Partita

The U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was founded in 1938 by followers of exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. For most of its first four decades, the Party drew its membership heavily from universities, intellectual circles, and white-collar professions. By the mid-1970s, the party had grown through its prominent role in the anti–Vietnam War movement and campus organizing, but its leadership, headed by figures like Jack Barnes, became convinced that the deepening economic crisis of the 1970s—marked by stagflation, deindustrialization, and bitter strikes in coal, steel, and trucking—heralded a resurgence of working-class militancy comparable to the 1930s. In response, at its 1978 convention the SWP adopted what became known as the “turn to industry,” a binding resolution directing the overwhelming majority of its members to leave their existing jobs, careers, and in many cases their cities, and seek employment in a narrow set of targeted “basic industries”: steel mills, coal and copper mines, auto plants, meatpacking houses, garment shops, and the railroads (Sheppard, Barry. The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988, Volume 2. Resistance Books, 2012). Members were expected to form “fractions” within industrial unions, sell the party’s weekly newspaper The Militant at plant gates, and recruit workers to Trotskyist politics.