Socialist Workers Party (US)
The Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. party is historically Trotskyist but these days is better described as Castroist. Their party-affiliated book publisher, Pathfinder Press, publishes several titles by Malcolm X, who spoke at some SWP forums after his break from the Nation of Islam. They also publish English translations of many books by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, as well as their newsletter The Militant.
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History
The U.S. Socialist Workers Party is historically rooted in the split in the international communist movement between Stalin and Trotsky, when the Communist Party USA expelled about 100 suspected Trotsky sympathizers in 1928, who formed a group called the Communist League of America under the leadership of James P. Cannon
The Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1939 presented the SWP with its first crisis leading to a party split. A large minority led by Max Schachtman regarded the Soviet Union as no longer being a "workers' state" worthy of defense. Simultaneously, the majority kept the doctrine that it was a "deformed workers' state" to be defended but reformed. The breakaway faction itself split into several groups, the largest of which became the International Socialists. Others from the split coalesced around the City University of New York, forming the core of the "New York Intellectuals" who became influential in the postwar era's social-democratic and neoconservative movements. The US's entry into World War II saw the leadership of the SWP jailed for their opposition to US entry into the war. Ranks were thinned by the military draft and a doctrine towards the war that proved unworkable.
Postwar
The early postwar years saw the ranks of the SWP swell to their largest numbers ever on a wave of labor militancy, before the purges of leftists from labor leadership that were soon to follow. The Cochrane faction left the SWP in 1953 over the viability of revolutionary strategy based on a Leninist vanguard party, concurrent with a doctrinal crisis within the Fourth International over related issues of party strategy. The Workers World Party followed Sam Marcy out of the SWP in 1959 over the SWP leadership's opposition to Maoism in China and to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both of which Marcy and his followers supported.
The 1960s saw a renaissance of the SWP through their role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, participation in the Civil Rights Movement, and significant role in organizing protests against the US intervention in Vietnam. However, doctrinal issues surrounding support for Cuba, and later over the party's stance towards movements based on ethnicity and gender, led to factionalism. A faction led by James Robertson disagreed with the party leadership over whether the Castro government was sufficiently pure to warrant defense. Robertson was expelled from the SWP in early 1964 and found the Spartacist League. Two Robertson followers, Tim Wohlforth
The SWP's attempt to graft New Left identity politics onto Old Left Marxist doctrine did not serve them well. It was seen by black and Hispanic nationalists as a white organization with a program diverging from their primary interest, while racial-essentialist approaches were failing to gain popularity among mainstream minority communities and alienating the American public at large. There was some success recruiting feminist and gay-rights activists; however, many of those cadres were in turn recruited out of the ranks of the SWP to radical gay and feminist ideologies seeing gender as the crux of a social revolution. The Freedom Socialist Party split in 1966 was a successful recruitment in of the Seattle branch to a "socialist feminism" ideology, which saw a nexus of black and feminist politics as the fundamental revolutionary force in the US. By the mid-1970s, the ranks of the SWP were waning while radical feminist and radical gay ideologies were nearing their peak, and the main arena for racial issues moved away from the realm of political protest towards legal advocacy and bureaucracy. David Thorstad
The SWP made one last attempt to return to its labor roots with a "turn to industry" in 1978, with an imperative for members to find industrial jobs and organize at the workplace. The attendant personal disruption alienated members, and the SWP suffered a further decline in membership. That was the SWP's last attempt to implement a strategy of organizing and action. It has since then been mainly concerned with internal functions, publications, and issues of doctrine. After years of status as the largest and most active Trotskyist organization in the US, the SWP formally ended its adherence to Trotskyist ideology in favor of Castroist ideology in 1983.
See also
- Socialist Workers Party - a party of the same name in Britain