Turnerites

Under a variety of names and within a number of organizations over at least 17 years, the group around Harry Turner, or Turnerites was a presence within Trotskyism in the United States.

The group originated in a controversy within the Spartacist League in the late 1960s. The leadership under James Robertson wanted the group to focus on organizing among students while Harry Turner wanted to organize a series of rank-and-file caucuses within labor unions, particularly minority workers, to oppose both employers and the union leadership. To this end Turner convinced the Spartacist League to create a pan-union Militant Labor Civil Rights Committee in September 1967. Robertson, however, had this group dissolved the next year and suggested that cadres form separate caucuses in their respective unions. The Spatacist League was wracked with a faction fight over this issue during 1968 at the end of which the group led by Harry Turner was expelled. During this fight the Turnerites were allied with another faction that was attracted to the ideas of the French Lutte Ouvrière but they left to establish their own organization, Spark, before the Turnerites were finally expelled.

Once out of the Spartacist League the Turner group looked for another Trotskyist group to unite with. After brief flirtations with the Workers League of the United States and Lyndon LaRouche's SDS-Labor Committee the tendency grouped around its publication, the Vanguard Newsletter. The newsletter kept some of the ideas that Turner advocated within the Spartacist League, including the building of rank-and-file caucuses within the unions with the ultimate aim of turning them into workers' councils or soviets.

The Vanguard Newsletter group still shopped around for another organization to merge with. For a time they explored opportunities with various De Leonist groups that had left the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Reconstruction and the Socialist Forum Group, but nothing ever came of it. In 1972 when the Leninist Faction left the Socialist Workers Party and formed the Class Struggle League (CSL) the Turnerites quickly made contact with it, even though it was in the process of negotiating with the Spartacists. After an attempt to unite the three groups was rejected by the SL, the Turnerites merged with the CSL. There were still controversies in the new organization. The majority former Leninist Faction members felt that the time had come to proclaim a Fifth International, while the minority from the Vanguard group wished to reconstruct the Fourth International. The minority and majority also differed on the nature of the Eastern European communist states with the later considering them deformed workers' states. On trade union work the first conference favored the idea of rank-and-file caucuses did not wish to build a national organization of such committees just yet, when there was no base for them.

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