Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party
Encyclopedia
The Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party was an attempt to set up a "united front" of several dissident US. Trotskyist groups in the 1980s.

The participating groups came from different backgrounds, but all ultimately traced their lineage to the Socialist Workers Party
Socialist Workers Party (United States)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far-left political organization in the United States. The group places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba...

.
  • The Freedom Socialist Party
    Freedom Socialist Party
    The Freedom Socialist Party is a socialist political party with a unique program of revolutionary feminism that emerged from a split in the United States Socialist Workers Party in 1966. It is currently a working class organization that works towards creating social justice and order for all...

     had been organized by the Seattle branch of the SWP in the mid-1960s. It espoused a unique form of socialist feminism
    Socialist feminism
    Socialist feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses upon both the public and private spheres of a woman's life and argues that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression...

     and was led by Clara Fraser
    Clara Fraser
    Clara Fraser was a feminist and socialist political organizer, who co-founded and led the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.-Early life:...

    .
  • The Socialist Union. This group was led by Milton Zaslow, who had been one of the original leaders of the Cochranites in the 1950s, before dropping out of political activity for a number of years. In 1969 he created a new organization in Los Angeles
    Los Ángeles
    Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

     called Liberation Union. After merging with a group that had been expelled from the SWP in the early 1970s, the Internationalist Tendency, he renamed the group Socialist Union.
  • A tendency around Murry Weiss and Myra Tanner Weiss
    Myra Tanner Weiss
    Myra Tanner Weiss was an American Communist following Trotskyism, and a three time U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party....

     based in New York. Not an organized faction, but a tendency around these two SWP leaders who had dropped out of the organization because of its intolerance to any criticism of the leaderships policies.
  • Trotskyist Organizing Committee or Turnerites
    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.- History :...

    . This group had been expelled from the Spartacist League
    Spartacist League (US)
    The Spartacist League/ US is a Trotskyist organization in the United States. It was the original Spartacist group that helped to inspire and organize similarly oriented groups around the world...

     in 1968. They had originally organized around their periodical Vanguard Newletter, had briefly become part of the Class Struggle League in 1973, then formed their own group in 1975.


A First National Conference attended by 100 members and fraternal representatives of these groups met in Union, Washington
Union, Washington
Union is a small unincorporated community in Mason County, Washington, United States. The town lies along the southern shore of Hood Canal, at an area known as "the Great Bend". There is no U.S. Census data for the location...

 Oct. 6-9, 1978. It adopted resolutions emphasizing the importance of women, minorities, gays and undocumented workers as the most oppressed section of the working class, and were anticipated to be the "vanguard of the proletariat". It also noted that "privileged layers within the working class" increased the gulf between workers and bred "reactionary habits".

The Conference also issued a document that tried to appeal to those leaders within the United Secretariat of the Fourth International who were hostile to Socialist Workers Party, criticizing the latter for bureaucratism, Stalinophobia and Sexophobia and accused the USFI of attempting to form an "unprincipled bloc" with the SWP. At the time of the Morenoist split with the United Secretariat and its parity commission
Parity Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International
The Parity Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International was an international regrouping of Trotskyists in 1981, claiming at the time to represent the majority of Trotskyists in the world....

 with the Lambertist
Fourth International (ICR)
The Fourth International was established as an "International Centre of Reconstruction" by co-thinkers of Pierre Lambert, in 1981 who argued that the post-war political evolution of the Fourth International under the leadership of Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel had taken the FI away from the...

 faction of the Fourth International, the CRSP sought affiliation with it, but does not appear to have been successful.

The group imploded when its Steering Committee held a plenum in Seattle July 4-7, 1980. There a decision was made to drop the united front type of organization in favor of a disciplined democratic centralist
Democratic centralism
Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party...

party. After this, the Turnerites and the Socialist Union left the CRSP. Murry Weiss joined the FSP.
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