Ann Snipper: Activist for the cause of workers

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Ann Snipper, a socialist for more than a half-century, died in Los Angeles on Oct. 3. She was 77.

At age 16, in 1929, Snipper joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth group of the Socialist Party. In the early 1930s, she helped muster support for striking farm workers in California.

As a member of the Socialist Party, she joined with the Trotskyists in opposing the reformist politics of the party leadership. In 1937, she and other revolutionary socialists were bureaucratically expelled from the party. In 1938, she became a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

In 1940, Snipper left the SWP with the grouping led by Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, who rejected the idea that the Soviet Union remained a workers state (although bureaucratically degenerated), which must be defended against imperialism. But Snipper soon reconsidered, and rejoined the SWP.

Throughout the next three decades, Ann Snipper played an active role in a wide range of party activities. In the early 1960s, she joined other SWP members in building the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In recent years, she participated in the pro-choice movement, helping to defend women's clinics under attack by rightwingers.

In 1983, Snipper and other long-time SWP members were bureaucratically expelled from the party for their principled opposition to the leadership's abandonment of the Trotskyist program. A majority of the expelled members formed Socialist Action. Others, including Ann Snipper, went on to found the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.

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Politics and Art in Solzhenitsun