Socialist Workers Party USA

[craigd89]

Do they have a website?? Anyone have information on them

[graymouser]

They do have a site, TheMilitant.com (http://www.themilitant.com/index.shtml), although they don't have a terrific web presence.

The SWP was, for the first 45 years of its existence, the largest and most prominent Trotskyist party in the United States. Unfortunately in the early 1980s it stopped defending its historic line and changed to one that centered on Cuba and the revolutions then happening in Central America and the Caribbean, and expelled everyone who did not go along with the ideological shift. They denounced the theory of Permanent Revolution and threw their chips in with the Cubans, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the New Jewel Movement in Grenada. Suffice to say it didn't win.

The SWP before 1978 had been a major presence on college campuses, but after that it decided it had to "turn to industry" in a very mechanical way. People were told to quit their jobs, even union jobs - they actually had a massive fraction of well over a hundred teachers - and go into key production industries. This declined to the point where they just had people working in meatpacking plants, a strategy they have now abandoned for one of trying to work in factories with large African American workforces and selling a book they recently published on Malcolm X. The book is almost Orwellian in its historical falsification of Malcolm's Black Nationalism and the SWP's support of it during the 1960s. It's worth noting that the SWP was actually fairly close to Malcolm in the last year of his life; it hosted a number of his speeches and he highly recommended the Militant as a paper that told the truth. Unfortunately it's no longer the same party.

At its height in 1976, the SWP was around 1800 members with 1000 more in the Young Socialists Alliance. Today, reports have placed it down below 100 members, with another hundred or so "active supporters" (people who don't have to get factory jobs; they have good-paying jobs so they can donate to the party). Jack Barnes, the SWP leader since 1972, has transformed the SWP from a vibrant Trotskyist party, albeit one with some flaws, into a tiny political cult around himself. The party does almost nothing to build any activities, and merely shows up with papers and books. Their press, Pathfinder, still carries some excellent literature, nearly all of it reprints from before 1983 - and they are quite comfortable with reissuing the works of people they expelled. Everyone who's left has told a very similar story about how the internal life of the SWP is quite unpleasant today, with "discipline" and a farcical "proletarian morality" being enforced through frequent accusations and trials, overwork and major party commitments.

The main group that claims political continuity with the pre-1980s SWP is Socialist Action. Many of our older comrades were in the party back in the '70s, and bring from it the an animating experience as well as the hard lessons of how badly a party can go wrong. Many ex-SWPers are also in a much looser formation, Solidarity, although that group has not kept up with the sharp Leninist politics of the old party.

[manic expression]

As someone who was involved in that group for about a year...stay away. Stay far away.

[gorillafuck]

Why the hell would it make people quit their jobs to be meatpackers? That's outrageously stupid.

[graymouser]

Why the hell would it make people quit their jobs to be meatpackers? That's outrageously stupid.
Well, they didn't start out in meatpacking - they were at one point more diverse with fractions in a number of industries. But over time they lost members and industries fled the country - for instance, a lot of people were actually garment workers, but almost all the garment jobs have left the United States.

The leadership came into the late 70s with the idea that there was about to be an upsurge in industry, a sort of fallout of the '60s and '70s radicalization. So they felt that it was important to get into certain "key industries." This meant getting people who were college educated to go into factories, mills and mines. A lot of left groups did this in the early '70s, with mixed results - the most successful were probably the International Socialists who went hard after the Teamsters and built a major reform movement there. The SWP, though, did it in the most amazingly asinine way. Members were told to go into union jobs and "talk socialism" and sell the Militant at the plant gates, and that was the limit of it. No union activism, and members were expressly banned from running for shop steward.

Of course their perspective was wrong, but the leadership has fetishized since '78 the idea of having a worker membership. If it has diminished, well, "better fewer but better" has been the whole motto of the leadership.

[graymouser]

As someone who was involved in that group for about a year...stay away. Stay far away.
That seems to be the trend in the party today, members lasting about a year before the crazy really sinks in. It's quite tragic, as the SWP had a long and proud history that it simply ran into the ground.