Revolutionary Policy Committee (U.S.)

The Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) was an offshoot of the so-called "Militant" faction in the Socialist Party of America during the middle-1930s. The group sought to transform the SP into a revolutionary socialist organization from its origins as a social democratic political party.

The Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) was an organized far left faction in the Socialist Party's factional war of 1934 to 1937. While it shared the name and basic objectives of a similar faction in Great Britain established in 1931, the American RPC seems to have been launched only in April 1934. The RPC made itself known with the publication of a thin 12-page pamphlet entitled An Appeal to the Membership of the Socialist Party, a document which prominently featured the names and party positions of about 80 members of the Socialist Party. Prominent sponsors of the 1934 appeal to the membership included Roy Reuther of Detroit, as well as Franz Daniel, Mary Hillyer and J. B. Matthews of New York City, in addition to the National Industrial Organizer of the Young People's Socialist League, Joseph Zameres. According to James Oneal, Frances A. Henson acted as secretary of the faction during its initial phase.

According to historian Constance Ashton Myers, the Revolutionary Policy Committee was spearheaded by a "Lovestoneite infiltrator," Irving Brown. Chairman of the group was J.B. Matthews, a former Methodist missionary who would later become chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities headed by Martin Dies, Jr.

The RPC's Appeal was intended to reorient the Socialist Party towards revolutionary socialism from its previous parliamentary tradition. Capitalism was portrayed as a "collapsing structure," all efforts at disarmament "abortive," fascism victorious in Europe, and a "certainty of world catastrophe" imminent. The appeal declared

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