Marxist Workers Party | |
---|---|
Abbreviation | MWP |
Founded | 1937 |
Dissolved | 1940 |
Ideology | Trotskyism |
Political position | Far-left |
The Marxist Workers Party was a Trotskyist communist party in the United States.
The MWP was a splinter group of the Proletarian Party, which left in 1937 because they disapproved of the PP vacillating line concerning the USSR and the popular front. The founders of the Marxist Workers Party were more critical of the Communist Party of Soviet Union line and, while granting that the USSR was, in some sense, a workers state, they had no use for the Comintern or the Communist Party. [1] : 366 The new organization kept, however, some of the Proletarian Party's other characteristics, including an emphasis on Marxist education; hence its establishment of Marxian Labor Colleges in San Francisco, Chicago and Flint, Michigan. [1] : 364
The group's first periodical was the Marxian Labor College Bulletin in San Francisco. This was moved to Chicago in 1939 and became The Marxist Review in 1940. The organization seems to have become defunct that year. [1] : 366 [2]
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany.
The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was a Trotskyist group in the United States established in 1973 and disbanded in 1989.
The Proletarian Party of America (PPA) was a small communist political party in the United States, originating in 1920 and terminated in 1971. Originally an offshoot of the Communist Party of America, the group maintained an independent existence for over five decades. It is best remembered for carrying forward Charles H. Kerr & Co., the oldest publisher of Marxist books in America.
The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution. The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.
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The Democratic Workers Party was a United States Marxist–Leninist party based in California headed by former professor Marlene Dixon, lasting from 1974–1987. One member, Janja Lalich, later became a widely cited researcher on cults. She characterized the DWP as a political cult with Dixon serving as its charismatic leader.
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Vern Ralph Smith was an American left wing journalist who served in an editorial capacity for several publications of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Smith is best remembered as the Moscow correspondent of the CPUSA's The Daily Worker during the middle-1930s.
Dennis E. Batt was an American political journalist and trade union activist. Best remembered as the first editor of The Communist, the official organ of the Communist Party of America and leading member of the Proletarian Party of America, in later years Batt's political views became increasingly conservative and he ended his life as a mainstream functionary in the union movement.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist political grouping which is the United States section of the International Communist League, formerly the International Spartacist Tendency. This Spartacist League named themselves after the original Spartacus League of Weimar Republic in Germany, but has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.
The Workers Party (WP) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland and Leon Trotsky's belief that the USSR under Joseph Stalin was still innately proletarian, a "degenerated workers' state." They included Max Shachtman, who became the new group's leader, Hal Draper, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Abern, Joseph Carter, Julius Jacobson, Phyllis Jacobson, Albert Glotzer, Stan Weir, B. J. Widick, James Robertson, and Irving Howe. The party's politics are often referred to as "Shachtmanite."
The Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) was a Maoist political party in the United States.
World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class. For theorists, these revolutions will not necessarily occur simultaneously, but where and when local conditions allow a revolutionary party to successfully replace bourgeois ownership and rule, and install a workers' state based on social ownership of the means of production. In most Marxist schools, such as Trotskyism and Communist Left, the essentially international character of the class struggle and the necessity of global scope are critical elements and a chief explanation of the failure of socialism in one country.
The International Conference of Marxist–Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) was an international grouping of political parties and organizations adhering to Mao Zedong Thought founded in 1998 by the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany. It was organized by a Joint Coordination Group and met every two or three years. It ceased to exist in 2017.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
Lotta Comunista or Gruppi Leninisti della Sinistra Comunista is a political party born in Italy that does not recognize parliamentary dynamics for the party's strategy in the current historical period, and thus describes itself as extra-parliamentary. It is a revolutionary and internationalist party founded by Arrigo Cervetto and Lorenzo Parodi in 1965 and inspired by the theory and practice of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism: