Difference between revisions of "Workers League"

Latest revision as of 01:41, 17 November 2007

The Workers League (WL) was launched in November 1966 with the renaming of the American Committee of the Fourth International. The Workers League (WL) had about sixty members, an office and a newspaper, the Bulletin. WL was supportive of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. By 1969, WL membership was almost one hundred.

WL participated in anti-war activities. WL helped in efforts to get the New York City Labor Council to have an anti-war march in 1970 which drew 25,000. WL organized a defense effort for WL member Juan Farinas who was charged with draft resistance. Farinas was eventually convicted and jailed. WL picked up a lot of members from the breakup of Students for a Democratic Society and other mass organizations. WL was calling for a mass labor party. By 1970, WL membership was 200 with branches in many cities.

In December 1971 WL founded a youth organization, Young Socialists. Many of the recruits were minorities, especially from Brooklyn neighborhoods like East New York and Brownsville. Hundreds of young people joined. The Young Socialists had meetings, held dances and had summer camps, and some youths attended Socialist Labour League summer camps in England.

WL members led a left-wing caucus in the Social Services Employees Union. WL also had members who worked in industrial jobs in Ohio. WL had newspaper drives which were successful, although they may have burned out some WL members. WL would go to a city and sell subscriptions to the Bulletin, sometimes door-to-door. In 1970 circulation was 5,000, by the fall of 1970 it was 10,000, by the fall of 1973 it was 20,000. When WL had a drive in a city it would sometimes try to form a branch from subscribers who were interested. In March 1973 WL moved its office, and on October 04, 1973 it began publishing the Bulletin bi-weekly. The WL began publishing a monthly magazine, Young Socialist which had a circulation over 12,000.

The Workers League was a member of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) which was dominated by the British Socialist Labour League. In 1971, the French ICFI affiliate, Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, broke from the ICFI due to its support of Bolivia's Partido Obrero Revolucionario and its opposition to the ICFI's support of Arab nationalism. The WL started moving leftward in mid-1974. A year later, at a Canadian summer camp attended by ICFI members, Nancy Fields, girlfriend of WL chair Tim Wohlforth, was accused of being a CIA agent. She was expelled from WL and Wohlforth was removed as chair, shortly afterward Wohlforth quit.

In the late 1970s, the WL moved the party headquarters to Michigan. In February 1986, the ICFI split. In 1996, the Workers League became the Socialist Equality Party