Socialist Action (US)
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See also Socialist Action (UK).
Socialist Action is a small Trotskyist political party in the United States. They were founded in 1983 as a regroupment of oppositionists expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in the so called 'Age Purge' loyal to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, where they are members of the left minority. They publish a monthly magazine, also named Socialist Action.
The history of Socialist Action has been one of factionalism and marginality despite the roots the group has within the workers movement. Like its parent the SWP, its history can in many respects be written as a record of the many factional struggles and splits which have wracked the group. The first such split was a grouping called Socialist Unity led by Les Evans, Joanna Mismik, Dianne Feely and others who soon fused with the Workers Power and International Socialists groups to form Solidarity. This grouping had about a third of the 160 members of SA at that time.
The second split came in 1992 and was led by Alan Benjamin who was then the editor of Socialist Action and had developed sympathies with the Lambertist current of Trotskyism. Failing to win SA as a whole to their politics, about a dozen activists left to form the Socialist Organizer group. A little while after this a group of former SWP members who had not been a part of the original split from that group left to form the Association for Independent Socialist Politics. This group of approximately thirty had previously called themselves Group X, in a clear reference to the then trendy Generation X, and had the adherence of many of SA's youth. They were led by Barry Shepherd, Malik Miah and Carl Finamore and went on to join the Committees of Correspondence.
Another, very small, tendency within SA in the 1990's was the Trotskyist Continuity Tendency (TCT), whose members left the SWP after the founders of SA. They argued that the former USSR was no longer a degenerated workers state as was the position of SA and the USFI to which it is allied. After a year or so they left SA but remained active in the Labor Party and published a magazine Revolutionary Marxism Today until disappearing in the late 1990s.
A few years ago they suffered the loss of a grouping based in San Francisco, their national center, who went on to form the Socialist Workers Organization led by Nat Weinstein, once the most prominent leader of SA. At the formation of the SWO both it and SA had approximately thirty-five members each but the SWO has since withered while SA has recruited a layer of youth in the upper Midwest.
External link
- Socialist Action magazine (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sa_review/sahome.htm)