Socialist Action
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 Corrrespondence.
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 dissappearing 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.
Another Socialist Action is a Trotskyist political group in Canada. It is also part of the left minority of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and is aligned with the US group of the same name.
There is also a Socialist Action grouping in Britain. It was was launched when the International Marxist Group entered the Labour Party in 1981. Officially named the Socialist League, it became universally known by the name of its publication, Socialist Action.
Its character changed in a wave of splits in the late 1980s, beginning in 1985 producing the International Group, which merged with the Socialist Group and is now the International Socialist Group.
In 1998 a minority split to from the now defunct Communist League - the British co-thinkers of the Socialist Workers Party (USA).
The remainder of the group is now a small group that drew pessimistic conclusions from the fall of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They continue to define themselves as a Trotskyist group but have have displayed an increasing tendency to ally with Stalinist formations and political positions. At the time of the split, the group was given equal status within the United Secretariat of the Fourth International with the International Group, but they are no longer affiliated.
Working with increasing secrecy in the Labour Party, they became supporters of Ken Livingstone and The Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs. They are involved in the publication of Socialist Campaign Group News and their members have mainatained leading poistions in many campaigns - the National Abortion Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and various coalitions against the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, for example. As a result, Socialist Action exert an influence beyond that which might be expected from so small a grouping.
In 2001 they stopped publishing their journal, also named Socialist Action, but continue to work together as a faction, for instance in the Student Broad Left and playing leading roles in organising the 2004 European Social Forum, and to publish occasional pamphlets and leaflets.
Selected pamphlets and issues of Socialist Action magazine: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sa_review/sahome.htm
