Proletarian Orientation Tendency

The POT, or Proletarian Orientation Tendency was a current in the Socialist Workers Party (US) in the early 1970s. In the [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/cochranite_legacy.htm opinion] of Louis Proyect: "This workerist grouping around old timer Larry Trainor, included not only my friend Alan Wald then in Berkeley, but a number of party members my age. They numbered perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the SWP and YSA. The POT worried that the rapid influx of middle-class students would create alien class pressures on the proletarian party."

Dick Merrill and his wife were main spokespersons of the POT in Boston, where many of its supporters lived. Bill Massey was also prominent in the tendency. In the eyes of the SWP's leadership, it generally reflected a position on the role of the working class similar to that of the Workers League. In many ways, the POT's argument for a turn into industry anticipated the turn taken by the SWP in the later 1970s.

In the [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fit/leninismus.htm opinion] of Paul Le Blanc: "The P.O.T. claimed to stand closer to an “orthodox” Trotskyist position, questioning some SWP policies regarding the antiwar, feminist, Black nationalist, student movements, and centering its struggle “against the SWP’s abandonment of a proletarian orientation, of its abandonment of viewing the working class as the revolutionary force in history,” in the polemical words of one P.O.T. supporter."

According to former adherent Alan Wald, in a letter to Asher Harer, dated Feb. 7, 1983, it “only argued for an augmentation of the campus orientation with the establishment of a viable trade union fraction and the voluntary colonization (into industrial jobs) of non-campus comrades, plus increased work on Third World and working-class community college campuses and among GIs."

However, Proyect [http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-January/000364.html recalls] that the Tendency was uncomfortable with the notion of a "black community": "They kept harping on the danger of the black bourgeoisie."

By the end of 1971, many of the POT's members found themselves outside the SWP. According to [http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2004w43/msg00048.htm some] , they had been expelled.

The POT had some positions in common with the LT (Leninist Tendency) which also existed in the SWP at that time.

By 1973, almost all members of the POT who remained members of the SWP had completely reversed their criticism of the SWP leadership, and now aligned themselves with the majority tendency of the United Secretariat, joining the Internationalist Tendency in the SWP. What remained constant was their opposition to the SWP leadership.