 |
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 growth of labour militancy in the early 1970s had an impact on the SWP and currents developed within it urging a reorientation of the party towards this militancy. One such current was the Proletarian Orientation Tendency. Under pressure from the party leadership it dissolved itself however. But another similar tendency developed called the Internationalist Tendency (IT). The IT posed a greater challenge for the group's leadership, as it espoused the ideas of the European-based leadership of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. However, despite tensions between the SWP and USFI, when the former expelled the IT the latter refused to defend their allies. The IT would disintegrate over the next few months, some of its supporters finding their way back into the SWP.
This period was the peak of the SWP's growth and influence. Nonetheless, this growth had stalled in the late 1970s after the end of the Vietnam War and the organisation was at an impasse. Despite which the leadership, now based around a group formed around the figure of Jack Barnes (many recruited at Carleton College in the early 1960s), decided that the key task was for party members to make a turn to industry. This turn entailed party members getting jobs in blue collar industries in preparation for the coming mass struggles which Barnes argued were coming. The result was the movement of many members and their systematic uprooting often out of established careers and into low paying jobs in small towns. Many of the older members with experience in trade unions resisted this 'colonization program' as did younger members. In the meantime the group began to lose members.
The result of this process and the leadership's increasingly rigid discipline was the development of opposition within the group. This opposition was not homogenous and was itself beset by differences between different factions.
A key factor in the growing divisions within the SWP was the move by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and others in the leadership away from Trotskyism, the ideology that had been the raison d'être of the SWP since its founding. In 1982, Barnes gave a speech which was later published as Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist continuity today in which Barnes rejected Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution arguing that it had been disproven by the process of the revolution in Cuba. Barnes also implicitly endorsed the theory of socialism in one country which had been assailed by Trotsky, again using Cuba as an example. This was the culmination of a move towards Castroism that had begun in the 1970s and indicated that the SWP was formally rejecting Trotskyism and was also a sign that Trotskyists were no longer welcome in the party.
One opposition group gathered around the Weinsteins on the West Coast, (with supporters elsewhere too), while a second group gathered around George Breitman and Frank Lovell . Together they formed an opposition bloc on the SWP's National Committee but in 1983 the Barnes-led leadership purged anyone not pledging support of the leadership. Those purged included almost every member of the SWP older than Barnes himself and has therefore been called the Age Purge. This act led to the loss of a third of the SWP membership.
Those purged swiftly regrouped and formed a number of groups. The grouping around the Weinsteins forming the San Francisco-based Socialist Action. The Breitman-Lovell group spent some time formed the Fourth Internationalist Tendency which set itself the task of recapturing the SWP to their understanding of Trotskyism. A group, mainly in Los Angeles, that had been close to Breitman but did not agree to orient toward the SWP belonged briefly to Socialist Action but left to join with descendants of the Schachtman organization in Los Angeles and Detroit in the "regroupment" organization Solidarity. The FIT continued to direct its work towards the SWP for many years until they finally recognised the impossibility of their task and dissolved into Solidarity. Their journal Bulletin in Defense of Marxism was to continue as Labor Standard. Meanwhile, Socialist Action lost a section of their leadership when supporters of Alan Benjamin formed Socialist Organizer, in solidarity with Pierre Lambert's international tendency. More recently they have broken into two groups one continuing as Socialist Action, the other taking the name of the Socialist Workers Organisation which publishes a magazine called Socialist Viewpoint.
The Socialist Workers Party formally left the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1990 though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since Barnes' 1982 speech. In the late 1980s, the SWP's supporters internationally reconstituted themselves in each country as under the name of the Communist League after either taking over national sections of the USFI and purging Trotskyists or splitting from USFI sections. The SWP's international formation is sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder tendency as they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore which sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press.
The Socialist Workers Party has run candidates for President since 1948; it received its greatest number of votes in 1976, when its candidate, Peter Camejo, received 90,310 votes. In 1976, the party won a lawsuit against the FBI as a result of years of spying by the FBI. During the 1970s and 1980s, the party abandoned Trotskyism in favor of a pro- Castro ideology.
The SWP's most high provile and controversial campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s was its Mark Curtis Defense Committees, established after Curtis, an SWP activist and trade union organizer, was charged and convicted on burglary and rape charges in 1988. The party claimed that Curtis had been framed by police for his role in defending immigrant workers.
The party has declined to a membership of several hundred in recent years and, in 2003, sold its headquarters in New York City.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|