The WSPUS criticizes them for being reformist and for abandoning the long-term goal of building socialism in favor of maintaining the capitalist mode of production tempered by a welfare state.

[2] For instance, they criticize the Socialist Party USA for advocating policies like full employment instead of dealing with the structural issues of capitalism like questioning the need to retain wage labor in the first place.

[citation needed] The WSPUS maintains that the revolution must be carried out by a willing majority organized without leaders, capturing the state by means of delegates elected solely to carry out the wishes of the majority to destroy the state by replacing it immediately with democratic control of the means of production across the entire country and indeed the entire planet.

[5] Those leaving to found the new organization were encouraged by the rapid growth of the so-called impossibilist movement in Canada and were deeply discouraged by the growing trend towards reformism in the SPA.

[6] The group was initially headed by an immigrant from England named Adolph Kohn, who was later remembered by one factional opponent as a "mild-mannered, blue-eyed man with a vast memory" who was "textually brilliant in Marxist lore".

[7] Writing under the pseudonym John O'London, Kohn attempted to gather around him others opposed to the World War in Europe who felt that the pursuit of ameliorative reforms only served to bolster the capitalist system.

The Proletarian Party, headed by Scottish emigrant John Keracher, regarded the Soviet Union as a workers' state which needed defending.

The WSPUS was given a regular page in the Western Clarion, the weekly paper of the original (non-WSM) Socialist Party of Canada, a publication which circulated broadly in American Left-socialist circles.

Pressured by the Palmer Raids of January 1920 and threatened with trademark litigation by the SPA, the SPUS in the early 1920s as the Socialist Educational Society (SES).