The Politics of the ISO

Capitalism has spread to every corner of the globe--a market-based, profit-driven system where wealth is used to get more wealth.

What is socialism? Imagine a society in which no one is satisfied until everyone has adequate food, shelter, clothing and so on.

The International Socialist Organization sees itself as part of a socialist tradition founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Socialism must involve workers taking power in their workplaces and forming their own democratically elected institutions.

The working class is the first class in society whose revolutionary interests don't lie in a new system of exploitation.

Socialists support trade unions because they are the most elementary form of organization of the working class.

Workers must organize rank-and-file organization inside unions to overcome the limits of the labor leadership.

In the collective fight for reforms, ordinary people are radicalized and gain a sense of their own power.

The modern state is the state of the dominant class, and its main purpose is to secure the rule of that class.

The working class cannot take over the existing state, but needs its own--a truly democratic state that works itself out of a job.

The U.S. political system relies on an institutional arrangement where only two parties are presented as legitimate options.

Without its own party and political representatives, the working class will stay subordinated to the two-party system.

Since capitalism is an international system, the working-class struggle to overcome capitalism must also be international.

U.S. politicians and employers have always used anti-immigrant laws not so much to prevent immigration, but to control it.

U.S. imperialism must be opposed, whether in the name of humanitarian intervention, spreading democracy or defending the "homeland."

The countries that have masqueraded as socialist--from the former USSR to China and Cuba--turned Marxism upside down.

Capitalism divides the working class, based on sexual, racial and other distinctions, with specially oppressed groups suffering the most.

The old slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, "An injury to one is an injury to all," is crucial for the labor movement.

Anyone who has gotten involved in even the smallest struggle knows that without organization, little can be accomplished.