Workers World Party

WORKERS WORLD PARTY. A unique, enduring group with a membership of no more than a thousand, the Workers World Party (WWP) is unusual, if not singular, in moving from Trotskyism to a kind of Maoism and beyond. Most notably, its political practice expressed the firm commitment that militant, even confrontational social movements set the agenda for the Left rather than larger membership organizations or more nuanced sets of ideas.

The origin of the Workers World Party can be traced to specific tendencies within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from the late 1940s onward. The failure of the anticipated world revolution to take place, a decade after Trotsky’s death, prompted a search for accommodation to a new global reality. Some Trotskyists already in 1948 urged support for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, concluding that the Cold War had become the most important factor in global politics. The ongoing disintegration of the SWP until revival in the early 1960s prompted more schisms and efforts by various groups to create a fresh entity.

In the evolving theory of “global class war,” activist-intellectuals Sam Marcy (1911-1998, born Sam Ballan) and former actor and steelworker Vince Copeland (1915-1993) argued that the Russians’ crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been entirely justified, after the West had subverted the liberatory beginnings of the workers’ revolt.

For Marcy and Copeland, the Western condemnation of the Soviet Union, the East Bloc states and China only served the interests of imperialism. Nevertheless, the little group that broke from the SWP formally in 1959 directed members and supporters to continue to study Trotsky, urging a sort of synthesis. If Trotsky himself had been right about “degenerated,” or as Marcyites rephrased it, “deformed workers’ states,” the cause could properly be laid not at the feet of Stalin but at the real source, the attacks of the world bourgeoisie on socialist societies. Further, the two leaders argued, there had been two Trotskys: one the Trotsky who wrote that the revolution had degenerated and critiqued Stalin without denouncing the Soviet Union, and the other a symbol of Trotsky used maliciously by anticommunists as an ideological assault upon socialist states.

Workers World, the group’s newspaper, had from its early beginnings a sort of 1920s-1930s quality of physical garishness, from glaring tabloid headlines of world crisis to melodramatic back pages rewrites of current news features along with original opinion columns. “Black and White Unite for a Workers World,” popularly seen on Communist publications of the 1930s aiming at a racially-mixed audience, found its most prominent use after the 1960s. A drawing of Trotsky appeared on the banner headline until the image came to be regarded as a probable sign of bad faith to the emerging socialist societies, especially China.

The WWP, abandoning the Trotsky heritage, declared itself Marxist-Leninist, a claim made otherwise by contemporary “anti-revisionist” Communist factions, mainly the Progressive Labor Party until the later proliferation of Maoist groups. Uniquely, via study circles, the WWP studied both Trotskyism and Stalinism as tools to understand and work with people on both sides of the ideological schism. (Observers from the SWP laconically remarked that although based in New York, the WWP seemed strongest around the Great Lakes, especially Buffalo and Milwaukee, hence the semi-humorous phrase, “the Lakes Tendency.”)

During the 1960s, WWP leaders created Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), which briefly played a prominent role in mobilizing and leafletting during the early antiwar marches of the anti-Vietnam War period. YAWF could not compete with the youth and mostly campus-based support organizations such as the Young Socialist Alliance, the Du Bois Clubs or the independent Students for a Democratic Society. But the WWP had a presence, notably among the first to hail the military victories of the National Liberation Front over the US invaders. The WWP also launched the American Servicemen’s Union, a project of GI mobilization that had a little prominence before disappearing.

In the long decades after the Vietnam War, newly founded Maoist groups rose and fell, along with factory initiatives presumed to enjoy their own claim on the working class. The WWP meanwhile remained substantially focused on anti-war and anti-intervention activities. Along with a few other Left parties, the WWP continued to conduct presidential campaigns in their own name. Diedre Griswold, stepdaughter of Vincent Copeland, often played a prominent role, including a presidential run in 1992. Very low voting totals seemed to matter little.

The US invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq breathed new life into an organization that had struggled to hold on. ANSWER, launched by the WWP, spearheaded mobilization in a scattering of places. As US invasions and interventions continued in the Middle East, the WWP made occasional splashes in collaboration with former Justice Department official Ramsey Clark and in the formation of the International Action Center. Notoriously, Workers World seemed fond of the leaders of North Korea and likewise assorted Arab “strongmen.” A split in 2004 brought forth the Party of Socialism and Liberation, with parallel if fewer activities. In later years a second split, with the Socialist Unity Party emerging, anticipated yet another split of sorts with the arrival of the People’ Power Assembly, made up mainly of activists expelled for questioning WWP tactics. Moving into the 2010s and beyond, the WWP led the coalition United National Antiwar Committee.

Across WWP history, a determination to join or create direct action confrontations with authorities drew supporters from many venues, as the WWP eagerly adopted Black nationalism, disability rights, and women’s and gay liberation. Trans activist Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014), a self-proclaimed butch dyke from Buffalo—a location famous or notorious for its working class gay scene—began writing for Workers World during the 1970s and later took over its “Political Prisoners” page, and by 1995, became the paper’s Managing Editor. Encouraged by party leadership embracing the Trans issues, her column “Lavender and Red” offered for many casual readers a pace-setter for other non-LGBT Left publications.

Alexander, Robert. “Schisms and unifications in the American Old Left, 1953-1970,” Labor History, vol.14 (Fall, 1973).

Lawrence, Ken. “Roots of the Workers World Party,” Marxmail Discucsion List, January, 1999.

Marcy, Sam. The Global Class War and the Destiny of American Labor. New Haven: Revolutionary Communist League, 1979.