Description
The collection contains correspondence, reports, draft resolutions, bulletins, minutes, plenum and convention documents, and
subject files related to Socialist Action, a Trotskyist political organization.
Background
Socialist Action is a Trotskyist political party in the United States. The roots were laid for the organization during the
early 1980s in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), when Jack Barnes, Mary Alice Waters, and other SWP leaders began to reject
Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution in favor of connecting with the Cuban Communist Party and Sandinista National
Liberation Front. This revisionist faction also favored the theory of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry,
which Lenin himself disagreed with, and also shifted from identifying as a "workers government" to considering itself a "workers
and farmers government." Various members of the SWP including Nat Weinstein, Jeff Mackler, Tom Kerry, Lynne Henderson, Frank
Lovell, George Breitman, and others, organized an oppositional faction that supported the SWP's foundational Trotskyist ideas,
and formed Socialist Action in 1983. Many members of this oppositional faction were expelled from the SWP and therefore aligned
exclusively with Socialist Action, which maintained its membership in the Fourth International and its advocacy of the original
Trotskyist ideas of James P. Cannon. Socialist Action has supported the political campaigns of various members for various
U.S. political offices. Socialist Action advocates for socialist revolution by way of the Transitional Program, which was
introduced at the founding congress of the Fourth International in 1938 and aims to connect the working class with revolutionary
ideas through highlighting the inadequacies of capitalism. The organization supports anti-war, labor, anti-racist, and feminist
movements, among others. In 2019, 29 members were expelled from the organization on the basis of their dissenting views against
the organization's anti-war platform and formed the organization Socialist Resurgence.
Restrictions
All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Director of Archives
and Special Collections. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical
materials and not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.