Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party

One important forerunner of the organized Left Wing Section of 1919 was the magazine The Class Struggle, founded by Ludwig Lore of the New Yorker Volkszeitung.

Lore's magazine, which first saw print in May 1917, related current events in Europe and discussed matters of import written by various adherents of the Zimmerwald Left with an eager English-speaking audience.

[3] The majority founded the National Council of the Left Wing and planned to take retake the socialist organization and convention.

The council members included Louis Fraina, C. E. Ruthenberg, I. E. Ferguson, John Ballam, James Larkin, Eamon MacAlpine, Benjamin Gitlow, Maximilian Cohen, and Bertram Wolfe.

[5] At the August 31 opening of the Socialist party convention the Reed-Gitlow group tried to enter and present their credentials, but were promptly thrown out of the hall with the help of the police.

Ludwig Lore's magazine The Class Struggle, established in 1917, was an early theoretical journal of the organized Left Wing in the Socialist Party.
John Reed and Ben Gitlow's Left Wing magazine Voice of Labor was later made the labor paper of the Communist Labor Party.