Socialist Workers Party (United States)
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a Trotskyist communist party in the United States. The SWP began as a group that was expelled from the Communist Party USA for supporting Leon Trotsky over Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Socialist Workers Party
January 1938
306 W. 37th Street, 13th floor
New York City, New York 10018
Fourth International (until 1990)
Pathfinder tendency (from 1990)
Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the SWP was the largest Trotskyist organization in the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, the SWP and its youth wing, the Young Socialist Alliance, were the third-largest socialist organizations, after the CPUSA and Students for a Democratic Society. The SWP suffered many splits and its membership declined. The modern SWP is smaller than its progeny, such as the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative and the Marxist-Leninist Party for Socialism and Liberation.
The SWP places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. It publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper, and maintains Pathfinder Press.
International affiliation[edit]
Due to legal constraints, the SWP ended its formal affiliation with the Fourth International in the 1940s. It remained in close political solidarity with the Fourth International.
The SWP broke formally with the Fourth International in 1990, though it had been increasingly inactive in the Trotskyist movement since Barnes's 1982 speech "Their Trotsky and Ours", which some view as signaling a break with Trotskyism. The SWP action followed the 1985 World Congress and the SWP closed Intercontinental Press in 1986. The SWP's international formation is sometimes called the Pathfinder tendency because they each operate a Pathfinder Bookstore that sells the publications of the SWP's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press.