Workers Party (1940-1949)

The Workers Party (1940-1949), a Trotskyist organization founded and led by Max Shachtman, split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, holding the Soviet Union to be a novel exploitative social formation, bureaucratic collectivism. Opposing the "two camps" of imperialism, the WP led struggles against the World War II no-strike pledge, and published Labor Action, a rank-and-file newspaper, and The New International, a political/theoretical journal, both continuing until 1958, when the successor to the WP, the Independent Socialist League (1949-1958) merged with the Socialist Party. The Workers Party was a source for many of the ideas, personalities and journals of the post-World War II non- and anti-communist left, and former members influenced the development of the Socialist Party and helped found the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later Democratic Socialists of America).