Socialist Workers Party (US)

[Who?]

Does anyone have any information regarding the American SWP's recent political activities?

Has anyone here ever seen them at a rally or anything? Are they involved in any activism?

I'm interested because I was reading about the party and it's history and currently they seem pretty inactive. (I'm not thinking about joining or anything I'm just curious)

[¿Que?]

I've never met anyone from SWP, however I can provide some links of interest. First, you might want to check out The Militant (http://www.themilitant.com/index.shtml), which is their newspaper. Also, there's a yahoo group that deals specifically with the SWP here (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/swp_usa/). If you don't get any good info here, might as well field your question over there. Buena Suerte!

[Who?]

I think I may have to, thanks for the links.

[¿Que?]

I think I may have to, thanks for the links.
You might also try marxmail. The same guy runs both mailing lists. He used to be in the SWP, too.

[KC]

I met one SWP member and their presidential candidate back in 2007 or 2008 at some campus anti-war gathering. The presidential candidate was very awkward and the member kept trying to get me to become a coal miner and join.

[Who?]

I met one SWP member and their presidential candidate back in 2007 or 2008 at some campus anti-war gathering. The presidential candidate was very awkward and the member kept trying to get me to become a coal miner and join.

Why didn't you take the member up on his/her offer? :lol:

[Revy]

Does anyone have any information regarding the American SWP's recent political activities?

Has anyone here ever seen them at a rally or anything? Are they involved in any activism?

I'm interested because I was reading about the party and it's history and currently they seem pretty inactive. (I'm not thinking about joining or anything I'm just curious)

They're a personality cult and those that lead it only see it as a cash cow.

Everyone in the party has to have a low-wage factory job to be considered a real worker while Barnes (the supreme leader) and his wife rolling around in cash sipping champagne on their yacht being the millionaires they are.

The party actually makes no effort to get on the ballot in their campaigns and often does very little campaigning, probably because the party doesn't support their own candidates. Members are expected to promote sales of SWP enterprises such as their paper and bookstore. In fact the party does not have a web site of its own, only a website for The Militant and also a website for Pathfinder Press.

[9]

I met one SWP member and their presidential candidate back in 2007 or 2008 at some campus anti-war gathering. The presidential candidate was very awkward and the member kept trying to get me to become a coal miner and join.

Don't they usually want members to become meat packers?

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Don't they usually want members to become meat packers?
Let me get this straight...
If I join the Socialist Workers Party it will be easier to get a job?

[9]

er... no? I'm not sure how you got that from my comment.

Unless I'm confusing them with another organization - and I'm pretty sure that I'm not - they have in the past urged their members to get jobs at meat packing plants.

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Ok never mind then.

[graymouser]

1. Yes, the Socialist Workers Party requires members to get a job in an industrial field considered a focus by the leadership. This was a pretty broad category about 30 years ago, but by 2000 it had narrowed down to meatpacking, mines and needle trades, They've pulled out of the mines and the needle trades have fled the country so members pretty much work at meat packing plants. However, there are organized supporters who are very close to membership but with a separate status. These people have better jobs and give heavy financial support to the SWP.

2. They do show up at protests and rallies, usually with a spread of Pathfinder Press books. They do jack shit to organize for them, but they are always willing to sell the Militant and Pathfinder books (most recently the Malcolm X book which attempts to falsify the SWP's '60s/'70s line on black nationalism). The only area where SWP is actively engaged in planning anything is Cuba solidarity.

3. Membership is rather arduous; trials for disloyalty are a commonplace thing. There's a "business casual" dress code for political work, and at national fraction meetings members are pretty much expected to wear suits. You can drink but not do drugs, and people have gotten tossed out on extremely sketchy grounds involving sexual peccadilloes.

4. You are expected not to have kids, not to buy a house, and to move when and where the SWP leadership tells you to move. As the party has shrunk over the years, there has been a pattern of collapsing one branch to shore up another. Anybody who's been in the SWP for more than a couple of years has probably moved as a result of these policies.

5. It almost goes without saying that members spend shit-tons of money on the party, which they usually don't have. Branches all rent out meeting space, sometimes with a store or permanent office, and everyone gives heavy sustainers that are theoretically voluntary but don't work out that way in practice. There are constant subscription drives and promotion of Pathfinder books.

6. The politics of the SWP are increasingly erratic. A while back, Jack Barnes declared that US imperialism had lost the cold war; he's recently taken positions against campaigns like BDS against Israel. It's sort of driven by a contrarian hatred of the "petty bourgeois" left. However, the theoretical organ New International rarely if ever comes out, while the Militant spends more space on sales of the Militant and Pathfinder books than on the actual political issues it ostensibly covers.

The SWP was centrist in the '60s and '70s, but it wasn't this grotesque distortion of what a party should be. Anyone left in it should be assumed to be a die-hard who would become an organized supporter if they were expelled.

[RedScare]

They come to my university campus and set up a booth to sell books and the Militant every other week or so, I haven't talked very much to them, but they seemed old and social awkward, but nice. Good books on sale, and the Militant isn't a bad newspaper, just your pretty standard Trot fare. Thanks for the heads up about them, I'll be sure to keep all that stuff in mind when I talk to them.

[Q]

They come to my university campus and set up a booth to sell books and the Militant every other week or so, I haven't talked very much to them, but they seemed old and social awkward, but nice. Good books on sale, and the Militant isn't a bad newspaper, just your pretty standard Trot fare. Thanks for the heads up about them, I'll be sure to keep all that stuff in mind when I talk to them.

The SWP is no longer Trotskyist. They booted out all the trots back in the early 1980's when the leadership wanted to persue an all out apologetic line on Cuba.

As for the stuff graymouser listed: just wow. They slided down the hill pretty hard.

[black magick hustla]

tbh the whole "dropout from the real world" mentality is pretty big in the leftist swamp. one of my buds was close to the RCP and he said they would unashamedly ask party members to drop out from school and become a fulltimer. leftism in the US is a dead end and it probably mentally fucks you up.

what happened to the days when normal dudes with average lives joined communist organizations

[Kassad]

Graymouser pretty much hit the nail on the head. I came in contact with the SWP in DC for the One Nation Working Together and in Chicago on October 16th. I was really baffled to see all their members in suits and really nice outfits. At both events, their tables were near the PSL and ANSWER booths and basically all their members just pick up a stack of The Militant and their new book on Malcolm X and they just walk around trying to sell them.

If you read The Militant, they don't talk about victories for workers. They rarely talk about the mass opposition to war, racism and bigotry. Their articles just talk about how many subscriptions of the newspaper they sell and how many books they sell. They remind me of a business and that's not what a socialist group should be focusing on.

Their group is dying fast and they're pouring what little resources they have into selling their party materials and running electoral campaigns that don't really do anything to build their party. They don't have a single member in my state and most signs point to the fact that Jack Barnes has established a financial cult around himself to sustain his lifestyle on the backs of party members. So in short, they were a hell of a party about 60 years ago. At this point, they are doing nothing for the left.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

I have seen them at different rallies and protests around here, against SB1070, marching on May Day, at school board meetings, and the first time I encountered them was countering a neo-Nazi hate rally. When one of my friends and I were in high school, we went to Des Moines to help them get signatures to run for city council. Their membership is aging and there was a lot of senior citizens at their meeting that I went to, which isn't necessarily bad, BUT... it is impossible to have a revolution without including the youth. Also, they do seem to be obsessed with the meatpacking industry, because it seemed like everyone I met was in that, and I also thought it was weird that they didn't even try to recruit my friend and me even though we agreed to go to their meeting and help them get signatures. Then they stopped talking to me, then they stopped talking to my friend because she told them to go to a rally that was dominated by Bash Back! people and I guess they didn't like that. Mostly I would say this group is not worth the time nor the effort. And it is true, they are constantly trying to sell you things.

[graymouser]

tbh the whole "dropout from the real world" mentality is pretty big in the leftist swamp. one of my buds was close to the RCP and he said they would unashamedly ask party members to drop out from school and become a fulltimer. leftism in the US is a dead end and it probably mentally fucks you up.

what happened to the days when normal dudes with average lives joined communist organizations
Well, the SWP and RCP have both become extremely unhealthy, and have some of the characteristics of "political cults" (which is a term I don't believe should be used lightly). So I wouldn't take them as average or typical examples but rather as pretty much an extreme. This is not normal for Leninist organizations.

As for the "drop out" mentality, that really comes from the '60s radicalization. It was relatively easy to get young students working as organizers; the SWP actually employed about 10% of its membership at its largest in 1976. You could get cheap accommodations and have revolutionaries get by on a relatively small amount in that period. Ironically, the SWP's practice of moving members around at will comes from their ideal in this period seeing themselves as "footloose revolutionaries" who would go wherever the struggle was hottest. In practice it's made them something like left-wing Jehovah's Witnesses (not my original formulation but one I've heard a lot from people who were kicked out over the years) only selling the Militant rather than giving out the Watchtower.

[graymouser]

Damn, I knew I forgot something from the above points on the SWP.

The SWP members are involved in trade union work, but they are banned from running for any union office whatsoever. Their political involvement is strictly limited to selling The Militant at plant gates. I've read accounts where SWP members had been part of union locals where they actually won some trust among their co-workers, who literally begged them to run for shop steward, but the SWPers always had to say no. There is no sense in which they are actually engaged with union politics, and because they are constantly moved around the map, the party never builds an actual base within the unions. This, of course, prevents any potential rivals to the central clique from arising.

[Kassad]

Damn, I knew I forgot something from the above points on the SWP.

The SWP members are involved in trade union work, but they are banned from running for any union office whatsoever. Their political involvement is strictly limited to selling The Militant at plant gates. I've read accounts where SWP members had been part of union locals where they actually won some trust among their co-workers, who literally begged them to run for shop steward, but the SWPers always had to say no. There is no sense in which they are actually engaged with union politics, and because they are constantly moved around the map, the party never builds an actual base within the unions. This, of course, prevents any potential rivals to the central clique from arising.

What do you think their membership numbers are like? They seem to at least have some international support, since they sell their materials in France and the United Kingdom.

[The Grey Blur]

i met some at an anti-EDL rally in england, i forget what their british branch is called but none of them are british, the guy i spoke to was icelandic. he tried to tell me the lindsey oil strikers were racists, i knew about the meat packing stuff so asked him if it was true and he said yeah, him and the other members there (about 4 or 5, all very odd ball) all worked in manual manufacturing like textile or meat packing, industries that i had no idea even existed any longer in britain. the business casual thing explains why their ring-leader who was running for office in london was wearing this big suit and everything. fair play i saw some of them go and talk to the rowdy muslim lads that most of the rest of the activist left seemed terrified by...though i don't think they got much response lol. the dude i debated with had the most shit-eating grin, it was really irritating and patronising. i think those 5 would be their entire british organisation and maybe 2 of them were british, the rest being of varying trans-atlantic/european nationality.

to be honest that whole demonstration was a very surreal experience, apart from my swp(US) experience, we were kettled for a whole day on the other side of the city from the EDL, the swp(UK) giving rambunctious speeches while inviting up bishops and imams to speak as well. about 5 different trot groups trying to recruit you while a huge bunch of working class muslim guys milled around in balaclavas and tracksuits. eventually the EDL broke out of their pen and the younger left and these muslims boys started chasing them about everywhere as the police tried to equally batter us and the EDL.

[graymouser]

What do you think their membership numbers are like? They seem to at least have some international support, since they sell their materials in France and the United Kingdom.
In terms of official members, the absolute high end is probably around 135, although there have been public claims that they've gone down below 100 members. Given that there are 13 branches left and I don't think they average 10 members per branch these days, I can believe that it's on the lower end. There are almost certainly an equal or greater number of organized supporters - but the Oberlin conferences, which are pretty much mandatory for both categories, set the high end at a total (supporters + US members + international members) between 250 and 300, internationally. For contrast, the SWP plus YSA totalled between 2500-3000 in 1976, two years before the "turn to industry" and seven years before the party officially abandoned its version of Trotskyism.

The international offshoots (almost all called "Communist League" or the local variation) are minuscule grouplets, no more than 4-6 members per country, and while they tend to translate New International, they don't have any newspapers of their own and instead they distribute The Militant. These are mostly the bitter ends of the pro-SWP groupings that had left the USFI back in 1989. The SWP had an agreement with the USFI majority not to leave immediately when the SWP abandoned Trotskyism but it simply didn't make sense on anybody's part. These people made small, hyper-sectarian groups that have withered away. But members still cough up cash to the center in the US, and go into debt to attend the SWP conferences and conventions in Oberlin, OH.

[Q]

~100 members? Really? I somehow had the impression their membership was still counting in the lower thousand or higher hundreds. What an incredible waste of a party :(
How can you even support an apparatus of fulltimers (let alone ones living on a luxurious lifestyle) on that basis?

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

this is upsetting to hear!

What the fuck is wrong with these people? Not only is it an awful, awful tactic, but I can see it totally fucking up the lives, and mentalities of a load of poor and idealistic people looking to help the world for the benefit of some party leaders ego/wallet. People have got to denouce this shit as much as possible.

[graymouser]

~100 members? Really? I somehow had the impression their membership was still counting in the lower thousand or higher hundreds. What an incredible waste of a party :(
Very few groups are in that range today in the United States. The SWP has steadily lost members, many of them on purpose, since 1976. They were at around 1000 back around 1989 when they split from the FI, and it became public that they had lost half their numeric strength from 1976.


How can you even support an apparatus of fulltimers (let alone ones living on a luxurious lifestyle) on that basis?
1. Pathfinder Press. Wages are not high at Pathfinder, but the prices of books are.
2. Institutional investments. Like a number of other radical organizations, the SWP has a non-profit organization, in their case the Anchor Foundation, that does their investing. They have accumulated a large sum of money from when the party was larger and have put it to work in various ways. Particularly when they sold their old headquarters building in NYC, there was a lot of money involved.
3. Party sustainers. Members and organized supporters are pressed to give everything that they possibly can to the party. The SWP has become quite shameless about asking for more and more.
4. "Angels." When old radicals die, their wills tend to be rather generous to parties that they were sympathetic to.

[Crux]

So how many years is left until the Pathfinderpress lose the rights to their english translations of Trotsky? And yeah, I've met them in sweden. They sell the Militant and have a fairly stacked booktable. I talked to them about Cuba, their answers were indistinguishable from what I would have gotten from the Communist Party, just a couple of meters away. They did defend Trotsky though when some latin american guy came up and said something about Trotsky being a german spy. They are an odd bookshop to be sure, but not much else.

[blake 3:17]

If I join the Socialist Workers Party it will be easier to get a job?

Quite possibly.

[KC]

Very few groups are in that range today in the United States.

Aside from PSL and ISO, I can't think of any other socialist organizations that would have an active membership larger than 100-200 people. Even the CPUSA is below that by now, if you count CPUSA and YCL as separate, which they basically are.

[Zeus the Moose]

Aside from PSL and ISO, I can't think of any other socialist organizations that would have an active membership larger than 100-200 people. Even the CPUSA is below that by now, if you count CPUSA and YCL as separate, which they basically are.

That's probably accurate. The SP-USA has about 1,000 members in total, the CPUSA probably more than that, and DSA claims somewhere around 5,000 members. But in terms of active members, I'm sure the PSL and the ISO have the most.

[KC]

That's probably accurate. The SP-USA has about 1,000 members in total, the CPUSA probably more than that, and DSA claims somewhere around 5,000 members. But in terms of active members, I'm sure the PSL and the ISO have the most.I know for a fact that YCL counts people that simply fill out a form on their website (http://www.yclusa.org/join) as "members" and the CPUSA claims all YCL members as CP members. So, yeah...