Economic unrest in the 1890s was represented by populism and the People's Party. Although using anti-capitalist rhetoric, it represented the views of small farmers who wanted to protect their own private property, not a call for communism, collectivism, or socialism.[12] Progressives in the early 20th century criticized the way capitalism had developed but were essentially middle class and reformist; however, both populism and progressivism steered some people to left-wing politics and many popular writers of the progressive period were left-wing.[13] Even the New Left relied on radical democratic traditions rather than left-wing ideology.[14]Friedrich Engels thought that the lack of a feudal past was the reason for the American working class holding middle-class values. Writing at a time when American industry was developing quickly towards the mass-production system known as Fordism, Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci saw individualism and laissez-faire liberalism as core shared American beliefs. According to the historian David De Leon, American radicalism was rooted in libertarianism and syndicalism rather than communism, Fabianism and social democracy, being opposed to centralized power and collectivism.[15] The character of the American political system is hostile toward third parties and has also been presented as a reason for the absence of a strong socialist party in the United States.[16]
Political repression has also contributed to the weakness of the left in the United States. Many cities had Red Squads to monitor and disrupt leftist groups in response to labor unrest such as the Haymarket Riot.[17] During World War II, the Smith Act made membership in revolutionary groups illegal. After the war, Senator Joseph McCarthy used the Smith Act to launch a crusade (McCarthyism) to purge alleged communists from government and the media. In the 1960s, the FBI's COINTELPRO program monitored, infiltrated, disrupted and discredited radical groups in the United States.[18] In 2008, Maryland police were revealed to have added the names and personal information of anti-war protesters and death penalty opponents to a database which was intended to be used for tracking terrorists.[19] Terry Turchie, a former deputy assistant director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division, admitted that "one of the missions of the FBI in its counterintelligence efforts was to try to keep these people (progressives and self-described socialists) out of office."[20]
The first European socialists to arrive in North America were a Christian sect known as Labadists, who founded the commune of Bohemia Manor in 1683, about 60 miles (97 km) west of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their communal way of life was based on the communal practices of the apostles and early Christians.[22]
The first secular American socialists were German Marxist immigrants who arrived following the Revolutions of 1848, also known as Forty-Eighters.[23]Joseph Weydemeyer, a German colleague of Karl Marx who sought refuge in New York in 1851 following the 1848 revolutions, established the first Marxist journal in the U.S., called Die Revolution, but It folded after two issues. In 1852 he established the Proletarierbund, which would become the American Workers' League, the first Marxist organization in the U.S., but it too was short-lived, having failed to attract a native English-speaking membership.[24]
In 1866, William H. Sylvis formed the National Labor Union (NLU). Frederich Albert Sorge, a German who had found refuge in New York following the 1848 revolutions, took Local No. 5 of the NLU into the First International as Section One in the U.S. By 1872, there were 22 sections, which were able to hold a convention in New York. The General Council of the International moved to New York with Sorge as General Secretary, but following internal conflict, it dissolved in 1876.[25]
A larger wave of German immigrants followed in the 1870s and 1880s, which included social democratic followers of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lasalle believed that state aid through political action was the road to revolution and was opposed to trade unionism which he saw as futile, believing that according to the iron law of wages employers would only pay subsistence wages. The Lassalleans formed the Social Democratic Party of North America in 1874 and both Marxists and Lassalleans formed the Workingmen's Party of the United States in 1876. When the Lassalleans gained control in 1877, they changed the name to the Socialist Labor Party of North America (SLP). However, many socialists abandoned political action altogether and moved to trade unionism. Two former socialists, Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers, formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886.[23]
Anarchists split from the Socialist Labor Party to form the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1881. By 1885 they had 7,000 members, double the membership of the SLP.[26] They were inspired by the International Anarchist Congress of 1881 in London. There were two federations in the United States that pledged adherence to the International. A convention of immigrant anarchists in Chicago formed the International Working People's Association (Black International), while a group of Native Americans in San Francisco formed the International Workingmen's Association (Red International).[27] Following a violent demonstration at Haymarket in Chicago in 1886, public opinion turned against anarchism. While very little violence could be attributed to anarchists, the attempted murder of a financier by an anarchist in 1892 and the 1901 assassination of the American president, William McKinley, by a professed anarchist led to the ending of political asylum for anarchists in 1903.[28] In 1919, following the Palmer Raids, anarchists were imprisoned and many, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were deported. Yet anarchism again reached great public notice with the trial of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who would be executed in 1927.[29]
The organizers of the IWW disagreed on whether electoral politics could be employed to liberate the working class. Debs left the IWW in 1906, and De Leon was expelled in 1908, forming a rival "Chicago IWW" that was closely linked to the SLP. The (Minneapolis) IWW's ideology evolved into anarcho-syndicalism, or "revolutionary industrial unionism", and avoided electoral political activity altogether.[31] It was successful organizing unskilled migratory workers in the lumber, agriculture, and construction trades in the Western states and immigrant textile workers in the Eastern states and occasionally accepted violence as part of industrial action.[32]
The SPA was divided between reformers who believed that socialism could be achieved through gradual reform of capitalism and revolutionaries who thought that socialism could only develop after capitalism was overthrown, but the party steered a center path between the two.[33] The SPA achieved the peak of its success by 1912 when its presidential candidate received 5.9% of the popular vote. The first Socialist congressman, Victor L. Berger, had been elected in 1910. By the beginning of 1912, there were 1,039 Socialist officeholders, including 56 mayors, 305 aldermen and councilmen, 22 police officials, and some state legislators. Milwaukee, Berkeley, Butte, Schenectady, and Flint were run by Socialists. A Socialist challenger to Gompers took one-third of the vote in a challenge for leadership of the AFL. The SPA had 5 English and 8 foreign-language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign-language weeklies, and 10 English and 2 foreign-language monthlies.[34]
American entry into the First World War in 1917 led to a patriotic hysteria aimed against Germans, immigrants, African Americans, class-conscious workers, and Socialists, and the ensuing Espionage Act and Sedition Act were used against them. The government harassed Socialist newspapers, the post office denied the SP use of the mails, and antiwar militants were arrested. Soon Debs and more than sixty IWW leaders were charged under the acts.[35]
Communist–Socialist split, the New Deal and Red Scares (1910s–1940s)
In 1928, following divisions inside the Soviet Union, Jay Lovestone, who had replaced Ruthenberg as general secretary of the CPUSA following his death, joined with William Z. Foster to expel Foster's former allies, James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, who were followers of Leon Trotsky. Following another Soviet factional dispute, Lovestone and Gitlow were expelled, and Earl Browder became party leader.[38]
By the 1930s the Socialist Party was deeply divided between an Old Guard, led by Hillquit, and younger Militants, who were more sympathetic to the Soviet Union, led by Norman Thomas. The Old Guard left the party to form the Social Democratic Federation.[41] Following talks between the Workers Party and the Socialists, members of the Workers Party joined the Socialists in 1936.[42] Once inside they operated as a separate faction.[43] The Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party the following year and set up the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the youth wing of the Socialists, the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) joined them.[44] Shachtman and others were expelled from the SWP in 1940 over their position on the Soviet Union and set up the Workers Party. Within months many members of the new party, including Burnham, had left.[45] The Workers Party was renamed the Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1949 and ceased being a political party.[46]
Some members of the Socialist Party's Old Guard formed the American Labor Party (ALP) in New York State, with support from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The right-wing of this party broke away in 1944 to form the Liberal Party of New York.[47] In the 1936, 1940 and 1944 elections the ALP received 274,000, 417,000, and 496,000 votes in New York State, while the Liberals received 329,000 votes in 1944.[48]
Civil rights, War on Poverty and the New Left (1950s–1960s)
Shachtman, Harrington, Kahn, and Rustin argued advocated a political strategy called "realignment" that prioritized strengthening labor unions and other progressive organizations that were already active in the Democratic Party. Contributing to the day-to-day struggles of the civil rights movement and labor unions had gained socialists credibility and influence, and had helped to push politicians in the Democratic Party towards "social-liberal" or social-democratic positions, at least on civil rights and the war on poverty.[61][62]
Harrington, Kahn, and Horowitz were officers and staff-persons of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), which helped to start the New LeftStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS).[63] The three LID officers clashed with the less experienced activists of SDS, like Tom Hayden, when the latter's Port Huron Statement criticized socialist and liberal opposition to communism and criticized the labor movement while promoting students as agents of social change.[64][65] LID and SDS split in 1965, when SDS voted to remove from its constitution the "exclusion clause" that prohibited membership by communists:[66] The SDS exclusion clause had barred "advocates of or apologists for" "totalitarianism".[67] The clause's removal effectively invited "disciplined cadre" to attempt to "take over or paralyze" SDS, as had occurred to mass organizations in the thirties.[68] Afterwards, Marxism–Leninism, particularly the Progressive Labor Party, helped to write "the death sentence" for SDS,[69][70][71][72] which nonetheless had over 100 thousand members at its peak.
SDUSA–SPUSA split, foundation of DSOC–DSA and anti-WTO protests (1970s–1990s)
When the SPA became SDUSA,[73] the majority had 22 of 33 votes on the (January 1973) national committee of SDUSA. Two minority caucuses of SDUSA became associated with two other socialist organizations, each of which was founded later in 1973. Many members of Michael Harrington's ("Coalition") caucus, with 8 of 33 seats on the 1973 SDUSA national committee,[76] joined Harrington's DSOC. Many members of the Debs caucus, with 2 of 33 seats on SDUSA's 1973 national committee,[76] joined the Socialist Party of the United States (SPUSA).
In the 1990s, anarchists attempted to organize across North America around Love and Rage, which drew several hundred activists. By 1997 anarchist organizations began to proliferate.[83] One successful anarchist movement was Food Not Bombs, that distributed free vegetarian meals. Anarchists received significant media coverage for their disruption of the 1999 World Trade Organization conference, called the Battle in Seattle, where the Direct Action Network was organized. Most organizations were short-lived and anarchism went into decline following a reaction by the authorities that was increased after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Occupy, Bernie Sanders campaigns and DSA electoral victories (2000s–present)
According to The New Republic, Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 United States presidential election "would thrill and then embitter a generation of leftists." with "Millennials curious about socialism [being] drawn to" Obama, "especially as he successfully repelled the avatar of the Democratic establishment, Hillary Clinton. In office, however, Obama veered to the economic center, tapping Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff and allowing fiscal moderates like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to steer the recovery from the economic crash."[82]
Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council as an openly socialist candidate in 2013. She was re-elected in 2015.[88][89][90]
Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who runs as an independent,[91] won his first election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981 and was re-elected for three additional terms. He then represented Vermont in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1991 until 2007, and was subsequently elected U.S. Senator for Vermont in 2007, a position which he still holds.[92][93][94] Although he did not win the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination, Sanders won the fifth highest number of primary votes of any candidate in a nomination race, Democratic or Republican, and had caused an upset in Michigan and many other states.[95]
Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the NY-14 U.S. House primary and went on to win her general election. She is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and ran on a progressive platform. Broadly, the modern American Left is characterized by organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the US with over 90,000 members. The DSA has seen a huge resurgence in growth with Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign and continues to grow despite having had a membership of around 5,000 members only a decade ago. Unlike other parts of the modern left like the Socialist Equality Party, the DSA is not a political party and its affiliated candidates usually run on a Democratic or independent ticket. The most widely circulated socialist publication in the US, Jacobin, along with other leftist publications, like Dissent and Monthly Review, have all become increasingly popular with the resurgence of democratic socialism post-Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.[citation needed]
free-thinking, and utopian socialism as typified by the work of thinkers such as Josiah Warren and Henry David Thoreau. This was overshadowed by a mass, cosmopolitan, and working-class movement between the 1880s and 1940s, whose members were mostly recent immigrants, including those of German, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, and Russian descent.[96]
Founded in 1876, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) was a reformist party but adopted the theories of Karl Marx and Daniel De Leon in 1900, leading to the defection of reformers to the new Socialist Party of America (SPA). It contested elections, including every election for President of the United States from 1892 to 1976. Some of its prominent members included Jack London and James Connolly. By 2009 it had lost its premises and ceased publishing its newspaper, The People.[99]
In 1970, a group of dissidents left the SLP to form Socialist Reconstruction. Socialist Reconstruction then expelled some of its dissidents, who formed the Socialist Forum Group.[100]
Comintern. The Socialist Party was re-formed in the mid-1920s but stopped running candidates after 1956, having been undercut by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the resulting leftward movement of the Democratic Party to its right, and by the Communist Party
on its left. In the early 1970s, the party split into tiny factions.
After 1960 the Socialist Party also functioned "as an educational organization".[101] Members of the Debs–Thomas Socialist Party helped to develop leaders of social-movement organizations, including the civil-rights movement and the New Left.[102][103] Similarly, contemporary social-democratic and democratic-socialist organizations are known because of their members' activities in other organizations.
List of Democratic Socialists of America members who have held office in the United States
Michael Harrington resigned from Social Democrats, USA early in 1973. He rejected the SDUSA (majority Socialist Party) position on the Vietnam War, which demanded an end to bombings and a negotiated peace settlement. Harrington called rather for an immediate cease fire and immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.[104] Even before the December 1972 convention, Michael Harrington had resigned as an Honorary Chairperson of the Socialist Party.[73] In the early spring of 1973, he resigned his membership in SDUSA. That same year, Harrington and his supporters formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). At its start, DSOC had 840 members, of which 2 percent served on its national board; approximately 200 had been members of Social Democrats, USA or its predecessors whose membership was then 1,800, according to a 1973 profile of Harrington.[105]
The DSOC became a member of the Socialist International. It supported progressive Democrats including DSOC member Congressman Ron Dellums and worked to help network activists in the Democratic Party and in labor unions.[106]
In 1982, the DSOC established the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) upon merging with the
The Socialist Party of America changed its name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) in 1972.[73] In electoral politics, SDUSA's National Co-chairman Bayard Rustin stated that its goal was to transform the Democratic Party into a social-democratic party.[112] SDUSA sponsored a conferences that featured discussions and debates over proposed resolutions, some of which were adopted as organizational statements. For these conferences, SDUSA invited a range of academic, political, and labor-union leaders. These meetings also functioned as reunions for political activists and intellectuals, some of whom worked together for decades.[113]
Many SDUSA members served as organizational leaders, especially in labor unions. Rustin served as President of the
In the Socialist Party before 1973, members of the Debs Caucus opposed endorsing or otherwise supporting Democratic Party candidates. They began working outside the Socialist Party with antiwar groups such as the
Students for a Democratic Society. Some locals voted to disaffiliate with SDUSA and more members resigned; they re-organized as the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) while continuing to operate the old Debs Caucus paper, the Socialist Tribune, later renamed The Socialist. The SPUSA continues to run local and national candidates, including Dan La Botz' 2010 campaign for US Senate in Ohio that won over 25,000 votes and Pat Noble's successful election onto the Red Bank Regional High School Board of Education in 2012 and subsequent re-election in 2015. The SPUSA has run or endorsed a presidential ticket in every election since its founding, most recently nominating Greens party co-founder and activist Howie Hawkins
distributist flavor,[121][122] and seeks "widespread economic participation and ownership" through supporting small business,[122] as well as providing a social safety net programs. It also has a minor anti-capitalism faction.[123] The party's name was inspired by Solidarity (Solidarnosc), the independent labor union of Poland.[124]
The Green Party of the United States is a eco-socialist party whose platform emphasizes environmentalism, non-hierarchical participatory democracy, social justice, respect for diversity, peace, and nonviolence.[125][126][127][128][129] At their 2016 party convention in Houston, the party changed its platform to support a decentralized form of eco-socialism based on workplace democracy.[130][131]
In the
2000 presidential election, Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke received 2,882,955 votes or 2.74% of the popular vote.[132]
In the 2016 election, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and running mate Ajamu Baraka qualified to be on the ballot in 44 states and the District of Columbia, with 3 additional states allowing write-in votes.[133][134]
The Greens/Green Party USA is a much smaller group focusing on education and local, grassroots organizing.
It has been involved in a number of events, such as a 2013 protest against the
Golden Dawn in Chicago,[137] a 2014 meeting on the Ukraine[138] and a protest against Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.[139] A significant program of the American Party of Labor is "Red Aid: Service to the People", which involves providing food, clothing and other assistance to the poor and homeless in impoverished communities, and has been established in multiple US cities.[140][141][142]
Its current organ, The Red Phoenix, carries articles concerning contemporary political issues and theoretical and historical questions.
Established in 1919, the Communist Party USA (CP) claimed a membership of 100,000 in 1939 and maintained a membership over 50,000 until the 1950s. However, the 1956 invasion of Hungary,
House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) contributed to its steady decline despite a brief increase in membership from the mid-1960s. Its estimated membership in 1996 was between 4,000 and 5,000.[143] From the 1940s, the FBI attempted to disrupt the CP, including through its Counter‐Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).[144]
Political Affairs. Beginning in 1988, the CP stopped running candidates for President of the United States.[149] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was found that the Soviet Union had provided funding to the CP throughout its history. The CP had always supported the positions of the Soviet Union.[150]
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) was founded in 1985 through the mergers of
New Communist Movement
. The FRSO grew out of an initial merger of the Proletarian Unity League and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters. Some years later, the Organization for Revolutionary Unity and the Amilcar Cabral/Paul Robeson Collective merged into the FRSO.
In 1999, the FRSO split into two organizations, both of which retain the FRSO name to this day. The split primarily concerned the organization's continued adherence to Marxism–Leninism, with one side of the FRSO upholding Marxism–Leninism and the other side preferring to pursue a strategy of regrouping and rebuilding the Left in the United States. These organizations are commonly identified through their publications, which are Fight Back! News and Freedom Road, and their websites, (frso.org) and (freedomroad.org), respectively.
In 2010, members of the FRSO (frso.org) and other anti-war and international solidarity activists were raided by the FBI. Secret documents left by the FBI revealed that agents planned to question activists about their involvement in the FRSO (frso.org) and their international solidarity work related to Colombia and Palestine.[151] The FRSO (frso.org) works in the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.
Both FRSO groups continue to uphold the right of national self-determination for
Chicanos
. The FRSO (frso.org) works in the labor movement, the student movement, and the oppressed nationalities movement.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation was formed in 2004 as a result of a split in the Workers World Party. The San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. branches left almost in their entirety and the party has grown significantly since then.[
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.) at the time of the split.[152]
Following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, A.N.S.W.E.R. organized the "Seize BP" campaign, which organized demonstrations calling for the U.S. federal government to seize BP's assets and place them in trust to pay for damages.[153]
The PSL has also been active in the antiracist movement, participating in protests across the country throughout 2020.
The Progressive Labor Party (PL) was formed as the Progressive Labor Movement in 1962 by a group of former members of the Communist Party USA, most of whom had quit or been expelled for supporting China in the Sino-Soviet split. To them, the Soviet Union was imperialist. They competed with the CP and SWP for influence in the anti-war movement and the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), forming the May 2 Movement as its anti-war front organization.[157] Its major publications are Progressive Labor and the Marxist–Leninist Quarterly.[158] They later abandoned Maoism, refusing to follow the line of any foreign country and formed the front group, the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), in 1973. Much of their activity included violent confrontations against far-right groups, such as Nazis and Klansmen.[159] While membership in 1978 was about 1,500, by 1996 it had fallen below 500.[160]
Formed in 1969 as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU), the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had almost one thousand members in twenty-five states by 1975. Its main founder and long-time leader,
school busing, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and gay rights. The party fell out of favour with the Chinese government after the death of Mao Zedong, partly because of the personality cult of the RCP leader. By the mid-1990s the party numbered fewer than 500 members.[163]
The Workers World Party (WWP) was formed in 1958 by fewer than one hundred people who left the Socialist Workers Party after the SWP supported socialists in New York State elections. Their publication is
Workers World. The party's position has developed from Trotskyism to independent Marxism–Leninism, supporting all Marxist states. They have been active in organizing protests against far-right groups. They were also notable for being the main US supporter of the former Ethiopian communist government. In the 1990s their membership was estimated at 200.[164]
Their front group,
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.) organized the early protests against the war in Iraq, which brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C. before the war had even begun.[165] However, following a split in the party in 2004, some members left to form the Party for Socialism and Liberation, taking leadership of A.N.S.W.E.R. with them. The Workers World Party then formed the Troops Out Now Coalition.[152]
Trotskyism
Many
Trotskyist parties and organizations exist that advocate communism. These groups are distinct from Marxist–Leninist groups in that they generally adhere to the theory and writings of Leon Trotsky
. Many owe their organizational heritage to the Socialist Workers Party, which emerged as a split-off from the CP.
The Freedom Socialist Party began in 1966 as the Seattle branch of the Socialist Workers Party that had split from the party and joined with others who had not belonged to the SWP. They differed with the SWP on the role of African Americans, whom they saw as being the future vanguard of the revolution, and of women, emphasizing their rights, which they called "socialist feminism". Clara Fraser came to lead the party and was to form the group Radical Women.[166]
International Marxist Tendency
The US Section of the International Marxist Tendency is an American Trotskyist organization formed in 2002. The IMT is inspired by the theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, as well as British Trotskyist Ted Grant, and publishes a regular newspaper called Socialist Revolution (formerly Socialist Appeal). It also supports a publishing house called Marxist Books. The organization argues for a break with the Democrats and Republicans, and the formation of a mass working-class party with a socialist program.[167]
The International Socialist Organization (ISO) was a group founded in 1977 as a section of the International Socialist Tendency (IST). The organization held Leninist positions on imperialism and considered itself a vanguard party, preparing the ground for a revolutionary party to hypothetically succeed it. The organization held a Trotskyist critique of nominally socialist states, which it considered class societies. In contrast to this, the ISO advocated the tradition of "socialism from below". It was strongly influenced by the perspectives of Hal Draper and Tony Cliff. It broke from the IST in 2001 but continued to exist as an independent organization for the next eighteen years.
The ISO emphasized educational work on the socialist tradition. Branches also took part in activism against the Iraq War, against police brutality, against the death penalty, and in labor strikes, among other social movements. At its peak in 2013, the group had as many as 1500 members. The organization argued that it was the largest revolutionary socialist group in the United States at that time. The ISO found itself in crisis early 2019, largely stemming from a scandal over the leadership's response to a 2013 sexual misconduct case. The ISO voted to dissolve itself in March 2019.
Socialist Action was formed in 1983 by members, almost all of whom had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party. Its members remained loyal to Trotskyist principles, including "
Although Socialist Alternative has sometimes pursued a democratic socialist strategy, most notably in Seattle where Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council as an openly socialist candidate in 2013.,[88][89][90] it identifies as a Trotskyist political organization. Socialist Alternative is the U.S. affiliate of the International Socialist Alternative, which is a Brussels-based international of Trotskyist political parties.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is a political party that formed after a 1964 ideological rupture with Socialist Workers Party over the issue of their support of the Fidel Castro government in Cuba, The SEP are composed of Trotskyists and are affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site.
With fewer than one thousand members in 1996, the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) was the second-largest Marxist–Leninist party in the United States.
Trotskyist Fourth International.[170] Their publications include The Militant and a theoretical journal, the International Socialist Review.[171] Two groups that broke with the SWP in the 1960s were the Spartacist League and the Workers League (which would later evolve into the Socialist Equality Party).[172] The SWP has been involved in numerous violent scuffles.[173] In 1970 the party successfully sued the FBI for COINTELPRO, where the FBI opened and copied mail, planted informants, wiretapped members' homes, bugged conventions, and broke into party offices.[174] The party fields candidates for President of the United States.[173]
The Spartacist League was formed in 1966 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who had been expelled two years earlier after accusing the SWP of adopting "petty bourgeois ideology". Beginning with a membership of around 75, their numbers dropped to 40 by 1969 although they grew to several hundred in the early 1970s, with Maoists disillusioned with China's new foreign policy joining the group.[176]
The League saw the Soviet Union as a "deformed workers' state", and supported it over some policies. It is committed to Trotskyist "permanent revolution", rejecting Mao's peasant guerilla warfare model. The group's publication is Workers Vanguard. Much of the group's activity has involved stopping Ku Klux Klan and Nazi rallies.[176]
. The divisions between Adams and Jefferson were exasperated by the more extreme views expressed by some of their partisans, particularly the High Federalists led by Hamilton on what was becoming known as the political right, and the democratic wing of the Republican Party on the left, associated with New York Governor George Clinton and Pennsylvania legislator Albert Gallatin, among others.
^Sale, p. 287. Sale described an "all‑out invasion of SDS by the Progressive Labor Party. PLers—concentrated chiefly in Boston, New York, and California, with some strength in Chicago and Michigan—were positively cyclotronic in their ability to split and splinter chapter organizations: if it wasn't their self‑righteous positiveness it was their caucus‑controlled rigidity, if not their deliberate disruptiveness it was their overt bids for control, if not their repetitious appeals for base‑building it was their unrelenting Marxism". Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, pp. 253.
^"The student radicals had gamely resisted the resurrected Marxist–Leninist sects ..." (p. 258); "for more than a year, SDS had been the target of a takeover attempt by the Progressive Labor Party, a Marxist–Leninist cadre of Maoists", Miller, p. 284. Miller describes Marxist Leninists also on pages 228, 231, 240, and 254: c.f., p. 268.
^Sale wrote, "SDS papers and pamphlets talked of 'armed struggle,' 'disciplined cadre,' 'white fighting force,' and the need for "a communist party that can guide this movement to victory"; SDS leaders and publications quoted Mao and Lenin and Ho Chi Minh more regularly than Jenminh Jih Pao. and a few of them even sought to say a few good words for Stalin". p. 269.
^Nossiter, Bernard D. (March 3, 1981). "New team at U.N.: Common roots and philosophies". The New York Times (Late City final ed.). section A, p. 2, col. 3.
^Black, Susannah (August 15, 2016). "Mr. Maturen Goes to Washington". Front Porch Republic. Retrieved August 16, 2016. What's next may be hinted at by a 51 year old devout Catholic, businessman, and semi-professional magician named Mike Maturen, who recently accepted the presidential nomination of the American Solidarity Party, the only active Christian Democratic party in the nation.
^Liberation Caucus of ASP 🧡, & (Liberation Caucus of the American Solidarity Party). (2021, October 28). Thread: What is the Liberation Caucus? We are a voting bloc caucus of @AmSolidarity, with members of varying backgrounds, unified by common principles. We seek to dismantle capitalism, racism and misogyny, and promote an ownership society through deliberative democracy. [Tweet]. @LiberationASP. https://twitter.com/LiberationASP/status/1453750965803393026
^"Officeholders". Green Party of the United States. Retrieved May 15, 2016.
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