Workers Party

The name Workers Party appears in the United States over three key historical periods in the development of the American left. In its first incarnation, the Workers Party was formed in December 1921 as the “legal organization” of the underground Communist Party. As James Cannon recounts in his The History of American Trotskyism (1944), “The Workers Party had a very limited program, but it became the medium through which all our legal public activity was carried on. Control rested in the underground Communist Party. The Workers Party encountered no persecution.” By 1923, members of the underground communist movement in the United States, with the support and authority of [Page 494]the Comintern World Congress, chose to work through the legal party rather than continue a division between the “underground” and the legal organization. The rise of Stalin's authority and the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union also had repercussions in the United States.

In 1928, members of the Communist Party believed to hold “Trotskyist” sympathies were also expelled from the American Communist Party. These individuals, under the leadership of James Cannon and Max Shachtman (among others), formed the Trotskyist Communist League of America in 1934, which again used the name Workers Party after merging with the American Workers Party. Finally, in 1938, the Trotskyists formed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and in 1940 a number of members split with the SWP over the “Russian Question” (Soviet influence) to form a new Workers Party, this time, under the leadership of Max Shachtman.

This third incarnation of the Workers Party (WP), then, under the leadership of Shachtman, broke with Trotsky as a result of his defense of the Soviet Union as a “workers' state, though degenerate.” Shachtman subscribed to the “bureaucratic collectivist” theory of the Soviet state. However, a minority within the Workers Party, led by Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James argued that the Soviet Union was premised on state capitalism. Dunayevskaya and James, and later Grace Lee Boggs, led what was to be known as the Johnson-Forest (James and Dunayevskaya's party names) Tendency within the WP. Wide-ranging theoretical and practical debates were carried out in the party's paper, the New International.

By the close of the 1940s, a number of debates, including the revolutionary role of African Americans and the perennial “Russian Question,” were continuing to divide the Workers Party. Members of the minority, under the leadership of Dunayevskaya and James, left the party in 1947 and rejoined the Socialist Workers Party. In 1949, the Workers Party name was changed to the Independent Socialist League.