Stalinist offshoot of
Socialist Workers Party founded by
Sam Marcy in 1959, after the
Trotskyist SWP refused to support the Soviet invasion of
Hungary and attacks against the uprising Hungarian worker class. The WWP was also a vocal supporter of
China's actions in
Tibet and
Tiananmen Square, claiming that those who oppose China's
workers paradise are in fact "
counter-revolutionaries". Similar reasoning led the group to support the 1991
KGB coup against
Mikhail Gorbachev, in hopes that the reforms of the '80's would be wiped away and that the
Soviet Union would return to its hardline roots. They also openly backed
Slobodan Milosevic's reign, as well as the government of
North Korea.
In the United States, the party concentrates on domestic issues, particularly treatment of minorities, in the hopes of garnering support from those demographics. The party is extremely vocal about Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, and routinely supports black leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. [To this extent, they remind me of the communists in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.] They have an odd relationship with the far more conservative Democratic Party, and openly support and contribute to the Democrats, even though they put forward their own candidates. The theory is that only through the Democrats can the WWP hope to influence any powerful liberals; in addition, Democratic voters are the WWP's main source of new recruits.
The middle-class radicalism of the WWP comes in numerous shapes and sizes, and the group has been well-known for creating fronts to carry out specific agendas. Among the factions that fall under the umbrealla of the WWP are Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF), People's Anti-War Mobilization (PAM), the International Action Center (IAC) and the National Coalition to Stop US Intervention in the Middle East, among numerous others. The WWP publishes the daily Workers World newspaper, as well as an occasional special report on world events. You can get your daily fix of sticking it to the Man at http://www.workers.org.