Criticism
Some in the NDP view I.S. electoral support for the NDP as an attempt to recruit its members. Other groups and individual leftists are critical of the I.S.'s orientation toward movements, claiming that it tries to take over groups and dominates them in an undemocratic manner, particularly in Toronto where the I.S. is strongest. Smaller socialist groups, such as the International Bolshevik Tendency and the Spartacists, and various anarchists describe the I.S. as left social democrats who are insincere about militancy and revolution. Socialist Action argues that the I.S. does not involve itself in campaigns it cannot recruit from and criticizes its role in labour politics for over-adapting to union bureaucracy.
The I.S. is also criticized for its role in the peace movement in Toronto where it has an influential position in the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War. The June 30th Committee, an independent Toronto anti-war group, argues that TCSW was decisively influenced by the I.S. to sabotage their demonstration on June 30, 2004. It did so by calling a demonstration for the same time and location as the J30 demonstration and then proceeded to split the demonstration. One account can be found Toronto's Now Magazine. TCSW and I.S. members dispute this account. Other detractors argue that the I.S. did the same thing again for an emergency rally in November 2004 called by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.
The I.S. has been criticized for its alleged role in undermining an anti-racist demonstration in Ottawa in May 1993. Strong criticisms of the I.S. were made in the second edition of Warren Kinsella's book Web of Hate and in the anarchist magazine Arm the Spirit. Regarding this incident, the Spartacist League produced a leaflet entitled "Love the liberals, trust the cops, and be somewhere else".
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“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)