International Workers Party - Late 1990s - 21st Century

21st Century

In the early and mid-1990s, Fulani, Newman and other IWP members joined with former followers of H. Ross Perot and other advocates of working outside the two-party system to build the New York Independence Party, an electoral third party. In 2001, the Independence Party had a major impact on the NYC mayoral campaign, with the Independence line providing a quantity of votes which exceed the victory margin of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a newly-minted Republican. Only months after Bloomberg took office, the All Stars Project, which Newman and Fulani had founded in the 1980s, secured an $8.5 million tax-free municipal loan (approved by the Industrial Development Agency board, whose members were mostly Bloomberg appointees) to purchase a headquarters on 42nd Street for its multi-theater, multicultural headquarters. (The approval process had been stalled for years under the more conservative Giuliani administration.)

Some critics and former members of NAP and the IWP have claimed that Newman and Fulani's willingness to seek Republican patronage betrays a stronger rightwing tilt than in previous years, citing not only their alliances with Republican politicians such as Bloomberg and Governor Pataki but also their support for several months in 2000 of the Presidential campaign of Patrick Buchanan. Others simply note their increased willingness to "play the political game" — particularly with players who support electoral reform. And Fulani, in a book published that year, described herself as a "post-modern Bolshevik." In 2003, Newman gave a public speech entitled "Why I Am Still a Marxist."

Since 2002, the web site http://www.ex-iwp.org/ has provided a forum for former IWP members, mainly those hostile to the group, as well as some who remember it with mixed or positive feelings, to comment openly on their experiences and on the party's current political, cultural and fundraising endeavors. A "send us your stuff" appeal by webmaster Marina Ortiz (a freelance writer and former IWP member) resulted in the sending in of previously secret internal IWP documents which were duly mounted on the web site. The site's discussion page strives to provide a psychologically safe environment for the venting of painful memories, and both anti- and pro-Newman correspondents are strongly discouraged from using abusive language.

The New York Post in a 2002 article cited supposedly secret documents of recent provenance that suggest that the IWP is still carrying out a disciplined revolutionary strategy; however, it appears now to be a Gramscian one based on a long-range goal of capturing hegemony over cultural, educational and other superstructural positions in American society, rather than a continuation of the IWP's earlier model of achieving power through street agitation and confrontational organizing. (The hegemony theory of revolution was developed by Antonio Gramsci, the second leader of the Italian Communist Party).