Socialist Action collection

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.