[1] In mid-1937 the Joerger and Salemme group held initial discussions on fusing with the Marxist Policy Committee (which itself later joined the Revolutionary Workers League).
[2] Later that year, in the lead-up to the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, and while Salemme and Joerger were still with the Trotskyists around James Cannon, a debate arose in American Trotskyism on the nature of the Soviet Union.
The Salemme-Joerger document, entitled 'The U.S.S.R. and Stalinism', declared that the 'victory of Stalin in the party, the adoption of the theory of 'Socialism in One Country', the expulsion of the Left Opposition and the crushing of the workers' democracy and workers' control, signified that at the head of the U.S.S.R. there ruled a counter-revolutionary group which ruled in the interests of a new Russian bourgeoisie.'"
The document went on to declare that the Soviet Union was "capitalist and fascist" and that revolutionaries must "stand for no 'material aid' to the Russian regime in time of war nor to its allies.
"[3] They also attacked Trotsky as a "juridical cretin" for insisting that nationalized property meant that Stalinist Russia remained a workers state.