History of the SWP in the US

[Severian]

From time to time, various bits of misinformation get posted about the Socialist Workers Party in the US (no relation to the British and Austrialian parties of the same name, OK?)

This kinda annoys me, since I used to belong to that party and still support and basically agree with it. But on the other hand, I'm more interested in discussing the big ideas and mass struggles and revolutions than various factional squabbles between small groups. So I haven't refuted most of this stuff in detail...except as regards the mass movement against the war in Vietnam, in the recent SDS thread, that involved bigger issues.

But here ya go for those interested, Wikipedia's article about the SWP. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_%28US%29#Origins)

I had to edit it a fair bit to make it more-or-less accurate. We'll see how long that lasts.

Any passage with British Commonwealth spelling is not mine.

One time only offer, all not-totally-petty questions will be answered. At least briefly, satisfaction not guaranteed. Please read article first to see if it's already covered there.

(BTW, this should be a caution about the uneven accuracy of Wikipedia...anyone can come along and edit an article, without even registering or logging in.)

[redstar2000]

How much money did the SWP get for that office building in Manhattan?

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/223.gif

[OleMarxco]

Oh, probably a million or two. Why, you tryin' to hit on'em fer bein' hypocritic, or whut!? ;)

[redstar2000]

Left gossip has it that it was $20 million or more. I'm honestly curious as to the real figure.

If I were in New York, I could go consult the Manhattan real estate transfer records...they're public.

But I figured that someone in or close to the SWP would have probably told Severian what the real figure was.

And no, I don't intend to "hit on them" for "hypocrisy"...They didn't buy the building back in the late 1930s or 40s as a real estate speculation. They had no idea of the kind of hyper-inflation of Manhattan real estate that has take place in the last couple of decades. (The current mayor of New York says that living in Manhattan is a "privilege", not a "right".)

$20 million is not that much; a 12 room apartment on, say, Central Park West probably costs around $20 million. :o :o :o

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[shadows]

I'm interested in reading the SWP version of the early sixties (62, 63?) expulsion/departure of Geoff White, Tim Wohlforth, and James Robertson, though I recall reading some SWP lit on this some long time back. (Education for Socialists pamphlet) It involves ICFI and Healy, way back then, when Healy was fronting as more 'orthodox' and going after Pabloites. Hm.

[Severian]

I don't recall the organization side of that split; tell ya the truth that kind of thing doesn't much interest me. "Who's to blame" for splits that were inevitable because of the political divergence, I mean. Most splits in the SWP's history basically involve the same organizational disputes anyway.

On the political side, it was largely about Cuba...I once met an ex-Spart who summed things up pretty accurately that all splits in the SWP over the past 40 years have been on the Cuban question and they've all been to the right. (That is, distancing themselves from an actual real-life revolution.)

The faction that became the Workers League argued that Cuba was a capitalist state, full stop; they still regard Castro as basically another Peron or similar bourgeois nationalist. (That's Socialist Equality Party/World Socialist Web Site now.) Healy and the British SLL supported this position. There's a booklet by Joseph Hansen from the faction fight, Cuba: The Acid Test, most vs Wohlforth and Healy...Hansen was rare among Marxist polemicists in that he was funny, and he had some pretty ridiculous straight men to riff off of in that controversy.

The Spartacists...I'm less sure exactly what they said then, but now they say Cuba's a degenerated workers state.

Both groups tended to abstain from the social movements of the 60s and 70s; not proletarian in their view basically. Dunno how that was reflected in the pre-split debates though.

The Fourth International stuff was basically a reflection of that; the SWP judged it had more in common with the IS, which was responding positively to the Cuban Revolution than with Healy or the French OCI...given what's known about Healy know, thank Gawd.

***

I actually don't recall a number for the headquarters sale, but I remember the idea was to get enough to pay decades of rent on a new (smaller) HQ. That area has become seriously gentrified recently, I once heard something about Madonna owning a condo next door, so I imagine it was a fair bit.

Also means the SWP isn't running its own printshop, which has its disadvantages but frees up people for the branches.

[shadows]

And I have read that the Militant is decreasing its number of pages, and a dispute over the role of Pathfinder books in the SWP. Any weight to these rumors?

[Severian]

Not that I know of.

The Militant is going part Spanish rather than the separate Perspectiva Mundial...that's on the website. Dunno if that's a reduction in English pages.

[shadows]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24 2005, 05:37 AM
Dunno if that's a reduction in English pages.
From 12 to 16 pages, with 8 pages in English and the same text in Spanish, so this is an overall reduction of a third. (12 to 8) Additionally, type size is purportedly increasing to make the paper more readable, further decreasing text. Is the SWP promoting its paper much? What with the change to more Spanish text, one might expect promotion. I've even heard that staff will decrease. Pernicious rumors? Accurate? I use to read the Militant regularly, back in the early to mid-1970's. Now, I only occasionally see the paper hawked at demos, though I always look for it.

[Severian]

It's not going to be half Spanish. That'd be a huge increase. Christ, the translation work. 4 pages weekly would be a slight increase over a monthly with smaller pages.

So did the rumor mill mention this in advance at all? If not, seems to imply it doesn't really have any inside dope.

Probably the SWP doesn't consider those protests a high priority. I know some peace protests I've been to, I've had to wonder what the heck I was doing there.

But the overall trend of these questions seems to be whether the SWP is declining in size: of course it is. Has been, gradually, since the end of the 70s radicalization, and probably will until there's another major upturn in the class struggle. If history's any guide.

***

This thread's kinda become the kind of organizational stuff I was trying to get away from: optimistically I can hope the politics of, say, "Their Trotsky and Ours" are already made clear in the Wikipedia article now.

Lemme just emphasize one additional point: there was no sharp break in the SWP's overall politics, and there is a great deal of political continuity from today back to its early days. Heck, just the fact the membership is taught that history, as a tradition one should be acting within, guarantees that.

Where there was a change, making a distinction between the democratic and socialist phases of the revolution, that was not due to Jack Barnes alone or anything...a lot of it was prepared by the work of Joseph Hansen, one of the older generation of SWP leaders, on the workers' and farmers' government. He pointed out this was the most common type of government to emerge from anticapitalist revolutions from China to Yugoslavia to Algeria to Cuba, contrary to expectations of the early Communist International that it would be a rare variant. Even in Russia, there was the initial coalition with the Left SRs and initial period of bourgeois-democratic agrarian reform in alliance with the kulaks; both Lenin and Trotsky commented that the revolution did not become fully socialist until the poor peasants' committees were set up in mid-1918.

Workers' and farmers' governments often involve some petty-bourgeois or sometimes even bourgeois representation in the cabinet, and initially concentrated on democratic tasks. They often make significant inroads on capitalist property, but usually the capitalist system is not completely smashed immediately.

'Course if it doesn't move on to do that, the workers' and farmers' government is usually overthrown as in Nicaragua or Algeria.