The Communist Workers Party (CWP) was a Maoist group in the United States. It was founded in 1969 as the Workers' Viewpoint Organization. Its founding cadre were drawn from the Progressive Labor Party but had grown disenchanted with that group.

The party followed the policies of both Mao Tse-Tung and Josef Stalin, later also praising Pol Pot, and gave some support to the Islamists of the Iranian Revolution, approving of their persecution of Trotskyists.

In a 1979 incident which became known as the Greensboro Massacre, the CWP held an anti-Klan rally which was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. Two members of the CWP and three rally participants were killed defending themselves in a gunfight with the KKK, in which at least one undercover FBI agent participated as a Klansman. In protest at Jimmy Carter's failure to ensure the conviction of their members' killers, the group attempted to storm the 1980 Democratic National Convention and succeeded in setting off firecrackers in Madison Square Garden. Despite this, the group decided to dissolve itself into the Democratic Party in 1985, renaming itself the New Democratic Movement .

External links

• Book review of Signe Waller's Love And Revolution by Yonni Chapman Socialism and Democracy Issue #36 Vol 18, No. 2. 2002

Further reading

• Klehr, Harvey. Maoists Move in on Manhattan Dems. Our Town, 2 August 1987.

• Waller, Signe. Love And Revolution: A Political Memoir: People’s History Of The Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting And Aftermath. London & New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2002. ISBN 0742513653.