page_title: Freedom Socialist Party
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Freedom Socialist Party / History
caption_attribution_description: English: New Freeway Hall, Columbia City, Seattle, Washington. Headquarters of the Freedom Socialist Party.
context_page_description: The Freedom Socialist Party is a far-left socialist political party with a revolutionary feminist philosophy based in the United States. It views the struggles of women and minorities as part of the struggle of the working class. It emerged from a split in the United States Socialist Workers Party in 1966. The party's Seattle branch, with support from individuals in other cities, split off from the SWP over what it described as the SWP's entrenched opportunism and undemocratic methods. The party has branches in the United States, as well as Australia, Canada, England, Germany and New Zealand. The current National Secretary of the FSP is Doug Barnes.
context_section_description: The immediate forerunner of the FSP was the Kirk-Kaye tendency within the Socialist Workers Part (SWP), led by Dick Fraser (Kirk) and Clara Fraser (Kaye) who were at the time husband and wife. At the time Richard Fraser was seen as the central leader of the tendency due to his development of the theory of revolutionary integrationism. In addition to their distinctive position on civil rights, derived from said theory of revolutionary integrationism, the tendency also took a position that was more sympathetic to China than was the norm in the SWP, in part this being due to the alliance between the Kirk-Kaye tendency and the loser tendency of Arne Swabeck and Frank Glass.
  Political differences, as articulated by the soon-to-become FSP, included what was characterized as the SWP's uncritical support of the black nationalist views of Malcolm X, SWP's orientation toward the labor aristocracy, its opportunism in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and its dismissive attitude toward the emerging feminist movement. The nascent FSP advocated the class solidarity of black and white workers, called for a greatly expanded understanding of and attention to women's emancipation, and urged the anti-war movement to support the socialist, anti-colonial aims of the Vietnamese Revolution.
  The FSP became a pole of attraction for Seattle leftists opposed to the SWP's internal politics and established a home at Freeway Hall.  The party formed Radical Women with the dual goal of building a revolutionary socialist feminist organization and teaching women the organizational and leadership skills they were often denied in male-dominated organizations.
caption: New Freeway Hall, Columbia City, Seattle, Washington, party headquarters.
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