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From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 23, 10 June 1946, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Protesting the refusal of the Socialist Workers Party leadership to take any genuine steps towards unity with the Workers Party, the Chicago Minority of the SWP this week announced its affiliation with the Workers Party through its spokesman, Albert Goldman, and called upon all revolutionary militants to follow its course. A group of SWP sympathizers in Chicago simultaneously announced their intention to follow the large group of Chicago Minority comrades into the WP. In New York, another group of SWP comrades, motivated by the same reasons as the Chicago Minority, also left the SWP to join the WP.
This action of the Chicago and New York SWP Minority comrades comes only a few weeks after six comrades, led by Oscar Shoenfeld, had quit the SWP to join the WP as a protest against the inaction of the SWP on the question of the unity.
The statement of the SWP Minority which is printed below damns the SWP leadership’s monolithic conception of the party as “alien to Trotskyism.” It traces the history and arguments of its Minority’s fight for unity of the two Trotskyist organizations, the reaction of the Cannon leadership in the SWP, and attitude of the WP which clearly established itself as the party of unity.
Albert Goldman, whose adherence to the WP is an event of great significance, is one of the best known figures in the American and world Trotskyist movement. With a long record of prominent activity in the revolutionary movement behind him, Goldman joined the Trotskyist movement in its early years. He was a member of its leading committees and highest bodies. Until his decision to join the Workers Party, Goldman was a member of the Political Committee of the SWP.
Important pages in the history of the Trotskyist movement, as well as of the American labor movement generally, are associated with his name. As attorney for defense in the Sacramento Case, in the famous Minneapolis Case (in which he was also a defendant with other leaders of the SWP) his name is bracketed with some of the most important labor defense cases in the United States. As attorney for Leon Trotsky, the great revolutionist who was murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist assassin, particularly during the hearings of the Dewey Commission into the frame-up charges made against Trotsky by Stalin, Goldman achieved world-wide fame.
The comrades who have joined with Goldman in entering the WP are almost uniformly revolutionary militants with long years of service in the Trotskyist movement. Virtually all of them have been members of the Trotskyist movement for more than ten years. Some of them were among the founders of the Trotskyist youth movement in 1932.
(Labor Action will carry fuller details next week, plus the record of Albert Goldman.)
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