[Marxism] A history of the US SWP, 1938-1965

[Lance Murdoch <lancemurdoch@xxxxxxxxx>]

I mentioned previously that I liked the idea of a left encyclopedia on
matters such as history, politics, philosophy and so forth.  The wiki
is a great format for that.  My experience with the bourgeois
Wikipedia showed me that I'd be better off working on a left-wing
encyclopedia (and perhaps venturing back there once in a while seeing
if I can battle some points into Wikipedia).

The now defunct red encyclopedia focused on left-wing groups and their
histories.  I figured I might start with what in the US might be the
toughest one, the Trotskyist movement.  Tough due to all the splits -
who knows how many descendants of the SWP's Revolutionary Tendency
exist today.

Anyhow after doing articles on the Communist League of America, the
American Workers Party and the Workers Party of the United States (and
culling research which I can use on other articles, say, on the
Minneapolis Teamster strike), I started working on an article on the
SWP.

Wanting to provide a fair and true picture of things, it has taken me
2-3 days.  I wanted to be accurate, consider both sides of a split,
and get as many sources as I could for accuracy and perspective.  The
only bit of perhaps subjectivity is saying that Morrow/Goldman were
right in 1946 about what the post-WWII situation would be and was
like, but it seems hard to refute and I don't know anyone in 2004 who
does refute it.  I also wrote it in a way where the personalities were
not so important as the ideas behind the splits and so forth, I try to
do that in all the encyclopedia articles I write.

Anyhow, this article has taken me longer than I'd thought as I have
only gotten to 1965.  I thought I'd take a break and do a history of
the descendants of the Revolutionary Tendency, but that made me even
more weary.

I'll probably rewrite this in the future.  I wanted to get the facts,
the dates, the groups and tendencies, and to some extent the line
differences correct, but in the future, having that information, and
having more context, I can probably go into more details about what
the arguments were about.  I also should research more who left, was
pushed out and was thrown out.  I guess the Sparts were the first
group to really get tossed out.

As far as I know, this contains all the major splits from 1938-1965.
I was trying to find the year the Weisses left the SWP and was having
trouble when I decided to take a break for a little bit.  I know it
some time in the mid-late 1960's.  The splits and expulsions I've
covered up to 1965 are: 1940 - Workers Party, 1946 - more defections
to the Workers Party, 1951 - Johnson-Forest Tendency leaves, 1953 -
Socialist Union leaves, 1958 - WWP leaves, 1953 - Sparts (RT)
expelled, 1964 - ACFI (RT) expelled, 1965 - Freedom Socialist Party
leaves.

Anyhow, here is my article thus far.  Please feel free to point out
any errors or important points missing.  You can even go to the web
page its on and edit it yourself.  This is up to 1965, in the future I
will do 1965 to the present of SWP.

-- Lance

--
Here it goes:

http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Socialist_Workers_Party_(USA)

The Socialist Workers Party (USA) was formed on January 1, 1938. Most
of the members were from the Workers Party of the United States which
had entered the Socialist Party of America in 1936. The Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) also took with them some of the Socialist Party's
left wing, and most of the Socialist youth organization, the Young
Peoples Socialist League.

Leon Trotsky published The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of
the Fourth International in mid-1938, which is also known as the
Transitional Program. In it, Trotsky predicted a revolutionary upsurge
would occur at the end of World War II, which Trotskyists would have
to prepare for. Using that document as a basis, the Fourth
International (FI) was formed in Paris during September of 1938. The
Fourth International was a grouping of Trotskyist parties worldwide,
just as the Third International was a grouping of orthodox communist
parties, and the Second International was a grouping of socialist
parties. The American Socialist Workers Party formed one of the
largest national parties in the Fourth International.

Within the SWP, a factional fight of issues, including the nature of
the Soviet Union, flared up in 1939 and 1940. Events such as the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, followed by the Soviet
invasion of Poland in September, and the Winter War between the USSR
and Finland which began in November, helped exacerbate this feud. One
of the main questions was whether the USSR was worth defending. Those
who thought it was not worth defending were a minority, but a
significant minority. In April of 1940, some of them left and formed
the Workers Party.

The Smith Act was passed by the US Congress in June 1940. During World
War II, leaders of the SWP were imprisoned under the act. Two months
after the act passed, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by a
Spanish communist.

The SWP followed the Proletarian Military Policy during World War II.
The policy was to be against the war, but to not fight conscription.
Instead, SWP members would be conscripted and would try to turn the
war into a revolutionary one. Many SWP'ers went on the dangerous
Murmansk run in which merchant marine ships brought supplies to the
USSR.

The SWP position during and after World War II was based on the idea
that there would soon be a revolutionary upsurge. A minority faction
within the SWP, which included Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman began
arguing prior to their imprisonment that there might not be a
revolutionary situation at the end of World War II, and that the SWP
should be preparing for the continuance of the CPSU party line in the
USSR, as well as the return of bourgeois republics in Europe. History
shows that this faction was more correct in their outlook than the SWP
majority faction. The minority faction has support in the Fourth
International as well. At the end of World War II this factional fight
flared up and the minority faction began having more contact with the
Workers Party, which had split off from the SWP several years prior.
Many of the people in this minority faction left the SWP in 1946 and
joined the Workers Party.

On the other hand, a faction within the Workers Party, the
Johnson-Forest Tendency, left the Workers Party and re-entered the SWP
in 1947. The tendency had developed a theory that the USSR was state
capitalist. They also had been very impressed with wildcat strikes
during World War II (despite the AFL and CIO leaderships no-strike
pledges). They did a lot of theoretical work, reading Hegel and works
of Marx and Lenin that were little known in the US at the time. Their
theories tilted more towards mass action and workers power than
bureaucracy and authoritarian vanguard leadership. They left the SWP
in 1951. Some of them went on to form the Marxist-Humanist News and
Letters Committees.

The Fourth International split in 1953. One faction, led by the FI's
secretariat Michel Pablo, urged that the FI parties enter the larger
worker parties on the FI's right on a long term basis. The faction
which included the majority of the SWP opposed this idea. The SWP left
the FI and formed the International Committee of the Fourth
International (ICFI) with France's Parti Communiste Internationaliste,
the former UK Revolutionary Communist Party which had enter the Labour
Party in a faction called "The Club", as well as smaller parties from
around the world. The group that did not leave the FI with the ICFI
continued to call themselves the Fourth International, while the ICFI
referred to them as the International Secretariat of the Fourth
International (ISFI).

The split in the International also was connected to a split in the
SWP. A faction within the SWP whose thinking reflected more the
Sectariat's line than the ICFI's, stated that the SWP's very negative
attitude about the USSR and Eastern Europe, among other things, made
it too sectarian. This perceived sectarianism included SWP lack of
opposition to anti-communist union leaders in unions such as the
United Auto Workers for fear of being allied with the CPUSA. In 1953
the SWP celebrated the 25th year of the Trotskyist faction expulsion
from the CPUSA, the "anti-sectarian" faction refused to participate.
This led to the expulsion of the faction in November of 1953. The
faction went on to form the Socialist Union in 1954.

Another SWP faction had started to have ideas different than the
dominant SWP ones. Particularly, they believed they should ally with
workers states in what they saw as a global class war between workers
and capitalists. This global class war faction started coming about in
1948 when they saw the Henry Wallace campaign for president as being
something to support. This was followed by different perspectives
between the factional and SWP majority position on the victory of
Chinese communists in 1949, the Korean War, the 1956 uprising in
Hungary and other issues. The faction left the SWP in 1958. In 1959,
the split faction, which was mostly concentrated in the Buffalo SWP
branch (but also took people from some other SWP branches like
Youngstown, Ohio), formed the Workers World Party.

On January 1, 1959 the Movimiento 26 de Julio took control of Cuba, an
event that would have major impact on the SWP henceforth. The SWP had
begin recruiting more youth in the late 1950's and early 1960's than
they had previously. The leadership of a SWP youth group which had
been formed in 1959, the Young Socialist Alliance, began to form the
Revolutionary Tendency (RT) which had a more critical view of the
Cuban government than the SWP leadership. The RT did not see the Cuban
government as being a proletarian workers one. The SWP majority, on
the other hand, saw the revolution in Cuba as a vindication of sorts
for the ISFI position that a good revolution was possible without a
vanguard Marxist-Leninist party leading it. They began considering
reaching out to the ISFI.

The ICFI, which the SWP was a part of, reunited with the ISFI in 1963,
creating the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. There had
been opposition to this reunification within the ICFI, especially from
the British section, known as "The Club" (a Trotskyist faction of the
Labour Party which would later become the Socialist Labour League).
Also opposing this merger was the SWP's Revolutionary Tendency. The
Revolutionary Tendency was split into two factions - one that opposed
the ICFI/ISFI reunification in conjunction with the British Socialist
Labour League, an RT faction which would in the future become the
American Committee of the Fourth International (ACFI) , and an RT
faction that did not oppose the reunification as part of an
international tendency, this faction in the future becoming the
Spartacist League. At the 1963 SWP convention the RT was denounced,
and after the convention a plenum was called and several RT leaders
from the "Spartacist" faction were expelled. In 1964 the leaders of
the "ACFI" RT faction were expelled.

Another tendency which had begun to form in 1957, mostly in the
Seattle branch of the SWP, had differences with the SWP majority
primarily over policies regarding African-Americans and the civil
rights movement. The Seattle branch, which had more black members than
many branches and which was more involved in the black struggle in the
South, wanted the SWP to support integration instead of black
nationalism. By the mid-1960's, this branch also had problems with the
SWP majority on anti-war tactics, with the tendency feeling the SWP
was more interested in building a single-issue anti-war mass movement
than making efforts to "connect the war to the other evils of the
system" within the anti-war movement. Unhappy with the SWP's 1965
convention, one of their members being kicked off the SWP's National
Committee, and the SWP leadership's actions towards the branch, the
tendency left the SWP in 1965. They would go on to form the Freedom
Socialist Party.

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