Albert Weisbord

American political activist

Albert Weisbord (1900–1977) was an American political activist and union organizer. He is best remembered, along his wife Vera Buch, as one of the primary union organizers of the seminal 1926 Passaic Textile Strike and as the founder of a small Trotskyist political organization of the 1930s called the Communist League of Struggle.

Albert Weisbord was born December 9, 1900, to a Russian Jewish family in New York City. His father was a manufacturer. Weisbord attended primary, grammar, and high school in Brooklyn, New York. He worked variously as a newsboy, a clerk in a grocery store, as a worker in a clothing factory, and in a soda shop during his earlier years. In the summer of 1921, the party's National Executive Committee asked him to conduct a speaking tour to help reorganize the Young People's Socialist League, the bulk of which had exited the SPA to join forces with the Communists. After going on tour to reorganize the locals, a national convention was held to relaunch a new YPSL (loyal to the Socialist Party) at Fitchburg, Massachusetts. The convention named Weisbord its National Director, a position which entitled him to a seat on the party's governing NEC. Weisbord remained as National Director of the Socialist Party's youth section until the middle of 1924. Weisbord resigned from the SPA joined the Communist (Workers) Party in November 1924. The radical Weisbord was seen as an inflammatory figure by the mill owners, and in August 1926 he was removed from leadership of the strikers. His participation as a leader of the Passaic strike as a leader of the United Textile Workers "made" Weisbord as a public face of the Workers (Communist) Party and upon termination of the strike in the fall of 1926 he was sent on a speaking tour on behalf of the party, telling of his strike experiences to a general audience. His selection no doubt was intended in part as a faction balancing measure, owing to Weisbord's status as one of the top Lovestone loyalists in the Communist Party's labor arm, TUEL being the main center for the opposition faction of William Z. Foster. In the fall of 1928, Weisbord was the candidate of the Workers (Communist) Party for U. S. Senate from New Jersey. Weisbord also served as the secretary treasurer of the National Textile Workers' Union, the Communist Party sponsored dual union affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League. By the time the CLS dissolved in 1937 it had almost no membership left, and Weisbord concentrated on publishing his book, The Conquest of Power: Liberalism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Socialism, Fascism, and Communism which was published by Covici Friede that year. When World War II broke out, Weisbord supported the U. S. entry into the war, albeit in the interest of defeating imperialism.

Albert Weisbord died in April 1977.

Passaic: The Story of a Struggle against Starvation Wages and for the Right to Organize. Chicago: Daily World Publishing Co., November 1926. For a New Communist International. New York: Communist League of Struggle, 1933. Communism and the Social Order. New York : Communist League of Struggle, 1934. The Conquest of Power: Liberalism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Socialism, Fascism, and Communism. New York: Covici Friede, 1937. Latin American actuality New York: Citadel Press, 1964. Critique of the New Draft Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Chicago: E. Clemente & Sons, 1962.

"Support the Central Executive Committee; Criticize Its Too Many Right Errors," The Daily Worker, vol. 5, no. 331 (January 24, 1929), pg. 3.