Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary The International Socialists (1968–1986) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States.
[1] At first it consisted mainly of ex-Independent Socialist League members who had disagreed with the decision to merge the ISL into the SP-SDF in 1958 and had become uncomfortable with the positions taken by Max Shachtman and the Realignment Caucus within the party, i.e. entry into the Democratic Party, and an orientation toward the established union leadership and liberal integrationist forces within the Civil Rights Movement.
National Secretary Joel Geier noted that while they had formerly been oriented toward the student, anti-war, and women's liberation movements, they would now focus on the industrial working class.
A group of member who were uncomfortable with this distancing from Trotskyist ideology broke away in 1973 and formed the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1973, taking about a third of the membership.
These included the United Action Caucus within Local 1101 in the Communication Workers of America, the opposition to the leadership of the United Mine Workers which eventually led to the election of Arnold Miller as president, the opposition within the National Maritime Union, and in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union where they led a successful court fight against the expulsion of IS member Stan Weir.
Here they worked within the Teamsters Rank and File Caucus, which was organized around the issue of alleged misspending of pension funds by union officials.
Through these activities the IS was able to recruit a number of important rank-and-file leaders, most of whom later left the group during its splits, such as that forming Workers Power.
He claimed that the IS was embracing dual unionism, and felt that the IS was becoming a "micro-sect" and it was best to participate in personal, rather than organized political activity.
These members were also disturbed by the abandonment, as they saw it, of IS's traditional policy on building rank and file caucuses in the unions as well as by the stance adopted by the leadership around Geier on the then-current upheaval in Portugal.