League for Socialist Action (Canada)
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The International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada, the Workers Party of Canada, Socialist Policy Group, Socialist Workers League, Revolutionary Workers Party and the League for Socialist Action were names of successive Trotskyist organisations in Canada.
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Origins
The Canadian Trotskyist movement originated in the late 1920s as the left faction within the Communist Party of Canada. Maurice Spector, editor of the Communist Party newspaper The Worker had been a Canadian delegate to the 1928 Comintern Congress in Moscow when he and American James Cannon inadvertently came across the suppressed platform of Trotsky's Left Opposition. Spector was won over to Trotsky's position and returned to Canada determined to build support for Trotsky in the party. He and his supporters were expelled 1928 and, with American Trotskyists, formed the Communist League of America and then a Canadian section called the International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada in 1932 which Jack MacDonald, the expelled National Secretary of the Communist Party, joined. The Canadian Trotskyist movement went through a number of splits and reincarnations thorugh the 1930s. In 1934 the group became the Workers Party of Canada with a monthly newspaper, The Vanguard which became a fortnightly paper in 1935. The Workers Party also published a twice-monthly Ukrainian newspaper, Labor News, and a youth magazine called first October Youth and then Young Militant.
The party had serious disputes over the Trotskyist movement's orientation to the new social democratic party in Canada, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. In 1937 a majority of the Workers Party voted to join the CCF. They did so and formed the Socialist Policy Group and published the newspaper Socialist Action. They were soon expelled from the CCF and reunited with the faction that had opposed CCF work and formed the Socialist Workers League in 1939.
Post-War
The SWL collapsed during World War II but was relaunched in 1946 as the Revolutionary Workers Party, Canadian Section of the Fourth International, under the leadership of Ross Dowson. The foundations of the party had been laid two years earlier, in 1944, when Canadian supporters of the Fourth International met in Montreal for their first national convention. Dowson ran for mayor of Toronto as an open Trotskyist at the end of the war and won over 20% of the vote.
In 1952 the RWP ceased its public activities and its members began to practice entrism in the CCF. The next year, the section split reflecting an the international split in the Fourth International between the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI). The majority of the RWP, including Ross Dowson, backed James P. Cannon and the International Committee while a minority, including Dowson's brother Murray and his brother-in-law Joe Rosenthal, sided with Pablo and the International Secretariat.
Dowson's Toronto supporters organised themselves around a new newspaper, Workers Vanguard. In 1955, the Toronto group reconstituted itself within the CCF as the Socialist Education League while the Vancouver branch which had lost contact with its Toronto cothinkers became the Socialist Information Centre.
League for Socialist Action
In 1961 the SEL and SIC merged and became the League for Socialist Action with branches in Toronto and Vancouver. The LSA marked the resumption of open Trotskyist activities in Canada after almost a decade of underground work. In 1964 a branch was established in Montreal under the name Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière. A youth wing, the Young Socialists, was also established in 1964; its branch in Quebec was known as the Ligue des Jeunes Socialistes.
Members of the LSA were involved in the Waffle movement of the New Democratic Party of Canada from 1969 until the Waffle's expulsion in 1972. The LSA decided to remain in the NDP. In the early 1970s the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (which was the result of a 1963 reconciliation between the ISFI and the ICFI) was riven by an international faction fight. Supporters of Ernest Mandel, many of whom were active in the student movement coalseced at the 1973 convention of the LSA as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, a minority tendency that ulitimately left the LSA to join the Revolutionary Marxist Group which supported Mandel internationally.
Dowson and his supporters, meanwhile, found themselves reduced to a minority within the LSA due to criticism of Dowson's sympathy with Canadian economic nationalism. They left the LSA in 1974 to form the Socialist League which became known as the Forward Group after the name of its publication.
In 1977 supporters of the Revolutionary Marxist Group and a separate Quebec organization, the Groupe Marxiste Revolutionnarie, united with the League for Socialist Action and the Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière to form the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire which became the new Canadian section of the USFI.
External links
- Call for a Revolutionary Workers Party (1946) (http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/RWP/RWP-Call-46.htm)
- Report of the Founding Convention of the Revolutionary Workers Party (http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/RWP/RWP-Founding.htm)
- Canadian Socialist History Project (http://www.socialisthistory.ca)