Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary The Workers Party (WP) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States.
The tendency developed the view that the WP should rejoin the Trotskyist Fourth International due to the imminence of a pre-revolutionary situation.
[2] It militantly opposed the no-strike pledge that the Congress of Industrial Organizations had agreed to with President Franklin Roosevelt for the duration of the war.
Also, in the late 1940s, the important Black author James Baldwin began a friendship with Stan Weir and became influenced by the politics of the "Shachtmanites.
After a merger with a number of former members of the Young People's Socialist League in the early 1950s, including Michael Harrington, who had left the latter organization because its parent organization, the SP, was too inclined to support United States foreign policy during the Cold War, the SYL renamed itself the Young Socialist League.
After WWII Shachtman would attend the Second World Congress of the Fourth International as an observer, only to reject the organization as having "proved incapable of abandoning its role of an utterly ineffectual left wing of Stalinist totalitarianism and counter-revolution.
[9] It was the first group to use the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow," implying that its members actively opposed both capitalism and the states allied to the Soviet Union.
Harvey Swados’s 1970 novel Standing Fast focuses on a fictionalised version of the Workers Party; the character Marty Dworkin is based on Max Shachtman.