The inaugural issue of Fighting Workers announces the split in the Workers Party and the formation of the Revolutionary Workers League led by Tom Stamm and Hugo Oehler.

‘Marxists Expelled from Workers Party, Form Revolutionary Workers League’ from Fighting Worker. Vol. 1 No. 1. November 30, 1935.

After a bitter struggle which began soon after the Workers Party was founded on the first of Dec. 1934, over the question of building an independent revolutionary party in the United States and the Fourth International, scores of revolutionists have been expelled from the Workers Party. Sincere workers devoted to the cause of the proletariat have been expelled from the party which they helped found. Expulsions have taken place on a national scale in N.Y., Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Many of the comrades expelled have a long record of activity and struggle in the European and American labor Some were members of the Socialist Party before 1917, foundation members of the Communist Party, the Communist League of America and the Workers Party. Others were members of the American Workers Party which fused with the Communist League to form the Workers Party.

Stalin’s Tactics

The expulsions were carried through immediately after the October plenum of the Workers Party which voted to hold a convention on December 26, and to organize a pre-convention discussion between the close of the plenum and the opening of the convention. In a word, we were expelled on the eve of the pre-convention discussion.

In order to cover up their bureaucratic action they print lies in their press, the New Militant, claiming that we left the party after a discussion which was unprecedented in the labor movement for fairness. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Charges

In order to prove that the Workers Party lies when it says we left, we print below copies of the charges on the basis of which comrades have been expelled. “October 29, 1935. In line with the decision of the Political Committee as communicated to this branch. (Branch 1, New York City), suspending from the Party, Stamm, Oehler and Basky and instructing the branches to take disciplinary action against members of the Party guilty of collaboration with the above-named, I prefer charges against Brown, Lewis, etc., Comradely, (signed) Borkeson.”

 On the same day H. Rin the Bronx Branch entered charges against more than a dozen comrades. Two days later Edith Konikow wrote a letter to another one of our comrades part of which reads as follows: “At the regular membership meeting of Branch 3, Tuesday, October 29th, the following charges were presented against you by comrade R. Robbins: I hereby bring charges against comrade Beardslee for his collaboration with expelled members of the Workers Party…”

It was the same story around the country. Where we controlled branches the Political Committee of the party excommunicated them; it cut them off from all communications and relations with the rest of the party.

Why They Lie

The bureaucrats lie because they cannot advertise the fact that they opened a pre-convention discussion by throwing out of the party a considerable section of it. They cannot afford to admit that without stamping themselves before the working class as bureaucrats. But they needn’t trouble about that. We will do it for them.

With the expulsion of the Marxists the Workers Party has ceased to be a revolutionary force. The expelled comrades have organized themselves on a national scale, in a dozen industrial centers as the Revolutionary Workers League and are already busy in trade unions, unemployed, labor defense and political propaganda work. The completion of the national tour made by comrade Oehler and the publication of the Fighting Worker are two important steps in the development of the League as a revolutionary force in the American labor movement. Others will follow.

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There have been a number of periodicals named Fighting Worker in US left history. This Fighting Worker was the newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers League from 1936 until 1947. The RWL was a 1935 split from the Workers Party of the U.S. led by James Cannon and allied with the Movement for the Fourth International led by Leon Trotsky. Led by Hugo Oehler and Tom Stamm, the RWL opposed the ‘French Turn’ then happening in world Trotskyism whereby national sections were joining left-moving Socialist Parties. Fighting Worker and the RWL at first positioned themselves as oppositional Trotskyists, but by 1938 refuted Trotsky and his international movement as “degenerate.’, The exact date of Trotsky’s degeneration causing an organizational split between the group’s founders and, for a time, two rival Revolutionary Workers Leagues with papers called Fighting Worker. Oehler went to Spain to make contact with the POUM but was arrested during their suppression. Declaring a rival Provisional International Contact Commission for the New Communist (Fourth) International in 1938, they briefly joined with the Leninist League (UK) and the Revolutionary Communist Organization (Austria). Fighting Worker would be published monthly and then every two weeks in Chicago and New York. After suffering a series of splits in the late 1930s, including of Tom Stamm, the RWL went into decline and Fighting Worker ceased publishing entirely in 1947. In addition to Fighting Worker, the RWL published local, labor, and theoretical papers.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fightingworker/v1n00-w001-nov-30-1935-fw.pdf