Workers World Party
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Workers World Party
Founded 1959
Headquarters New York, New York
Political ideology Communism;
Marxism-Leninism
Political position Fiscal: Far-left
Social: Far-left
Color(s) Red
Website Workers World Party
Workers World Party (WWP) is a Communist party in the United States, founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy.[1] Marcy and his followers split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them Marcy's group's support for Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948, the positive view they held of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong, and their defense of the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, all of which the SWP opposed.
The WWP describes itself as a party that has, since its founding, "supported the struggles of all oppressed peoples". It has recognized the right of nations to self-determination, including the nationally oppressed peoples inside the United States. It supports affirmative action as absolutely necessary in the fight for equality. As well, it opposes all forms of racism and religious bigotry." Initially the WWP was confined to the Buffalo, New York area, where it had constituted the Buffalo and other smaller branches of the SWP, like Youngstown, Ohio, but expanded in the 1960s. During the Civil Rights Movement the WWP had a youth movement, "Youth Against War and Fascism", which opposed the Vietnam War. Workers World and YAWF were noted for their consistent defense of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground along with Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Puerto Rican Independence movement. Workers World Party was an early advocate of gay rights as well, and remains active in this area of struggle today.
The WWP has published a weekly newspaper since 1959 titled "Workers World".
Contents [hide]
1 Ideological background and platform
2 Activities and organizational structure
3 Presidential candidates
4 Disagreement with other leftists
5 Split
6 References
7 External links
8 Further reading
[edit]
Ideological background and platform
Ideologically, the WWP is orthodox Marxist-Leninist. The party's Trotskyist origins are reflected in much of Sam Marcy's early literature. However, Marcy also continued to uphold the USSR as a socialist state until the very end. When the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party was formed, the WWP included a friendly headline directed to them, "Welcome, Comrades!" in Workers World newspaper. The Provisional Organizing Committee replied by telling them, "Trotskyism is Counter-Revolution and Nothing Else!". Following this, "virtually all mention of Trotsky vanished forever from its pages."[2] These things led some individuals and organizations to accuse both Marcy and the party of being "Stalinist," though Marcy was always critical of Stalin's leadership.
The party was also not simply a "pro-Soviet" organization (i.e. simply following the line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Marcy firmly criticized Khrushchev for starting the Sino-Soviet split and called for the unity of all of the socialist states at the time (i.e. the Warsaw Pact countries, China, Yugoslavia, Albania and the DPRK).[2] This notion of supporting all of the socialist states and calling for a united socialist bloc, rather than simply following the line of one of the large, ruling Communist parties (e.g. Chinese or Soviet), was what made the WWP unique during the Cold War era, and independence remains a defining trait of the party.
[edit]
Activities and organizational structure
The WWP has organized, directed or participated in many coalition organizations for various causes, typically anti-imperialist in nature. The International Action Center, which counts many WWP members as leading activists, founded the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) coalition shortly after 9/11, and has run both the All People's Congress (APC) and the International Action Center (IAC) for many years. The APC and the IAC in particular share a large degree of overlap in their memberships with cadre in the WWP. In 2004, a youth group close to the WWP called Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) was founded.
The WWP lists regional offices in some major US cities. The party receives donations and contributions as the source of its funding, while volunteers/cadres run the day to day operations of the party. The party is led by an internally elected secretariat. Currently, the Secretariat is made up of six people: Deirdre Griswold, Larry Holmes, Fred Goldstein, Monica Moorehead, Sara Flounders, and Teresa Gutierrez.
The WWP has participated in presidential election campaigns since the 1980 election, though its effectiveness in this area is limited as it has not been able to get on the ballots of many states. The party also has run some campaigns for other offices. One of the most successful was in 1990, when Susan Farquhar got on the ballot as a US Senate candidate in Michigan and received 1.3% of the vote. However, the party's best result was in the 1992 Ohio US Senate election, when the WWP candidate received 6.7% of the vote.[3]
[edit]
Presidential candidates
1980 - Deirdre Griswold and Gavrielle Holmes
1984 - Larry Holmes (or in some states Gavrielle Holmes) and Gloria LaRiva
1988 - Larry Holmes and Gloria LaRiva
1992 - Gloria LaRiva and Larry Holmes
1996 - Monica Moorehead and Gloria LaRiva
2000 - Monica Moorehead and Gloria LaRiva
2004 - John Parker and Teresa Gutierrez - also endorsed by Liberty Union Party of Vermont
2008 - The WWP endorsed Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party's presidential candidate.[4]
[edit]
Disagreement with other leftists
Not all groups, organizations and parties on the left agree with the WWP's political positions or tactics. This is seen in disagreements over analysis of whether or not a particular country is socialist (e.g. Cuba or the People's Republic of China) and also positions historically held by the party (e.g., support for Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia and Hungary). It is also seen in disagreements over WWP calls for solidarity with governments that it sees as being socialist, anti-imperialist, or any country facing the threat of being attacked by the United States.
The WWP also faces opposition from ideological groups that are critical of other Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist parties. On the political left, this criticism comes from anarchists, social democrats and the liberal left. The political right is also often opposed to any communist party or socialist organization. When the WWP was playing a large role in organizing anti-war protests before the US attack on Iraq in 2003, various newspapers and TV shows attacked the WWP specifically.[5]
[edit]
Split
In 2004,[6] the San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C. branches of WWP left almost in their entirety to form the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The ANSWER coalition aligned itself with the PSL and the Workers World Party then founded the Troops Out Now Coalition.
To date, neither party has officially given any reason for the split. Some comment that the reaon may have been to do with the topic of revolution.[7]
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Freedom Road Socialist Organization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FRSO Logo from frso.org.
FRSO logo from freedomroad.org .
As many of the Maoist-oriented groups formed in the United States New Communist Movement of the 1970s were shrinking or collapsing, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization was formed in 1985 to try to solidify some of these groups into a single organization that would have some longevity.
The component groups of the FRSO saw ultraleftism as the main error of the New Communist Movement and attempted to reverse what they saw as that movement's excessive divisiveness and sectarianism. FRSO was founded by a merger of two organizations - the Proletarian Unity League and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters in 1985, and then a subsequent fusing with the Organization for Revolutionary Unity in 1986. Freedom Road later absorbed other groups too, including the Amlcar Cabral-Paul Robeson Collective in 1988 and the Socialist Organizing Network in 1994.
Freedom Road supports self-determination, up to and including independence, for African Americans in the Black Belt Region of the U.S. South and Chicanos in the U.S. Southwest. Much of the theory regarding this comes from the African American Communist Harry Haywood, as laid out in resolutions at the Comintern in 1928 and 1930. Freedom Road's position on the national question is a defining feature of its politics.
In 1999, FRSO split into two competing organizations, each retaining the organization's name. Each of these groups considers itself to be the only legitimate Freedom Road Socialist Organization.Contents [hide]
1 The 1980s
2 1989-1991
3 The 1990s
4 The 1999 Split
5 Freedom Road Socialist Organization - the 'freedomroad.org' group
5.1 FRSO (freedomroad.org) Post-Split Congresses
5.2 FRSO (freedomroad.org) Publications
6 Freedom Road Socialist Organization - the 'frso.org' group
6.1 FRSO (frso.org) Post-Split Congresses
6.2 FRSO (frso.org) Publications
7 External links
7.1 Freedom Road Socialist Organization (frso.org)
7.2 Freedom Road Socialist Organization (freedomroad.org)
[edit]
The 1980s
In the 1980s, members of Freedom Road and its predecessor organizations worked to build the Rainbow Coalition, and supported both of Jesse Jackson's campaigns for the presidency of the United States (1984 and 1988). They also worked on the successful campaign to get African-American progressive Harold Washington elected as mayor of Chicago in 1983 and reelected in 1987.
In the 1980s FRSO also played an important role in the U.S. student movement. Particularly FRSO played a role in leading the Progressive Student Network (PSN), a national, multi-issue, progressive student activist organization.
From the 1980s through the mid-1990s, Freedom Road published a magazine called Forward Motion, which previously had been published by the Proletarian Unity League, one of FRSO's predecessor organizations.
[edit]
1989-1991
FRSO played a role in the anti-war movement that emerged in 1990 in opposition to the Gulf War. FRSO also helped build the reproductive rights / abortion rights movement in this period, including the massive 1989 demonstration in Washington DC.
In response to the fall of Eastern European governments, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, two distinct positions began to emerge within Freedom Road on how to assess the socialist countries. One position saw the events of 1989-1991 as indicative of a deep crisis in Marxism that required rethinking of basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism. The other position continued to assess the experience of socialist countries as essentially positive, and saw their defeats as the result of revisionism, not as a crisis of Marxism itself. This side continued to identify itself as Marxist-Leninist. This internal division solidified throughout the 1990s until the organization split in 1999.
[edit]
The 1990s
In 1994 the Socialist Organizing Network (SON) merged into FRSO. SON was formed out of the disollution of the League of Revolutionary Struggle in the late 1980s, and included those who had been in LRS that still considered themselves Marxists (most of the LRS leadership had rejected Marxism when they decided to disband the LRS).
The merger between FRSO and SON technically marked the creation of a new organization, as at the time it was seen as a merger of two equal organizations into something new, rather than SON being incorporated in FRSO. Therefore for a brief time the merged organization was called "Freedom Road / Socialist Organizing Network", including both organizations' names, with the possibility existing that the merged organization would adopt an entirely new name. A new name never came to fruition, so the name reverted back to "Freedom Road Socialist Organization". But the 1994 FRSO Congress, at which the FRSO/SON merger was formalized, was referred to as the First Congress of FRSO/SON.
Socialist Organizing Network's publication Moving Forward was published by FRSO for a short period after the merger.
FRSO continued to sporadically publish Forward Motion during the 1990s.
In 1998, FRSO's Chicago District and Minnesota / Madison District began to publish a Midwest regional newspaper called Fight Back!.
[edit]
The 1999 Split
In 1999, FRSO split into two groups, each retaining the organization's name. For a time after the split the two identically-named groups were identified by their respective publication's name — Freedom Road Magazine (which was started by the left refoundationist group shortly after the split) and Fight Back! Newspaper (hence "Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Freedom Road]" and "Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Fight Back!]"). The parenthetical terms are not used by either group to describe itself - both groups consider themselves to be the only legitimate Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
For the remainder of this article, the two groups will be identified by their website address in order to remain objective, as neither group accepts any of the parenthetical qualifications of their name. So Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Freedom Road] is now referred to as FRSO (freedomroad.org), and Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Fight Back] is now referred to as FRSO (frso.org).
The two groups split principally over the proposal by a section of FRSO's membership in 1999 that FRSO adopt a Left Refoundation strategy. The Left Refoundation strategy was advocated by those who saw Marxism as in deep crisis. The aim of the statement and strategy was to further elaborate a response to the "crisis of socialism". It called for the construction of "a new type of political party" to unite with advanced sections of the masses, stressing collaboration across the left over strict adherence to Marxism-Leninism. The FRSO (freedomroad.org) group were the proponents of the Left Refoundation statement and strategy while the FRSO (frso.org) group rejected it, characterizing it as an abandonment of Marxism-Leninism.
[edit]
Freedom Road Socialist Organization - the 'freedomroad.org' group
Freedom Road (freedomroad.org) continues to uphold the line FRSO adopted in 1991 (prior to the split) encapsulated by its organizational document, "On the Crisis of Socialism". This document was adopted in light of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in China in 1989. It stressed an interpretation of Marxism-Leninism as a scientific ideology of socialist revolution rather than as an orthodoxy or dogma. The document restated FRSO's support of the dictatorship of the proletariat while clarifying its line against the interpretation of this concept as a "massive repressive state apparatus over and above the people." The latter interpretation, the group argues, lead to counter-revolutionary tendencies taking hold in the Soviet bloc states and in China after capitalist restoration. According to an article in its magazine ("Toward a Critical Reassessment of Maoism") this is a problem it also sees in "Stalinian Marxism" or Stalinism.
FRSO (freedomroad.org) continues to uphold FRSO's pre-split line supporting full self-determination for the Black and Chicano/a nations in the South's Black Belt Region and Southwest (Aztlan) respectively. Its theoretical materials stress the "intersections" of these struggles, with each other and with the struggles of feminism, LGBT liberation, and the labor movement; that is, oppressors and forms of oppression and goals that they hold in common. FRSO (freedomroad.org) argues that such "intersections" highlight the necessity of building a united front of the movements of the multi-national working class and those of oppressed communities and nationalities, toward the aim of revolution. It has summed up this line as "Organizing All the Oppressed To End All Our Oppressions."
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FRSO (freedomroad.org) Post-Split Congresses
FRSO (freedomroad.org) held organizational Congresses in 2000 and in 2003. The 2003 Congress produced the document FRSO/OSCL's Strategy for a New Historical Period. This document states that, "The main task of socialists in this period is to win a significant minority of the US population to oppose the program of planetary military control, or empire, which Bush and company are implementing. We must win a subset of this significant minority to be fully anti-imperialist. Anti-empire and then anti-imperialist practice — both of which include opposition to white supremacy within the US — is the key link for building a socialist movement in the US." 1
In 2006, FRSO (freedomroad.org) began to officially call itself "Freedom Road Socialist Organization / Organizacin Socialista del Camino para la Libertad", using both the English and Spanish names together. In an abbreviated manner the group refers to itself to as "FRSO/OSCL" or "Freedom Road/El Camino".
[edit]
FRSO (freedomroad.org) Publications
FRSO (freedomroad.org) began publishing Freedom Road Magazine in 2001. They ceased publication of it in 2003 after publishing three issues. At that time they declared they would focus more on web-based publications and flyers and pamphlets. They have not published a regular newspaper or magazine since 2003.
[edit]
Freedom Road Socialist Organization - the 'frso.org' group
The Freedom Road group that publishes Fight Back! Newspaper is associated with the website frso.org. FRSO (frso.org) continues to explicitly uphold Marxism-Leninism, is organized according to democratic centralism, and upholds an anti-revisionist line. FRSO (frso.org) actively maintains friendly relations with many Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations around the world.
FRSO (frso.org) continues to uphold FRSO's pre-split line on the African-American and Chicano national questions, supporting self-determination for the African-American nation in the Black Belt South and the Chicano nation in the Southwest.
FRSO (frso.org) bases itself on the strategy of forming a strategic alliance between the oppressed nationalities and the multi-national working class. FRSO intends to build toward the creation of a single, multinational, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Communist party in the U.S.
Unlike the Left Refoundationist group, FRSO (frso.org) continues to uphold Joseph Stalin as one of the "principal theorists" of Marxism-Leninism, along with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong. FRSO (frso.org) recognizes Cuba, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and China as socialist countries. It is also close to the Workers Party of Belgium (WPB) and a participant in the WPB's annual International Communist Seminar -- one of two U.S.-based groups to attend in 2006, along with Workers World Party. They support national liberation movements such as those led by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the FARC-EP. FRSO's solidarity with the national liberation movements in Colombia and Palestine have been a defining feature of the organization in the period since the split in FRSO.
FRSO (frso.org) is active in the new Students for a Democratic Society.[1]
[edit]
FRSO (frso.org) Post-Split Congresses
FRSO (frso.org) held organizational Congresses in 2001, 2004, and 2007.
At the 2001 Congress, FRSO (frso.org) adopted a new version of their main Unity Statement, since the pre-split version did not explicitly mention Marxist-Leninism.
At the 2004 Congress, FRSO (frso.org) produced a new statement on the National Questions in the U.S., which they said, "represents a concluding step in placing our organization on a Marxist-Leninist basis."2
At the 2007 Congress, FRSO (frso.org) released a document titled "Class in the U.S. and Our Strategy for Revolution".3 They stated that this document would be the first piece of a larger organizational political program, the other parts of which are still in the process of development. Freedom Road has historically not had an organizational program, instead having a "Unity Statement". Historically it is more common for communist parties and organizations to have a program. At the 2007 Congress, FRSO (frso.org) also released a document titled "The Movement Against the War in Iraq: A New Period and Our Tasks."4
According to their website, "The members of Freedom Road are very active in movements fighting for justice, particularly in labor, oppressed nationality, anti-war and anti-imperialist, and student movements."5
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Progressive Labor Party (United States)
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(Redirected from Progressive Labor Party (USA))
Progressive Labor (PL)
Formation 1961/1965
Type communist party
Purpose/focus global communist revolution followed immediately by a working class-ruled, moneyless society, with policy to be administered by hundreds of millions of workers through Party locals worldwide, coordinated through several tiers of membership meetings and forums
Location United States of America, Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan, Greece
Membership unknown; in the thousands
Website
http://progressivelabor.890m.com/The Progressive Labor Party (originally the Progressive Labor Movement and often referred to as PL) is a transnational communist party based in the United States. It was formed in the fall of 1961 by members of the Communist Party USA who felt that the Soviet Union had betrayed communism and become revisionist and state capitalist. Founders also felt that the CPUSA was adopting unforgivably reformist positions, such as peaceful coexistence, turning to electoral politics and hiding communist politics behind a veneer of reform-oriented causes.
The party advocates a "fight directly for communism" that includes limited aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat but virulently rejects the standard conception of the socialist economic transition-stage as a mistake of the 'old movement'. It has also stated numerous times and in numerous contexts, chiefly in regards to lesser evil, how "workers must never again share power with class enemies." To accomplish its goal of communism, the party says it seeks to recapture the power and influence that the 1930s-era CPUSA once had — namely, of being the largest and most politically influential communist party in the country — and to combine that influence with its mix of New Left-tinged communist thinking.
Accordingly, PL's greatest point of pride is how much it considers itself to have evolved in a positive direction away from the old communist movement. It constantly criticizes many aspects of the history of communism, and also criticizes itself in relation to how closely current policies may resemble past failed ones, which it calls "right opportunism." While still taking cues from the past revolutionaries it admires, PL sees itself as being at the forefront of a new type of working class communist liberation that will truly carry the revolution through to fruition for the first time. It also espouses a unique approach to the issue of the Communist International, saying that instead of separate communist parties in each country, the revolutionary organization should be one monolithic, multiracial, cross-cultural PLP, with branches and collectives all over the globe. To that end, while its strongest and most active concentrations are New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California, the party has several small sections in various countries, including Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, and Pakistan.Contents [hide]
1 Early history of the party
2 Changes in thought, direction, and approach
3 Present-day activities
4 Notes
5 Further reading
6 Historic PLP publications
7 External links
[edit]
Early history of the party
As it broke away from the CPUSA, PL made it clear that it wanted to advocate communist revolution openly and aggressively among the working class. Recruitment increased as the Civil Rights Movement intensified: though it started as several score based on the East Coast early on, PL then became inspired enough by the Cuban Revolution to wind up with many of its student-aged members going to Havana and break the travel ban. Defiance of the ban resulted in a congressional investigation before the House Un-American Activities Committee at which the students banged on desks and heckled HUAC, shouting pro-communist slogans and generally causing too much disruption for the proceedings to continue. These actions prompted protests from other groups that would ultimately destroy HUAC's ability to hold hearings at all.
PL also founded the campus-based May 2 Movement, which organized the first significant march against the Vietnam War in New York City in 1964. But once the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) came to the forefront of the U.S. leftist activist political scene in 1965, PL dissolved M2M and entered SDS, working vigorously to attract supporters and to form party clubs on campuses.
Within a few years, PL had become the largest communist faction within SDS and a major player in the student movement's internal politics. Their politics were received with either disgust or admiration within SDS, but no one denied their massed presence and vigorous work in working class neighborhoods. When a New York City Police Department policeman, Gilligan, killed an unarmed black youth in Harlem, the nieghborhood erupted in intense violence, and PLP led these riots and its leaders were arrested and arraigned for this activity.
Against that politically polarizing backdrop within the already intense worldwide movement against social injustice, various anti-PL SDS factions took to developing their own interpretations of communist ideology and formed what it named the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), while PL, in its own right, was busy organizing its supporters into the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) from 1966-69. The competing SDS factions did not get along peacefully; clashes between them were chronic and bitter, and would ultimately result in an irrevocable split of SDS into separate organizations and, shortly thereafter, the expiration of SDS itself.
By the middle of the sixties, PL was arguing that its experiences from the Harlem rebellion onward had slowly convinced them to abandon advocacy of ethnic nationalism as a politically appropriate route to workers seizing state power. In early 1969 PL came out openly with an organization-wide document called Revolutionaries Must Fight Nationalism, a document claiming that all nationalism, both nation-state-based nationalism and ethnic nationalism among oppressed minorities, was ultimately reactionary — that it was akin to identity politics at home, like with the Black Panther Party, and weakened any communist character of national-liberation struggles abroad, like with the Vietnam War. The new position was greeted with open hostility and even rage among most of the non-PL-supporting SDS, especially RYM, who interpreted it as anti-working class and even implicitly racist and refused to accept it. PL's attempted explanations that it was the political, not the personal, side of nationalism that it was rejecting were also refused. The rage on RYM's end and defense of the position on PL's end could not, and did not, hold the overall organization together for long.
In the end, the PL/WSA wing did indeed win majority support at the 1969 SDS national convention in Chicago; RYM, as it turned out, had teamed with the Black Panther Party to engage in deceptive tactics in the conference which deflated their political reputation and lessened the political impact of the split. However, PL alone could not lead SDS, and its wing of the organization buckled and collapsed. The general crisis of the entire United States New Left by 1975 only accelerated that failure, and as tensions increased PL's remaining campus members and supporters were sometimes known to engage in particularly heated shouting matches and even occasional mutually-provoked fistfights with members of rival groups like former SDS leaders the Weathermen and Chicano nationalists the Young Lords.
The party also suffered the departure of several significant collectives from its general organization at that time. It didn't become inoperable or insignificant but it shrank became more fractious even as it ratcheted up its work. According to this chronology, "the majority of the Boston chapter had left [PLP] in 1974" and in April 1977 "70% of the Bay Area chapter of PL" also left the organization, "just about the only remaining one with significant mass work" (O’Brien, Five Retreats). Meanwhile, some of the party's more widely influential members drifted away as well, including Bill Epton, PL's vice chairman and Harlem branch leader, who presumably could not reconcile his own politics to that of PL's rejection of nationalism in 1969.
Though in the 1960s the party was widely regarded as the torch-bearer of Maoism within SDS, it had never really seen itself as a hard-line follower of Mao Zedong; indeed, even early on, PL's political line differed sharply from Maoism on fundamental points. It was briefly the subsidized fraternal party to China, but broke that relationship in 1967 and reacted particularly harshly to the news of Mao meeting with Nixon in 1972, denouncing Mao as revisionist. Claims to Maoism in the United States thereafter passed to other groups, most notably the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. Briefly in the early 1970s, PL continued to offer limited tacit support to the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in a fraternal party relationship.
[edit]
Changes in thought, direction, and approach
In the early 1980s PL went beyond opposing nationalism and began to more aggressively develop new political positions that were radically different from any other known version of Marxism-Leninism. Chief among these was the argument that socialism, the accepted transition-phase between capitalism and communism in Marxist theory, was the primary reason behind the reversal of workers' power in Russia and China and should be abandoned. While seeming excessively radical to some, this position in fact flowed logically from the party's prior rejection of Mao's concept of New Democracy, dismissed by the party as a reactionary "three-stage theory" of first New Democracy, then socialism, then communism. With PL's subsequent rejection of the socialist stage as equally unnecessary and reactionary, PL's proletarian struggle was reframed as a "fight directly for communism" wherein these intermediate stages would be shunned in favor of widespread understanding and acceptance of fully communist ideology among the masses from the outset.
To PL, such a strategy of mass participation in communist politics necessitates that current party members build true, deep, honest friendships with workers, rather than viewing such workers simply as potential recruits. In this vein, it advocates "basebuilding," meaning that members should get stable jobs that keep them in touch with the working class — teaching in public school as opposed to private, for example, or working in a welfare office as opposed to a day spa — and should enjoy everyday lives while gradually attempting to win their co-workers, friends and family to respect and join the party.
In terms of its organization, PL has replaced the classic "cadre" conception of a communist party with that of a "mass party", by which it means that the party should not be an elite of "professional revolutionaries" but should be composed of, by, and for the whole working class, where everyone has full knowledge and appreciation of communist principles and action so that they do not allow the party leadership structure to become corrupt. Also, members are cautioned not to necessarily expect revolution in their lifetimes, but to build for it anyway. The party still sees the need for a Red Army and an armed populace to defend the new communist society they envision from attack by resurgent ruling classes, and they utilize the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to refer to this necessity. However, since it rejects socialism, PL's usage of the term today differs starkly from usage by other communist groups, who generally consider the dictatorship of the proletariat to be synonymous with the classic conception of socialism.
Other than its fight directly for a communist political and economic system, perhaps the biggest change to come from its steep changes in political line is PL's current belief in a complete and total abolition of money and the wage system immediately upon the seizure of state power by the working class. After PL's revolution, cash and credit money and all forms of market-based and profit-based exchanges of all types would immediately cease (or if the world were already in shambles due to world war, would simply not be restarted). Members argue that wage differences based on type of work and the retention of a certain amount of competitiveness and elitism under socialism was what led it to turn back into capitalism with time. They see the immediate abolition of money, wages, and other market society elements as an approach that would more easily enable workers to adopt a sense of communist culture, ethics, and morality. Meanwhile, PL fiercely opposes the Theory of Productive Forces espoused by past communists, which it points out placed more emphasis on achieving abundance in socialist societies than it did on actually winning the working class to communist ideology and practice, particularly in the cases of the Great Leap Forward and the Five Year Plans. PL argues that communism should have been the glue that held these societies together, rather than abundance. In part, the party states:
Who is to say what "abundance" really is? Many working-class people in the U.S. probably live at a higher standard of living than Marx might have predicted -- better health care, longer life span, shorter workday, indoor plumbing, electricity, cars, etc. All of those material things constitute "abundance" on one level, yet we know that it is not enough, because we know of the potential for a better world. We also know that most of the world doesn't even have a fraction of what many U.S. workers have. But even if the whole world lived at this relatively "abundant" level, we would still be fighting to smash the system. The "abundance" by itself does not, and cannot, eliminate selfishness and class divisions.
– Communist Economics, Communist Power (1982)
The party operates on the standard Leninist principle of democratic centralism; generally, members are permitted to leave or enter the organization as best suits them, though this is obviously dependent on the type of work they are doing, the length of time they've been doing it, and how politically practical it is to stay or to leave, whether for the party collective, the individual's political base, or the individual him/herself. Regardless, no part of PL has had any known history of harassing or threatening ex-members or of trying to convince current members deeply dissatisfied with the party's direction to stay.
PL members are of the opinion that the political and economic choices of Stalin extend back to Lenin's New Economic Policy and were ultimately endemic to the Soviet Union's entire history — i.e., the history of socialism and its concessions to capitalism, which in PL's view cannot lead to communism. Therefore, they say, regardless of the leader in question, and regardless of whether or not s/he made good political advances in the country or towards the communist movement as a whole (which they believe Stalin did, especially against the Nazis), mistakes were made that were common to all of those leaders, because the faulty theory of socialism was common to all of them. PL attacks the cult of personality and any "Great Leader" status as anti-working class, and pledges that the elimination of the socialist stage, the retention of the armed dictatorship of the working class to defend against a comeback by the ruling classes, and "confidence in the working class" from the beginning that they can fully understand and utilize openly communist ideas collectively, without having to look to a great figure (or figures) for guidance, will signal much deeper and more profound strides towards communism than socialism could ever have hoped to achieve. Like all groups descended from Maoism, however, PL supports a positive interpretation of Stalin's legacy. Most members, while allowing that "errors" were made, expressly deny the view of him by mainstream scholars as mass murderer and tyrant, claiming that his leadership helped defeat fascism, that the numbers killed by the policies in his era were far fewer than the many millions widely accepted, and that the rest resulted from a combination of the Russian Civil War, famine, and World War II. Typically, PL also defends killings unrelated to these factors as ultimately justified to protect the Soviet Union's proletarian dictatorship against spies, Fifth column elements, counterrevolutionaries, and other class enemies.
United front and popular front strategies, members say, have been proven wrong despite all valiant attempts to make them work by forces genuinely fighting for communism. PL alleges that such forces' alliances with "lesser-evil" bosses and/or fake-left groups for short-term gains—, cited by the Spanish Civil War, the assassination of Salvador Allende, and other examples, has been one of the main weaknesses of the old communist movement. Because of this, PL prefers to steadily strengthen its own political standing and recruitment via its basebuilding strategy, rather than focus energy on participation in (or creation of) leftist coalitions, as it sees most other groups claiming Marxism doing.
The party says its ideas and organizational skills were decisive in the street battle it led in Boston in 1975 that broke apart the briefly-influential mass anti-desegregation busing group Restore Our Alienated Rights. In the late 1960s and early 1970s PL's "academic" target was Arthur Jensen, and through the 1990s it continued in that vein by repeatedly and forcefully disrupting speakers and conferences promoting scientific racism, which it saw as coming back into vogue at that time with books like The Bell Curve. This activity was largely carried out through the PLP front group, International Committee Against Racism (InCAR). In one famous incident, at an academic conference in 1977, members of the InCAR poured a pitcher of water on sociobiologist E. O. Wilson's head while chanting "Wilson, you're all wet".[1]
On the circumstances of revolution, PL is quite steadfast. It believes that the primary contradiction in the world today is—unfortunately—between various groups of competing imperialists for world domination, or "inter-imperialist rivalry," rather than between workers and bosses, or (as Maoists claim) between imperialism and national-liberation movements. It recognizes the weakness of the Radical left at the present stage in history and notes that nationalism has presently replaced communism as the driving force in the worldwide popular left. But the PLP simultaneously sees an inexorable economic and political decline of the U.S. versus other capitalist powers, like China and the EU, and dwindling of necessary imperial resources around the world like oil. The party thinks that cutthroat competition over such resources will inevitably lead to a third world war. They assert that such a war, while it will bring much suffering and death for workers, will also be the catalyst for a great new communist revolution, provided enough people are won to the party's ideas before and during such a conflict.
In line with its anti-nationalist politics, while firmly denouncing the "fascist" policies of the State of Israel, PL also criticizes both the Palestinian intifada and the Iraqi insurgency because of what it sees as these movements' reactionary nature; that the most they will do is put another capitalist government in power and establish new domination by local bosses, and dependency on non-US imperialists such as the European Union.
And in response to the current worldwide economic crisis, the PLP has continued its overall fight against the ideas and policies of the US ruling class, organizes workers into mainstream unions from which it then tries to lead wildcat strikes, berates cops and community policing strategies, and unreservedly criticizes Barack Obama for being yet another example of the rulers fooling the people with an impressive-seeming figurehead, in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton (the latter of whose "workfare" policies it had mercilessly blasted as racist "slave labor").
The party upholds what some might consider a purist vision of a mass-based communism, one that it claims was the true spirit of the Cultural Revolution sabotaged by Mao's cult of personality, reactionary elements within the Communist Party of China, and Mao's own political weaknesses. It believes it "stands on the shoulders of giants" but can also learn a lot from their mistakes, "to get it right the next time."
Members and leaders peg the active membership of the party to be somewhere in the lower thousands, though it is not known if this estimate includes members in countries other than the U.S., or members in the military forces and other non-public work. Generally, there is a consensus that "members lists" or a general knowledge of specific or general membership size among participants is both unnecessary and dangerous to the party's internal security.
[edit]
Present-day activities
May Day 2006
Today, at least in the United States, the party is most widely known among the general public for its willfully confrontational and often violent stance of militant anti-fascism against groups like the Klan and the Nazi movements. Whenever an organized opposition to a racist or fascist rally has not yet been planned, PL will often organize and lead one. The party takes open and intense pride in being the "only organization publicly known for advocating both communism and militancy" in the US. It is also active in anti-police brutality work, public health, public schools, and various types of basic industry, including Boeing. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 in Washington, D.C. has an open PL member who was its president for one term and still exercises substantial influence and leadership in the Local.
Rebuilding in New Orleans has also become a staple of PL's yearly "Summer Project" work in the months of July and August, particularly among US East Coast collectives.
Recently, PL has made tentative, low-key moves to examine the possibility of a relationship with the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany.
The party makes a point of celebrating May Day with public marches every year, on the Saturday closest to May 1 to accommodate 5-day-per-week working schedules. This closest-Saturday tradition means that PL's May Day rally sometimes, but not often, falls on May 1 itself. The three major centers for the march are always in the party's most active cities, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, though smaller supporting marches sometimes occur in less prominent cities and towns. Internationally, PL supporters typically take part in larger May Day events as contingents.
Its biweekly newspaper is Challenge and its Spanish counterpart Desafo, as well as an annual theoretical magazine, The Communist.
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The U.S. Marxist-Leninist Organization or USMLO is a minor anti-revisionist communist party in the United States. Born out of the MLP-USA's splt with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), USMLO is the current U.S. referent to the CPC(M-L) . The group publishes Voice of Revolution. Like the CPC-ML at that time, it was Hoxhaist.
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Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
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The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP, USA), known originally as the Revolutionary Union, is a Maoist Communist party formed in 1975 in the United States. The RCP states that U.S. imperialism will never peacefully end, and that the only way for people to liberate themselves is through Communist revolution.
The Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) and other collectives had been rooted in the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM II) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society after the latter fell apart in 1969. There were also discussions with several other Marxist-Leninist groupd in the short-lived National Liaison Committee. The party is led by its elected National Chairman and primary theoretical spokesperson, Bob Avakian. It is one of the few surviving direct descendants of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s.
Though not necessarily so when compared with similar parties in the more general revolutionary-communist movement, such as those rooted in Maoism that are now "post-Maoist", or those who look to other leaders (or to none) for their communism, the RCP, when straightforward "Maoism" as it was originally defined is considered, is indisputably the biggest, most active, and most widely-recognized group in the U.S that advocates this.
Part of its influence can be seen in the numbers of groups it has spawned in recent decades. RCP members and supporters have been at the forefront of groups Refuse and Resist, founded by C. Clark Kissinger; October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation; La Rsistencia; No Business As Usual; the anti-war groups Not in Our Name and World Can't Wait; affiliated youth groups the Attica Brigade, Revolutionary Student Brigade and the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade; and its network of "Revolution Clubs". The RCP also runs Revolution Books, a bookstore and publishing house based in New York City.
Young supporters join Revolution Clubs under the slogans "humanity needs revolution and Communism" and "fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution." Historically, one of the group's most notable actions was raising the Red Flag over the Alamo Mission in San Antonio on 20 March 1980. This was done by Damian Garcia, who was killed a month later, 22 April 1980, in a Los Angeles housing project. The RCP claims his murder was a result of his actions at the Alamo, and alleges LAPD involvement. Another notable action was when a member of the RCP's youth organization, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, burned a United States flag at the Republican National Convention in 1984, leading to the Supreme Court case known as Texas v. Johnson.
The RCP enthusiastically supported the 1992 sometimes-violent Los Angeles social unrest in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdicts as a "rebellion", and then-LAPD chief Daryl Gates went so far as to allege that the RCP was explicitly involved in the riots, something that actually echoed the NYPD's similar conviction about the Progressive Labor Party's involvement in the 1960s Harlem Rebellion, which that organization was proven to have led. Los Angeles has long been one of the RCP's larger and more active branches, given the party's California roots. William "Mobile" Shaw was until recently its leader.
As a result of criminal indictments stemming from a protest against Deng Xiaoping at the White House in 1979, Bob Avakian fled the United States. Due primarily to this, the RCP is active in both the United States and Western Europe. The protest, known colloquially as the Deng Demo, was part of an attempt to "realign" the international communist movement o that it recognized that socialism had been defeated in China, and that a capitalist-oriented leadership had seized power.
The RCP helped found the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, an association of revolutionary communist parties and organizations from Afghanistan to Italy. The RCP has both defended and criticized fellow RIM participants leading People's War, including the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The RIM is a significant fraction of the international communist movement that sees the socialist period as one of continuing class struggle, with the role of a vanguard party in government to bring the lower classes increasingly into the administration of society as a whole.
Major RIM parties, including the RCP and the CPN-M, argue that while the Soviet Union was essentially genuinely socialist under Stalin's government, power-induced "absolutism" nevertheless hindered the ability of the masses to rule, and to replenish the truly revolutionary CPSU ranks over time.
Avakian in particular says that communists must acknowledge the real history, with its victories as well as its mistakes, and "do better next time". Advocates for Avakian's "new synthesis" of communism contend that this synthesis has advanced the communist project in three areas: philosophy, politics and the strategic conception of how one would actually make revolution in a country like this. [1].Contents [hide]
1 Origins
2 Views on the United States
3 RCP today
4 Avakian's "Promotion and Popularization"
5 Activities
6 References
7 External links
7.1 Related links
7.2 RCP support websites
7.3 Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade websites
7.4 Archives
7.5 RCP publications
7.6 Critical opinions
[edit]
Origins
Bob Avakian was one of many activists in The Sixties who turned to communist ideas and began organizing in the Bay Area of California. H. Bruce Franklin, Stephen Charles Hamilton, and Bob Avakian together formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, or BARU, which was subsequently able to absorb a series of similar local collectives which had developed out of Students for a Democratic Society. The new nationwide structure allowed BARU to change its name to simply the Revolutionary Union.
The RCP claims that of the various groups coming out of SDS, it was the first to seriously attempt to develop itself both at the theoretical level, with the publication of "Red Papers 1", and at the practical level, by sinking roots into working class communities and struggles. Notable was Avakian's organizing work at a Chevron plant in the Bay Area as an organizing model to link the insurgent student movements with working people in struggle. This turn to 1970s "point of production" organizing was a broader phenomenon which was expanded throughout the Midwest and into the Appalachian coal fields during the wildcat upsurges through 1980.
Such rapid expansion was not without its problems, however, and in 1971 H. Bruce and Jane Franklin led a section of the RU to fuse with the Venceremos Organization, advocating immediate urban guerrilla warfare and then dissolving shortly thereafter.
After a series of unsuccessful unity meetings with nationality-based communist organizations called the National Liaison Committee, including the Black Workers Congress and Maoist-inspired Young Lords Party, the RU formed the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975. The new organization stated its goal was the building of a "party of a new type," inducing some other Maoists to criticize it for revisionism. The organization had a strong "workerist" orientation concentrated upon mass line, and many members became engaged in point of production organizing and trade union struggle.
Tensions over this "workerist" tendency came to a head within the RCP in 1977 around whether China remained a communist country after the death of Mao Zedong and subsequent leadership struggles in the People's Republic of China between the Gang of Four and Hua Guofeng. Bob Avakian developed the analysis and led the forces within the RCP that declared that there had been a coup in China following Mao’s death and the new Chinese leadership was taking China on a capitalist road. The RCP's Vice Chairman, Mickey Jarvis, along with an estimated 30-40% of the membership and most of the Revolutionary Student Brigade formally left the RCP to form the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWHq). In subsequent polemics, the RCP has dubbed the RWHq faction "Mensheviks" after Lenin's opponents in the RSDLP.[2]
Among older members of the RCP, there is a high proportion of Vietnam War-era veterans, including participants in the VVAW-AI. Joe Veale, the spokesperson for the Los Angeles area branch, was a former member of the Black Panther Party. C. Clark Kissinger, a writer for Revolution and prominent activist associated with the RCP, was a national secretary of SDS.
The RCP was controversial for being one of the few groups in the American left that held a position consistent with the International Communist Movement, that homosexuality constituted a conscious "ideological statement" and was a byproduct of capitalism. Within the last decade, with the publication of the New Draft Program of the RCP USA, they have repudiated that position, criticizing it as incorrect, unscientific and not "thoroughly marxist". The RCP holds that all sexual and intimate relations in bourgeois society are largely dominated by the ideology of male supremacy and exist within a framework of social relations where the oppression of women is an integral and fundamental part. [3]
[edit]
Views on the United States
The RCP has written that the United States "is a country founded on genocide and slavery" and that it the responsibility the RCP has a "special challenge and responsibility to make revolution, at the earliest possible time, right within the belly of this most powerful imperialist beast." The RCP has also stated that "the development of capitalism in the U.S. is a history of the most savage oppression of the Black, Native American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, Asian, and other oppressed peoples" and that "the proletariat must overthrow and thoroughly smash and dismantle the bourgeois state. And that requires war."[4]
[edit]
RCP today
Following the re-election of George W. Bush, the RCP released a statement called "The Battle for the Future". It calls Bush a Christian Fascist and calls on the masses to resist. The document also puts forward Bob Avakian as the party's leader. Several supporters of the RCP initiated a campaign entitled World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime to facilitate a political "re-polarization" around the current right-wing shift in U.S. government. Hundreds of protests and rallies, as well as disruption of prominent governmental speakers has ensued. Most recently, World Can't Wait organized a series of nationwide protests on October 5, 2006 and has been at the forefront of efforts to impeach Bush and Vice President Cheney for "war crimes and other crimes against humanity".
In 2005, the RCP changed the name of its newspaper from Revolutionary Worker to Revolution. According to their website, the May 1, 2005 issue of RW newspaper signaled the end of 25 years of Revolutionary Worker/Obrero Revolucionario and the beginning of Revolution/Revolucin. "[W]e believe that the new name more fully reflects our revolutionary communist ideology and politics, and the enriched vision of a tribune of the people that has been pioneered by RCP Chairman Bob Avakian."
In late 2005 and early 2006 the RCP launched the Revolutionary Communist Speaking Tour (RC4) of Black leaders intended to "build a Communist movement among the people locked on the bottom of society in the current era of Bushite Christian-Fascism." The RC4 tour ended quietly with the disassociation of one of the lead speakers, Akil Bomani, due to disagreements about lyrics in one of his songs produced independently.
Revolution Books distributes materials related to the RCP, and the revolutionary movement in general. They operate stores nationally, with a large store in New York City and a Spanish-language store, Libros Revolucion, in Los Angeles.
After many years of exile, Bob Avakian released a four-disk DVD set of speeches called Revolution given on the East Coast and the West Coast, presumably within the United States, although Avakian had not been seen in the country for over 20 years. Aside from continuing his advocacy of Communism, Avakian critiqued what he called dogmatism within the movement, and emphasized the role of thinking and learning in political struggle.
The RCP had recently undergone a split in it's ranks, concentrated around the role of revolutionary leadership. In published documents, the RCP has characterized this split as ulitmately a struggle over the character of the party, between forces dedicated to revolution and those that have given up on making revolution in a country like the US. [5] In late December 2007, Mike Ely, the former editor of the Revolution Newspaper, put out a polemic known as the "9 letters" which in the main accused RCP for being forced by the political line of Bob Avakian to push all work into promotion of his thought, which the 9 Letters went on to criticize. RCP has characterized Ely as "capitulating, and promoting capitulation to imperialism and its horrors, while maintaining a threadbare camouflage of communism and in fact pandering to and cohering all kinds of anti-communist prejudices – in the name of 'communism'". [6]
[edit]
Avakian's "Promotion and Popularization"
The RCP has said that there are two mainstays of its work: the role of the party press and building a culture of "appreciation, promotion and popularization" of Bob Avakian and his body of work, method, and approach, "along with a whole ensemble of Communist work which is necessary to the bringing forward of a revolutionary people—including building “massive political resistance to the main ways in which, at any given time, the exploitative and oppressive nature of this system is concentrated in the policies and actions of the ruling class and its institutions and agencies” and solving the problems of how to involve the masses in “meaningful revolutionary work”"[7]. Others have charged that the RCP has created a cult of personality around Avakian, with dissenting voices driven from the organization.
[edit]
Activities
The RCP does not generally attempt to work inside leftist coalitions, preferring to launch independent mass organizations to "repolarize" political movements on a more radical basis. Unlike informal activist groupings, the RCP explicitly states its expectation that members uphold their organization's positions, abstain from illegal drugs and habits, and maintain exceptional standards of "revolutionary morality."[8]
The RCP has had an often stormy relationship with the broader political Left. From the initial publication of the Red Papers that formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, and their controversial inclusion of Josef Stalin as a historical leader, the RCP has cut against the dominant Anti-Communist political discourse in the United States. Because the RCP is highly critical of the Soviet Union, which it views as state capitalist and social-imperialist, the RCP has often traded polemical criticisms with the pro-Soviet CPUSA, as well as Trotskyist groups that have rejected the view of the Soviet bloc as state capitalists to be decried in favor of "deformed workers states" to be defended.
As the RCP evolved as an organization, they came to reject electoral politics, a position they continue to uphold. According to Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air they contrasted themselves with other self-identified Marxist-Leninst parties in the 1980s who advocated working within or alongside Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, with the RCP summarizing their position in the slogan, "The right to vote has been won ... Now we need the political awareness and sophistication not to use it." In the years of the Jackson presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 the RCP's Carl Dix ran as an "anti-candidate [...]running against the notion that oppressed people could rely on the election arena to accomplish positive change."[9]
The RCP holds that its line against electoral politics has been vindicated by the dissolution of several of the Marxist-Leninist groups in the Jackson Campaigns, and others' perceived shifts of line away from open advocacy of revolution with "ultra-leftism." The RCP's critique of what they call the "voting trap" has led many other socialist groups to label them "sectarian" and "abstentionist".
Other critics have claimed its organization of mass rallies amounts to engaging in lesser-evil politics, particularly with their World Can't Wait campaign.[10] The RCP rejects these criticisms, its partisans pointing out that while it has shared stages with Democratic Party office-holders, it has never once, anywhere, endorsed Democratic Party candidates in elections or bourgeois democracy in general. The RCP sees the social base of the Democratic Party as distinct and in contradiction.
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Socialist Workers Party (United States)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Socialist Workers Party
Party Chairman Jack Barnes
Founded 1938
Political ideology Communism
International affiliation Pathfinder tendency; formerly Fourth International
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist political party in the United States. The group places a priority on what it calls "solidarity work" to aid strikes and other labor disputes and is strongly supportive of the Cuban Revolution. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928 (with interruptions), and maintains Pathfinder Press, which publishes titles by past and present SWP leaders (James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, Evelyn Reed and Jack Barnes) as well as by leftists from Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky to Malcolm X and Che Guevara.
James P. Cannon in Moscow (1922)Contents [hide]
1 Party history
1.1 Forerunners
1.2 Formation of the SWP
1.3 The pre-war 1940s
1.4 The World War II years
1.5 Post-war years
1.6 The Cold War period
1.7 1960s
1.8 1970s and new leadership
1.9 1980s and after
1.10 The question of International affiliation
1.11 The party and presidential politics
2 Personnel
2.1 SWP National Secretaries
2.2 Prominent current and former members
3 Footnotes
4 External links
5 See also
6 Further reading
6.1 Books
6.2 Archival material
[edit]
Party history
[edit]
Forerunners
The Socialist Workers Party traces its origins back to the former Communist League of America (CLA), founded in 1928 by members of the Communist Party USA expelled for supporting Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky against Joseph Stalin. In 1934, the Communist League of America merged with the American Workers Party led by A.J. Muste, forming the Workers Party of the United States.
The rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and the failure of the communist and social democratic left to unite against the common danger created a situation in which certain radical parties throughout the world reexamined their priorities and sought a mechanism for building united action. As early as December 1933, a Trotskyist splinter group called the Communist League of Struggle (CLS), headed by former Socialist Party youth section leader Albert Weisbord and his wife Vera Buch, approached Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of America seeking a united front hunger march of the two organizations followed by a general strike.[1] This suggestion was dismissed as "poppycock" by SP Executive Secretary Clarence Senior, but the seed of the idea of joint action had been planted.[2]
Early in 1934, the French Trotskyists of the Communist League conceived of the idea of entering the French Socialist Party (the Section Franaise de l'International Ouvrire or SFIO) in order to recruit members for the Trotskyists, or so some critics have charged. The group retained its identity as a factional organization inside the SFIO and built a base among the party's youth section, continuing their activity until popular front action between the SFIO and the mainline Communist Party of France made their position untenable. This tactic of "entering" the larger social democratic parties of each country, endorsed by Trotsky himself, became known as the "French Turn" and was replicated by various Trotskyist parties around the world.
Throughout 1935 the Workers Party of the United States was deeply divided over the "entryism" tactic called for by the "French Turn," and a bitter debate swept the organization. Ultimately, the majority faction of Jim Cannon, Max Shachtman, and James Burnham won the day and the Workers Party determined to enter the American Socialist Party; a minority faction headed by Hugo Oehler refused to accept this result and split from the organization. This year-long delay proved fortuitous for the Trotskyists, however, as the Socialist Party was itself in turmoil and the moment for merger was probably not yet ripe. The 1934 National Convention of the SP had been the scene of a bitter faction fight, pitting the older, cautious, trade union-oriented "Old Guard" of the party against an alliance of younger, more aggressive and headstrong radicals called the "Militants" and the group of radical pacifists around charismatic party leader Norman Thomas. The Militants had won the day at the 1934 convention and passed an aggressive Declaration of Principles, which was regarded by the Old Guard as a thinly-disguised call to armed insurrection. Late 1934 and 1935 had been a time of factional war in the Socialist Party, in which the Old Guard had established itself as the Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party, first in an effort to defeat the 1934 Declaration of Principles in referendum vote of the party membership and later as the embryo of a new political organization, complete with a "Provisional Executive Committee" and an office in New York City.[3]
The SP's Militant faction sought to expand the organization as an "all-inclusive party" — inviting in members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Lovestoneite and Trotskyist movements, and radical individuals as the first step towards making the SP a mass party.[4] Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the SP, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow, youth leader and ex-Lovestone supporter Herbert Zam, and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman.[5] Goldman at this time also joined with YPSL leader Ernest Erber to establish a newspaper in Chicago with a Trotskyist orientation, The Socialist Appeal, later to serve as the organ of the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party.[6]
In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard for their factional organization and alleged "violation of party discipline," James Cannon and his faction won their internal battle in the Workers Party to join the SP, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry.[7] Negotiations commenced with the Socialist Party leadership, with the admissions ultimately made on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than admission of the Workers Party and its approximately 2,000 members as a group.[8] On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party."[9] A new phase in the party's life had begun.
Although party leader Jim Cannon later hinted that the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party had been a contrived tactic aimed at stealing "confused young Left Socialists" for his own organization,[10] it seems that at its inception, the entryist tactic was made in good faith. Historian Constance Myers notes that while "initial prognoses for the union of Trotskyists and Socialists were favorable," it was only later when "constant and protracted contact caused differences to surface."[11] The Trotskyists retained a common orientation with the radicalized SP in their opposition to the European war, their preference for industrial unionism and the CIO over the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor, a commitment to trade union activism, the defense of the Soviet Union as the first workers' state while at the same time maintaining an antipathy toward the Stalin government, and in their general aims in the 1936 election.[12]
Cannon went to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to establish another new newspaper, Labor Action, targeted to trade unionists and SP 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.
Norman Thomas attracted nearly 188,000 votes in his 1936 Socialist Party run for President but performed poorly in historic strongholds of the party. Moreover, the party's membership had begun to decline.[13] The organization was deeply factionalized, with the Militant faction split into right ("Altmanite"), center ("Clarity") and left ("Appeal") factions, in addition to the radical pacifists around Norman Thomas. A special convention was planned for the last week of March 1937 to set the party's future policy, initially intended as an unprecedented "secret" gathering.[14]
Prior to the March convention, the Trotskyist "Appeal" faction held an organizational gathering of their own, meeting in Chicago, with 93 delegates gathering from February 20-22, 1937.[15] The meeting organized the faction on a permanent basis, electing a National Action Committee of five to "coordinate branch work" and "formulate Appeal policies."[16] Two delegates from the Clarity caucus were in attendance. James Burnham vigorously attacked the Labour and Socialist International, the international organization of left wing parties to which the Socialist Party, and tension rose along these lines among the Trotskyists. 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. At this meeting Thomas pledged that the upcoming convention would make no effort to terminate the newspapers of the various factions.[17]
There was no action to expel the Trotskyist Appeal faction, but pressure continued to build along these lines, egged on by the CPUSA's increasingly hysterical denunciations of Trotsky and his followers as wreckers and agents of international fascism. The convention did pass a ban on future branch resolutions on controversial matters, an effort to rein in the activities of the factions at the local level. It also did ban factional newspapers, establishing instead a national organ.
Constance Myers indicates that three factors led to the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Party in 1937: the divergence between the official Socialists and the Trotskyist faction on the issues, the determination of Altman's wing of the Militants to oust the Trotskyists, and Trotsky's own decision to move towards a break with the party.[18] Recognizing that the Clarity faction had chosen to stand with the Altmanites and the group around Thomas, Trotsky recommended that the Appeal group focus on disagreements over Spain to provoke a split. At the same time, Thomas, freshly returned from Spain, had come to the conclusion that the Trotskyists had joined the SP not to make it stronger, but to capture the organization for their own purposes.[19] On June 24-25, 1937, a meeting of the Appeal faction's National Action Committee voted to ratched up the rhetoric against American Labor Party and Republican nominee for mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia, a favorite son of many in Socialist ranks, and to reestablish their newspaper, The Socialist Appeal.[20] This was met with expulsions from the party beginning August 9 with a rump meeting of the Central Committee of Local New York, which expelled 52 New York Trotskyists by a vote of 48 to 2, with 18 abstentions, and ordering 70 more to be brought up on charges.[21] Wholesale expulsions followed, with a major section of the YPSL leaving the party with the Trotskyists.
The 1,000 or so Trotskyists who entered the SP in 1936 exited in the summer of 1937 with their ranks swelled by another 1,000.[22] On December 31, 1937, representatives of this faction gathered in Chicago to establish a new political organization — the Socialist Workers Party.
[edit]
Formation of the SWP
The October 2, 1937, issue of the Socialist Appeal included a convention call from the so-called "Left Wing" to "All Locals and Branches of the Socialist Party," accusing the NEC of the party of having "betrayed the principles of socialism" by withdrawing the party's candidate for Mayor of New York in favor of LaGuardia and for having ordered "the bureaucratic expulsion of all the revolutionary members of the party who oppose and obstruct this sell-out policy."[23] A convention was called by four Socialist Party State Committees, the NEC of the YPSL, and the organized Left Wing organizations of Chicago and New York, slated to be held in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend, November 25-28, 1937. This meeting was quickly postponed until December 31, however, "in order to provide adequate time for discussion by the membership" of important questions.[24] An agenda was published in December by the Convention Organizing Committee, naming Cannon as the primary reporter on the Trade Union question, Shachtman on the Russian Resolution, Goldman on the Spanish Resolution, Canadian Maurice Spector on the International Resolution, Burnham on the Declaration of Principles of the new organization, and Abern on Party Organization and Constitution.[25] The gathering was to conclude with the election of a new National Committee.
On the appointed day, December 31, 1937, over 100 regular and fraternal delegates gathered in Chicago, where they were greeted by a speech of welcome delivered by Chicago leader Albert Goldman, a labor attorney. As editor of the Trotskyist movement's ongoing theoretical magazine, The New International, Max Shachtman delivered the first official report to the gathering, dealing with the political situation in the United States. Shachtman boldly declared that
"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.
"If the working class is unable to prevent the outbreak of war, and the United States enters directly into it, our party stands pledged to the traditional position of revolutionary Marxism.
"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."[26]
The convention devoted a full day to discussion of the problems of the labor movement and the role of the new organization in the unions, with "National Secretary of the Convention Arrangements Committee" Jim Cannon delivering the primary report. While criticizing the "reactionary role which the AF of L leadership has played," Cannon declared that "our party...takes a clear-cut position in favor of the earliest and completest possible unification of the AF of L and the CIO, and also the hitherto unaffiliated Railroad Brotherhoods."[27]
[edit]
The pre-war 1940s
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, among other questions. The SWP was to experience many other factional conflicts and splits in its history, but this was the largest, and it foreshadowed many features of those to come.
The majority faction, led by Cannon, supported Trotsky's position that the USSR remained a "workers' state" and should be supported in any war with capitalist states, despite their opposition to the government headed by Joseph Stalin. The minority faction, led by Shachtman, held that the USSR should not be supported in its war with Finland. One of its leaders, James Burnham held, in addition, that the USSR had degenerated so far that it deserved no defense whatsoever. Like this debate, most later factional disputes within the SWP also centered on different attitudes towards revolutions in other countries.
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. The majority faction said this was contrary to Lenin's concept of democratic centralism, and that disagreements and the SWP should be debated only internally. Similar disagreements over the SWP's internal government have surfaced in most later faction fights, with most later opposition factions raising similar demands and accusations. Despite this, most of these later factions claimed political descent from Cannon and the SWP majority, not from earlier opposition factions and splinter parties.
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.
[edit]
The World War II years
The SWP opposed U.S. entry into World War II, arguing that the U.S. would be conducting an imperialist war for redivision of the world's colonies and spheres of influence, not a war for democracy against fascism. It experienced some difficulty as a result.
First, the SWP's main base of influence in the labor unions came under attack. This was its place in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the upper Midwest, especially Minneapolis. A number of members of the SWP had been prominent in leading the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike and mid-30s organization of Midwest intercity trucking and held leadership positions in a number of locals. The Minneapolis local's newspaper agitated against U.S. entry into the war. Teamsters International President Daniel Tobin launched an effort to dislodge them from these positions, and with the aid of employers and government agencies, he was successful.
A number of members were imprisoned under the Smith Act of 1941, including J. P. Cannon (see Smith Act Trials). Those imprisoned included the main national leaders of the SWP and those members most prominent in the Midwest Teamsters.
Graffiti in the Basque Country: James P. Cannon, American Trotskyist
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 were 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 meant that during the war years the editorship of The Militant passed through a number of hands.
The SWP was active in supporting those labor strikes that occurred despite the wartime "no-strike pledge", and in supporting protests against racist discrimination during the war, such as A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement. The U.S. Postal Service refused to mail some issues of The Militant and threatened to cancel its third-class mailing permit, citing objections to its articles opposing racist discrimination.
[edit]
Post-war years
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. Indeed, revolutions did occur in countries including Yugoslavia, Albania, Korea, and China, to name only those which resulted in the overthrow of capitalism, but contrary to Trotskyist expectations they were headed by Moscow-oriented "Stalinist" parties.
In the United States, the largest strike wave in U.S. history - involving over five million workers - occurred with the end of the war and 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, as well as strikes officially called by the United Mine Workers of America. There were also protests by GIs demanding rapid demobilization after the end of the war, sometimes called the going-home movement). SWP participation in this upsurge led to a brief period of rapid growth for the SWP immediately after the war.
The end of the war also saw the reorganization of the Fourth International, 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 Albert Goldman grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the SWP's ultra-leftist attitude towards revolutionary policies. Eventually they were to leave the SWP in a state of demoralization and some joined the WP.
On the other hand a faction within the WP called the Johnson-Forest Tendency, CLR James (known as Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest), were impatient with 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 to form the Correspondence Publishing Committee. Dunayevskaya and her supporters eventually formed the News and Letters Committees in 1955 after splitting with CLR James, who was deported from the USA to Britain from where he continued to advise the Correspondence Publishing Committee which split again in 1962, with those loyal to CLR James taking the name Facing Reality.
[edit]
The Cold War period
The brief postwar wave of labor unrest gave way to the conservatism of the 1950s, the housebreaking of previously radical labor unions, and McCarthyism. The growing civil rights movement, which continued uninterrupted out of WWII, could not fully offset these trends, and the SWP experienced a period of decline and isolation.
The party also had a number of splits over these years. One such split saw the departure of the faction of Bert Cochran and Clarke, who formed the American Socialist Union which lasted until 1959. That 1953 opposition supported some of the positions of Michel Pablo, the Secretary of the Fourth International, although Pablo disagreed with their wish to dissolve the Fourth International.
The next, smaller 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 regarded Mao Zedong as a revolutionary leader. This faction ended up leaving the SWP in 1958 after supporting the suppression of the Hungarian Rising of 1956, a position contrary to that held by the SWP and other Trotskyist tendencies. It 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 signaled a change in political direction for the SWP as it embarked on pro-Castro "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 Socialist Party of America. 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.
[edit]
1960s
Farrell Dobbs
Despite such growing signs of an end to the isolation which the group had endured during the McCarthyite period, it experienced a new split in the early 1960s. 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 successfully negotiated a reunification of the ISFI and the International Committee of the Fourth International leading to the creation in 1963 of the reunified Fourth International. 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.
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 were critical of the Castro government, arguing that Cuba remained a "deformed workers state". However, a split developed within this faction between groups headed by the two men. Nonetheless both the RT and the Reorganized Minority Tendency split to form the Spartacist (see Spartacist League), and the American Committee for the Fourth International, 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 the alleged suppression of internal democracy, as did Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss.
The SWP supported both the civil rights movement and the Black nationalist movement which grew during the 1960s. It particularly praised the militancy of Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, who in turn spoke at the SWP's public forums and gave an interview to Young Socialist magazine. After his assassination, the SWP had limited success in forming alliances with his followers and other Black nationalists. However, these movements were part of the radicalization of these years aiding the SWP's growth.
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 involvement in many of the campaigns and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. The SWP advocated that the antiwar movement should call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, and should primarily focus on organizing large, legal demonstrations for this demand. It was recognized by friend and foe alike as a major factor influencing the direction of the antiwar movement along these lines. One of the leaders of the anti-war movement at this time, along with Dave Dellinger and many others was Fred Halstead, a World War II veteran and former leader of the garment workers union in New York City. Halstead was the 1968 Presidential candidate of the SWP who visited Vietnam in that capacity.
The SWP was also increasingly outspoken in its defense of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro and its identification with that government. A new leadership led by Jack Barnes (who became national secretary in 1972) made identification with Cuba an ever greater part of the politics of the SWP throughout the 1970s.
The party 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. The expansion of the press also allow the SWP to host Intercontinental Press, the FI magazine which moved from Paris to New York in 1969, which later merged with Inprecor.
[edit]
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, which included Larry Trainor, which eventually dissolved itself.
Another tendency developed called the Internationalist Tendency (IT). The IT posed a greater challenge for the group's leadership, as the tendency agreed with the Fourth International's advocacy of guerrilla warfare as a "tactic on a continental scale" in Latin America. 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. The IT would disintegrate over the next few months, some of its supporters finding their way back into 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. It argued for a reversal of the Latin American guerrilla war orientation adopted at the Ninth World Congress.
This period was the peak of the SWP's growth and influence. The party continued its involvement in the movement against the war in Vietnam, which peaked in 1970-71. The SWP also supported Chicano nationalism, including the Raza Unida Party. It helped organize protests demanding legal abortion through the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition. With the mid- to late 70s decline of these movements and the end of the 1960s-1970s youth radicalization, SWP membership and influence went into decline.
In 1978, the SWP leadership 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 SWP leadership projected, increasing mass struggles. The 1977-78 coal miners' strike and developments like Steelworkers Fight Back were among the events pointed to in arguing for this change in policy. 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.
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. Many of the older members with experience in trade unions resisted this 'colonization program', which upset their established routine in the unions, as did some of the younger members.
[edit]
1980s and after
Opposition to the "turn to industry" developed within the SWP. This opposition was not homogeneous and was itself beset by differences between different factions.
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. 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 failed to sufficiently distinguish between the democratic and socialist tasks of a workers' revolution. Barnes argued that anticapitalist revolutions typically began with a "workers' and farmers' government" which initially concentrated on bourgeois-democratic measures, and only later moved on to the abolition of capitalism.
Barnes also argued that the "Trotskyist" label unnecessarily distinguished leftists in that tradition from leftists of other origins, such as the Cuban Communist Party, or the Sandinista National Liberation Front. He argued that the SWP had more in common with these organizations than with many groups calling themselves Trotskyist. The SWP has continued to publish numerous books by Trotsky and advocate a number of ideas commonly associated with Trotskyism, including Trotsky's analysis of "Stalinism".
The opposition factions continued to support the theory of permanent revolution, and the Trotskyist label: they anticipated that the SWP leadership was reassessing its place in the Fourth International. While declaring their support to the Cuban and the leftist Nicaraguan governments, they were more critical of the Castroist and Sandinista leadership. Additionally, they continued to oppose the "turn to industry".
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 both groups were expelled. The opposition factions, having split from the SWP, formed new organizations. The grouping around the Weinsteins forming the San Francisco-based Socialist Action. The Breitman-Lovell group, after a time, formed the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. Both groups described themselves as "public factions" of the SWP and set the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. Another group, mainly in Los Angeles, had been close to Breitman but did not agree to orient toward the SWP belonged briefly to Socialist Action but left to join the "regroupment" organization Solidarity.
This was the most recent split or major faction fight in the SWP; 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 U.S. left. Numerous recent expulsions -- sometimes of long-standing SWP veterans -- have contributed to the membership decline. In 2003, the party sold its major headquarters building in New York City for $20 million and moved to another location in Manhattan. Party leaders Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters subsequently sold their West Village condominium for $1.87 million.[28] The Party has never explained how and why its top leaders needed to live in multi-million dollar digs.
The SWP now focuses most of its energy on internal activities, such as fund-raising, the weekly Militant Labor Forum, and the distribution of Pathfinder books and The Militant. While its members are present in a handful of trade unions, it has reduced participation in larger political movements, such as the antiwar movement, that in the past it viewed as important arenas of political activity.[citation needed] The party is no longer seen as a force on the left as it once was, and its attacks[citation needed] on the antiwar movement, anti-globalization movement, and other left-wing movements that the SWP views as "liberal" have further estranged the party from certain critics in leftist circles.
[edit]
The question of International affiliation
Due to legal constraints, the SWP ended its formal affiliation with the Fourth International in the 1940s. It remained in close political solidarity with the Fourth International, however. The Socialist Workers Party broke formally with the (reunified) Fourth International in 1990 though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since National Secretary Jack Barnes' 1982 speech, "Their Trotsky and Ours," which some view as signaling a break with Trotskyism. The SWP action followed the 1985 World Congress, and the SWP closed Intercontinental Press in 1986. The SWP's international formation is sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder tendency because they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore which sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press. In 1986, the party won a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a result of years of a campaign of spying and disruption by the FBI.[29]
[edit]
The party and presidential politics
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 2004, its presidential campaign achieved ballot access in 13 states and the District of Columbia, more than any other socialist candidates. The SWP's most high profile and controversial campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s was its Mark Curtis Defense Committee, 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. Curtis was eventually paroled.
In the U.S. presidential election of 2004 the Socialist Workers Party ran Rger Calero for President and Arrin Hawkins for Vice-President. It should be noted that both candidates were constitutionally unqualified for the positions because Calero is not an American citizen and Hawkins is 29 years old, with the minimum age being 35. James Harris and Margaret Trowe, the SWP's ticket from 2000, stood in on the ballot in some states where Calero and Hawkins could not be listed. The two tickets received a total of 8,533 votes. They were on the ballot in 11 states and the District of Columbia, more than any other socialist candidates. The vote total does not reflect the actual vote because of the unqualified status of the candidates. County clerks (In some states) and secretaries of states have discretion in reporting votes for ineligible candidates. The same situation obtained in 2008.
1948—Farrell Dobbs: received 13,614 votes.
1952—Farrell Dobbs: received 10,312 votes.
1956—Farrell Dobbs: received 7,797 votes.
1960—Farrell Dobbs: received 60,166 votes.
1964—Clifton DeBerry: received 32,327 votes.
1968—Fred Halstead: received 41,390 votes.
1972
Linda Jenness: received 83,380 votes. In 1972 in Arizona, Pima and Yavapai counties had a ballot malfunction that counted many votes for both a major party candidate and Linda Jenness. A court ordered that the ballots be counted for both. As a consequence, Jenness received 16% and 8% of the vote in Pima and Yavapai, respectively. 30,579 of her 30,945 Arizona votes are from those two counties. Some sources don't count these votes for Jenness.
Evelyn Reed: received 13,878 votes. Ballot access: Indiana, New York, and Wisconsin
1976—Peter Camejo: received 90,986 votes.[30]
1980
Andrew Pulley: received 40,105 votes.
Richard Congress: received 4,029 votes votes.[31] Ballot access in Ohio.
Clifton DeBerry
1984—Melvin T. Mason: received 24,672 votes.
1988—James "Mac" Warren: received 15,604 votes.
1992—James "Mac" Warren: received 23,096 votes.
1996—James Harris: received 8,463 votes.
2000— James Harris: received 7,378 votes.
2004
Rger Calero combined with Harris received 8,533 votes [32]
James Harris
2008
Rger Calero: received 5,127 votes [33]
James Harris: received 2,424 votes
[edit]
Personnel
[edit]
SWP National Secretaries
James P. Cannon (1938-1953)
Farrell Dobbs (1953-1972)
Jack Barnes (since 1972)
[edit]
Prominent current and former members
Martin Abern
Harry Braverman
George Breitman
Joel Britton
James Burnham
Peter Camejo
Joseph Carter
Bert Cochran
Jake Cooper
Stephanie Coontz
Seth Dellinger
Paul Draper
Raya Dunayevskaya
James T. Farrell
Fred Feldman
Richard Fraser
Albert Goldman
Joseph Hansen
Asher Harer
Sidney Hook
C. L. R. James
Martin Koppel
Lyndon LaRouche
Paul Montauk
Felix Morrow
George Novack
Evelyn Reed
Harry Ring
Olga Rodriguez
Norton Sandler
Ted Selander
Max Shachtman
Ed Shaw
Barry Sheppard
Eric Simpson
Carl Skoglund
Morris Starsky
Arne Swabeck
Larry Trainor
Mary-Alice Waters
Myra Tanner Weiss
Murry Weiss
........................................
Party for Socialism and Liberation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Party for Socialism and Liberation
Founded 2004[1]
Political ideology Communism,
Marxism-Leninism
Political position Fiscal: Socialist economics
Social: Revolutionary socialism
International affiliation None
Website PSLweb.org
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a Marxist Leninist party in the United States founded to promote revolutionary change.[2]
It was originally created as the result of a split within the ranks of the Workers World Party (WWP). The San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C. branches of WWP left almost in their entirety to form the PSL. No reason has ever been officially given for the split by either party. The PSL has since established branches in several additional urban centers across the United States.Contents [hide]
1 Publications
2 International views
3 Participation in the anti-war movement
4 PSL electoral participation
5 Notes
6 Sources
7 External links
[edit]
Publications
The main publications of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, reflecting its political perspective, are the biweekly newspaper, Liberation, and the quarterly magazine, Socialism and Liberation. PSL outlines its political perspective, including its assessment of the current international and domestic situation in the pamphlet "Who We Are, What We Stand For." The PSL advocates building a revolutionary workers’ party in the United States.
[edit]
International views
The PSL supports the government of Cuba, and while critical of the current Chinese government, it views the Chinese Revolution favorably. The PSL also supports the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela – a frequent topic in its magazine. It has endorsed activities that call for the release of the Cuban Five – deemed political prisoners by supporters – and called for the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles from the US.[3]
The PSL supports the rights of nations to self determination. It has been outspoken in condemning the state of Israel and its role in the Middle East. The PSL also led demonstrations against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 2006. The PSL supports the right of return for Palestinian people.
[edit]
Participation in the anti-war movement
The PSL is very active in the antiwar movement. It is a member of the steering committee of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which has taken a lead organizing role in mass antiwar demonstrations since 2001. Unlike the Workers World Party, which never maintained a formal position in the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition despite its clear influence, the PSL’s role within A.N.S.W.E.R. is overt. As one of the most active members of the coalition. PSL has gained notice for successfully forging ties with Arab and Muslim American groups such as the Muslim American Society, Al-Awda and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. This cooperation with these groups has been characterized by conservatives as dangerous collaboration with "Islamists".[4]
The National Offices of the Party for Socialism and Liberation are based in San Francisco, California and Washington, D.C.. The PSL also maintains branches and centers in Baltimore, MD; Chicago; Los Angeles, CA; New Haven, CT; New Paltz and New York City, NY; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WA; Sioux Falls, SD; and Miami, FL. The PSL's New York City branch is based in Harlem.
[edit]
PSL electoral participation
For the 2008 U.S. elections, PSL fielded candidates Gloria La Riva for President and Eugene Puryear for Vice President. They ended in the 9th place overall, receiving 7,311 votes.[5] In 1994 and 1998, La Riva was the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for governor of California, and was the Worker's World Party candidate for U.S. vice president from 1984 to 2000. They were on the ballot in 12 states: Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.[6] Michael Prysner, an anti-war Iraq war veteran, also announced as a candidate for Congress in Florida's 22nd congressional district in 2008 but he didn't qualify for the ballot. Nine other party members ran as candidates with other parties or as nonpartisan candidates in four states and DC.[7]
The PSL ran Carlos Alvarez for mayor of Los Angeles, CA in the March 2009 elections.[8] Alvarez received 2,483 votes in the election, or 1.08%.[9]"
The PSL is currently launching a campaign for Mayor of New York City.[10] Frances Villar of the PSL will challenge incumbent Michael Bloomberg for mayor of the city.