The most important faction opposing the SWP leadership's new line was the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) led by James Robertson and Tim Wohlforth that rejected the SWP's "capitulation" to Pabloism and opposed joining the USFI. Membership Office For membership enquiries phone: 020 7840 5602 email: membership@swp.org.uk. phone: 020 7840 5601 [23], 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. To subscribe to Socialist Worker The organization has experienced an unusually long period of internal peace since, although it has declined steadily in both its membership numbers and its political influence within the American left.

The end of the war also saw the reorganization of the Fourth International in which the SWP played a major role. The majority faction said this was contrary to Lenin's concept of democratic centralism and that disagreements within the SWP should be debated only internally. The opposition factions, having split from the SWP, formed new organizations. The SWP experienced many other factional conflicts and splits in its history, but this was the largest and foreshadowed many features of those to come. Both groups described themselves as "public factions" of the SWP and set the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. Party members sought to get jobs in the same workplaces in order to work as organized "fractions", doing "communist political work" as well as union activity. We think that the problems in society stem from a system - capitalism - that prioritises profit above all else. The SWP's attempt at entryism into the growing civil rights movement, which continued uninterrupted out of World War II, could not fully offset these trends and the SWP experienced a period of decline and isolation. While criticizing the "reactionary role which the AFL leadership has played", Cannon declared that "our party...takes a clear-cut position in favor of the earliest and completest possible unification of the AFL and the CIO, and also the hitherto unaffiliated Railroad Brotherhoods".[24]. Like this debate, most later factional disputes within the SWP centered on different attitudes toward revolutions in other countries.

[5] Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the party, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow, youth leader and ex-Jay Lovestone supporter Herbert Zam and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman. phone: 020 7840 5630 [13], Prior to the March convention, the Trotskyist Socialist Appeal faction held an organizational gathering of their own in Chicago, with 93 delegates gathering on February 20–22, 1937. It also maintains Pathfinder Press. The SWP was also increasingly outspoken in its defense of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro and its identification with that government. As a result, many members were asked to move and change jobs, often out of established careers and into low-paying jobs in small towns. 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. 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. This opposition was not homogeneous and was itself beset by differences between different factions. He declared: It is entirely inconceivable that American imperialism can succeed in resisting the inexorable tendencies that are pulling it into the vortex of the coming world war. Interactive controls allow you to compare particular states. Socialist Workers Party's homepage. The Post Office refused to mail some issues of The Militant and threatened to cancel its third-class mailing permit, citing objections to its articles calling for violent overthrow of the government. In 1986, the party won a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a result of years of spying and disruption.[27]. 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.[17]. phone: 020 7840 5656 email: isj@swp.org.uk phone: 020 7840 5602 Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium, Introduction: labor and radical newspapers history and geography, Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California Campaign, Votes for SP candidates for president, governor, and congress by county, 1904-1948, Socialist Activities by States and Regions, Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium | University of Washington. To contact the monthly magazine, Socialist Review

Frank Lovell Papers.

United action between the Clarity and Appeal groups was not forthcoming and an emergency meeting of Vincent Dunne and Cannon was held in New York with leaders of the various factions including Thomas, Jack Altman and Gus Tyler of Clarity. Their analysis brought them closer to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI) from which the SWP had split in 1953. The industrial department produces leaflets around various disputes, gives help and advice about being a socialist at work, and organises activity in the trade unions. LeBlanc, Paul; Bryan Palmer, and Thomas Bias (eds.). One of the key issues was the Cuban Revolution and the SWP's response to it. If slow, refresh the page.

The minority faction led by Shachtman eventually split away almost 40% of the party's membership as well as its youth organization, the Young People's Socialist League, forming the Workers Party.[25]. The 1940 split in the SWP followed an internal factional debate over the party's internal government, the class nature of the Russian state and Marxist philosophy and other questions. We stand against all forms of exploitation, bigotry and oppression. After his assassination, the SWP had limited success in forming alliances with his followers and other black nationalists. Much of this was due to its involvement in many of the campaigns and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. [19] On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization—the Socialist Workers Party. Curtis was eventually paroled, but he was later arrested in Chicago on prostitution-related charges and then expelled from the SWP. The international tensions developed further when the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency was established in 1973 by the SWP and its co-thinkers in order to contribute to the debate for the Tenth World Congress. [11], 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. 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.

phone: 020 7840 5620

Concentrated almost exclusively in New York City and Minneapolis, the CLA did not have more than 100 adherents in 1929. The party claimed that Curtis had been framed by police for his role in defending immigrant workers. One such current was the Proletarian Orientation Tendency, which included Larry Trainor, which eventually dissolved itself.

He argued that the SWP had more in common with these organizations than with many groups calling themselves Trotskyist.

However, despite tensions between the SWP and the rest of the international, when the former expelled the IT the International refused to side with the tendency.

A further factor in the growing divisions within the SWP was the move by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and others in the leadership away from the Trotskyist label. 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. To make payments Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University. 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. They were on the ballot in 11 states and the District of Columbia, more than any other socialist candidates. The SWP action followed the 1985 World Congress and the SWP closed Intercontinental Press in 1986. Due to legal constraints, the SWP ended its formal affiliation with the Fourth International in the 1940s. 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. [3] This suggestion was dismissed as "poppycock" by SP Executive Secretary Clarence Senior, but the seed of the idea of joint action had been planted.[4]. "Left Wing Delegates Found Socialist Workers Party at Convention in Chicago," pg.