After the two posts on this subject from angry White Kid's blog and from Chuck0, I really have to chime in here.

Our biggest problem to date in doing counter-minutemen work in San Diego has been the ISO. At our mobilization in Calexico, they did their best to sabotage the actions. Gente Unida is a coalition that was formed to oposed the Minutemen, but quickly broadened its scope (in theory) to be human rights violations against migrant people by anyone, even though all of its actions have focused on the Minutemen to date.
...

Apparently the ISO got some orders from Chicago that anti-Minutemen work was their new hot recruiting ground, so they quickly jumped into Gente Unida, sending up to 7 people to any given meeting, even when the meetings shrinked down to 12 people.

Once this was pointed out to them and they were called out for selling papers at all Gente Unida actions, including the No Border camp in Campo, and not giving any funds back to Gente Unida, they backed off and started sending only one or two people to meetings. They also refused to restrict their paper selling to a table, saying that we were acting like cops (apparently a common tactic for authoritarians) for saying that they shouldn't force papers on people. In the discussion, they admitted that they sell papers to recruit members and that they can't share the money because it all goes back to Chicago. Their excuse was that our group should want to recruit members and make money too.

Gente Unida agreed at a meeting that the Calexico mobilization would use an affinity group/spokescouncil format with one consensus feeler per group.

Friday night before the actions started, we had a great spokescouncil meeting with a ton of out of town folks and only a handful of ISO folks who showed up late. We made a great action plan and executed it in the morning perfectly, to the effect of stopping the Friends of the Border Patrol from doing any action for two weeks.

Then, at the Saturday night spokescouncil, a male member of the LA ISO adamantly refused to use an affinity group spokescouncil format, interrupting the two female facilitators repeatedly. He insisted that we shoudl just take a majority vote and all do one thing. He also made comments like "there's a thing called democracy, and some people use it", apparently referring to majority voting.

This severely hampered the meeting and slowed it down, confusing lots of new people in the process and making the vibe horrible. All other members of the ISO filed in line behind their party and completely ignored the previous decision that Gente Unida had made about the structure of the activities.

Fortunately, the ISO finally left in one big hive mind group to do their action and the rest of the people at the mobilizatino continued with their plans to act as affinity groups, effectively covering tons of grouns and scaring off the pair of vigilantes that was encountered that night.

Soon after this the ISO decided that Anti-Minutemen activity was not such a hot recruiting ground and has stopped working on it at all in San Diego.

The moral of all this? Don't work with the ISO. Working with them only legitimizes their work and allows them to continue to function. Don't work with Authoritarian groups who only want to control you through mechanisms like mass actions and majority voting that they will try to stack to their advantage.

There are powerful democratic structures like affinity groups, consensus and spokescouncils that are used by groups all over the world to do incredibly important and powerful actions like shutting down the WTO, the FTAA and interrupting the G8. They work. They are directly democratic and allow for a ton of creativity and Autonomy.

Groups like the ISO, the RCP and ANSWER don't like these methods and don't use them because they don't allow them to control actions and they don't fit with their authoritarian politics. They can't follow their orders from their leaders in Chicago if they have to make their own decisions and come up with creative actions. They can't look like the vanguard at a decentralized action where everyone is equal. They're not even interested in doing direct action that actually accomplishes something, just in marching so that they can look like they're doing something and have a chance to table and recruit dues paying members.

One ISO organizer wanted a long explanation of what an affinity group was, and after 3 explanations said that only mass actions are effective. I just don't know how these people can even take themselves seriously.

Worst of all, people outside of radical politics don't know how to distinguish genuine, honest activity from front groups like the World Can't Wait, and so it makes all organizers look like cooks who follow some Guru in a faraway city.

Fortunately, there is a ton of Autonomous, non-hierarchical radical activity happening around the world, in the US and in San Diego, so its easy to go back to ignoring authoritarians like the ISO when they move on to a new recruiting ground. Its just hard to keep them from wasting your time when they want to, but hopefully by sharing these experiences more people can learn what kind of opportunists these Authoritarian vanguard groups are.