Page "William Z. Foster" Paragraph 5

The SLNA's policies — direct action at the shop floor level leading to workers ' governance of society, but without the dead weight of bureaucratic structures — bore a strong resemblance to the anarchist thinking of the day.

That is not coincidental, since Foster was not only lecturing at anarchist groups and settlements, but became a close working associate with Jay Fox, an anarchist with roots in the Chicago labor movement, and married Ester Abramowitz, who had belonged to an anarchist collective in Washington.

Among the other members of the SLNA were Tom Mooney, who became a labor martyr while in prison for allegedly throwing a bomb at a Preparedness Day parade in 1916, Earl Browder, an accountant and union activist in Kansas City and Foster's rival for the Presidency of the Communist Party twenty years later, and James P. Cannon, a member of the IWW and one of Foster's allies in the internal warfare within the CPUSA until he was expelled for Trotskyism.

The SLNA, however, was never an effective force and folded in 1914.