A Partial Survey of Groups on the U.S. Left in 1999

What follows is necessarily incomplete and obviously opinionated (my own opinions) but seeks to give some sense of who’s who and what’s what on the U.S. left at the end of the 20th century.

The longest existing socialist group in the United States is the Socialist Labor Party, whose roots go back to 1876 but which became transformed in 1890 under the leadership of an original but rigid thinker named Daniel DeLeon, and which for many decades has been little more than a rather static educational group.

Also a shadow of its former self is the Industrial Workers of the World, an impressive revolutionary union formed by socialists and anarchists in 1905, but for at least the last five decades little more than a small cluster of affinity groups.

Under Eugene V. Debs during its first two decades, the Socialist Party of America (formed in 1901) was the largest socialist group in U.S. history, but it broke into Communist and Social Democratic fragments after World War I, and in the 1970s what was left of the Socialist Party fragmented into the groups discussed next.

The Social Democratic perspective in the United States is represented by three groups.

One is the tiny and aging but once quite influential Social Democrats USA, whose paper New America and also the unaffiliated but like-minded magazine New Leader have, like the organization, been friendly both to the trade union bureaucracy and policies developed by the U.S. State Department (and to Cold War “hawks” in the Democratic and Republican parties), wavering between liberalism and neo-conservatism, and barely socialist at all.

Taking its socialism more seriously, and more serious as an intellectual and political force on the left, has been Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which currently has a paper membership (not an active, coherently-organized membership) of several thousand individuals — some of whom are just a little to the left of Social Democrats USA, some of whom are more like the original social democrats (i.e., more Marxist-influenced), and a few of whom stretch in a more revolutionary direction. The publications closest to the DSA perspective (though independent of DSA) are Dissent and In These Times.

There is another tiny group, the Socialist Party, USA, which — unlike the others (and unlike the Communist Party) — rejects supporting Democratic Party politicians, and which also inclines in a revolutionary direction.

It is likely that there are no more than 10,000 in the three groups just described.

Because of the collapse of the Communist regimes that controlled so many countries, the influence of the Stalinist tradition has similarly shrunk. The Communist Party USA is a shadow of its former self. It puts out a fairly capable People’s Weekly World and continues to be engaged in various unions and social movements, but its dogged defense of the traditions of the discredited Stalin/Brezhnev dictatorship fatally compromises its credibility.

The Revolutionary Communist Party — glorifying the ideas of Stalin and the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung) — also continues to exist.

Two groups of activists breaking from the Stalinist tradition and reaching for more democratic perspectives are the Committees of Correspondence (which was initiated by a split-off from the Communist Party in the early 1990s) and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (which long ago broke away from the Revolutionary Communist Party). They both have members who have done effective and important work in the labor movement and in various social struggles, although questions remain as to whether their trajectory is revolutionary or reformist.

The best-known and most valuable magazine pulling away from the Stalinist milieu toward a revolutionary socialist direction — in the process attracting forces coming out of left-wing social democratic and Trotskyist milieus — is Monthly Review.

It is likely that there are no more than 10,000 in the groups just described.

There are a number of competing groups claiming to be revolutionary socialist or “revolutionary communist.” Many of these identify themselves as Trotskyist. It is likely that there are no more than 5,000 of those about to be described — but, unfortunately, there are more groups and more complications than can adequately be dealt with.

Of the self-proclaimed Trotskyists, some tend to be very strident and bring to mind Shakespeare’s line of being “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The worst — because it has concentrated on rather vicious slander campaigns against others on the left (accusing them of working for the old Soviet secret police, the Central Intelligence Agency, etc.) is the Socialist Equality Party, formerly known as the Workers League.

Better than this, but also very much inclined to focus on strident polemics at the expense of other activity, are the Spartacist League and the Bolshevik League.

Even smaller, but less narrowly polemical and more inclined to do serious political work, is Socialist Organizer (which identifies with a larger French Trotskyist group whose leader was Pierre Lambert).

Larger — but also seemingly quite self-absorbed (not inclined, in most cases, to work with others) is the International Socialist Organization, functioning under the guidance of a very substantial organization in Britain called the Socialist Workers Party (not to be confused with the U.S. Socialist Workers Party discussed below).

There is also the Freedom Socialist Party, predominantly concentrated in Seattle where its founding leader Clara Fraser lived, which gives admirable stress to feminist ideas, but — like the other groups mentioned here — tends to see itself as the exclusive source of revolutionary wisdom.

Far more serious are Socialist Action, Labor Militant, and the Trotskyist League, all of which have members doing substantial and positive work in trade unions, the Labor Party, social movements, etc., and who try to do serious socialist educational work that will make sense to people unfamiliar with left-wing ideas.

The Trotskyist League is smaller than the others and has no pretensions to being the future leader of the U.S. working class — instead seeking to work in conjunction with others whom it considers to be revolutionaries.

In contrast, Labor Militant and Socialist Action (among the larger of the Trotskyist groups) each appears to see itself as the exclusive nucleus of a future revolutionary vanguard party that will lead the U.S. to socialism — and sometimes this imposes limitations on how they work with others.

Labor Militant is relatively new to the U.S. scene and was established by a substantial British group known as the Militant Tendency. Socialist Action has much more substantial roots in the traditions of American Trotskyism, and while it identifies critically with the Fourth International (the worldwide organization of revolutionary socialist groups established by Leon Trotsky), it very much sets its own policies. Its origins were in the next group we should look at.

The Socialist Workers Party, with its weekly paper The Militant, was the original party of U.S. Trotskyism, established in 1938 with roots going back even further. Once it was by far the largest and most active Trotskyist and revolutionary socialist organization in the country (close to 2,000). In the mid-1970s a younger leadership took over — claiming adherence to “orthodox” positions. But in the early 1980s they initiated a series of purges that eventually reduced the group to a few hundred people who no longer considered themselves Trotskyists, had broken from the Fourth International, and looked to the Cuban Communist Party of Fidel Castro as the leader of the world revolution. The group has tended to be fairly ingrown since the mid-1980s.

Two other groups which broke away from Trotskyism are the Workers World Party and the News and Letters Committees. Workers World broke away in the late 1950s, believing that the Communist bloc was — in spite of Stalinism — the leader of a “global class war” that would overturn capitalism, and that Mao and Castro were positive left-wing elements in that bloc. The News and Letters Committees had been part of an earlier break-away and believed that Marxist-Humanist perspectives influenced by the philosopher Hegel and elaborated by their leader Raya Dunayevskaya provide a superior orientation to that represented by Trotsky. Whereas the somewhat larger Workers World Party has been best known for “mass work” in the form of well-organized but strident and sometimes confrontational demonstrations around various issues, News and Letters is best known for philosophically-oriented analyses of current realities.

Another breakaway from the Socialist Workers Party was a sizable group led by Max Shachtman, who began as a dissident Trotskyist in 1940 but before his death evolved into a leader of Social Democrats USA. Some of his comrades differed with him enough to help form Democratic Socialists of America. Yet other of his comrades rejected social democratic politics altogether and sought to establish a revolutionary socialist pole with the magazine New Politics.

Some from that tradition also decided to form a revolutionary socialist group, the Independent Socialist Clubs, which grew into the International Socialists — which then merged with some of the expelled members from the Socialist Workers Party and others to form Solidarity, associated with the magazine Against the Current. Solidarity has several hundred members, some of whom have done very important work in trade unions and social movements (although often on their own, since the group is not very cohesive). From the beginning it has urged a left-wing “socialist regroupment,” although with limited success. Some of its members also maintain ties to the Fourth International.

Then there is Labor Standard, which is a magazine, not a group. Some of its founders were also expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in the early 1980s and hoped to draw together all supporters of the Fourth International in one organization — something which didn’t happen. Those putting out the magazine believe the best way to keep alive the revolutionary socialist traditions of American Trotskyism is to help build a large, active, democratic, socially-conscious labor movement and Labor Party in which socialist ideas will have a relevance that they cannot have if they are just the “property” of small political groups.

There are more publications (such as Z, influenced by a blend of socialist and anarchist ideas) and various other tiny groups. And fortunately there are a great many more socialist-minded people in the United States than are contained in any of these groups — and in the future there are likely to be many, many more. (There are also many more ideological complications than suggested above — but to do that justice would take at least one fat book.) This is just a simplified but hopefully useful map for working-class activists as they attempt to figure out who’s who and what’s what in the world of labor and left-wing activism.

— Paul Le Blanc