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The Socialist Workers Party is a small communist political party in the United States.
Origins
The socialist Workers Party was founded in 1938 by the Trotskyists of the former Communist League of America after its members had been expelled from the Socialist Party of America. Their political origins lay in the Communist Party USA. Its best known leader was James Patrick Cannon, who initially led the SWP along with Max Shachtman until a split between the two men in 1940.
The 1940 split in the SWP was centered on the question of the party's internal regime, but also involved a series of other questions such as the class nature of the Russian state and Marxist philosophy. The minority faction led by Shachtman formed the Workers Party after a dispute that centered on what position the party should adopt in the so called Winter War between Finland and the USSR. In many ways the subsequent history of the party can best be assesed through the many splits and factional struggles, or lack of such struggles, that have marked the organisation.
During World War II, a number of members were imprisoned under the Smith Act of 1941, including J. P. Cannon (see Smith Act Trials). However the party put into practice the so-called Proletarian Military Policy of opposing the war politically while arguing that their members of military age, which meant most of the membership, should go with their class into the military and attempt to transform the imperialist war into a civil war while fighting the Nazis. Although the members of the SWP kept a deliberately low profile during the war years the marine fraction of the party lost a number of its members while sailing in the extremely perilous convoys to Murmansk in an attempt to contact revolutionaries in Russia.
As a consequence of the repression they experienced during the war the SWP was quite cautious in its campaigning during this period. That many of their members were in the armed forces also had a detrimental effect on their ability to exploit the opportunities that existed. However in contrast to the rival Workers' Party of Max Shachtman they wrere unadventurous. One campaign that they did launch that seems to have failed due to a lack of energy on the part of the SWP was its campaign for a Labor Party. Problems caused as a result of the imprisonment of experienced leaders and the enlistment in the armed forces of many others mean that during the war years the editorship of The Militant passed through a number of hands.
Post-War Following the war the SWP and the Fourth International both expected that there would be a wave of revolutionary struggles such as accompanied the end of the previous war. This, however, failed to materialise despite an increase in the level of labor strikes in the USA between 1945 and 1948 with the end of the wartime pledge made by many union leaders not to strike for the duration. This did not mean there were not many strikes during wartime - there were many wildcat strikes during this period.
The end of the war also saw the reorganisation of the FI in which process the SWP played a major role. As part of this process, moves were made to heal the breach with Max Shachtman's supporters in the Workers Party (WP) and for the two groups to fuse. This eventually came to nothing. However some members of the SWP around Felix Morrow and Goldman grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the SWP's ultra-leftist attitude towards revolutionary policies and argued for the use of transitional politics as outlined by Trotsky in the Transitional Program which had been adopted by the Fourth International in 1938. Eventually they were to leave the SWP in a state of demoralisation and some joined the WP.
On the other hand a faction within the WP called the Johnson-Forrest tendency, CLR James (known as Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (Forrest), were impatient of the caution of the WP and considered that the situation could rapidly become pre-revolutionary. This led them to decamp from the WP and rejoin the SWP in 1947. This tendency had moved further away from the 'orthodox Trotskyism' of the SWP, which made for an uncomfortable presence. For example, they continued to hold the position that the USSR was a state capitalist society. By 1951, their presence in the SWP was ever more anomalous and most left. Dunayevskaya and her supporters eventually formed the News and Letters Committees in 1955 after splitting with CLR James, who was deported from the USA.
Cold War The party has also had a number of splits over the years. In the face of the Cold War and the accompanying repression of radical forces in the USA, one such split saw the departure of the Pabloite faction of Bert Cochran and Clarke who formed the Socialist Union which lasted until 1959. This 1953 opposition supported the positions of Michel Pablo the Secretary of the Fourth International. Singnificantly this schism saw the departure from the SWP of much of the layer of activists won during the struggles of the 1930s in heavy industry. This was represented as an affect of the demoralisation of this layer by the Cannon faction. But it also meant that from the early 1950s that the SWP was left without any real base in industry.
The next far less significant split was that of Sam Marcy's Global Class War faction which had called within the SWP for support of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party Presidential run in 1948 and was very supportive of the Chinese revolution. This faction ended up leaving the SWP in 1958 after supporting the suppression of the Hungarian Rising of 1956 contrary to the position held by most with Trotskyist tendencies. They went on to form the Workers' World Party.
Meanwhile throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the remaining membership of the SWP clung to its firmly held beliefs and grew older. Consequently the party membership shrank over these years from a post war high in 1948 until the tide began to turn in the early 1960s. The 1959 Revolution in Cuba however signalled a change in political direction for the SWP as it embarked on solidarity work through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The result was a small accretion of youth to the party's ranks and in the same period long time SWP leader Murry Weiss won another group of youth from the Shachtmanites as they joined the SPUSA. Many of the new recruits, however, were drawn from the student movement, unlike those who had led the party since the 1930s, and as a result the internal culture of the party began to change.
1960s Despite such growing signs of an end to the isolation which the group had endured during the McCarthyite period, it fell into a crisis in the early 1960s. This was in part because the leadership was unable to summon enough energy to satisfy the desire of the new younger members to engage in the Civil Rights struggles of those years as their own view of class conflict had been shaped by the rise of the industrial unions in the 1930s and they saw everything through that prism. There was also an international aspect to this internal dispute as the SWP turned back to cooperation with the European based International Secretariat of the Fourth International. Those youth members who dissented with the conservatism of the leadership naturally looked for allies in the international movement of their own and found them in Gerry Healy's SLL which claimed a political orthodoxy that appealed to the Americans.
A factional situation developed in the SWP that saw a number of small oppositional groups develop. One of the key issues was the Cuban Revolution and the SWP's response to it. Cannon and other SWP leaders such as Joseph Hansen saw Cuba as qualitatively different from the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. Their analysis brought them closer to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International from which the SWP had split in 1953. The SWP attempted to negotiate a reunification of the ISFI and the International Committee of the Fourth International leading to the creation in 1963 of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Several sections of the ICFI, including Gerry Healy's Socialist Labor League rejcted the merger and turned against the SWP leadership working with opponents within the party.
The most important faction opposing the SWP leadership's new line was the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) led by James Robertson and Tim Wohlforth which rejected the SWP's "capitulation" to Pabloism and opposed joining the USFI. They produced an analysis of the Cuba which was much more critical of the revolution. However, a split developed within this faction however between groups headed by the two men. Nonetheless both the RT and the Reorganised Minority Tendency were expelled to form the Spartacist (see Spartacist League), and the American Committee for the Fourth International (see Socialist Equality Party), respectively with the latter becoming aligned with Healy's SLL.
In the aftermath the Seattle branch also left to found the Freedom Socialist Party, after protesting about the suppression of internal democracy, as did Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss.
Like all left wing groups the SWP grew during the 1960s and experienced a particularly brisk growth in the first years of the 1970s. Much of this was due to its central involvement in many of the campaigns against the war in Vietnam. However it was also increasingly strident in its defence of the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro and its identification with that regime. A new leadership led by Jack Barnes (who became national secretary in 1972), after the end of the Vietnam War and the death of several of the older leaders, particularly Joseph Hansen at the beginning of 1979, made identification with Cuba an ever greater part of the politics of the SWP as throughout the 1970s. Initially this was partially concealed by the 'orthodox Trotskyist' positions that older members of the party developed in the pages of the groups publications. Particularly prominent in such writing was Joe Hansen, who edited the group's international bulletin, Intercontinental Press, which to many was the voice of the SWP. The part also published many of Leon Trotsky's works in these years through their publishing house, Pathfinder Press. Not only were the better-known writings reprinted, many for the first time since the 1930s, but other more obscure articles and letters were collected and printed for a wider audience than they had when first distributed.
1970s and new leadership The growth of labour militancy in the early 1970s had an impact on the SWP and currents developed within it urging a reorientation of the party towards this militancy. One such current was the Proletarian Orientation Tendency. Under pressure from the party leadership it dissolved itself however. But another similar tendency developed called the Internationalist Tendency (IT). The IT posed a greater challenge for the group's leadership, as it espoused the ideas of the European-based leadership of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. However, despite tensions between the SWP and USFI, when the former expelled the IT the latter refused to defend their allies. The IT would disintegrate over the next few months, some of its supporters finding their way back into the SWP.
This period was the peak of the SWP's growth and influence. Nonetheless, this growth had stalled in the late 1970s after the end of the Vietnam War and the organisation was at an impasse. Despite which the leadership, now based around a group formed around the figure of Jack Barnes (many recruited at Carleton College in the early 1960s), decided that the key task was for party members to make a turn to industry. This turn entailed party members getting jobs in blue collar industries in preparation for the coming mass struggles which Barnes argued were coming. The result was the movement of many members and their systematic uprooting often out of established careers and into low paying jobs in small towns. Many of the older members with experience in trade unions resisted this 'colonization program' as did younger members. In the meantime the group began to lose members.
Rejecting Trotskyism The result of this process and the leadership's increasingly rigid discipline was the development of opposition within the group. This opposition was not homogenous and was itself beset by differences between different factions.
A key factor in the growing divisions within the SWP was the move by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and others in the leadership away from Trotskyism, the ideology that had been the raison d'ętre of the SWP since its founding. In 1982, Barnes gave a speech which was later published as Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist continuity today in which Barnes rejected Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution arguing that it had been disproven by the process of the revolution in Cuba. Barnes also implicitly endorsed the theory of socialism in one country which had been assailed by Trotsky, again using Cuba as an example. This was the culmination of a move towards Castroism that had begun in the 1970s and indicated that the SWP was formally rejecting Trotskyism and was also a sign that Trotskyists were no longer welcome in the party.
One opposition group gathered around the Weinsteins on the West Coast, (with supporters elsewhere too), while a second group gathered around George Breitman and Frank Lovell. Together they formed an opposition bloc on the SWP's National Committee but in 1983 the Barnes-led leadership purged anyone not pledging support of the leadership. Those purged included almost every member of the SWP older than Barnes himself and has therefore been called the Age Purge. This act led to the loss of a third of the SWP membership.
Those purged swiftly regrouped and formed a number of groups. The grouping around the Weinsteins forming the San Francisco-based Socialist Action. The Breitman-Lovell group spent some time formed the Fourth Internationalist Tendency which set itself the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. A group, mainly in Los Angeles, that had been close to Breitman but did not agree to orient toward the SWP belonged briefly to Socialist Action but left to join with descendants of the Schachtman organization in Los Angeles and Detroit in the "regroupment" organization Solidarity. The FIT continued to direct its work towards the SWP for many years until they finally recognised the impossibility of their task and dissolved into Solidarity. Their journal Bulletin in Defense of Marxism was to continue as Labor Standard. Meanwhile, Socialist Action lost a section of their leadership when supporters of Alan Benjamin formed Socialist Organizer, in solidarity with Pierre Lambert's international tendency. More recently they have broken into two groups one continuing as Socialist Action, the other taking the name of the Socialist Workers Organisation which publishes a magazine called Socialist Viewpoint.
The Socialist Workers Party formally left the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1990 though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since Barnes' 1982 speech. In the late 1980s, the SWP's supporters internationally reconstituted themselves in each country as under the name of the Communist League after either taking over national sections of the USFI and purging Trotskyists or splitting from USFI sections. The SWP's international formation is sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder tendency as they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore which sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press.
The Socialist Workers Party has run candidates for President since 1948; it received its greatest number of votes in 1976, when its candidate, Peter Camejo, received 90,310 votes. In 1976, the party won a lawsuit against the FBI as a result of years of spying by the FBI.
The SWP's most high provile and controversial campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s was its Mark Curtis Defense Committees, established after Curtis, an SWP activist and trade union organizer, was charged and convicted on burglary and rape charges in 1988. The party claimed that Curtis had been framed by police for his role in defending immigrant workers.
The party has declined to a membership of several hundred in recent years and, in 2003, sold its headquarters in New York City.
2004 Presidential Election The Socialist Workers Party ran Roger Calero for President and Arrin Hawkins for Vice-President. It should be noted that both candidates were technically unqualified for the positions because Calero is not an American citizen and Hawkins is 29 years old, with the minimum age being 35. They received 11,947 votes in the Presidential Elections of 2004.
They also ran several candidates for Congress.
SWP National Secretaries
Presidential candidates from 1948
Other leading members
External links See also: COINTELPRO, Other parties called the Socialist Workers Party, List of political parties in the United States List of Communist parties | 
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