 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 4 ] Next Last |
The party has also had a number of splits over the years. In the face of the Cold War and the accompanying repression of radical forces in the USA, one such split saw the departure of the Pabloite faction of Bert Cochran and Clarke who formed the Socialist Union which lasted until 1959. This 1953 opposition supported the positions of Michel Pablo the Secretary of the Fourth International. Singnificantly this schism saw the departure from the SWP of much of the layer of activists won during the struggles of the 1930s in heavy industry. This was represented as an affect of the demoralisation of this layer by the Cannon faction. But it also meant that from the early 1950's that the SWP was left without any real base in industry.
The next far less significant split was that of Sam Marcy 's Global Class War faction which had called within the SWP for support of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party Presidential run in 1948 and was very supportive of the Chinese revolution. This faction ended up leaving the SWP in 1958 after supporting the suppression of the Hungarian Rising of 1956 contrary to the position held by most with Trotskyist tendencies. They went on to form the Workers' World Party.
Meanwhile throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the remaining membership of the SWP clung to its firmly held beliefs and grew older. Consequently the party membership shrank over these years from a post war high in 1948 until the tide began to turn in the early 1960s. The 1959 Revolution in Cuba however signalled a change in political direction for the SWP as it embarked on solidarity work through the Fair Play for Cuba committee. The result was a small accretion of youth to the party's ranks and in the same period long time SWP leader Murry Weiss won another group of youth from the Shachtmanites as they joined the SPUSA. Many of the new recruits however were drawn from the student movement unlike those who had led the party since the 1930s and as a result the internal culture of the party began to change.
Despite such growing signs of an end to the isolation which the group had endured during the McCarthyite period, it fell into a crisis in the early 1960s. This was in part because the leadership was unable to summon enough energy to satisfy the desire of the new younger members to engage in the Civil Rights struggles of those years as their own view of class conflict had been shaped by the rise of the industrial unions in the 1930s and they saw everything through that prism. There was also an international aspect to this internal dispute as the SWP turned back to cooperation with the European based International Secretariat of the Fourth International. Those youth members who dissented with the conservatism of the leadership naturally looked for allies in the international movement of their own and found them in Gerry Healy's SLL which claimed a political orthodoxy that appealed to the Americans.
A factional situation developed in the SWP that saw a number of small oppositional groups develop. One of the key issues was the Cuban Revolution and the SWP's response to it. Cannon and other SWP leaders such as Joseph Hansen saw Cuba as qualitatively different from the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. Their analysis brought them closer to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International from which the SWP had split in 1953. The SWP attempted to negotiate a reunification of the ISFI and the International Committee of the Fourth International leading to the creation in 1963 of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Several sections of the ICFI, including Gerry Healy's Socialist Labor League rejcted the merger and turned against the SWP leadership working with opponents within the party.
The most important faction opposing the SWP leadership's new line was the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) led by James Robertson and Tim Wohlforth which rejected the SWP's "capitulation" to Pabloism and opposed joining the USFI. They produced an analysis of the Cuba which was much more critical of the revolution. However, a split developed within this faction however between groups headed by the two men. Nonetheless both the RT and the Reorganised Minority Tendency were expelled to form the Spartacist (see Spartacist League), and the American Committee for the Fourth International (see Socialist Equality Party), respectively with the latter becoming aligned with Healy's SLL.
In the aftermath the Seattle branch also left to found the Freedom Socialist Party, after protesting about the suppression of internal democracy, as did Murray and Myra Tanner Weiss .
Like all left wing groups the SWP grew during the 1960s and experienced a particularly brisk growth in the first years of the 1970s. Much of this was due to its central involvement in many of the campaigns against the war in Vietnam. However it was also increasingly strident in its defence of the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro and its identification with that regime. A new leadership led by Jack Barnes (who became national secretary in 1972), after the end of the Vietnam war and the death of several of the older leaders, particularly Joseph Hansen at the beginning of 1979, made identification with Cuba an ever greater part of the politics of the SWP as throughout the 1970s. Initially this was partially concealed by the 'orthodox Trotskyist' positions that older members of the party developed in the pages of the groups publications. Particularly prominent in such writing was Joe Hansen , who edited the group's international bulletin, Intercontinental Press, which to many was the voice of the SWP. The part also published many of Leon Trotsky's works in these years through their publishing house, Pathfinder Press . Not only were the better-known writings reprinted, many for the first time since the 1930s, but other more obscure articles and letters were collected and printed for a wider audience than they had when first distributed.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|