Socialist Workers Party (United States)

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.

Historian Constance Myers writes that "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable", but "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface" later.

[17] Cannon went to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to establish another new newspaper, Labor Action, targeted to trade unionists and Socialist Party 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.

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.

[19] The meeting organized the faction on a permanent basis, electing a National Action Committee of five to "coordinate branch work" and "formulate Appeal policies".

[21] There was no action to expel the Trotskyist Appeal faction, but pressure continued to build along these lines, egged on by the Communist Party's increasingly vehement denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism.

The convention passed a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level.

At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had concluded that the Trotskyists had joined the Socialist Party not to make it stronger, but to capture it for their own purposes.

As editor of the Trotskyist movement's ongoing theoretical magazine, The New International, Shachtman delivered the first official report to the gathering, dealing with the political situation in the United States.

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 labor movement's problems and the role of the new organization in the unions, with Cannon delivering the primary report.

[9]: 793–810 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.

Problems caused by some experienced leaders' imprisonment and many others' enlistment in the armed forces meant that the editorship of The Militant passed through a number of hands during the war.

[citation needed] The SWP was active in supporting labor strikes that occurred despite the wartime "no-strike pledge" and protests against racist discrimination during the war, such as A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement.

Indeed, revolutions did occur in 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.

[citation needed] 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.

The Cuban Revolution signaled a change in the SWP's political direction as it embarked on pro-Castro "solidarity work" through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

In the same period, longtime SWP leader Murry Weiss won another group of youth from the Shachtmanites as they joined the Socialist Party of America.

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.

[9]: 923–929 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.

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.

The SWP advocated that the antiwar movement call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops and focus on organizing large, legal demonstrations for this demand.

[9]: 875–876 The international tensions developed further when the SWP and its co-thinkers established the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency in 1973 in order to contribute to the debate for the Tenth World Congress.

This turn entailed party members getting jobs in blue-collar industries in preparation for, the SWP leadership projected, increasing mass struggles.

Barnes argued that anticapitalist revolutions typically began with a "workers' and farmers' government" that initially concentrated on bourgeois-democratic measures and only later moved on to the abolition of capitalism.

[citation needed] 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.

Another group, mainly in Los Angeles, had been close to Breitman, belonged briefly to Socialist Action, and left to join the "regroupment" organization Solidarity.

SWP members are present in a handful of trade unions and take part in such activities as promoting Cuban solidarity, joining striking workers' picket lines, actions against racism and police brutality, opposing US imperialist wars, defending the Bundy family, speaking out against attacks on democratic rights, and promoting the creation of a broad-based labor party.

FBI officials testified to the Church Committee that the SWP has "not been responsible for any violent acts nor has it urged actions constituting an indictable incitement to violence".

[citation needed] The SWP broke formally with the Fourth International in 1990, though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since Barnes's 1982 speech "Their Trotsky and Ours", which some view as signaling a break with Trotskyism.