The founding of the SWP built on 20 years of experience in constructing a party in the United States that could emulate the communist course of the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, the party that led millions of workers and farmers to take power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

The new organization was led by seasoned communists who had been part of organizing the Communist Party in the United States and who opposed the growing Stalinization of the party leadership and supported the fight led by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to continue Lenin’s communist course. The Socialist Workers Party incorporated layers of workers and youth newly radicalized by the labor battles of the 1930s.

Coming out of the convention the Socialist Workers Party deepened its orientation to the industrial working class and unions in order to meet the challenges and revolutionary opportunities in the class struggle at home and abroad. Its cadres joined in union battles against the employers, the rising Black rights movement, struggles against colonial rule in Puerto Rico and around the world, the fight against fascism both in Europe and in its incipient forms at home, and the campaign against the imperialist rulers’ drive toward war, which had been developing over the previous several years. The SWP defended the Soviet workers state in face of imperialist attack. And it played a key role in the establishment of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution founded by Trotsky and other veteran communists, although the party was barred from formal membership by reactionary U.S. legislation.

Just a few years after the party’s founding, on Dec. 8, 1941, 18 SWP and Teamsters union leaders were sentenced to prison on frame-up charges because of their active opposition within the labor movement to Washington’s intervention in the imperialist slaughter of World War II. They were jailed in Sandstone federal penitentiary in Minnesota in 1944-45.

Reprinted below are excerpts from the Socialist Appeal, the name of the Militant at that time, and the Pathfinder book The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolutions 1938–39.

The first selection is from a front-page article published in the Jan. 15, 1938, issue of Socialist Appeal, under the headlines, "Hail the Socialist Workers Party!" and "Join the Struggle for Socialism!" The second excerpt is from a resolution adopted by the party’s founding convention on "The political situation and the tasks of the party," from The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright © 1982 by Pathfinder, reprinted by permission.

To read about the preceding decade in building a proletarian party in the United States, see Pathfinder’s The History of American Trotskyism, 1928–38: Report of a Participant, by James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party and its first national secretary.
 

The Chicago convention of the revolutionary socialists has established the American section of the Fourth International.

In forming the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, the convention shaped the indispensable weapon of the working class in its struggle against a powerful and merciless class enemy, the exploiter of labor and oppressor of the people. With only the trade unions at its disposal, the working class is but half-armed. With a revolutionary party at its head, it is invincible.  
 
The anti-labor drive
The Socialist Workers Party could not have been founded at a more crucial moment. The American working class is face to face with a heavy employers’ onslaught upon its standard of living, already badly undermined by years of crisis and depression. The only solution that the wisest of the capitalist statesmen, [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, has been able to offer to the problem of hunger is to cut down the production of food. Now, with a new depression leading towards an even sharper crisis, the capitalists, whose rule Roosevelt has been bent on preserving, are proceeding to throw new hundreds of thousands out of work and to cut the wages of those whom they continue to employ. The most powerful capitalist nation of the earth has proved incapable of feeding, clothing and housing the masses of the population. The existing social system is bankrupt and awaits only the revolutionary action of the working class to be flung into the discard so as to make way for the socialist economy of abundance and equality.

Even more menacing than the crisis and the anti-labor drive is the growing threat of war. The crisis condemns millions to hunger and slow starvation. The imperialist war condemns them to speedy death in muddy, blood-soaked trenches--victims of the imperialist lust for expansion and profit.
 

The capitalist world crisis
The political and economic situation in the United States is developing in the midst of a convulsive evolution of a world capitalist society in a state of crisis and decay--a world crisis with which the United States is inextricably connected and from whose effects it cannot exempt itself by a policy of either economic or political "isolation."

The world bourgeoisie has been able to surmount the violent crisis that shook its whole economic structure beginning with the stock market crash in the United States in 1929. In countries such as Germany, a purely conjunctural improvement has been achieved by a sharp reduction of the standard of living of the masses and by a tremendous increase of operations in the armaments and related industries, resulting in a partial consolidation of the fascist regime. In France, the People’s Front movement¹ has been able to survive and to perpetuate its democratic illusions on the basis of a temporary prosperity, or more accurately, of a slowing down of the more violent pace of economic decline which harassed the country a few years ago. England too has been able to arrest a more catastrophic economic fall by virtue of the unprecedented armaments program inaugurated by the government.

None of the big powers, however, can achieve that level of economic stability which was attained, for example, by France after the World War, except by resolving, at least on a capitalist basis, the conflict between its productive forces and the national boundaries and the limitations imposed by its share of the world market. This is especially true of those powers, like Germany, Italy, Japan, and Poland, whose need of economic expansion comes into the sharpest and most immediate conflict with the present divisions of the world market. The present period may be characterized as one in which all the imperialist powers are jockeying for best position, from the standpoint of the advancement of their economic and military (armaments) strength, in preparation for the inevitable struggle for the revision of the world among the big imperialist bandits, i.e., for the second world war.

In this sense, the second world war has already begun. More exactly, the big preliminary skirmishes have already taken place. The conquest of Ethiopia by Italian imperialism² strengthened the latter’s position along the lifeline of British imperialism, in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and northeastern Africa. The mineral wealth and strategical importance of Spain are the object of a duel between Italy-Germany and England-France, the accompanying shadow of the civil war on the peninsula. The invasion of China by Japan only heralds the war in which not only these two countries, but also the Soviet Union, the British empire, and the United States will be inescapably and directly involved as active belligerents.  
 
Position of the SWP
If the working class is unable to prevent the outbreak of war, and the United States enters directly into it, the SWP stands pledged to the traditional position of revolutionary Marxism. It will utilize the crisis of capitalist rule engendered by the war to prosecute the class struggle with the utmost intransigence, to strengthen the independent labor and revolutionary movements, and to bring the war to a close by the revolutionary overturn of capitalism and the establishment of proletarian rule in the form of the workers’ state. Combating the chauvinistic wave, it will not only reject any and every form of class collaboration, support of the war and of the capitalist government, but will work toward the defeat of the American capitalist class and its war regime by the proletarian revolution.

The SWP will advocate the continuance of the class struggle during the war regardless of the consequences to the military front of American capitalism; and will try to prepare the masses to utilize the war crisis for the overthrow of U.S. capitalism and the victory of socialism.  
 
Party must be rooted in the unions
We cannot ignore the fact that the past development of the Fourth Internationalist movement in this country has prepared it to meet the great tasks that now face it chiefly in one sense, namely, in that it has provided the party with its thought-out and proven principled foundations. At the same time, it must be recognized that the intensely political and polemical life of the movement in the past, its enforced isolation from the mainstream of the working-class movement, has produced not only certain sectarian tendencies (Oehler, etc.), but also a tendency towards an exclusively internal existence unconnected with the living movement of the working class. It is imperative that this tendency be overcome and that the party turn its full energies towards rooting itself in the labor movement.

The SWP proceeds in its tactics and activities not merely from the standpoint of what it ought to be and must become, but primarily from the realistic consideration of what it is at the present time, what forces are at its disposal, and what tasks it can reasonably accomplish in the coming period. We are not yet a mass party and therefore cannot assume all the responsibilities incumbent upon such a movement. It is only in certain localities--and they are not numerous--that our party has firm contacts with the organized labor movement. For the most part, however, the party still operates as a large propaganda organization. It is necessary to take deliberate measures to pass beyond these confines. The main task of the party in the coming period is not the impossible one of becoming the leader of the American working class; that would be a vain illusion, and would bring both disappointment and disorientation into our midst. Our main task is to entrench ourselves in the labor movement, above all in the trade unions, to gain important bases in the labor movement, to consolidate them, and to proceed from them to our next tasks.

The accomplishment of this simple, prosaic, but indispensable task means a radical improvement of the composition of our party. We will not succeed in rooting the party in the working class, much less to defend the revolutionary proletarian principles of the party from being undermined, unless the party is an overwhelmingly proletarian party, composed in its decisive majority of workers in the factories, mines, and mills. We cannot blind ourselves to the fact that this is not the case at the present time. The party must therefore steer a deliberate course towards recruiting above all from the factory proletariat, especially those engaged in heavy industry. It is a perilous weakness of our party that it has a very small representation in the mining industry, in steel, in automobile, etc. Our attention must therefore be turned to the most patient and systematic agitational activity in the industries, in the shops themselves. The winning of a thousand factory proletarians to the ranks of the party would be a triumph which would change the whole complexion of the movement and both the nature and effectiveness of its work in the class struggle. What is said about the social composition of the party applies with at least equal force to the organization of the youth, which, precisely because of the decline of youth in industry, has a far too small proportion of proletarian elements in its composition.

No effective work can be done in the trade unions--and consequently no effective work in the class struggle--unless the party is directly connected with these elementary organizations of the working class. This means that the party must not only demand a minimum of activity of all its members, but that it demands of every worker in its ranks immediate adherence to his corresponding trade union, and activity inside of it if he is already a member. The most correct trade union policy in the world has little or no significance if the party is not in a position to apply it where it is meant to be applied.

These elementary measures, which are indispensable for the transition from a propaganda group to a mass party in the American working class and its struggle, will, if carried out in an organized, systematic form, enable the party to ward off the danger of being sapped by triflers and dilettantes, by purely literary radicalism, and to become a serious and significant factor in the great struggles and decisive tests that lie ahead on the road to the proletarian revolution.

² The Italian imperialists invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and still remained in control of the country when World War II began in 1939. The Italian troops were driven out in 1941.  
 
 
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