Vol. 80/No. 8 February 29, 2016
Boston SWP — A long, proud history
In recent years a small number of party members have maintained a local headquarters, participated in union struggles and fights for Black rights, and run in election campaigns. The effort in Boston could no longer be sustained, and to maximize the strongest national presence of the party today and take advantage of political openings nationwide members of the party in Boston moved elsewhere.
“The Socialist Workers Party has a long, proud history in Boston,” John Studer, SWP national campaign director and editor of the Militant, said at an Oct. 24 meeting there on party perspectives and moves to prepare for deeper participation in class struggle openings today.
“Working people face slow-burn depression conditions as the contraction in capitalist production and trade continues and the bosses and their government attack our wages, jobs and safety conditions, seeking to put the burden for their crisis on our backs,” Studer said.
“This has sparked deep interest in what can be done to meet these attacks, what are the roots of the crisis and, as the 2016 presidential campaign unfolds, what workers should do to advance their class interests,” he said.
The meeting of two dozen people, including long-time supporters of the SWP in Boston, celebrated the party’s political accomplishments there over the years, including highlighting two major fights in the U.S. class struggle that the SWP in Boston was right in the center of.
GE strike and fight against Vietnam War
In 1969 workers in 13 unions at General Electric went on a 101-day strike at 280 of its plants nationwide. Boston SWP members walked the picket lines and built solidarity for the strike. Party members explained to participants in the anti-war movement the importance of supporting this labor battle as part of the fight against Washington’s imperialist war against the Vietnamese Revolution. General Electric produced jet engines for U.S. war planes and profited immensely from the Indochina war.Leaders of the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance helped lead the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam in building support for the walkout and organizing protests against GE recruiting at area universities.
“The SWP advanced this perspective in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Boston and elsewhere to win young fighters to see the power of the working class and the union movement,” Studer said. “Organizing the strategy and tactics of the fight against the war to maximize winning the working class — on the job and in uniform — was decisive.”
Gains were made in the fight against Washington’s war through the SMC’s work supporting the strikers. “GE workers are fighting this billion dollar corporation with their weapon of withholding labor,” union leaders wrote in a December 1969 letter of thanks. “They are deeply appreciative of all the assistance they get in this struggle.”
Through these struggles, and others like them, cadres in Boston helped the party win new generations of young fighters to the communist movement.
Mobilizations beat back school segregation
Between 1974 and 1976, a pitched battle raged in Boston over a federal court ruling ordering city officials to desegregate the schools.More than a decade after the victorious mass working-class fight to end Jim Crow, Democratic Party officials in the Boston City Council organized a violent racist campaign to defy the order. Black students, parents and their supporters took up the fight for implementation of the order and against racist attacks by supporters of segregation. The Socialist Workers Party helped lead this fight. Party members joined in organizing the National Student Coalition Against Racism, which worked with the NAACP to organize thousands in street protest actions to “keep the buses rolling” and to defend Black youth riding on them.
“SWP members across the country joined other defenders of Black rights to build the protests and increase pressure on Boston’s propertied rulers,” Studer said. New recruits were won to the SWP and YSA.
Boston was one of the founding units of the communist movement in the U.S. and of the Socialist Workers Party.
Studer explained that the SWP in Boston traces its continuity to the founding of the communist party in the U.S., emulating the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917 led by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Antoinette Konikow, a Russian-born Marxist who immigrated to Boston in 1893, was a founding member of the new Communist Party here. She was expelled from the CP in 1928, as were James P. Cannon and other party leaders in New York and elsewhere, for supporting Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s fight to maintain the continuity of Lenin against a counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin.
Recruits in Boston were won and became the Boston branch of the SWP at its founding in 1938. Konikow remained active building the party until her death at the age of 77 in July 1946.
“SWP members will continue to take part in working-class politics in Boston and the region, coming from New York and other branches,” Studer said, “and, given the pace of political developments today, we’re certain we’ll be rebuilding the party branch here.” A number of supporters of the SWP remain in the area to help the party in its work.
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