About this site
A hub for the material of the US Socialist Workers Party on the Red Mole archives, starting with the recordings.
The recordings
The audio index of the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line publishes recordings digitised from reel-to-reel tapes held in the Holt Labor Library collection (now in the Gerth Archives, California State University, Dominguez Hills): by Stephen Upjohn in 2006, with further tapes digitised by Gary Bills (Portland, Oregon, 2011) and Sebastian Bungen (2025). Most are classes and public talks given by SWP leaders from the 1950s to the 1980s; a few are meetings in London (the Isaac Deutscher memorial meeting of 1967, the anti-imperialist symposium of 1967). The titles, grouping and dates are ETOL's unless a recording itself says otherwise. The recordings are played from ETOL; this site hosts none.
The transcripts
Each recording was transcribed by machine in November 2026 (Whisper large-v3-turbo) and the text then edited lightly for print: fillers, false starts and repetitions are taken out, and the speaker's own corrections applied silently. The paragraphs and the part titles are the editor's, added to help the reader find the way. The asides, jokes, rhetorical questions and the speaker's direct address to the audience are kept. The speaker's facts are not corrected. Where a word could not be made out it is marked [?] or [inaudible], and each transcript's editor's notes list them with the time in the recording, so they can be checked by ear.
The edit was made from the machine's text, not by listening again to every word, so a misheard name or a dropped "not" can remain. For anything you quote, listen to the recording. Reports of errors are welcome and are corrected against the tape.
Credits
The tapes belong to the Holt Labor Library collection; their digitisation and publication are the work of the people named above and of the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (David Walters and others) on the Marxists Internet Archive. This site is part of the Red Mole archives.