[p. 20]
In mid-February a serious split occurred in the Socialist Workers Party. A minority, whose main strength appears to lie in industrial Buffalo, the steel region of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and the South, and which is led by Sam Marcy and four other members of the SWP National Committee, broke with the SWP over long-smoldering political differences that came to a climax as a result of the recent "Independent Socialist" election campaign in New York. The new group, which accuses the SWP majority of opportunist adaptation to former right-wing Stalinists who have broken with the CP, has begun publication of its own newspaper, Workers World.
Within the SWP, another minority, also opposed to what it considers excessive subordination to ex-Stalinist allies in the election campaign but determined to fight for its position within the framework of the party, is engaged in a bitter struggle that comes to a head at the SWP Convention at Whitsuntide, the results of which are for the moment unpredictable.
This crisis coincides—and this is hardly an accident—with crises in the two other organizations that broke with the Fourth International in 1953. For a considerable period of time the International has limited itself to repeated and urgent requests to these groups to reunite with the International, and has leaned over backward in refraining from anything that might be termed intervention, going to the extreme even of not criticizing some of these groups' political positions which seemed to it erroneous or potentially so. Its motive was threefold: to allow objective judgment to replace fractional fever among these groups' members; to permit history itself to prove to them which policies were correct; and to demonstrate to them that the International, far from liquidating itself or succumbing to the attempts of these groups to break it up, continues with ever greater organizational strength and political homogeneity. Now, however, in view of the danger, whose intensity is revealed by these crises, that many valuable elements will be lost to Trotskyism, the International has decided that the time has come for a more active policy.
[p. 21]
It is now publishing in its international internal bulletins key documents from the different sides in the SWP crisis and split so that all the members of the International may be fully informed. It has also addressed an Open Letter to the SWP and the other groups that broke with it in 1953, beginning an exposition of the International's position on the recent evolution of these organizations, and appealing one more time for the urgent necessity of unification within the Fourth International of all militants who claim to stand for the political and organizational principles of Trotskyism.