1939-40: The US Trotskyist movement, the SWP (no relation to British SWP), which is then the strongest in the world and one of very few that would be able to operate with some freedom during World War 2, splits in a dispute over whether to back the USSR in its war against Finland (Nov 1939 to March 1940). The USSR “defencists” led by James P Cannon (and supported by Trotsky) expel the minority led by Max Shachtman.
1940, August: Trotsky killed by Stalinist assassin.
Late 1940 to early 1950s: The minority, now organised as the Workers Party (WP), conclude that the USSR has become a new exploiting-class society, the “barbarism” fork in their day of the options long seen as produced when capitalism decays: socialism or barbarism. The SWP also moves from its 1939 stance, becoming more and more swallowed up by “defence of the USSR”. By 1951 it sees Stalin’s satellite states in Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’ states”. In 1946-7 there are negotiations to reunify WP and SWP, but they fail, and by 1951 the two groups are bitterly opposed. After 1979 the SWP will spiral off even further, becoming an uncritical pro-Cuba, pro-North-Korea, sect. Most of its members still wanting some sort of Trotskyism, and who remain active, will end up in the Solidarity group formed in 1986 (see below).
1950s: The WP, now more modestly renamed Independent Socialist League (ISL), slowly dwindles, hemmed in by conservative relative prosperity in the USA, working-class quiescence, and the successes of revolutionary Stalinist-oriented movements in ex-colonial countries. Shachtman writes little after 1954. Hal Draper, who had been a youngster in the 1939-40 split, produces the ISL’s weekly paper Labor Action almost single-handed.
1958, September: The diminished ISL dissolves into the Socialist Party USA and disperses. Draper no longer works with Shachtman. The SP’s youth group, YPSL, thanks to a de facto ISL-youth takeover, becomes the biggest left youth group in the USA in the early 1960s, with great activity in the civil rights movement. But that fades. In December 1972, the residual SP-USA splits, a month after Shachtman’s death. Social Democrats USA is led by Shachtman associates such as Tom Kahn and Penn Kemble. It soon dwindles. Shachtman had been drawn into string-pulling and politicking with “sympathetic” union bureaucrats and was equivocal on the Vietnam war. Kahn becomes a high-up trade union official, Kemble a high-up government official. In the 1980s they would push Reagan to back the Contras in Nicaragua. The other side of the split, DSOC, a forerunner of today’s DSA, is led by Michael Harrington, who had joined the ISL in 1953 but seems always to have been a (feisty, talented) reformist. The DSA will be weak for a long time. It will grow rapidly from the Sanders movement in 2016. It now has nearly 100,000 members, but at the same time has shifted towards “camp-ist” politics, i.e. supporting almost any political force in the world appearing anti-USA. Hal Draper quit Labor Action in July 1957. His partner Anne Draper and he spent a year travelling in Europe, then moved to Berkeley, California. Anne Draper worked with unions, especially farm workers; Hal Draper studied for a postgraduate degree and in 1960-70 had a job in the university library. He started writing again, with Two Souls for Harrington’s Anvil, and more for Phyllis and Julius Jacobson’s New Politics journal, in 1960-1,
1964, September: YPSL members at the university in Berkeley influenced by Draper form an Independent Socialist Club (ISC), which quickly becomes active in and recruits from a big Free Speech Movement on the campus, the first flowering of 1960s US student radicalism.
1965, April: First Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) demonstration against Vietnam war
1967, from June: ISC leads successful drive for 120,000 electoral registrations for a “Peace and Freedom Party” placeholder-party in California to get “ballot line” status.
1967, September: ISC expands outside Berkeley to form Independent Socialist Clubs of America (ISCA).
1967, from October: Radicalisation and agitation against the US war in Vietnam explodes on US campuses.
1968, November: ISCA backs Eldridge Cleaver, a maverick Black Panther leader, as PFP candidate for President. The Jacobsons (who do not join ISCA) object. Cleaver’s politics are anything but working-class and he gets 0.05% of the vote.
1969, June: SDS, which was an old grouping previously connected to Democratic Party meliorism, but had exploded to become the biggest vehicle of student radicalism and dominated by variants of Maoism, splits and collapses.
1969, September: ISCA renames itself International Socialists, and declares itself “democratic centralist”. In September 1970s it will move its HQ to Detroit (then seen as the centre of US industry) and rename its paper Workers Power. It pushes its student members hard to get jobs in heavy industry.
1971, January: Hal Draper and a few comrades quit IS, saying it is becoming too hectic and mandatory. They propose instead a “political centre”, an editorial board seeking educational influence rather than tight activist organisation. They do not do that. After Anne Draper dies in 1973, Hal Draper writes five valuable volumes of exegesis, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (1977-1990).
1971, November: Start, in one LA high school, of the Red Tide movement of high school youth, linked to IS. It will become a national organisation in 1975. Hit hard by the 1977 IS split, it continues diminished for a few years after.
1972, January: IS expels Third Camp Tendency (Joanne Landy and others), who object that IS’s policy on the Vietnam War has shaded too pro-Stalinist.
1973, September: Revolutionary Tendency (about 100 of the 300 members IS has then) splits. Although led by an old ISLer, Sy Landy, it now wants a more “Orthodox-Trotskyist-like” profile (and a “state-capitalist” designation for the Stalinist states). The RT forms the RSL (soon fades; dissolves in 1980s). In 1976 Landy splits from RSL to form the LRP (small, but extant). Another split from the RSL, Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, enters the SWP and soon dissolves.
1977, March: IS expels a Left Faction led by Barbara and Cal Winslow, linked to the SWP-UK. (Barbara Winslow’s raging in Higgins’s book against indifference to feminism in the SWP-UK then has come with hindsight, and is unjust). Contrary to what I used to think, the Left Faction is arguing for a more measured approach against hectic “Bolshevisation” (so called) pushed by IS secretary Glenn Wolfe (a former member, though always Maoist-leaning, of a forerunner of AWL, the Trotskyist Tendency in IS-SWP-UK: he had split from us in 1971 to side with the IS-SWP-UK leadership). With the help of Joan Smith and Steve Jeffreys from SWP-UK, the Winslows will form the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The ISO will push out the Winslows a few years later. Then, led by Ahmed Shawki (also arriving from SWP-UK), it will become the biggest group on the US far left before disbanding suddenly in 2019.
1978, October: IS stops publishing its paper, Workers Power. Subsequently Steve Zeluck, the now-famous historian Robert Brenner, and others split from IS to form a group called Workers Power (WP), which starts the magazine Against the Current (still produced, now under the auspices of Solidarity). Both IS and WP abandon the hectic perspectives of the 1969-77 IS. In 1985 they reunite, and then (spring 1986) merge with “Mandelites” expelled from the “Orthodox Trotskyist” SWP to create a group, still extant, called Solidarity, explicitly designed to be a loose educational network rather than an activist organisation with a binding policy.
1979, February: Kim Moody, Jane Slaughter, Mike Parker and others from IS launch Labor Notes, still buoyant and publishing bulletins, briefings, pamphlets, etc. and organising large conferences of rank and file unionists, but explicitly not under IS political leadership. It helps Teamsters for a Democratic Union (launched 1976), the main “success story” from IS’s union activity. But TDU now backs Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien, who is better than the gangster-type Teamsters leaders of the 1970s, but also the union leader closest to Trump.
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