Workers Party (United States)

The Workers Party (WP) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland. They included Max Shachtman, who became the new group's leader, Hal Draper, C. L. R. James, Martin Abern, Joseph Carter, Julius Jacobson, and Irving Howe. The party's politics are often referred to as Shachtmanite.

At the time of the split, almost 40% of the membership of the SWP left the SWP. The WP had approximately 500 members. Although it recruited among workers and youth during the war years it never grew substantially, despite having more impact than its numbers would suggest.

By 1941 the party had developed a minority tendency which was grouped around the figures of two leading intellectuals CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya. This tendency took the name the Johnson-Forest Tendency for its principal leaders' pseudonyms. It developed the viewpoint that Russia was state capitalist. The tendency developed the view that the WP should rejoin the Fourth International due to the imminence of a pre-revolutionary situation. In the meantime the SWP had from 1943 onwards developed a loose oppositional tendency led by Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman which, among other things, called for the WP to be readmitted to the SWP.

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