History
The group originated in a controversy within the Spartacist League in the late 1960s. The leadership under James Robertson wanted the group to focus on organizing among students while Harry Turner wanted to organize a series of rank-and-file caucuses within labor unions, particularly minority workers, to oppose both employers and the union leadership. To this end Turner convinced the Spartacist League to create a pan-union Militant Labor Civil Rights Committee in September 1967. Robertson, however, had this group dissolved the next year and suggested that cadres form separate caucuses in their respective unions. The Spatacist League was wracked with a faction fight over this issue during 1968 at the end of which the group led by Harry Turner was expelled. During this fight the Turnerites were allied with another faction that was attracted to the ideas of the French Lutte Ouvrière but they left to establish their own organization, Spark, before the Turnerites were finally expelled. [1]
The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist political grouping. They are 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 the current League has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.
James Robertson was National Chairman of the Spartacist League (US), the original national section of the International Communist League. Robertson is now a consultative member of the ICL's international executive committee.
Workers' Struggle is the name by which the French Trotskyist political party Communist Union is usually known, after the name of its weekly paper. Arlette Laguiller has been its spokeswoman since 1973 and ran in each presidential election until 2012, when Nathalie Arthaud was the candidate. Robert Barcia (Hardy) was its founder and central leader. Lutte Ouvrière is a member of the Internationalist Communist Union. It emphasises workplace activity and has been critical of such recent phenomena as alter-globalization.
Once out of the Spartacist League the Turner group looked for another Trotskyist group to unite with. After brief flirtations with the Workers League of the United States and Lyndon LaRouche's SDS-Labor Committee the tendency grouped around its publication, the Vanguard Newsletter. The newsletter kept some of the ideas that Turner advocated within the Spartacist League, including the building of rank-and-file caucuses within the unions with the ultimate aim of turning them into workers' councils or soviets. [2]
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was an American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement, whose main organization was the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). He wrote on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. LaRouche was a presidential candidate in each election from 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party and seven times for the Democratic Party nomination.
The LaRouche movement is a political and cultural network promoting the late Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas. It has included many organizations and companies around the world, which campaign, gather information and publish books and periodicals. The movement promotes a revival of classical art and a greater commitment to science; advocates the development of major economic infrastructure projects on a global scale; and calls for a reform of the world financial system to encourage investment in the physical economy and suppress financial speculation.
A workers' council is a form of political and economic organization in which a single local administrative division, such as a municipality or a county, is governed by a council made up of temporary and instantly revocable delegates elected in the region's workplaces.
A variation is a soldiers' council, when the delegates are chosen amongst (mutinous) soldiers. A mix of workers and soldiers also existed.
The Vanguard Newsletter group still shopped around for another organization to merge with. For a time they explored opportunities with various De Leonist groups that had left the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Reconstruction and the Socialist Forum Group, but nothing ever came of it. In 1972 when the Leninist Faction left the Socialist Workers Party and formed the Class Struggle League (CSL) the Turnerites quickly made contact with it, even though it was in the process of negotiating with the Spartacists. After an attempt to unite the three groups was rejected by the SL, the Turnerites merged with the CSL. There were still controversies in the new organization. The majority former Leninist Faction members felt that the time had come to proclaim a Fifth International, while the minority from the Vanguard group wished to reconstruct the Fourth International. The minority and majority also differed on the nature of the Eastern European communist states with the later considering them deformed workers' states. On trade union work the first conference favored the idea of rank-and-file caucuses did not wish to build a national organization of such committees just yet, when there was no base for them. [3]
De Leonism, occasionally known as Marxism–De Leonism, is a libertarian Marxist current developed by the American activist Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the first United States socialist political party, the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP). De Leon combined the rising theories of revolutionary syndicalism in his time with orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory, militant industrial unions are the vehicle of class struggle. Industrial unions serving the interests of the proletariat will bring about the change needed to establish a socialist system. While sharing some characteristics of anarcho-syndicalism and with the SLP being a member of the predominantly anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), De Leonism actually differs from it in that he and the modern SLP still believe in the necessity of a central government to coordinate production as well as in the use of a revolutionary political party in addition to union action to achieve its goals.
The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) is the oldest socialist political party in the United States, established in 1876. It is the second oldest socialist party in the world still in existence.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.
The Class Struggle League dissolved in May 1975 with the former Leninist Faction group joining the Trotskyist Organization of the United States. The Turnerites reorganized into an independent group, the Trotskyist Organizing Committee (TOC). At this point it had around thirty members spread out in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Texas. It began making overtures to other Trotskyist parties based on a five point programme: recognition of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism, for the Fourth International, for the Transitional Program, a national organization of rank-and-file trade union caucuses and formation of a labor party. They attempted mergers with the SWP, Spark, the Socialist League (Democratic Centralist) and the Revolutionary Workers League all to no avail. [3]
The Trotskyist Organization of the United States was a small Trotskyist group active in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. The group was founded by two dissident factions which had emerged at the Socialist Workers Partys 1971 convention.
The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States and thus also in the state of New York. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the most populous city in Illinois and the third most populous city in the United States. With an estimated population of 2,716,450 (2017), it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States. Chicago is the county seat of Cook County, the second most populous county in the United States, and the principal city of the Chicago metropolitan area, which is often referred to as "Chicagoland." The Chicago metropolitan area, at nearly 10 million people, is the third-largest in the United States; the fifth largest in North America ; and the third largest metropolitan area in the world by land area.
Finally, in 1978, TOC was invited to join the Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party, an umbrella group of several Trotskyist organizations. It joined the group in November 1978. However, when the CSRP proclaimed its intention to form itself into a distinct political party adhering to democratic centralism in July 1980 the Turnerites left again, this time emerging as the Revolutionary Unity League [4]
The Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party was an attempt to set up a "united front" of several dissident American Trotskyist groups in the 1980s.
Democratic centralism is a democratic practice in which political decisions reached by voting processes are binding upon all members of the party.
In January 1982 when the Morenoist faction of the Fourth International, International Workers League (Fourth International), was preparing its first world congress both the RUL and a group called the Revolutionary Workers Front sent representatives hoping to secure affiliation. With the encouragement of the leadership of the International the two groups set up a "leadership team" to co-ordinate joint strikes, demonstrations and campaigns. The two groups also had discussions where their political differences were hammered out and eventually planned a unification convention. This convention met on June 26–27, 1982 and a new organization, the Internationalist Workers Party (Fourth International) was founded. [5]
However in July 1984 a severe factional crisis wracked the party with the eventual establishment of the International Socialist League (Fourth International) with Turner in the leadership. The IWP(FI) remained the official Morenoist affiliate in the United States, though the ISL(FI) remained a "sympathizing section". The ISL(FI) began publishing a newspaper, Workers Organizer, in November 1985, stating it had branches in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Wisconsin. [6]
