members, and over 1,000 at some high points, the ISO was in the early 2000s the most active revolutionary socialist group in the USA. Its political history could be traced back to the Workers' Party of Max Shachtman (from 1940) - with twists and shifts along the way, and as it turned out enough of those to destroy the legacy.

The Workers' Party's continuation, the Independent Socialist League (ISL), stopped publishing its paper in 1958. One of its residues, around Michael Harrington, would in 1973 found what is now the Democratic Socialists of America, which since 2015 has flourished into by far the US left's largest grouping, but on a left-reformist basis increasingly tinged with "campism" alien to the ISL legacy. From 1964 Hal Draper assembled a small but more left-wing group around ISL-type politics, the Independent Socialist Clubs.

Draper dropped out, tired, in 1971, and the ISC (renamed IS) came more under the influence of the SWP-UK. Shawki himself first came into politics in the SWP-UK, moving to the US in the 1980s.

In the mid-1970s the SWP-UK was going through a turn in which it was close to soft-Maoist groups like the PRP in Portugal and Avanguardia Operaia in Italy, not so much their views on China as their ultra-left and populist rhetoric. Under pressure from that, and from colder times for the left in the USA after the end of the Vietnam war, the IS broke up into at least seven splinters (ISO, WP, RSL, TO, LRP, RMC, and the remnant IS).

The ISO was the SWP-loyal splinter. Though tiny at first, it came to be the most successful.

In 2001 the SWP-UK forced an international parting-of-the-ways with the ISO. The SWP-UK claimed that the ISO was insufficiently responsive to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests and similar mobilisations. The facts didn't seem to fit that claim, and even if they did, it was hardly good cause for a split. Maybe Shawki and the ISO leaders had just become too self-confident for SWP leader Tony Cliff (who died in 2000) and his amanuensis Alex Callinicos to deal with.

The ISO grew. It never reviewed and questioned the political heritage it had got from the SWP (including the "absolute anti-Zionism" which the SWP had developed from 1987-8), but it became the most active group on the US radical left.

The ISO suddenly dissolved itself in 2019. With all its activity and its substantial, well-produced press, it disappeared. Vanished. Scattered.

Revolutionary socialist groups often suffer splits, setbacks, periods of decline. That comes with the terrain. But for a relatively sizeable, active, and well-placed group, with some political tradition, to collapse completely, is a first - an unprecedented turn.

The nearest I have to insight into that collapse comes from conversation with Mick Armstrong, a leader of the Socialist Alternative group in Australia, which had links with the ISO over many years. Mick was at the ISO-USA convention in February 2019 (which led in to the collapse) and has attended other ISO meetings.

S Alt, he said, had had some differences with the ISO, but mostly he gave me a picture of the old ISO leadership (in office largely unchanged since the early 80s) losing energy and will.

Ahmed Shawki was already out of action through ill-health. The ISO leaders were uncertain about and divided on the rise of the Bernie Sanders movement and of the DSA. Alan Maass and Todd Chretien were the "right" (more inclined to involvement in the DSA), Joel Geier the "left".

At the convention - before anyone was talking of collapse, and in fact while new ISO leaders were talking about a turn to more activity - the old leaders did not even stand for re-election. Then after the convention a storm arose over the ISO's handling of a rape charge some years back. Leading figures, old and new, just resigned, and soon the group formally voted to dissolve.

The convention, said Mick, was a mess. The ISO, he thought, had been affected by ideas circling round "identity politics": some political debates, for example, would be stalled by claims that to argue further would be inconsiderate of so-and-so's mental health.

Sadia Schneider, a younger S Alt leader, also gave me some insights. She said that the collapse came from the ISO leaders dealing poorly with the rape charge. (But why ever should that lead to giving up on the whole project of building a revolutionary socialist organisation, rather than to changing procedures, replacing officials?)

The rise of the DSA had thrown the ISO into disarray. (But why should that make the ISO dissolve itself, rather than get into difficult debate or even split?)

More relevantly to my mind, Sadia said that the ISO-USA had been short on political education. It had tended to "movementism" and light-on-theory activism. It lacked political leaders intermediate between the top few and its local activists. The organisation was dispersed, with concentrations in Chicago and New York but lots of small groups scattered in other cities across the wide expanses of the USA.

My best guess is that the ISO decayed because it relied more and more on reactive, catch-penny tactical schemes, and neglected the task of investigating and developing its political tradition.

It's hard to blame Shawki for all that. I saw him only from a distance, when he was at events like the European Social Forum. My impression from that, and from other accounts, is that he was an ebullient speaker, agitator, and political "entrepreneur", but never really aspired to be a theorist. Any organisation's leadership will need to include that type, as well as the theorists, and has to look to combining different talents into a team rather than expecting any individual to cover all bases.

The blame for Shawki's sad last years, living in the wreckage of his life's work, surely has to lie with those who taught him and who shaped the team around him, namely the SWP-UK leadership of the 1970s-90s.