World Socialist Party
WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY. The US companion party of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the World Socialist Party was formed in 1904 by a group of anti-reformist Marxists who had broken with H. M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. During World War I, two members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Moses Baritz and Adolph Kohn, came to the United States to avoid conscription, and they established a following in Detroit. In 1916 some of their supporters founded the Socialist Party of the United States, but changed its name to Workers’ Socialist Party a few months later when they found that the name Socialist Party had been copyrighted by the Socialist Party of America. The new party at first existed only in Detroit, and from 1919 to 1922 took the name Detroit Socialist Educational Society.
Party locals have existed off and on in several US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But its real stronghold, and the only city where it can be said to have had an enduring influence, was Boston, where the tireless I. Rab conducted Marxist study classes and lively forums almost nightly from the early 1930s through the late 1940s and more or less weekly for many years thereafter. In the 1970s the Boston local had a regular program on radio.
In 1939 the Workers’ Socialist Party started publication of the Western Socialist (“Journal of Scientific Socialism in the Western Hemisphere”). The name World Socialist Party was adopted in 1947 to avoid confusion with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
Tractarians and debaters rather than activists, the World Socialist Party persisted as a very small educational group, pamphleteering and leafleting for what it regards as the only truly and purely Marxian socialism. In 1986, the organization crudely published a journal, World Socialist Review, that featured many articles from the affiliate in Great Britain.
Further reading
Jerome, W. “A Brief History of the World Socialist Party.” Western Socialist 33, no. 252 (1966).
World Socialist Review, 1986-2011. https://libcom.org/library/world-socialist-review