Socialist Workers Party

SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY. While its membership never reached more than 2,000, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has sometimes enjoyed an influence far beyond its numbers in the labor and radical movements. For most of its history it strongly identified with the revolutionary Marxist, Bolshevik-Leninist perspectives of Leon Trotsky. In the 1980s it stressed an affinity with the orientation of Fidel Castro’s Communist Party of Cuba.

The SWP traces its roots to the early Communist movement of the United States. In 1928 prominent members of the Communist Party—James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman, Martin Abern, Rose Karsner, Arne Swabeck, Karl Skoglund, V. R. Dunne, Antoinette Konikow, and others—were expelled for “Trotskyism” and went on to organize the Communist League of America, with about one hundred members when founded in 1929. The organization published the weekly Militant, a theoretical magazine called New International (later renamed Fourth International and then International Socialist Review), and numerous books and pamphlets by Trotsky and others. Opposing what they considered the bureaucratic-conservative degeneration of the workers’ state in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin—and the consequent Stalinization of the world Communist movement—the Trotskyists stressed the principles of workers’ democracy and revolutionary internationalism as essential aspects of the socialist struggle. They influenced many leading intellectuals (especially through vigorous opposition to the Stalinist purges of 1936–1938). At the same time, the Trotskyists focused on both the unemployed movement and union organizing among industrial workers during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. In 1934 they led workers to victory during the militant Teamsters’ strikes in Minneapolis. They played a significant role in other unions—among auto and maritime workers, for example, in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the SWP’s future leaders (such as Farrell Dobbs, Tom Kerry, Joe Hansen, George Breitman, and others) were recruited and developed in this period.

A series of mergers, splits, and fusions led up to the formation of the SWP in 1938, by which time the Trotskyist ranks had swelled to about 1,200. In 1934 the Communist League of America merged with A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States. In 1936 this organization went into the Socialist Party of America, led by Norman Thomas, but the Trotskyists and many newly won supporters were soon expelled for challenging the Socialist Party’s moderate leadership. The 1938 founding of the SWP coincided with the creation of the Fourth International, a worldwide organization of Trotskyists. The SWP was one of the largest components of this international organization, continuing to play an influential consultative role when forced to formally disaffiliate by the Voorhis Act. Another piece of restrictive legislation, the Smith Act, was used first against the Trotskyists, imprisoning eighteen leaders of the SWP and of the Minneapolis Teamsters because of their refusal to refrain from criticizing what they considered imperialist war aims of the US government during World War II. The strategy that Trotskyists advocated for defeating fascism was a working-class united front—independent of the capitalists—that would combine democratic and transitional (socialist-oriented) demands.

Despite wartime repression, the SWP made gains and played an especially aggressive role in the postwar strike waves. By 1940 it had a membership of 1,500. The Cold War anticommunist witch-hunts and the 1950s economic prosperity took a heavy toll, reducing the party to no more than 400 aging veterans by 1959. Yet their authority among US radicals increased when the 1956 Khrushchev revelations vindicated their long-standing condemnation of Stalin’s crimes. The anticolonial revolutions generated renewed interest in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, and the trajectory of the Cuban Revolution—hailed by SWP members, who helped to form Fair Play for Cuba Committees—also caused many to take a closer look at Trotskyist perspectives. Further, as one New Left veteran (never in the SWP milieu) reminisced: “In the 1950s and early 1960s when not much was happening on the Left as such, the SWP’s local Militant Labor Forums, where they existed, often reached out to young people; and individual SWPers often conducted themselves with a dignity that made an impression on youngsters.”

The rise of the Black liberation movement in the United States contributed to a new radicalization; by championing and publicizing the ideas of Malcolm X, the SWP further increased its influence—though African American membership never exceeded 7 percent, out of a membership of about 1,200 by the late 1970s. The student and youth radicalization, and especially the mass movement against the US war in Vietnam, brought many recruits into the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (founded in 1960). The SWP played a central role in the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and in the National Peace Action Coalition, responsible for drawing hundreds of thousands into active opposition to the war. Members of the SWP and the Young Socialist Alliance also played a role in women’s liberation efforts (and to a lesser extent in gay rights activities). In this period women’s membership rose to about 40 percent, with significant numbers of women playing leadership roles. Influence was also exerted in the Chicano and Puerto Rican communities. In many areas the SWP became known for running vigorous and sometimes innovative socialist election campaigns to introduce the public to socialist ideas and to dramatize the need for political independence from the Democratic and Republican parties.

Over the years many frictions resulted in groupings and individuals leaving the SWP. Among the best-known splits were those led by Max Shachtman in 1940 and Bert Cochran in 1953 (representing about 500 and 200 members, respectively). The Shachtmanites viewed the Soviet Union as a “bureaucratic-collectivist” society no less reactionary than capitalism (some later decided it was even more reactionary than capitalism), whereas the SWP majority insisted that the nationalized, planned economy of the Soviet Union represented a working-class gain worth defending from both Western imperialism and Stalinist bureaucrats. The Cochranites believed the classical Trotskyist analysis and party-building perspectives had become outdated in the face of the Cold War confrontation and anticommunist repression, and they viewed the SWP majority as “sectarian” defenders of “sterile orthodoxies.”

Many writers and intellectuals in and around the Trotskyist movement during the 1930s later went on to become influential moderate socialist, liberal, and even conservative ideological and cultural figures. Among ex-members who remained on the left end of the political spectrum, continuing to have an influence on the broader radical movement, were A. J. Muste, Harry Braverman, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Sidney Lens, Hal Draper, Staughton Lynd, and Murry Weiss. Among the revolutionary veterans who continued to make significant contributions from within the SWP were George Novack, Joseph Hansen, George Breitman, Art Preis, Frank Lovell, Fred Halstead, Paul Siegel, and Evelyn Reed.

By the early 1970s a transition resulted in a new leadership team of 1960s recruits headed by Jack Barnes, a former economics student from Carleton College whose predecessors as SWP national secretary had been class-struggle veterans James P. Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. Perhaps a lack of confidence caused the new leadership to impose an increasingly tight internal regime. This lack of confidence was undoubtedly intensified by the failure of a “proletarianization” effort (in which a majority of the members got industrial jobs) to yield hoped-for gains in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s—as the new SWP leadership put forward a far-reaching critique of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution—about 200 veteran members were driven out for resisting the abandonment of major aspects of the SWP program. Many more drifted away in demoralization, though the SWP remained one of the major organizations of the American Left, with perhaps 700 members. One of its contributions in the 1970s and 1980s was a successful lawsuit against the US government, publicizing many years of vicious and illegal harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies.

In the 17 May 1991 issue of the Militant it was announced that—largely due to “the historical importance and weight of the communist leadership in Cuba and its political trajectory”—by the end of the 1980s the SWP leadership and its followers “no longer considered themselves Trotskyist and were separate from the world Trotskyist movement and its various competing parties and international groupings.” While it continued, in the twilight of the twentieth century, to maintain branches in two dozen cities and cany on modest activities (especially in solidarity with Castro’s Cuba and in opposition to US imperialism), the organization failed to regain the dynamism that had characterized it in earlier decades.

Breitman, George, ed. The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party. New York: Monad Press, 1982.

Breitman, George, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan Wald. Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, Second Edition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972.

Halstead, Fred. Out Now!: A Participant's Account of the American Movement against the Vietnam War. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2001.

Le Blanc, Paul. Trotskyism in America: The First Fifty Years. New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1987.

Le Blanc, Paul, Bryan Palmer, et al, eds. U.S. Trotskyism, 1928-1965: Emergence, Endurance, Resurgence, 3 vols. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Register of the Socialist Workers Party Records. Collection Guide. Hoover Institution Archives. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf1k40019v/