, October 2011 The WWP had its origins in the Global Class War Tendency, led by
Sam Marcy and
Vincent Copeland, within the SWP. This group crystallized during the
1948 presidential election when they urged the SWP to back
Henry Wallace's
Progressive Party campaign, rather than field their own candidates. Throughout the 1950s, the Global Class War Tendency expressed positions at odds with official SWP policy, categorizing the
Korean War as a class, rather than imperialist, conflict; support of the
People's Republic of China as a
workers' state, if not necessarily supporting the
Mao Zedong leadership; and supporting the suppression of the
Hungarian Revolution by the
Soviet Union in 1956. The Global Class War Tendency left the SWP in early 1959. Although they would later abandon
Trotskyism, in their
International Workers' Day issue (no. 3) of their new periodical, the group proclaimed: "We are THE Trotskyists. We stand 100% with all the principled positions of Leon Trotsky, the most revolutionary communist since Lenin". The nascent group appears to have organized as the Workers World Party by February 1960. At its inception, the WWP was concentrated among the
working class in Buffalo, Youngstown, Seattle and New York. A youth organization, first known as the Anti-Fascist Youth Committee and later as
Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), was created in April 1962. The WWP began publishing the monthly
Workers World newspaper in 1959; it was published weekly since 1974. From the beginning, the WWP and YAWF concentrated their energies on
street demonstrations. Early campaigns focused on support of
Patrice Lumumba, opposition to the
House Un-American Activities Committee and against racial discrimination in housing. They conducted the first protest against
American involvement in Vietnam on August 2, 1962. Their opposition to the war also included the tactics of "
draft resistance" and
"GI resistance". After organizing demonstrations at
Fort Sill, Oklahoma in support of a soldier being tried for possessing anti-war literature, they founded the
American Servicemen's Union, intended to be a
mass organization of American soldiers. However, the group was completely dominated by the WWP and YAWF. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the party was involved in protests over causes including "defen[se] of the heroic black uprisings in
Watts,
Newark,
Detroit,
Harlem" and
women's liberation. During the
Attica Prison riot, the rioters requested YAWF member
Tom Soto to present their grievances for them. The WWP was most successful in organizing demonstrations in support of
desegregation "busing" in the Boston schools in 1975. Nearly 30,000 people attended the Boston March Against Racism which they had organized. During the 1970s, they also attempted to begin work inside organized labor, but apparently were not very successful. In 1980, the WWP began to participate in
electoral politics, naming a presidential ticket as well as candidates for New York Senate, congressional and state legislature seats. In California, they ran their candidate
Deirdre Griswold in the primary for the
Peace and Freedom Party nomination. They came in last, with 1,232 votes out of 9,092. In 1984, the WWP supported
Jesse Jackson's bid for the
Democratic nomination, but when he lost in the primaries they nominated their own presidential ticket, along with a handful of congressional and legislative nominees.
Splits In 1968, the WWP absorbed a small faction of the
Spartacist League that had worked with it in the
Coalition for an Anti-Imperialist Movement called the
Revolutionary Communist League (Internationalist). This group left the WWP in 1971 as the
New York Revolutionary Committee. The NYRC's newspaper provided rare details about the internal functioning of the group that have subsequently been used by scholars as a primary source. The NYRC later reconstituted as the Revolutionary Communist League (Internationalist). In 2004, the WWP suffered its most serious split when the San Francisco branch and some other members left to form the
Party for Socialism and Liberation. In July 2018, the WWP experienced another schism in which several branches including the Detroit branch, one of its oldest, resigned from the organization to form the
Communist Workers League.
Associated organizations The WWP has organized, directed or participated in many coalition organizations for various causes, typically
anti-imperialist in nature. The
International Action Center, which counts many WWP members as leading activists, founded the
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) coalition shortly after the
September 11 attacks in 2001 and has run the All People's Congress (APC). The APC and the IAC in particular share a large degree of overlap in their memberships with
cadre in the WWP. In 2004, a
youth group close to the WWP called Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) was founded. The group's website was live , but the latest newsletter available at that time was dated October 4, 2010, and the home page advertised a "forthcoming" event on 3 December 2011. == Ideology ==