Workers Party (United States)
미국 노동자당(샥트먼)
A Third Camp Trotskyist party founded in April 1940 by Max Shachtman and others who split from the Socialist Workers Party. Rejecting Trotsky's view that the USSR under Stalin was still a 'degenerated workers' state', it opposed both the United States and the Soviet Union, and in 1949 it renamed itself the Independent Socialist League.
In depth
The party was founded by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland and rejected Trotsky's view of the USSR. Max Shachtman became its leader, and Hal Draper, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Irving Howe were among its members. Almost 40% of the SWP's membership left with the split, giving the new party about 500 members, and it never grew substantially.
From the start the party advocated a Third Camp perspective against both imperialist camps, and it soon analysed the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic collectivist mode of production. It was the first group to use the slogan 'Neither Washington nor Moscow'. By 1941 a minority led by James and Dunayevskaya, the Johnson-Forest Tendency, had come to see Russia as state capitalist; it left in October 1947 to rejoin the SWP. Grace Lee Boggs joined the party and worked in the Johnson-Forest Tendency.
During the Second World War members took industrial jobs opened by labour shortages, and the party militantly opposed the no-strike pledge the Congress of Industrial Organizations had given President Roosevelt. In 1949, recognising that it was far too small to call itself a party, it renamed itself the Independent Socialist League, which joined the Socialist Party–Social Democratic Federation in 1957 and dissolved the following year.