Workers Party

WORKERS PARTY. The founding of the Workers Party (WP) in 1940 came about as a result of the first major split in the American Trotskyist movement, then constituted as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Within the SWP a minority coalesced around the leadership of James Burnham, Martin Abern, and Max Shachtman had increasing doubts as to whether the Soviet Union was still some form of workers’ state, even a “degenerated” one as proclaimed by the party’s majority. The issue was whether revolutionary socialists should continue to give their political support to the Soviet Union and use that country as even a deeply flawed model for socialist transformation. The Soviet Union’s attack on Finland, which followed its occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, brought matters to a head. The minority was now confronted by what it viewed as Soviet imperialism, a phenomenon not expected from a workers’ state. After insisting on expanded freedom to express its factional views, the minority was expelled.

James Burnham, a professor of philosophy, had taken the lead in suggesting that the Soviet Union had become a new form of class society, dominated by a bureaucratic ruling class. After he completed his brief sojourn in the newly founded WP, its intellectual leadership clearly shifted to Max Shachtman and before long the group came to be known as the Shachtmanites. Its theoretical basis emerged in the pages of the New International, the journal that the minority had taken with it from the SWP. While still identifying with Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Shachtman argued that Stalin had carried out a completely successful counterrevolution.

The WP defined its politics largely on its position on the “Russian question.” Labeling the Soviet Union an example of bureaucratic collectivism, it argued that a nationalized economy alone did not constitute socialism, because the entire apparatus of the state was controlled by the privileged Soviet bureaucrats, not the working class. The economic transformation carried out under Stalin’s five-year plans could be compared best with capitalism’s period of primary accumulation, except that the Soviet version was more brutal and murderous in its execution. Thus bureaucratic collectivism, not a form of socialism, had become an alternative form of development to capitalism.

Rejecting both capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism, the WP declared its independence of the leaders of the two systems in its slogan, “Neither Washington nor Moscow,” and called for the formation of a revolutionary “Third Camp.” It refused to support the United States or its allies during World War II, considering the war to be a struggle among rival imperialisms. Although strongly opposed to Nazism and fascism, the party supported only indigenous resistance movements in Europe and not the governments of Great Britain and the United States, which it expected to take fascist turns themselves under the impact of the war. The “no-strike pledge,” supported by most of US unions and eventually the Communist Party itself to further the war effort, was scornfully rejected as part of the erosion of workers’ rights and democracy expected by the party during wartime.

Membership in the WP generally ran in the low hundreds, the bulk of them intellectuals rather than workers, a large proportion from New York and a highly disproportionate number Jewish. Its better-known members or supporters included such writers as Saul Bellow, Harvey Swados, Dwight Macdonald, James T. Farrell, and Irving Howe, who during some periods edited its newspaper, Labor Action. Many of its members answered the call to take factory jobs and become active in local unions. By 1949, recognizing that it functioned not as party, but rather a “socialist propaganda group,” the WP changed its name changed to the Independent Socialist League (ISL). As such, it became the first group to be granted a hearing by and subsequent removal from the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations.

Calling itself an advocate of democratic socialism, the ISL strongly identified itself with the anti-Stalinist upheavals in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 and sought to take advantage of the upheaval in the CP caused by the revelations in Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet CP. Despite this, as well as its efforts in support of the burgeoning civil rights movement, the ISL remained a small, isolated sect and continued to lose members, such as the group led by Irving Howe that later began to publish Dissent. To overcome its isolation, the leadership of the ISL developed a perspective for merger into the Socialist Party as a basis for the creation of a broad, revitalized socialist movement.

Following the merger in 1958, Shachtman proposed a political reorientation toward working within the existing Democratic Party and the ultimate carrying out of a “realignment” of the major parties, so that the Democrats would become truly the party of labor, liberals, minorities, and the Left. A minority, under the leadership of Hal Draper, former editor of Labor Action, opposed this policy and reaffirmed the traditional ISL support for the formation of a labor party independent of the Democrats.

Shachtman’s anticommunism ultimately led to his support for USmilitary involvement in Vietnam. Subsequently, the labor-party faction left to form the Independent Socialist Clubs, later the International Socialists, which continued to support the idea of the Third Camp. Another group, under the leadership of writer Michael Harrington, supported realignment but broke with Shachtman over Vietnam and formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, later merging with the NewAmerican Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America. The remainder of the Socialist Party reorganized as the ferociously hawkish Social Democrats, USA. The WP and its progeny could be described variously as most notable for sharpening the discussions on the nature and dynamics of Soviet society and for training a number of future leaders of the labor and civil rights movements, or alternatively as a background for the most politically conservative movement is US socialist history.

Buhle, Paul and Jon Bloom, eds. The Legacy of the Workers Party, 1940-1949: Recollections and Reflections. New York: Tamiment Library, New York University, 1986.

Drucker, Peter. Max Shachtman and His Left. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1994.

Fisk, Milton. Socialism from Below in the United States: The Origins of the International Socialist Organization. Cleveland: Hera Press, 1977.

Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer. New York: Basic Books, 1987.