Socialist Workers Party (US)

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The Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. party is historically Trotskyist but these days is better described as Castroist. Their party-affiliated book publisher, Pathfinder Press, publishes a number of titles by Malcolm X, who spoke at some SWP forums after his break from the Nation of Islam. They also publish English translations of many books by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, as well as their newsletter The Militant.

[edit] History

The U.S. Socialist Workers Party is historically rooted in the split in the international communist movement between Stalin and Trotsky, when the Communist Party USA expelled about 100 suspected Trotsky sympathizers who formed a group called the Communist League of America, under the leadership of James P. Cannon. CLA's main activity consisted of publishing The Militant newspaper. The slow growth and isolation of the movement induced its adherents to fuse with the American Workers' Party in 1934 and the Socialist Party in 1935. CLA members were instrumental in organizing the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 and grew to be a significant faction of the Socialist Party through their militant brand of labor organizing. After its adherents split from the Socialist Party in 1937, the Socialist Workers Party was founded with about 2000 members.

The Stalin-Hitler Pact presented the SWP with its first crisis leading to a party split. A large minority led by Max Schachtman regarded the Soviet Union as no longer being a "workers' state" worthy of defense, while the majority kept the doctrine that it was a "deformed workers' state" to be defended but reformed. The breakaway faction formed the International Socialists. The entry of the US into World War II saw the leadership of the SWP jailed for their opposition to US entry into the war. Ranks were thinned by the military draft and a doctrine towards the war that proved unworkable.

[edit] Postwar

The postwar years saw the ranks of the SWP swell to their largest numbers ever on a wave of labor militancy, before the purges of leftists from labor leadership that was soon to follow. The Cochrane faction left the SWP in 1953 over the viability of revolutionary strategy based on a Leninist vanguard party. The Workers World Party followed Sam Marcy out of the SWP in 1959 over the SWP leadership's opposition to Maoism in China and to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both of which Marcy and his followers supported.

The 1960s saw a renaissance of the SWP through their role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, participation in the Civil Rights Movement, and their major role in organizing protests against the US intervention in Vietnam. However, the central role of students in 1960s activism caused cultural and doctrinal drift within the SWP that alienated members who saw labor issues as central to SWP's strategy, causing several factional fights and splits as the decade wore on. To these factions the SWP was growing "opportunist," "petty bourgeois" and "diversionist" over its support for black and Hispanic nationalism (and for a brief while the Black Panther Party), feminism, and gay-rights issues. To the SWP leadership, these Old Left traditionalist factions were "workerist," "ultraleft," and "sectarian." The most significant splits were the ones led by Tim Wohlforth, whose faction founded the Workers League, and James Robertson, whose faction founded the Spartacist League. One follower of the Robertson split was Lyndon LaRouche (Lyn Marcus), who went on his own to teach Free University courses on Marxist theory at Columbia University, form the Labor Committee of the Columbia University student strike in 1968 (later a faction of SDS), and achieve fame as a megalomaniac conspiracy theorist. Wohlforth eventually went on to write a book titled "The Prophet's Children," a retrospective of the Trotskyist experience in which he attempted to digest its lessons, "separating the Marxist kernel from the Leninist husk." An exodus of more labor-oriented members followed the rejection of proposals "For a Proletarian Orientation" at the SWP convention of 1970.

The SWP's attempt to graft New Left identity politics onto Old Left Marxist doctrine did not serve them well. It was seen by black and Hispanic nationalists as a white organization with a program diverging from their primary interest, while racial-essentialist approaches were failing to gain popularity among mainstream minority communities and alienating the American public at large. There was some success recruiting feminist and gay-rights activists, however, radical feminist and radical gay groups, distinguished from mainstream feminist and gay rights activists by ideologies seeing gender as the crux of a social revolution, in turn recruited from the ranks of SWP. The Freedom Socialist Party split was a successful recruitment in 1966 of the Seattle branch to a "socialist feminism" ideology, which saw a nexus of black and feminist politics as the fundamental revolutionary force in the US, by Clara Fraser. By the mid 1970s the ranks of the SWP were waning while radical feminist and radical gay ideologies were nearing their peak and the center of gravity for black and Hispanic issues moved away from the realm of political protest towards the realms of legal advocacy and bureaucracy. David Thorstad, a former member of SWP, went on to found the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

The SWP made one last attempt to return to its labor roots with a "turn to industry" in 1978, with an imperative for members to find industrial jobs and organize at the workplace. The attendant personal disruption alienated members and the SWP suffered a further decline in membership. That was the SWP's last attempt to implement a strategy of organizing and action. It has since then been mainly concerned with internal functions, publications, and issues of doctrine.

[edit] See also

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