Socialist Workers Party (United States)
미국 사회주의노동자당
An American socialist party founded in 1938 by Trotskyists expelled from the Socialist Party of America in 1937. For most of its history it was the largest Trotskyist organisation in the United States, and it took part in founding the Fourth International. In the 1980s it turned from Trotskyism towards Castroism, and it survives as a small party.
In depth
The party traces its origins to the Communist League of America, founded in 1928 by members expelled from the Communist Party USA for supporting Trotsky. In 1934 the League merged with A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States, which in 1936, following the “French Turn” endorsed by Trotsky, entered the Socialist Party of America through individual applications. When the Socialist Party expelled the Trotskyists wholesale in summer 1937, they left with a large part of its youth organisation and founded the Socialist Workers Party at a convention in Chicago on 31 December 1937. Both the English and Russian sources give 1938 as its founding year. Its best-known leader was James P. Cannon, and Max Shachtman was another major figure until the 1940 split.
In 1940 the Soviet–Finnish war divided the majority under Trotsky and Cannon, who held that the Soviet Union was still a “workers’ state” to be defended, from a minority under Shachtman and James Burnham, who rejected this. The minority took almost 40% of the membership and 80% of the youth organisation and formed the Workers Party. According to the Russian source the party was a section of the Fourth International from 1938 to 1990, though from 1940 it was formally not a section in order to avoid the Voorhis Act. During the Second World War Cannon and other leaders were imprisoned under the Smith Act. The Johnson–Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya rejoined in 1947, and most of its members left around 1951.
The party declined and was isolated during the McCarthy period, but grew again through solidarity work with the Cuban Revolution, the student movement of the 1960s and the movement against the Vietnam War; Malcolm X spoke at its public forums. In 1963 it helped bring about the reunification of the Fourth International. According to the Church Committee report of 1976, the FBI had investigated the party since 1940 and launched a COINTELPRO operation against it in 1961, including up to 92 break-ins at its offices; the party won a lawsuit against the FBI in 1986.
Under Jack Barnes, national secretary from 1972, the party identified ever more closely with Cuba, and in 1978 it decided on a “turn to industry”, sending members into blue-collar jobs. In 1982 Barnes rejected the theory of permanent revolution in his speech Their Trotsky and Ours, and the party drifted away from the Fourth International. Today it concentrates on distributing the weekly The Militant, selling Pathfinder Press books and running candidates.