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Socialist Workers Party (United States)
Encyclopedia
The Socialist Workers Party is a far-left political organization in the United States. The group places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba
. The SWP publishes The Militant
, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928, and maintains Pathfinder Press.
(CLA), founded in 1928 by members of the Communist Party USA
expelled for supporting Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky
against Joseph Stalin
.
Concentrated almost exclusively in New York City and Minneapolis
, in 1929 the CLA did not have more than 100 adherents.
After five years of propaganda work, the CLA remained a tiny organization, with a membership of about 200 and very little influence.
The rise of fascism
in Nazi Germany
and the failure of the communist and social democratic left to unite against the common danger created a situation where certain radical parties throughout the world reexamined their priorities and sought a mechanism for building united action. As early as December 1933, a Trotskyist splinter group called the Communist League of Struggle
(CLS), headed by former Socialist Party youth section leader Albert Weisbord
and his wife Vera Buch, approached Norman Thomas
of the Socialist Party of America
seeking a united front
hunger march of the two organizations followed by a general strike. This suggestion was dismissed as "poppycock
" by SP Executive Secretary Clarence Senior
, but the seed of the idea of joint action had been planted.
(the Section Française de l'International Ouvrière or SFIO) in order to recruit members for the Trotskyists, or so some critics have charged. The group retained its identity as a factional organization inside the SFIO and built a base among the party's youth section, continuing their activity until popular front
action between the SFIO and the mainline Communist Party of France made their position untenable. This tactic of "entering" the larger social democratic parties of each country, endorsed by Trotsky himself, became known as the "French Turn
" and was replicated by various Trotskyist parties around the world.
In 1934, the Communist League of America merged with the American Workers Party
led by A.J. Muste, forming the Workers Party of the United States
.
Throughout 1935 the Workers Party of the United States was deeply divided over the "entryism
" tactic called for by the "French Turn," and a bitter debate swept the organization. Ultimately, the majority faction of Jim Cannon
, Max Shachtman
, and James Burnham
won the day and the Workers Party determined to enter the Socialist Party of America
; a minority faction headed by Hugo Oehler
refused to accept this result and split from the organization.
The Socialist Party was itself beset with factional disagreements. The SP's left wing "Militant" faction sought to expand the organization into an "all-inclusive party" — inviting in members of the Lovestone and Trotskyist movements as well as radical individuals as the first step towards making the SP a mass party. Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the SP, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow
, youth leader and ex-Lovestone
supporter Herbert Zam, and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman
. Goldman at this time also joined with YPSL leader Ernest Erber to establish a newspaper in Chicago with a Trotskyist orientation, The Socialist Appeal, later to serve as the organ of the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party.
In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard for their factional organization and alleged "violation of party discipline," James Cannon and his faction won their internal battle in the Workers Party to join the SP, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry. Negotiations commenced with the Socialist Party leadership, with the admissions ultimately made on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than admission of the Workers Party and its approximately 2,000 members as a group. On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party." A new phase in the party's life had begun.
Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization, it seems that at its inception, the entryist tactic was made in good faith. Historian Constance Myers notes that while "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable," it was only later when "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface." The Trotskyists retained a common orientation with the radicalized SP in their opposition to the European war, their preference for industrial unionism and the CIO
over the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor
, a commitment to trade union activism, the defense of the Soviet Union as the first workers' state while at the same time maintaining an antipathy toward the Stalin government, and in their general aims in the 1936 election.
Cannon went to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to establish another new newspaper, Labor Action, targeted to trade unionists and SP members and aimed at winning them over to Trotskyist views, while Shachtman and Burnham handled the bulk of the faction's activities in New York.
Norman Thomas attracted nearly 188,000 votes in his 1936 Socialist Party run for President but performed poorly in historic strongholds of the party. Moreover, the party's membership had begun to decline. The organization was deeply factionalized, with the Militant faction split into right ("Altmanite"), center ("Clarity") and left ("Appeal") factions, in addition to the radical pacifists around Norman Thomas. A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.
of Clarity. At this meeting Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the newspapers of the various factions.
There was no action to expel the Trotskyist Appeal faction, but pressure continued to build along these lines, egged on by the CPUSA's increasingly hysterical denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention did pass a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level. It also did ban factional newspapers, establishing instead a national organ.
Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party. Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the group around Thomas, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had come to the conclusion that the Trotskyists had joined the SP not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes.
On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratched up the rhetoric against American Labor Party
and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks, and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal. This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2, with 18 abstentions, and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges. Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the YPSL leaving the party with the Trotskyists.
The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who entered the SP in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000. On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization — the Socialist Workers Party.
In December 1937 an agenda was published by the Convention Organizing Committee, naming Cannon as the primary reporter on the Trade Union question, Shachtman on the Russian Resolution, Goldman on the Spanish Resolution, Canadian Maurice Spector
on the International Resolution, Burnham on the Declaration of Principles of the new organization, and Abern on Party Organization and Constitution. The gathering was to conclude with the election of a new National Committee.
On the appointed day, December 31, 1937, over 100 regular and fraternal delegates gathered in Chicago, where they were greeted by a speech of welcome delivered by Chicago leader Albert Goldman, a labor attorney. As editor of the Trotskyist movement's ongoing theoretical magazine, The New International, Max Shachtman delivered the first official report to the gathering, dealing with the political situation in the United States. Shachtman boldly declared that
The convention devoted a full day to discussion of the problems of the labor movement and the role of the new organization in the unions, with "National Secretary of the Convention Arrangements Committee" Jim Cannon delivering the primary report. While criticizing the "reactionary role which the AF of L leadership has played," Cannon declared that "our party...takes a clear-cut position in favor of the earliest and completest possible unification of the AF of L and the CIO, and also the hitherto unaffiliated Railroad Brotherhoods."
The majority faction, led by Cannon, supported Trotsky's position that the USSR remained a "workers' state" and should be supported in any war with capitalist states, despite their opposition to the government headed by Joseph Stalin. The minority faction, led by Shachtman, held that the USSR should not be supported in its war with Finland
. One of its leaders, James Burnham
held, in addition, that the USSR had degenerated so far that it deserved no defense whatsoever. Like this debate, most later factional disputes within the SWP also centered on different attitudes towards revolutions in other countries.
The opposition faction alleged that Cannon's leadership of the SWP was "bureaucratic conservative" and demanded the right to its own publications to express its views outside the party. The majority faction said this was contrary to Lenin's concept of democratic centralism
, and that disagreements and the SWP should be debated only internally. Similar disagreements over the SWP's internal government have surfaced in most later faction fights, with most later opposition factions raising similar demands and accusations. Despite this, most of these later factions claimed political descent from Cannon and the SWP majority, not from earlier opposition factions and splinter parties.
The minority faction led by Shachtman eventually split away almost 40% of the party's membership as well as its youth organization, the Young People's Socialist League
, forming the Workers Party
.
of 1941, including J. P. Cannon (see Smith Act Trials). Those imprisoned included the main national leaders of the SWP and those members most prominent in the Midwest Teamsters.
The party put into practice the so-called Proletarian Military Policy
of opposing the war politically while attempting to transform what they saw as an imperialist war into a civil war. The party lost a number of its members while sailing in the extremely perilous convoys to Murmansk. Problems caused as a result of the imprisonment of experienced leaders and the enlistment in the armed forces of many others meant that during the war years the editorship of The Militant
passed through a number of hands.
The SWP was active in supporting those labor strikes that occurred despite the wartime "no-strike pledge", and in supporting protests against racist discrimination during the war, such as A. Philip Randolph
's March on Washington Movement
. The U.S. Postal Service refused to mail some issues of The Militant and threatened to cancel its third-class mailing permit, citing objections to its articles opposing racist discrimination.
both expected that there would be a wave of revolutionary struggles such as accompanied the end of the previous war. Indeed, revolutions did occur in countries including Yugoslavia
, Albania
, Korea, and China
, to name only those that resulted in the overthrow of capitalism, but contrary to Trotskyist expectations they were headed by Moscow-oriented "Stalinist
" parties.
In the United States, the largest strike wave in U.S. history - involving over five million workers - occurred with the end of the war and the wartime pledge made by many union
leaders not to strike for the duration. (This did not mean there were not many strikes during wartime - there were many wildcat strikes during this period, as well as strikes officially called by the United Mine Workers of America. There were also protests by GIs demanding rapid demobilization after the end of the war, sometimes called the going-home movement). SWP participation in this upsurge led to a brief period of rapid growth for the SWP immediately after the war.
The end of the war also saw the reorganization of the Fourth International, in which process the SWP played a major role. As part of this process, moves were made to heal the breach with Max Shachtman
's supporters in the Workers Party (WP) and for the two groups to fuse. This eventually came to nothing. However some members of the SWP around Felix Morrow
and Albert Goldman
grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the SWP's ultra-leftist attitude towards revolutionary policies. Eventually they were to leave the SWP in a state of demoralization and some joined the WP.
On the other hand a faction within the WP called the Johnson-Forest Tendency
, CLR James (known as Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya
(Forest), were impatient with the caution of the WP and considered that the situation could rapidly become pre-revolutionary. This led them to decamp from the WP and rejoin the SWP in 1947. This tendency had moved further away from the "orthodox Trotskyism
" of the SWP, which made for an uncomfortable presence. For example, they continued to hold the position that the USSR
was a "state capitalist" society. By 1951, their presence in the SWP was ever more anomalous and most left to form the Correspondence Publishing Committee
. Dunayevskaya and her supporters eventually formed the News and Letters Committees in 1955 after splitting with CLR James, who was deported from the USA to Britain from where he continued to advise the Correspondence Publishing Committee
, which split again in 1962, with those loyal to CLR James taking the name Facing Reality
.
. The growing civil rights movement, which continued uninterrupted out of WWII, could not fully offset these trends, and the SWP experienced a period of decline and isolation.
The party also had a number of splits over these years. One such split saw the departure of the faction of Bert Cochran
and Clarke, who formed the American Socialist Union
, which lasted until 1959. That 1953 opposition supported some of the positions of Michel Pablo
, the Secretary of the Fourth International
, although Pablo disagreed with their wish to dissolve the Fourth International.
The next, smaller split was that of Sam Marcy
's Global Class War faction, which called within the SWP for support of Henry Wallace
's Progressive Party
Presidential
run in 1948 and regarded Mao Zedong
as a revolutionary leader. This faction ended up leaving the SWP in 1958 after supporting the suppression of the Hungarian Rising of 1956, a position contrary to that held by the SWP and other Trotskyist tendencies. It went on to form the Workers World Party
.
Meanwhile throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the remaining membership of the SWP clung to its firmly held beliefs and grew older. Consequently the party membership shrank over these years from a post war high in 1948 until the tide began to turn in the early 1960s. The 1959 Revolution in Cuba
however signaled a change in political direction for the SWP as it embarked on pro-Castro "solidarity work" through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
. The result was a small accretion of youth to the party's ranks and in the same period long time SWP leader Murry Weiss won another group of youth from the Shachtmanites as they joined the Socialist Party of America
. Many of the new recruits, however, were drawn from the student movement, unlike those who had led the party since the 1930s, and as a result the internal culture of the party began to change.
Despite such growing signs of an end to the isolation the group endured during the McCarthyite
period, it experienced a new split in the early 1960s. A factional situation developed in the SWP that saw a number of small oppositional groups develop. One of the key issues was the Cuban Revolution and the SWP's response to it. Cannon and other SWP leaders such as Joseph Hansen
saw Cuba
as qualitatively different from the "Stalinist" states of Eastern Europe
. Their analysis brought them closer to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International from which the SWP had split in 1953. The SWP successfully negotiated a reunification of the ISFI and the International Committee of the Fourth International
leading to the creation in 1963 of the reunified Fourth International. Two sections of the ICFI, including Gerry Healy
's Socialist Labour League rejected the merger and turned against the SWP leadership, working with opponents within the party.
The most important faction opposing the SWP leadership's new line was the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) led by James Robertson
and Tim Wohlforth
that rejected the SWP's "capitulation" to Pabloism and opposed joining the USFI. They were critical of the Castro government, arguing that Cuba remained a "deformed workers state". However, a split developed within this faction between groups headed by the two men. Nonetheless both the RT and the Reorganized Minority Tendency split to form the Spartacist (see Spartacist League
), and the American Committee for the Fourth International, respectively with the latter becoming aligned with Healy's SLL.
In the aftermath the Seattle branch also left to found the Freedom Socialist Party
, after protesting the alleged suppression of internal democracy, as did Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss
.
The SWP supported both the civil rights movement and the Black nationalist movement which grew during the 1960s. It particularly praised the militancy of Black nationalist leader Malcolm X
, who in turn spoke at the SWP's public forums and gave an interview to Young Socialist magazine. After his assassination, the SWP had limited success in forming alliances with his followers and other Black nationalists. However, these movements were part of the radicalization
of these years aiding the SWP's growth.
Like all left wing groups, the SWP grew during the 1960s and experienced a particularly brisk growth in the first years of the 1970s. Much of this was due to its involvement in many of the campaigns and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam
. The SWP advocated that the antiwar movement should call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, and should primarily focus on organizing large, legal demonstrations for this demand. It was recognized by friend and foe alike as a major factor influencing the direction of the antiwar movement along these lines. One of the leaders of the anti-war movement at this time, along with Dave Dellinger and many others was Fred Halstead
, a World War II veteran and former leader of the garment workers union in New York City. Halstead was the 1968 Presidential candidate of the SWP who visited Vietnam in that capacity.
The SWP was also increasingly outspoken in its defense of the Cuba
n government of Fidel Castro
and its identification with that government. A new leadership led by Jack Barnes
(who became national secretary in 1972) made identification with Cuba an ever greater part of the politics of the SWP throughout the 1970s.
The party also published many of Leon Trotsky's works in these years through their publishing house, Pathfinder Press. Not only were the better-known writings reprinted, many for the first time since the 1930s, but other more obscure articles and letters were collected and printed for a wider audience than they had when first distributed. The expansion of the press also allow the SWP to host Intercontinental Press
, the FI magazine which moved from Paris to New York in 1969, which later merged with Inprecor
.
, which eventually dissolved itself.
Another tendency developed called the Internationalist Tendency (IT). The IT posed a greater challenge for the group's leadership, as the tendency agreed with the Fourth International's advocacy of guerrilla warfare as a "tactic on a continental scale" in Latin America. However, despite tensions between the SWP and the rest of the international, when the former expelled the IT the International refused to side with the tendency. The IT would disintegrate over the next few months, some of its supporters finding their way back into the SWP.
The international tensions developed further when the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency was established in 1973 by the SWP and its co-thinkers in order to contribute to the debate for the Tenth World Congress. It argued for a reversal of the Latin America
n guerrilla war
orientation adopted at the Ninth World Congress.
This period was the peak of the SWP's growth and influence. The party continued its involvement in the movement against the war in Vietnam, which peaked in 1970-71. The SWP also supported Chicano nationalism, including the Raza Unida Party
. It helped organize protests demanding legal abortion through the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition. With the mid- to late 70s decline of these movements and the end of the 1960s-1970s youth radicalization, SWP membership and influence went into decline.
In 1978, the SWP leadership decided that the key task was for party members to make a turn to industry. This turn entailed party members getting jobs in blue collar industries in preparation for, the SWP leadership projected, increasing mass struggles. The 1977-78 coal miners' strike and developments like Steelworkers Fight Back were among the events pointed to in arguing for this change in policy. Party members sought to get jobs in the same workplaces in order to work as organized "fractions", doing "communist political work" as well as union activity.
As a result, many members were asked to move and change jobs, often out of established careers and into low-paying jobs in small towns. Many of the older members with experience in trade union
s resisted this 'colonization program', which upset their established routine in the unions, as did some of the younger members.
A further factor in the growing divisions within the SWP was the move by Jack Barnes
, Mary-Alice Waters
and others in the leadership away from the Trotskyist label. In 1982, Barnes gave a speech which was later published as Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist continuity today
in which Barnes rejected Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution
arguing that it failed to sufficiently distinguish between the democratic and socialist tasks of a workers' revolution. Barnes argued that anticapitalist revolutions typically began with a "workers' and farmers' government" which initially concentrated on bourgeois-democratic measures, and only later moved on to the abolition of capitalism.
Barnes also argued that the "Trotskyist" label unnecessarily distinguished leftists in that tradition from leftists of other origins, such as the Cuban Communist Party, or the Sandinista National Liberation Front
. He argued that the SWP had more in common with these organizations than with many groups calling themselves Trotskyist. The SWP has continued to publish numerous books by Trotsky and advocate a number of ideas commonly associated with Trotskyism, including Trotsky's analysis of "Stalinism".
The opposition factions continued to support the theory of permanent revolution, and the Trotskyist label: they anticipated that the SWP leadership was reassessing its place in the Fourth International. While declaring their support to the Cuban and the leftist Nicaraguan governments, they were more critical of the Castroist and Sandinista leadership. Additionally, they continued to oppose the "turn to industry".
One opposition group gathered around the Weinsteins on the West Coast, (with supporters elsewhere too), while a second group gathered around George Breitman
and Frank Lovell
. Together they formed an opposition bloc on the SWP's National Committee but in 1983 both groups were expelled. The opposition factions, having split from the SWP, formed new organizations. The grouping around the Weinsteins forming the San Francisco-based Socialist Action. The Breitman-Lovell group, after a time, formed the Fourth Internationalist Tendency
. Both groups described themselves as "public factions" of the SWP and set the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. Another group, mainly in Los Angeles, had been close to Breitman but did not agree to orient toward the SWP belonged briefly to Socialist Action but left to join the "regroupment" organization Solidarity
.
This was the most recent split or major faction fight in the SWP; the organization has experienced an unusually long period of internal peace since, although it has declined steadily in both its membership numbers and its political influence within the U.S. left. Numerous recent expulsions—sometimes of long-standing SWP veterans—have contributed to the membership decline. In 2003, the party sold its major headquarters building in New York City for $20 million and moved to another location in Manhattan. Party leaders Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters subsequently sold their West Village condominium for $1.87 million.
Defense Committee, established after Curtis, an SWP activist and trade union organizer, was charged and convicted on burglary and rape charges in 1988. The party claimed that Curtis had been framed by police for his role in defending immigrant workers. Curtis was eventually paroled.
The SWP now focuses most of its energy on internal activities, such as fund-raising, the weekly Militant Labor Forum, and the distribution of Pathfinder books and The Militant. Its members are present in a handful of trade unions and it focuses most of its political energy towards defending immigrant rights and promoting Cuban solidarity.
in the 1940s. It remained in close political solidarity with the Fourth International, however. The Socialist Workers Party broke formally with the Fourth International in 1990 though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since National Secretary Jack Barnes' 1982 speech, "Their Trotsky and Ours
", which some view as signaling a break with Trotskyism. The SWP action followed the 1985 World Congress, and the SWP closed Intercontinental Press in 1986. The SWP's international formation is sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder tendency
because they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore which sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press. In 1986, the party won a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation
as a result of years of spying and disruption.
, received 90,310 votes.
In the U.S. presidential election of 2004 the Socialist Workers Party ran Róger Calero
for President and Arrin Hawkins
for Vice-President. It should be noted that both candidates were constitutionally unqualified for the positions (under Article II, section 1) because Calero is not an American citizen and Hawkins was 29 years old, with the minimum age being 35. James Harris
and Margaret Trowe
, the SWP's ticket from 2000, stood in on the ballot in some states where Calero and Hawkins could not be listed. The two tickets combined received over 10,000 votes. They were on the ballot in 11 states and the District of Columbia, more than any other socialist candidates. The vote total does not reflect the actual vote because of the unqualified status of the candidates. County clerks (in some states) and statewide Secretaries of State have discretion in reporting votes for ineligible candidates. The same situation obtained in 2008.
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
. The SWP publishes The Militant
The Militant
The Militant is an international Socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party and the Pathfinder Tendency. It is published in the United States and distributed in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, Iceland, and New...
, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928, and maintains Pathfinder Press.
The Communist League of America
The Socialist Workers Party traces its origins back to the former Communist League of AmericaCommunist League of America
The Communist League of America was founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern late in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism. The CLA was the United States section of Leon Trotsky's International Left Opposition and initially positioned itself as...
(CLA), founded in 1928 by members of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
expelled for supporting Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
against Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
.
Concentrated almost exclusively in New York City and Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis , nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City," is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States...
, in 1929 the CLA did not have more than 100 adherents.
After five years of propaganda work, the CLA remained a tiny organization, with a membership of about 200 and very little influence.
The rise of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in Nazi Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and the failure of the communist and social democratic left to unite against the common danger created a situation where certain radical parties throughout the world reexamined their priorities and sought a mechanism for building united action. As early as December 1933, a Trotskyist splinter group called the Communist League of Struggle
Communist League of Struggle
The Communist League of Struggle was a small communist organization active in the United States during the 1930s. Founded by Albert Weisbord and his wife, Vera Buch, who were veterans of the Left Socialist movement and the Communist Party USA, the CLS briefly affiliated with Leon Trotsky...
(CLS), headed by former Socialist Party youth section leader Albert Weisbord
Albert Weisbord
Albert Weisbord was an American political activist and union organizer. He is best remembered as one of the primary union organizers of the seminal 1926 Passaic Textile Strike and as the founder of a small Trotskyist political organization of the 1930s called the Communist League of...
and his wife Vera Buch, approached Norman Thomas
Norman Thomas
Norman Mattoon Thomas was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.-Early years:...
of the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
seeking a united front
United front
The united front is a form of struggle that may be pursued by revolutionaries. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organisation created by revolutionaries in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.According to the theses of...
hunger march of the two organizations followed by a general strike. This suggestion was dismissed as "poppycock
Poppycock
Poppycock is a brand of candied popcorn. Though it is marketed in a variety of combinations, the original mixture consists of clusters of popcorn, almonds, and pecans covered in a candy glaze. Other specialty combinations include mixtures with emphasis on cashews, chocolate, and...
" by SP Executive Secretary Clarence Senior
Clarence Senior
Clarence Ollson Senior was, as a young man, an American socialist political activist best remembered as the National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America during the 1930s. Originally a protégé of Presidential candidate Norman Thomas, during the inner-party fight of the 1930s,...
, but the seed of the idea of joint action had been planted.
"Entryism"
Early in 1934, the French Trotskyists of the Communist League conceived of the idea of entering the French Socialist PartySocialist Party (France)
The Socialist Party is a social-democratic political party in France and the largest party of the French centre-left. It is one of the two major contemporary political parties in France, along with the center-right Union for a Popular Movement...
(the Section Française de l'International Ouvrière or SFIO) in order to recruit members for the Trotskyists, or so some critics have charged. The group retained its identity as a factional organization inside the SFIO and built a base among the party's youth section, continuing their activity until popular front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
action between the SFIO and the mainline Communist Party of France made their position untenable. This tactic of "entering" the larger social democratic parties of each country, endorsed by Trotsky himself, became known as the "French Turn
French Turn
The French Turn was the name given to the entry between 1934 and 1936 of the French Trotskyists into the Section Française de l'International Ouvrière...
" and was replicated by various Trotskyist parties around the world.
In 1934, the Communist League of America merged with the American Workers Party
American Workers Party
The American Workers Party was a socialist organization established in December 1933 by activists in the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, a group headed by A.J. Muste.-Formation:...
led by A.J. Muste, forming the Workers Party of the United States
Workers Party of the United States
The Workers Party of the United States was established in December 1934 by a merger of the American Workers Party led by A.J. Muste and the Trotskyist Communist League of America led by James P. Cannon. The party was dissolved in 1936 when its members entered the Socialist Party of America en...
.
Throughout 1935 the Workers Party of the United States was deeply divided over the "entryism
Entryism
Entryism is a political tactic by which an organisation or state encourages its members or agents to infiltrate another organisation in an attempt to gain recruits, or take over entirely...
" tactic called for by the "French Turn," and a bitter debate swept the organization. Ultimately, the majority faction of Jim Cannon
James P. Cannon
James Patrick "Jim" Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.Born on February 11, 1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, he joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911...
, Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...
, and James Burnham
James Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
won the day and the Workers Party determined to enter the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
; a minority faction headed by Hugo Oehler
Hugo Oehler
-Biography:An active trade unionist, Oehler joined the Communist Party USA in its early days, and by 1927 was a district organizer for the party in Kansas...
refused to accept this result and split from the organization.
The Socialist Party was itself beset with factional disagreements. The SP's left wing "Militant" faction sought to expand the organization into an "all-inclusive party" — inviting in members of the Lovestone and Trotskyist movements as well as radical individuals as the first step towards making the SP a mass party. Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the SP, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow
Benjamin Gitlow
Benjamin "Ben" Gitlow was a prominent American socialist politician of the early twentieth century and a founding member of the Communist Party USA. From the end of the 1930s, Gitlow turned to conservatism and wrote two sensational exposés of American Communism, books which were very influential...
, youth leader and ex-Lovestone
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...
supporter Herbert Zam, and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman
Albert Goldman (politician)
Albert Goldman was an American Trotskyist and lawyer to the labor movement.Born Albert Verblen in Chicago, he studied at Medhill High School and then the University of Cincinnati. He also studied to be a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College...
. Goldman at this time also joined with YPSL leader Ernest Erber to establish a newspaper in Chicago with a Trotskyist orientation, The Socialist Appeal, later to serve as the organ of the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party.
In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard for their factional organization and alleged "violation of party discipline," James Cannon and his faction won their internal battle in the Workers Party to join the SP, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry. Negotiations commenced with the Socialist Party leadership, with the admissions ultimately made on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than admission of the Workers Party and its approximately 2,000 members as a group. On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party." A new phase in the party's life had begun.
Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization, it seems that at its inception, the entryist tactic was made in good faith. Historian Constance Myers notes that while "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable," it was only later when "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface." The Trotskyists retained a common orientation with the radicalized SP in their opposition to the European war, their preference for industrial unionism and the CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
over the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
, a commitment to trade union activism, the defense of the Soviet Union as the first workers' state while at the same time maintaining an antipathy toward the Stalin government, and in their general aims in the 1936 election.
Cannon went to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to establish another new newspaper, Labor Action, targeted to trade unionists and SP members and aimed at winning them over to Trotskyist views, while Shachtman and Burnham handled the bulk of the faction's activities in New York.
Norman Thomas attracted nearly 188,000 votes in his 1936 Socialist Party run for President but performed poorly in historic strongholds of the party. Moreover, the party's membership had begun to decline. The organization was deeply factionalized, with the Militant faction split into right ("Altmanite"), center ("Clarity") and left ("Appeal") factions, in addition to the radical pacifists around Norman Thomas. A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.
Split from the Socialist Party
Prior to the March convention, the Trotskyist "Appeal" faction held an organizational gathering of their own, meeting in Chicago, with 93 delegates gathering from February 20–22, 1937. The meeting organized the faction on a permanent basis, electing a National Action Committee of five to "coordinate branch work" and "formulate Appeal policies." Two delegates from the Clarity caucus were in attendance. James Burnham vigorously attacked the Labour and Socialist International, the international organization of left wing parties to which the Socialist Party, and tension rose along these lines among the Trotskyists. United action between the Clarity and Appeal groups was not forthcoming and an emergency meeting of Vincent Dunne and Cannon was held in New York with leaders of the various factions including Thomas, Jack Altman, and Gus TylerGus Tyler
August "Gus" Tyler was an American socialist activist of the 1930s, a labor union official, author, and newspaper columnist...
of Clarity. At this meeting Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the newspapers of the various factions.
There was no action to expel the Trotskyist Appeal faction, but pressure continued to build along these lines, egged on by the CPUSA's increasingly hysterical denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention did pass a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level. It also did ban factional newspapers, establishing instead a national organ.
Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party. Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the group around Thomas, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had come to the conclusion that the Trotskyists had joined the SP not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes.
On June 24–25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratched up the rhetoric against American Labor Party
American Labor Party
The American Labor Party was a political party in the United States established in 1936 which was active almost exclusively in the state of New York. The organization was founded by labor leaders and former members of the Socialist Party who had established themselves as the Social Democratic...
and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks, and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal. This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2, with 18 abstentions, and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges. Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the YPSL leaving the party with the Trotskyists.
The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who entered the SP in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000. On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization — the Socialist Workers Party.
Formation of the SWP
The October 2, 1937, issue of the Socialist Appeal included a convention call from the so-called "Left Wing" to "All Locals and Branches of the Socialist Party," accusing the NEC of the party of having "betrayed the principles of socialism" by withdrawing the party's candidate for Mayor of New York in favor of LaGuardia and for having ordered "the bureaucratic expulsion of all the revolutionary members of the party who oppose and obstruct this sell-out policy." A convention was called by four Socialist Party State Committees, the NEC of the YPSL, and the organized Left Wing organizations of Chicago and New York, slated to be held in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend, November 25–28, 1937. This meeting was quickly postponed until December 31, however, "in order to provide adequate time for discussion by the membership" of important questions.In December 1937 an agenda was published by the Convention Organizing Committee, naming Cannon as the primary reporter on the Trade Union question, Shachtman on the Russian Resolution, Goldman on the Spanish Resolution, Canadian Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector was the Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada for much of the 1920s and an early follower of Leon Trotsky after his split from the Communist International....
on the International Resolution, Burnham on the Declaration of Principles of the new organization, and Abern on Party Organization and Constitution. The gathering was to conclude with the election of a new National Committee.
On the appointed day, December 31, 1937, over 100 regular and fraternal delegates gathered in Chicago, where they were greeted by a speech of welcome delivered by Chicago leader Albert Goldman, a labor attorney. As editor of the Trotskyist movement's ongoing theoretical magazine, The New International, Max Shachtman delivered the first official report to the gathering, dealing with the political situation in the United States. Shachtman boldly declared that
"It is entirely inconceivable that American imperialism can succeed in resisting the inexorable tendencies that are pulling it into the vortex of the coming world war.
"If the working class is unable to prevent the outbreak of war, and the United States enters directly into it, our party stands pledged to the traditional position of revolutionary Marxism.
"It will utilize the crisis of capitalist rule engendered by the war to prosecute the class struggle with the utmost intransigence, to strengthen the independent labor and revolutionary movements, and to bring the war to a close by the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of proletarian rule in the form of the workers state."
The convention devoted a full day to discussion of the problems of the labor movement and the role of the new organization in the unions, with "National Secretary of the Convention Arrangements Committee" Jim Cannon delivering the primary report. While criticizing the "reactionary role which the AF of L leadership has played," Cannon declared that "our party...takes a clear-cut position in favor of the earliest and completest possible unification of the AF of L and the CIO, and also the hitherto unaffiliated Railroad Brotherhoods."
The 1940 split
The 1940 split in the SWP followed an internal factional debate over the party's internal government, the class nature of the Russian state, and Marxist philosophy, among other questions. The SWP was to experience many other factional conflicts and splits in its history, but this was the largest, and it foreshadowed many features of those to come.The majority faction, led by Cannon, supported Trotsky's position that the USSR remained a "workers' state" and should be supported in any war with capitalist states, despite their opposition to the government headed by Joseph Stalin. The minority faction, led by Shachtman, held that the USSR should not be supported in its war with Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. One of its leaders, James Burnham
James Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
held, in addition, that the USSR had degenerated so far that it deserved no defense whatsoever. Like this debate, most later factional disputes within the SWP also centered on different attitudes towards revolutions in other countries.
The opposition faction alleged that Cannon's leadership of the SWP was "bureaucratic conservative" and demanded the right to its own publications to express its views outside the party. The majority faction said this was contrary to Lenin's concept of democratic centralism
Democratic centralism
Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party...
, and that disagreements and the SWP should be debated only internally. Similar disagreements over the SWP's internal government have surfaced in most later faction fights, with most later opposition factions raising similar demands and accusations. Despite this, most of these later factions claimed political descent from Cannon and the SWP majority, not from earlier opposition factions and splinter parties.
The minority faction led by Shachtman eventually split away almost 40% of the party's membership as well as its youth organization, the Young People's Socialist League
Young People's Socialist League
The Young People's Socialist League , founded in 1989, is the official youth arm of the Socialist Party USA. The group's membership consists of those democratic socialists under the age of 30, and its political activities tend to concentrate on increasing the voter turnout of young democratic...
, forming the Workers Party
Workers Party (US)
Not to be confused with the modern Marxist-Leninist party, Workers Party, USA.The Workers Party was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland. They included Max Shachtman,...
.
The World War II years
A number of members were imprisoned under the Smith ActSmith Act
The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 is a United States federal statute that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S...
of 1941, including J. P. Cannon (see Smith Act Trials). Those imprisoned included the main national leaders of the SWP and those members most prominent in the Midwest Teamsters.
Proletarian Military Policy
The Proletarian Military Policy was a policy adopted by the Fourth International in response to World War II. It was an attempt to apply transitional demands such as trade union control of military training and the election of officers to transform what it characterised as an imperialist war into...
of opposing the war politically while attempting to transform what they saw as an imperialist war into a civil war. The party lost a number of its members while sailing in the extremely perilous convoys to Murmansk. Problems caused as a result of the imprisonment of experienced leaders and the enlistment in the armed forces of many others meant that during the war years the editorship of The Militant
The Militant
The Militant is an international Socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party and the Pathfinder Tendency. It is published in the United States and distributed in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, Iceland, and New...
passed through a number of hands.
The SWP was active in supporting those labor strikes that occurred despite the wartime "no-strike pledge", and in supporting protests against racist discrimination during the war, such as A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
's March on Washington Movement
March on Washington Movement
The March on Washington Movement lasted from 1933-1947. It was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Martin Luther King was heavily influenced by Randolph and his ideals. The March on Washington Movement was formed as a tool to organize a mass march on Washington, D.C., designed to...
. The U.S. Postal Service refused to mail some issues of The Militant and threatened to cancel its third-class mailing permit, citing objections to its articles opposing racist discrimination.
Post-war years
Following the war the SWP and the Fourth InternationalFourth International
The Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...
both expected that there would be a wave of revolutionary struggles such as accompanied the end of the previous war. Indeed, revolutions did occur in countries including Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
, Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
, Korea, and China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
, to name only those that resulted in the overthrow of capitalism, but contrary to Trotskyist expectations they were headed by Moscow-oriented "Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
" parties.
In the United States, the largest strike wave in U.S. history - involving over five million workers - occurred with the end of the war and the wartime pledge made by many union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
leaders not to strike for the duration. (This did not mean there were not many strikes during wartime - there were many wildcat strikes during this period, as well as strikes officially called by the United Mine Workers of America. There were also protests by GIs demanding rapid demobilization after the end of the war, sometimes called the going-home movement). SWP participation in this upsurge led to a brief period of rapid growth for the SWP immediately after the war.
The end of the war also saw the reorganization of the Fourth International, in which process the SWP played a major role. As part of this process, moves were made to heal the breach with Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...
's supporters in the Workers Party (WP) and for the two groups to fuse. This eventually came to nothing. However some members of the SWP around Felix Morrow
Felix Morrow
Felix Morrow was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. In later years, Morrow left the world of politics to become a book publisher. He is best remembered as a factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement....
and Albert Goldman
Albert Goldman (politician)
Albert Goldman was an American Trotskyist and lawyer to the labor movement.Born Albert Verblen in Chicago, he studied at Medhill High School and then the University of Cincinnati. He also studied to be a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College...
grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the SWP's ultra-leftist attitude towards revolutionary policies. Eventually they were to leave the SWP in a state of demoralization and some joined the WP.
On the other hand a faction within the WP called the Johnson-Forest Tendency
Johnson-Forest Tendency
The Johnson–Forest tendency, sometimes called the Johnsonites, refers to a radical left tendency in the United States associated with Marxist theorists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, who used the pseudonyms J.R. Johnson and Freddie Forest respectively...
, CLR James (known as Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya was the founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism in the United States of America. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.-Biography:Of Jewish...
(Forest), were impatient with the caution of the WP and considered that the situation could rapidly become pre-revolutionary. This led them to decamp from the WP and rejoin the SWP in 1947. This tendency had moved further away from the "orthodox Trotskyism
Orthodox Trotskyism
Orthodox Trotskyism is a branch of Trotskyism which aims to adhere more closely to the philosophy, methods and positions of Trotsky and the early Fourth International, Lenin, and Marx than other Trotskyists....
" of the SWP, which made for an uncomfortable presence. For example, they continued to hold the position that the USSR
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
was a "state capitalist" society. By 1951, their presence in the SWP was ever more anomalous and most left to form the Correspondence Publishing Committee
Correspondence Publishing Committee
Correspondence Publishing Committee was a radical left organization led by C.L.R. James and Martin Glaberman that existed in the United States from approximately 1951 until it split in 1962.-History:...
. Dunayevskaya and her supporters eventually formed the News and Letters Committees in 1955 after splitting with CLR James, who was deported from the USA to Britain from where he continued to advise the Correspondence Publishing Committee
Correspondence Publishing Committee
Correspondence Publishing Committee was a radical left organization led by C.L.R. James and Martin Glaberman that existed in the United States from approximately 1951 until it split in 1962.-History:...
, which split again in 1962, with those loyal to CLR James taking the name Facing Reality
Facing Reality
Facing Reality was a radical left group in the United States which existed from about 1962 until 1970.-History:Facing Reality originated in the Johnson-Forest Tendency led by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. It has its origins in the Trotskyist left but regarded the Soviet Union as state...
.
The Cold War period
The brief postwar wave of labor unrest gave way to the conservatism of the 1950s, the housebreaking of previously radical labor unions, and McCarthyismMcCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
. The growing civil rights movement, which continued uninterrupted out of WWII, could not fully offset these trends, and the SWP experienced a period of decline and isolation.
The party also had a number of splits over these years. One such split saw the departure of the faction of Bert Cochran
Bert Cochran
Bert Cochran was an American Communist politician and author.Cochran was born in Poland in 1913 and came to the US at an early age. His birth name was Alexander Goldfarb. In the 1930s, Cochran attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he was recruited to the Trotskyist movement by Max...
and Clarke, who formed the American Socialist Union
American Socialist Union
The Socialist Union of America, also called American Socialist Union, Socialist Union or Cochranites were a Trotskyist group that split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1953 and disbanded in 1959...
, which lasted until 1959. That 1953 opposition supported some of the positions of Michel Pablo
Michel Pablo
Michel Pablo was the pseudonym of Michalis N. Raptis , a Trotskyist leader of Greek origin.- Early activism :...
, the Secretary of the Fourth International
Fourth International
The Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...
, although Pablo disagreed with their wish to dissolve the Fourth International.
The next, smaller split was that of Sam Marcy
Sam Marcy
Sam Marcy was an American Marxist of the post-World War II era. In 1959, a group he led founded the Workers World Party, which continues to the present day....
's Global Class War faction, which called within the SWP for support of Henry Wallace
Henry A. Wallace
Henry Agard Wallace was the 33rd Vice President of the United States , the Secretary of Agriculture , and the Secretary of Commerce . In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.-Early life:Henry A...
's Progressive Party
Progressive Party (United States, 1948)
The United States Progressive Party of 1948 was a left-wing political party that ran former Vice President Henry A. Wallace of Iowa for president and U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho for vice president in 1948.-Foundation:...
Presidential
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
run in 1948 and regarded Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
as a revolutionary leader. This faction ended up leaving the SWP in 1958 after supporting the suppression of the Hungarian Rising of 1956, a position contrary to that held by the SWP and other Trotskyist tendencies. It went on to form the Workers World Party
Workers World Party
Workers World Party is a far-left political party in the United States, founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy. Marcy and his followers split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them Marcy's group's support for Henry A...
.
Meanwhile throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the remaining membership of the SWP clung to its firmly held beliefs and grew older. Consequently the party membership shrank over these years from a post war high in 1948 until the tide began to turn in the early 1960s. The 1959 Revolution in Cuba
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
however signaled a change in political direction for the SWP as it embarked on pro-Castro "solidarity work" through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
Fair Play for Cuba Committee
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was an activist group set up in New York in April 1960. The FPCC's purpose was to provide grassroots support for the Cuban Revolution against attacks by the United States government, once Fidel Castro began openly admitting his commitment to Marxism and began the...
. The result was a small accretion of youth to the party's ranks and in the same period long time SWP leader Murry Weiss won another group of youth from the Shachtmanites as they joined the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
. Many of the new recruits, however, were drawn from the student movement, unlike those who had led the party since the 1930s, and as a result the internal culture of the party began to change.
1960s
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
period, it experienced a new split in the early 1960s. A factional situation developed in the SWP that saw a number of small oppositional groups develop. One of the key issues was the Cuban Revolution and the SWP's response to it. Cannon and other SWP leaders such as Joseph Hansen
Joseph Hansen (socialist)
Joseph Leroy Hansen , was an American Trotskyist and leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party.Born in Richfield, Utah, Joseph Hansen was the oldest of 15 children in a poor working class family, and he was the only one of them who could attend college. His father, Conrad J. Z...
saw Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
as qualitatively different from the "Stalinist" states of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
. Their analysis brought them closer to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International from which the SWP had split in 1953. The SWP successfully negotiated a reunification of the ISFI and the International Committee of the Fourth International
International Committee of the Fourth International
The International Committee of the Fourth International is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain.-Foundation:The International...
leading to the creation in 1963 of the reunified Fourth International. Two sections of the ICFI, including Gerry Healy
Gerry Healy
Thomas Gerard Healy, known as Gerry Healy , was a political activist, a co-founder of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and, according to former prominent U.S. supporter David North, the leader of the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain between 1950 – 1985...
's Socialist Labour League rejected the merger and turned against the SWP leadership, working with opponents within the party.
The most important faction opposing the SWP leadership's new line was the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) led by James Robertson
James Robertson (Trotskyist)
James Robertson is National Chairman of the Spartacist League of the United States, which is a section of the International Communist League , an international organization of small Trotskyist groups...
and Tim Wohlforth
Tim Wohlforth
Timothy Andrew Wohlforth , is a United States former Trotskyist leader. Since leaving the Trotskyist movement he has become a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented non-fiction....
that rejected the SWP's "capitulation" to Pabloism and opposed joining the USFI. They were critical of the Castro government, arguing that Cuba remained a "deformed workers state". However, a split developed within this faction between groups headed by the two men. Nonetheless both the RT and the Reorganized Minority Tendency split to form the Spartacist (see Spartacist League
Spartacist League (US)
The Spartacist League/ US is a Trotskyist organization in the United States. It was the original Spartacist group that helped to inspire and organize similarly oriented groups around the world...
), and the American Committee for the Fourth International, respectively with the latter becoming aligned with Healy's SLL.
In the aftermath the Seattle branch also left to found the Freedom Socialist Party
Freedom Socialist Party
The Freedom Socialist Party is a socialist political party with a unique program of revolutionary feminism that emerged from a split in the United States Socialist Workers Party in 1966. It is currently a working class organization that works towards creating social justice and order for all...
, after protesting the alleged suppression of internal democracy, as did Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss
Myra Tanner Weiss
Myra Tanner Weiss was an American Communist following Trotskyism, and a three time U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party....
.
The SWP supported both the civil rights movement and the Black nationalist movement which grew during the 1960s. It particularly praised the militancy of Black nationalist leader Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...
, who in turn spoke at the SWP's public forums and gave an interview to Young Socialist magazine. After his assassination, the SWP had limited success in forming alliances with his followers and other Black nationalists. However, these movements were part of the radicalization
Radicalization
Radicalization is the process in which an individual changes from passiveness or activism to become more revolutionary, militant or extremist. Radicalization is often associated with youth, adversity, alienation, social exclusion, poverty, or the perception of injustice to self or others.-...
of these years aiding the SWP's growth.
Like all left wing groups, the SWP grew during the 1960s and experienced a particularly brisk growth in the first years of the 1970s. Much of this was due to its involvement in many of the campaigns and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. The SWP advocated that the antiwar movement should call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, and should primarily focus on organizing large, legal demonstrations for this demand. It was recognized by friend and foe alike as a major factor influencing the direction of the antiwar movement along these lines. One of the leaders of the anti-war movement at this time, along with Dave Dellinger and many others was Fred Halstead
Fred Halstead
Fred W. Halstead was a candidate for President of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party in 1968. His running mate was Paul Boutelle.Halstead played a very significant role in the movement against the Vietnam War...
, a World War II veteran and former leader of the garment workers union in New York City. Halstead was the 1968 Presidential candidate of the SWP who visited Vietnam in that capacity.
The SWP was also increasingly outspoken in its defense of the Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
n government of Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
and its identification with that government. A new leadership led by Jack Barnes
Jack Barnes
Jack Whittier Barnes is an American Communist and the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Barnes was elected the party's national secretary in 1972, replacing the retiring Farrell Dobbs. He had joined the SWP in the early 1960s as a student at Carleton College in Minnesota and...
(who became national secretary in 1972) made identification with Cuba an ever greater part of the politics of the SWP throughout the 1970s.
The party also published many of Leon Trotsky's works in these years through their publishing house, Pathfinder Press. Not only were the better-known writings reprinted, many for the first time since the 1930s, but other more obscure articles and letters were collected and printed for a wider audience than they had when first distributed. The expansion of the press also allow the SWP to host Intercontinental Press
Intercontinental Press
Intercontinental Press was a weekly news magazine produced on behalf of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International between 1963 and 1986. The magazine was founded as "World Outlook" in 1963 under the editorial direction of Joseph Hansen, Pierre Frank and Reba Hansen. A parallel edition in...
, the FI magazine which moved from Paris to New York in 1969, which later merged with Inprecor
Inprecor
Inprecor is a multilingual monthly Marxist magazine published by the reunified Fourth International. Its name is a contraction of International Press Correspondence and indicates that the magazine translates articles and letters from revolutionaries around the world.Inprecor was established by the...
.
1970s and new leadership
The growth of labour militancy in the early 1970s had an impact on the SWP and currents developed within it urging a reorientation of the party towards this militancy. One such current was the Proletarian Orientation Tendency, which included Larry TrainorLarry Trainor
Larry Trainor was a leading activist of the Socialist Workers Party in Boston and a member of the party's National Committee....
, which eventually dissolved itself.
Another tendency developed called the Internationalist Tendency (IT). The IT posed a greater challenge for the group's leadership, as the tendency agreed with the Fourth International's advocacy of guerrilla warfare as a "tactic on a continental scale" in Latin America. However, despite tensions between the SWP and the rest of the international, when the former expelled the IT the International refused to side with the tendency. The IT would disintegrate over the next few months, some of its supporters finding their way back into the SWP.
The international tensions developed further when the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency was established in 1973 by the SWP and its co-thinkers in order to contribute to the debate for the Tenth World Congress. It argued for a reversal of the Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
n guerrilla war
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
orientation adopted at the Ninth World Congress.
This period was the peak of the SWP's growth and influence. The party continued its involvement in the movement against the war in Vietnam, which peaked in 1970-71. The SWP also supported Chicano nationalism, including the Raza Unida Party
Raza Unida Party
Partido Nacional de La Raza Unida is an American political party centered on Chicano interests. The party was termed La Raza in reference to the Mestizo people. During the 1970s the Party campaigned for better housing, work, and educational opportunities for Mexican-Americans...
. It helped organize protests demanding legal abortion through the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition. With the mid- to late 70s decline of these movements and the end of the 1960s-1970s youth radicalization, SWP membership and influence went into decline.
In 1978, the SWP leadership decided that the key task was for party members to make a turn to industry. This turn entailed party members getting jobs in blue collar industries in preparation for, the SWP leadership projected, increasing mass struggles. The 1977-78 coal miners' strike and developments like Steelworkers Fight Back were among the events pointed to in arguing for this change in policy. Party members sought to get jobs in the same workplaces in order to work as organized "fractions", doing "communist political work" as well as union activity.
As a result, many members were asked to move and change jobs, often out of established careers and into low-paying jobs in small towns. Many of the older members with experience in trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
s resisted this 'colonization program', which upset their established routine in the unions, as did some of the younger members.
Internal affairs
Opposition to the "turn to industry" developed within the SWP. This opposition was not homogeneous and was itself beset by differences between different factions.A further factor in the growing divisions within the SWP was the move by Jack Barnes
Jack Barnes
Jack Whittier Barnes is an American Communist and the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Barnes was elected the party's national secretary in 1972, replacing the retiring Farrell Dobbs. He had joined the SWP in the early 1960s as a student at Carleton College in Minnesota and...
, Mary-Alice Waters
Mary-Alice Waters
Mary-Alice Waters is a socialist journalist and activist in the United States.Waters became involved in Trotskyist politics at a young age, and joined the Socialist Workers Party in the 1960s...
and others in the leadership away from the Trotskyist label. In 1982, Barnes gave a speech which was later published as Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist continuity today
Their Trotsky and Ours
Their Trotsky and Ours is a political book by the American Communist Jack Barnes, leader of the Socialist Workers Party. It is based on Barnes' speech and explains the SWP's view on Trotskyism. Barnes repudiated the traditional Trotskyist understanding of Permanent Revolution in favor of a view...
in which Barnes rejected Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution
Permanent Revolution
Permanent revolution is a term within Marxist theory, established in usage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky. The use of the term by different theorists is not identical...
arguing that it failed to sufficiently distinguish between the democratic and socialist tasks of a workers' revolution. Barnes argued that anticapitalist revolutions typically began with a "workers' and farmers' government" which initially concentrated on bourgeois-democratic measures, and only later moved on to the abolition of capitalism.
Barnes also argued that the "Trotskyist" label unnecessarily distinguished leftists in that tradition from leftists of other origins, such as the Cuban Communist Party, or the Sandinista National Liberation Front
Sandinista National Liberation Front
The Sandinista National Liberation Front is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish...
. He argued that the SWP had more in common with these organizations than with many groups calling themselves Trotskyist. The SWP has continued to publish numerous books by Trotsky and advocate a number of ideas commonly associated with Trotskyism, including Trotsky's analysis of "Stalinism".
The opposition factions continued to support the theory of permanent revolution, and the Trotskyist label: they anticipated that the SWP leadership was reassessing its place in the Fourth International. While declaring their support to the Cuban and the leftist Nicaraguan governments, they were more critical of the Castroist and Sandinista leadership. Additionally, they continued to oppose the "turn to industry".
One opposition group gathered around the Weinsteins on the West Coast, (with supporters elsewhere too), while a second group gathered around George Breitman
George Breitman
George Breitman was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a long-time editor of that organization's weekly paper, The Militant. Breitman also supervised and edited several important...
and Frank Lovell
Frank Lovell
Frank Lovell was an American communist politician.Lovell was born in Ipava, a town situated in the farming district of Illinois. Lovell studied psychology at the University of California in Berkeley...
. Together they formed an opposition bloc on the SWP's National Committee but in 1983 both groups were expelled. The opposition factions, having split from the SWP, formed new organizations. The grouping around the Weinsteins forming the San Francisco-based Socialist Action. The Breitman-Lovell group, after a time, formed the Fourth Internationalist Tendency
Fourth Internationalist Tendency
The Fourth Internationalist Tendency was a public faction of the Socialist Workers Party , formed after the 1983 expulsion from that organization of a group of supporters of the Fourth International. While the SWP was not formally affiliated with the International for legal reasons, it had until...
. Both groups described themselves as "public factions" of the SWP and set the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. Another group, mainly in Los Angeles, had been close to Breitman but did not agree to orient toward the SWP belonged briefly to Socialist Action but left to join the "regroupment" organization Solidarity
Solidarity (US)
In left-wing politics in the United States, Solidarity is a socialist organization associated with the journal Against the Current. Solidarity is an organizational descendant of International Socialists, a Trotskyist organization based on the proposition that the Soviet Union was not a "degenerate...
.
This was the most recent split or major faction fight in the SWP; the organization has experienced an unusually long period of internal peace since, although it has declined steadily in both its membership numbers and its political influence within the U.S. left. Numerous recent expulsions—sometimes of long-standing SWP veterans—have contributed to the membership decline. In 2003, the party sold its major headquarters building in New York City for $20 million and moved to another location in Manhattan. Party leaders Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters subsequently sold their West Village condominium for $1.87 million.
Party activities
The SWP's most high profile and controversial campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s was its Mark CurtisMark Curtis (SWP member)
Mark Curtis is a former member of the American Socialist Workers Party . Curtis was the subject of a high profile defense campaign by the SWP after he was charged and convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in 1988. The SWP and others of Curtis's defenders claimed that he had been...
Defense Committee, established after Curtis, an SWP activist and trade union organizer, was charged and convicted on burglary and rape charges in 1988. The party claimed that Curtis had been framed by police for his role in defending immigrant workers. Curtis was eventually paroled.
The SWP now focuses most of its energy on internal activities, such as fund-raising, the weekly Militant Labor Forum, and the distribution of Pathfinder books and The Militant. Its members are present in a handful of trade unions and it focuses most of its political energy towards defending immigrant rights and promoting Cuban solidarity.
The question of International affiliation
Due to legal constraints, the SWP ended its formal affiliation with the Fourth InternationalFourth International
The Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...
in the 1940s. It remained in close political solidarity with the Fourth International, however. The Socialist Workers Party broke formally with the Fourth International in 1990 though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since National Secretary Jack Barnes' 1982 speech, "Their Trotsky and Ours
Their Trotsky and Ours
Their Trotsky and Ours is a political book by the American Communist Jack Barnes, leader of the Socialist Workers Party. It is based on Barnes' speech and explains the SWP's view on Trotskyism. Barnes repudiated the traditional Trotskyist understanding of Permanent Revolution in favor of a view...
", which some view as signaling a break with Trotskyism. The SWP action followed the 1985 World Congress, and the SWP closed Intercontinental Press in 1986. The SWP's international formation is sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder tendency
Pathfinder tendency
The Pathfinder tendency is the unofficial name of a group of historically Trotskyist organizations that are politically and organizationally allied with the Socialist Workers Party of the United States and its perspective of solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Communist Party.The...
because they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore which sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press. In 1986, the party won a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
as a result of years of spying and disruption.
The party and presidential politics
The Socialist Workers Party has run candidates for President since 1948; it received its greatest number of votes in 1976, when its candidate, Peter CamejoPeter Camejo
Peter Miguel Camejo was an American author, activist and politician. In the 2004 United States presidential election, he was selected by independent candidate Ralph Nader as his vice-presidential running mate on a ticket which had the endorsement of the Reform Party.Camejo was a three-time Green...
, received 90,310 votes.
In the U.S. presidential election of 2004 the Socialist Workers Party ran Róger Calero
Róger Calero
Róger Calero is a Nicaraguan American journalist and one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. He was SWP candidate for President of the United States in 2004 and 2008, and for the United States Senate in New York in 2006....
for President and Arrin Hawkins
Arrin Hawkins
Arrin Hawkins is an American activist and political candidate. Hawkins ran as the vice presidential nominee of the Socialist Workers Party in the 2004 U.S. presidential election....
for Vice-President. It should be noted that both candidates were constitutionally unqualified for the positions (under Article II, section 1) because Calero is not an American citizen and Hawkins was 29 years old, with the minimum age being 35. James Harris
James Harris (politician)
James Harris is an African American communist politician and member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the party's candidate for President of the United States in 1996 receiving 8,463 votes and again in 2000 when his ticket received 7,378 votes...
and Margaret Trowe
Margaret Trowe
Margaret Trowe is an American Communist and women's rights activist. She was the 2000 United States Vice Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Workers Party; she also appeared as their VP candidate in 2004 in those states where the official candidate Arrin Hawkins was excluded from the ballot...
, the SWP's ticket from 2000, stood in on the ballot in some states where Calero and Hawkins could not be listed. The two tickets combined received over 10,000 votes. They were on the ballot in 11 states and the District of Columbia, more than any other socialist candidates. The vote total does not reflect the actual vote because of the unqualified status of the candidates. County clerks (in some states) and statewide Secretaries of State have discretion in reporting votes for ineligible candidates. The same situation obtained in 2008.
- 1948United States presidential election, 1948The United States presidential election of 1948 is considered by most historians as the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction indicated that incumbent President Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman won, overcoming a three-way...
—Farrell DobbsFarrell DobbsFarrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist and trade unionist.He was born in Queen City, Missouri where his father was a worker in a coal mine. They moved to Minneapolis, and he graduated from North High School in 1925. In 1926, he left for North Dakota to find work, but returned the following fall...
: received 13,614 votes. - 1952United States presidential election, 1952The United States presidential election of 1952 took place in an era when Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was escalating rapidly. In the United States Senate, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had become a national figure after chairing congressional...
—Farrell Dobbs: received 10,312 votes. - 1956United States presidential election, 1956The United States presidential election of 1956 saw a popular Dwight D. Eisenhower successfully run for re-election. The 1956 election was a rematch of 1952, as Eisenhower's opponent in 1956 was Democrat Adlai Stevenson, whom Eisenhower had defeated four years earlier.Incumbent President Eisenhower...
—Farrell Dobbs: received 7,797 votes. - 1960United States presidential election, 1960The United States presidential election of 1960 was the 44th American presidential election, held on November 8, 1960, for the term beginning January 20, 1961, and ending January 20, 1965. The incumbent president, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, was not eligible to run again. The Republican Party...
—Farrell Dobbs: received 60,166 votes. - 1964United States presidential election, 1964The United States presidential election of 1964 was held on November 3, 1964. Incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to office less than a year earlier following the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Johnson, who had successfully associated himself with Kennedy's...
—Clifton DeBerryClifton DeBerryClifton DeBerry was an American communist and two-time candidate for President of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the first black American in the 20th Century to be chosen by a political party as its nominee for President....
: received 32,327 votes. - 1968United States presidential election, 1968The United States presidential election of 1968 was the 46th quadrennial United States presidential election. Coming four years after Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won in a historic landslide, it saw Johnson forced out of the race and Republican Richard Nixon elected...
—Fred HalsteadFred HalsteadFred W. Halstead was a candidate for President of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party in 1968. His running mate was Paul Boutelle.Halstead played a very significant role in the movement against the Vietnam War...
: received 41,390 votes. - 1972United States presidential election, 1972The United States presidential election of 1972 was the 47th quadrennial United States presidential election. It was held on November 7, 1972. The Democratic Party's nomination was eventually won by Senator George McGovern, who ran an anti-war campaign against incumbent Republican President Richard...
- Linda JennessLinda JennessLinda Jenness was a Socialist Workers Party candidate for president of the United States in the 1972 election. She received 83,380 votes .In Arizona, Pima and Yavapai counties had a ballot malfunction that counted many votes for both a major party candidate and Linda Jenness. A court ordered that...
: received 83,380 votes. In 1972 in Arizona, Pima and Yavapai counties had a ballot malfunction that counted many votes for both a major party candidate and Linda Jenness. A court ordered that the ballots be counted for both. As a consequence, Jenness received 16% and 8% of the vote in Pima and Yavapai, respectively. 30,579 of her 30,945 Arizona votes are from those two counties. Some sources don't count these votes for Jenness. - Evelyn ReedEvelyn ReedEvelyn Reed was an American communist and women’s rights activist.In January 1940, she traveled to Mexico to see the exiled Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova. There, at the house of Trotsky in Coyoacán, Reed met the American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, leader of...
: received 13,878 votes. Ballot accessBallot accessBallot access rules, called nomination rules outside the United States, regulate the conditions under which a candidate or political party is either entitled to stand for election or to appear on voters' ballots...
: IndianaIndianaIndiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
, New YorkNew YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, and WisconsinWisconsinWisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...
- Linda Jenness
- 1976United States presidential election, 1976The United States presidential election of 1976 followed the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal. It pitted incumbent President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate, against the relatively unknown former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic...
—Peter CamejoPeter CamejoPeter Miguel Camejo was an American author, activist and politician. In the 2004 United States presidential election, he was selected by independent candidate Ralph Nader as his vice-presidential running mate on a ticket which had the endorsement of the Reform Party.Camejo was a three-time Green...
: received 90,986 votes. - 1980United States presidential election, 1980The United States presidential election of 1980 featured a contest between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, as well as Republican Congressman John B. Anderson, who ran as an independent...
- Andrew PulleyAndrew PulleyAndrew Pulley is an American politician who ran as Socialist Workers Party candidate for Vice President of the United States in 1972; at the time he was twenty years old, making him ineligible under the United States Constitution. Along with Presidential candidate Linda Jenness he received 52,799...
: received 40,105 votes. - Richard CongressRichard CongressRichard Congress was a candidate for United States President of the Socialist Workers Party. He was one of three candidates the party had that year, the others being Andrew Pulley and Clifton DeBerry. Matilde Zimmermann was the vice presidential candidate on all three tickets.Congress was on the...
: received 4,029 votes votes. Ballot accessBallot accessBallot access rules, called nomination rules outside the United States, regulate the conditions under which a candidate or political party is either entitled to stand for election or to appear on voters' ballots...
in Ohio. - Clifton DeBerryClifton DeBerryClifton DeBerry was an American communist and two-time candidate for President of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the first black American in the 20th Century to be chosen by a political party as its nominee for President....
- Andrew Pulley
- 1984United States presidential election, 1984The United States presidential election of 1984 was a contest between the incumbent President Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate, and former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate. Reagan was helped by a strong economic recovery from the deep recession of 1981–1982...
—Melvin T. MasonMelvin T. MasonMelvin T. Mason is an American politician who ran as Socialist Workers Party candidate for United States President in the 1984 United States presidential election...
: received 24,672 votes. - 1988United States presidential election, 1988The United States presidential election of 1988 featured no incumbent president, as President Ronald Reagan was unable to seek re-election after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Reagan's Vice President, George H. W. Bush, won the Republican nomination, while the...
—James "Mac" Warren: received 15,604 votes. - 1992United States presidential election, 1992The United States presidential election of 1992 had three major candidates: Incumbent Republican President George Bush; Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and independent Texas businessman Ross Perot....
—James "Mac" Warren: received 23,096 votes. - 1996United States presidential election, 1996The United States presidential election of 1996 was a contest between the Democratic national ticket of President Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee and the Republican national ticket of former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas for President and former Housing Secretary Jack...
—James HarrisJames Harris (politician)James Harris is an African American communist politician and member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the party's candidate for President of the United States in 1996 receiving 8,463 votes and again in 2000 when his ticket received 7,378 votes...
: received 8,463 votes. - 2000United States presidential election, 2000The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Republican candidate George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush , and Democratic candidate Al Gore, then-Vice President....
— James Harris: received 7,378 votes. - 2004United States presidential election, 2004The United States presidential election of 2004 was the United States' 55th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, the then-junior U.S. Senator...
- Róger CaleroRóger CaleroRóger Calero is a Nicaraguan American journalist and one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. He was SWP candidate for President of the United States in 2004 and 2008, and for the United States Senate in New York in 2006....
: received 3,677 votes - James Harris: received 7,411 votes
- Róger Calero
- 2008United States presidential election, 2008The United States presidential election of 2008 was the 56th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 2008. Democrat Barack Obama, then the junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama received 365...
- Róger Calero: received 5,151 votes
- James Harris: received 2,424 votes
SWP National Secretaries
- James P. CannonJames P. CannonJames Patrick "Jim" Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.Born on February 11, 1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, he joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911...
(1938–1953) - Farrell DobbsFarrell DobbsFarrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist and trade unionist.He was born in Queen City, Missouri where his father was a worker in a coal mine. They moved to Minneapolis, and he graduated from North High School in 1925. In 1926, he left for North Dakota to find work, but returned the following fall...
(1953–1972) - Jack BarnesJack BarnesJack Whittier Barnes is an American Communist and the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Barnes was elected the party's national secretary in 1972, replacing the retiring Farrell Dobbs. He had joined the SWP in the early 1960s as a student at Carleton College in Minnesota and...
(since 1972)
Prominent current and former members
- Martin AbernMartin AbernMartin Abern was a Marxist politician who was an important leader of the Communist youth movement of the 1920s as well as a founder of the American Trotskyist movement.-Early years:...
- Harry BravermanHarry BravermanHarry Braverman was an American Socialist, economist and political writer. He sometimes used the pseudonym Harry Frankel.Braverman was born on the 9th December 1920 in New York City...
- George BreitmanGeorge BreitmanGeorge Breitman was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a long-time editor of that organization's weekly paper, The Militant. Breitman also supervised and edited several important...
- Joel BrittonJoel BrittonJoel Britton is an American Communist and serves on the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. Britton is a longtime trade unionist having been a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union as well as a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union while working as a...
- James BurnhamJames BurnhamJames Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
- Peter CamejoPeter CamejoPeter Miguel Camejo was an American author, activist and politician. In the 2004 United States presidential election, he was selected by independent candidate Ralph Nader as his vice-presidential running mate on a ticket which had the endorsement of the Reform Party.Camejo was a three-time Green...
- Joseph Carter
- Steve Clarke
- Bert CochranBert CochranBert Cochran was an American Communist politician and author.Cochran was born in Poland in 1913 and came to the US at an early age. His birth name was Alexander Goldfarb. In the 1930s, Cochran attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he was recruited to the Trotskyist movement by Max...
- Jake CooperJake CooperJake Cooper was an American Socialist. He was active in the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 led by the Communist League of America and later became a member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a leading member of the SWP he was imprisoned under the Smith Act together with many other SWP...
- Stephanie CoontzStephanie CoontzStephanie Coontz is an author, historian, and faculty member at The Evergreen State College. She teaches history and family studies and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001-2004. Coontz has authored and co-edited...
- Clifton DeBerryClifton DeBerryClifton DeBerry was an American communist and two-time candidate for President of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the first black American in the 20th Century to be chosen by a political party as its nominee for President....
- Seth Dellinger
- Farrell DobbsFarrell DobbsFarrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist and trade unionist.He was born in Queen City, Missouri where his father was a worker in a coal mine. They moved to Minneapolis, and he graduated from North High School in 1925. In 1926, he left for North Dakota to find work, but returned the following fall...
- Hal DraperHal DraperHal Draper was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement and is perhaps best known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called...
- Raya DunayevskayaRaya DunayevskayaRaya Dunayevskaya was the founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism in the United States of America. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.-Biography:Of Jewish...
- James T. FarrellJames T. FarrellJames Thomas Farrell was an American novelist. One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and into a television miniseries in 1979...
- Fred FeldmanFred FeldmanFred Feldman is a Marxist activist in the United States, and a former leader of the Socialist Workers Party .Feldman came into political activity through the Student Peace Union at the University of Pennsylvania, which was led by supporters of the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance such as Feldman...
- Eric FlintEric FlintEric Flint is an American author, editor, and e-publisher. The majority of his main works are alternate history science fiction, but he also writes humorous fantasy adventures.- Career :...
- Clara FraserClara FraserClara Fraser was a feminist and socialist political organizer, who co-founded and led the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.-Early life:...
- Richard FraserRichard FraserRichard Fraser was a lyricist for the British progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer .He is notable for receiving credit for their 1970 debut album's third track, the hit "Knife Edge" and for his lyrical contributions to Pictures at an Exhibition...
- Albert GoldmanAlbert Goldman (politician)Albert Goldman was an American Trotskyist and lawyer to the labor movement.Born Albert Verblen in Chicago, he studied at Medhill High School and then the University of Cincinnati. He also studied to be a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College...
- Joseph HansenJoseph Hansen (socialist)Joseph Leroy Hansen , was an American Trotskyist and leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party.Born in Richfield, Utah, Joseph Hansen was the oldest of 15 children in a poor working class family, and he was the only one of them who could attend college. His father, Conrad J. Z...
- Asher Harer
- Sidney HookSidney HookSidney Hook was an American pragmatic philosopher known for his contributions to public debates.A student of John Dewey, Hook continued to examine the philosophy of history, of education, politics, and of ethics. After embracing Marxism in his youth, Hook was known for his criticisms of...
- C. L. R. JamesC. L. R. JamesCyril Lionel Robert James , who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J.R. Johnson, was an Afro-Trinidadian historian, journalist, socialist theorist and essayist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts...
- Martin KoppelMartin KoppelMartín Koppel is one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.-Early life:Before joining the staff of the SWP's paper The Militant in 1991, he was a steelworker in Chicago and member of the United Steelworkers of America union....
- Lyndon LaRoucheLyndon LaRoucheLyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. is an American political activist and founder of a network of political committees, parties, and publications known collectively as the LaRouche movement...
- Frank LovellFrank LovellFrank Lovell was an American communist politician.Lovell was born in Ipava, a town situated in the farming district of Illinois. Lovell studied psychology at the University of California in Berkeley...
- Sarah Lovell
- Sam MarcySam MarcySam Marcy was an American Marxist of the post-World War II era. In 1959, a group he led founded the Workers World Party, which continues to the present day....
- Kathleen MickellsKathleen MickellsKathleen Mickells is an American oil refinery worker, coal miner and activist with the Socialist Workers Party .Mickells was born in Omaha, Nebraska and worked at the Cumberland Mine in Greene County, Pennsylvania before being laid off in 1987. In 1986, she led a delegation of American women coal...
- Paul MontaukPaul MontaukPaul Montauk was an American communist and lifelong member of the Socialist Workers Party.Paul Montauk was born in Staten Island, New York, in 1922. His father was a jeweler and watch repairman, whose small business collapsed under the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s...
- Felix MorrowFelix MorrowFelix Morrow was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. In later years, Morrow left the world of politics to become a book publisher. He is best remembered as a factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement....
- George NovackGeorge NovackGeorge Novack was an American Communist politician and Marxist theoretician....
- Evelyn ReedEvelyn ReedEvelyn Reed was an American communist and women’s rights activist.In January 1940, she traveled to Mexico to see the exiled Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova. There, at the house of Trotsky in Coyoacán, Reed met the American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, leader of...
- Harry RingHarry RingHarry Ring was an American communist and a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party.Ring joined the communist movement in Newark, New Jersey in 1936, and he served on the SWP’s National Committee from 1954 to 1981...
- Olga RodriguezOlga RodriguezOlga Rodriguez is a Chicano activist and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States.Rodriguez first became active in the fight for Chicano rights in her home state of Texas, supporting the struggle to organize farmworkers in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1960s while a high...
- Norton Sandler
- Ted Selander
- Max ShachtmanMax ShachtmanMax Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...
- Ed ShawEd ShawEdward "Ed" Shaw was an American socialist and lifelong member of the Socialist Workers Party.Born in Zion, Illinois, on July 13, 1923, Shaw grew up in a family of working farmers. In his youth, he rebelled against the fundamentalist religious assumptions that surrounded him in Zion...
- Barry Sheppard
- Eric Simpson
- Carl SkoglundCarl SkoglundCarl Skoglund was a Swedish-American socialist, affectionately called Skogie by all his American friends and comrades. He was born in Dalsland and went to the United States in 1911. After spending some time in the I.W.W...
- Morris StarskyMorris StarskyMorris Joseph Starsky , an American political and social activist and philosophy professor, served as a tenured faculty member in the Arizona State University Philosophy Department until his termination by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1970.-Early career:Starsky graduated with a BA degree from...
- Arne SwabeckArne SwabeckArne Swabeck was an American Communist leader.Swabeck was born in Denmark and emigrated to the United States where he became one of the founding members of the Communist Party. In the late 1920s he was expelled from the party as a Trotskyist and worked together with James P. Cannon and other...
- Larry TrainorLarry TrainorLarry Trainor was a leading activist of the Socialist Workers Party in Boston and a member of the party's National Committee....
- Mary-Alice WatersMary-Alice WatersMary-Alice Waters is a socialist journalist and activist in the United States.Waters became involved in Trotskyist politics at a young age, and joined the Socialist Workers Party in the 1960s...
- Myra Tanner WeissMyra Tanner WeissMyra Tanner Weiss was an American Communist following Trotskyism, and a three time U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party....
- Murray Weiss
- David Loeb Weiss
See also
- Pathfinder MuralPathfinder MuralThe Pathfinder Mural is a work of art formerly located at 410 West Street in the New York City neighborhood known as the West Village. It was conceived of by artist Mike Alewitz in 1988 and painted as a collaboration among eighty artists from twenty nations, who painted it on the side of the...
- COINTELPROCOINTELPROCOINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
- Other parties called the Socialist Workers Party
- List of political parties in the United States
- List of Communist parties
Books
- Breitman, George (ed.) Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolutions, 1938-39. New York: Monad Press, 1982.
- Cannon, James P., The History of American Trotskyism: Report of a Participant. New York: Pioneer Press, 1944.
- Halstead, Fred, Out Now!: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War. New York: Monad Press, 1978.
- Jayko, Margaret (ed.), FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit Against Government Spying. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988.
- Myers, Constance Ashton, The Prophet's Children: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
- Sheppard, Barry, The Party: A Political Memoir of the Socialist Workers Party, 1960-1988. Volume 1: The Sixties. Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 2005.
- Wohlforth, Tim, The Prophet's Children: Travels on the American Left. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Press, 1994.
Archival material
- George Breitman Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner ArchivesTamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner ArchivesThe Tamiment Library is a research library at New York University that documents radical and left history, with strengths in the histories of communism, socialism, anarchism, the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and utopian experiments. The Robert F. Wagner Archives, which is also housed in...
at New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
, New York. Finding Aid. - James P. Cannon Papers. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. —Also available on microfilm.
- Frank Lovell Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University. Finding Aid.
- Max Shachtman Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University. Finding Aid.
- David Loeb Weiss Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University.
- Myra Tanner Weiss Papers. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University.
External links
- The Militant homepage. SWP official organ.
- Pathfinder Press homepage. SWP publishing house.
- James P. Cannon Internet Archive, Marxists Internet Archive.
- "SWP_USA" Yahoo! Group — An unofficial discussion board independent of any organization.
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections - Vietnam War Era Ephemera —Includes ephemera produced by the SWP.