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

The group originated in a controversy within the Spartacist League in the late 1960s. The leadership under James Robertson wanted the group to focus on organizing among students while Harry Turner wanted to organize a series of rank-and-file caucuses within labor unions, particularly minority workers, to oppose both employers and the union leadership. To this end Turner convinced the Spartacist League to create a pan-union Militant Labor Civil Rights Committee in September 1967. Robertson, however, had this group dissolved the next year and suggested that cadres form separate caucuses in their respective unions. The Spatacist League was wracked with a faction fight over this issue during 1968 at the end of which the group led by Harry Turner was expelled. During this fight the Turnerites were allied with another faction that was attracted to the ideas of the French Lutte Ouvrière but they left to establish their own organization, Spark, before the Turnerites were finally expelled.