Max Shachtman
Encyclopedia
Max Shachtman (ˈʃɑːktmən; September 10, 1904 – November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky
to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO
President George Meany
.
family in Warsaw
, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905.
At an early age, he became interested in Marxism
and was sympathetic to the radical wing of the Socialist Party
. Having dropped out of City College
, in 1921 he joined the Workers Council
, a Communist organization led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg
which was sharply critical of the underground form of organization of the Communist Party of America. At the end of December 1921 the Communist Party launched a "legal political party," the Workers Party of America
, of which the Workers' Council was a constituent member. Shachtman thereby joined the official Communist movement by virtue of the Workers' Council's dissolution by merger.
Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern
to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the Communist youth organization and edit the Young Worker. After joining the Communist Party, he rose to become an alternate member of its Central Committee. He edited Labor Defender, a journal of International Labor Defense
, which he made the first photographic magazine on the US left. As editor of Labor Defender he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police.
Through most of his time in the Communist Party Shachtman, along with Abern, associated with a group led by James P. Cannon
. Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International
(Comintern), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky
.
took control of the Comintern. These three and a handful of others formed a group around a newspaper called The Militant
. Winning new support, including an important group of trade unionists in Minneapolis, the group shortly thereafter formed the Trotskyist Communist League of America
(CLA). As Tim Wohlforth
notes, Shachtman was already noted as a talented journalist and intellectual: The Militant
listed Shachtman as its managing editor. Shachtman took up a series of positions as a journalist which allowed him the time and resources to bring the American Trotskyists into contact with their co-thinkers. The CLA often gave him responsibility for contact and correspondence with Trotskyists in other countries. While holidaying in Europe during 1930, he became the first American to visit Trotsky in exile, on an island called Prinkipo in Russian
, one of the Princes' Islands
near Istanbul
, Turkey
. He attended the first European conference of the International Left Opposition in April 1930 and represented the CLA on the International Bureau of the ILO.
Shachtman's working relationship with Abern was strengthened in 1929 and 1930. They invited Albert Glotzer, already an old friend and political colleague of Shachtman from their days as leaders of the Communist youth organization, to work with them.
Shachtman's journalistic and linguistic skills allowed him to become a successful popularizer and translator of Trotsky's work and to help found and run the Trotskyists' publishing house, Pioneer Press. He was known for the liberal use of humor and sarcasm in his polemical speeches. A division of labor developed within the CLA in which Cannon led the organization while Shachtman directed its literature and international relations.
These tensions were amplified by the social differences within the leadership: the older trade unionists supported Cannon; Shachtman and his allies Abern, Albert Glotzer
and Maurice Spector
were young intellectuals. Stanton and Tabor explain that the CLA's modest progress also increased the frustration between the factions. During this time, Cannon experienced a spell of depression, during which the CLA's organizing secretary was Abern while Shachtman worked on The Militant. Writing in 1936, Shachtman would criticize Abern's habit of nourishing secret cliques of friends and supporters by supplying them with insider information about debates in the League's leadership. Wohlforth's History reports a factional battle upon Cannon's return, in which the Minneapolis branch successfully backed Cannon's return to leadership against Abern and Shachtman. Glotzer's memoir mentions age as a factor: Cannon and other leaders were older than Shachtman, Abern, Maurice Spector
and himself. It was only a sharp intervention by the ILO in 1933 that ended the fight. Although the line-up of opponents largely anticipated Shachtman's 1940 split from the mainstream Trotskyists, the years from 1933 to 1938 restored the co-operation between Cannon and Shachtman.
In 1933, in an internal party document entitled "Communism and the Negro Question", Shachtman dissented from Trotsky's view that black self-determination was a transitional demand
for recruiting black workers in the United States to a socialist program, a position that was later more fully developed by CLR James. His views, later published by Verso as Race and Revolution in 2003, launched the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism
within the U.S. Marxist movement, later to be further developed by Daniel Guérin
, Richard S. Fraser
, and James Robertson
.
The Trotskyists expanded their role in the US labor movement through their leadership of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike, which broadened into a city-wide general strike. Important to the strike's victory was the strike daily The Organizer; although Farrell Dobbs
was listed on its masthead as the editor, Shachtman wrote much of it and organized its production. The Trotskyists' role in Minneapolis brought them closer to A. J. Muste
's American Workers Party
, which had played a similar role in the Toledo general strike that same year.
In 1934, after the CLA merged with the AWP to form the U.S. Workers Party
, Shachtman began editing the party's new theoretical journal, New International
. During this time, he wrote a notable booklet on the Moscow Trials
and translated Leon Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (in 1937) and his Problems of the Chinese Revolution (originally published in 1932).
When the development of the WP was cut short by the rapid growth of the Socialist Party, George Breitman
recalls that Shachtman and Cannon successfully proposed that the U.S. Workers Party
, should dissolve, so that its members could recruit to Trotskyism from inside the Socialist Party.
(SWP). Shachtman gave the report on the political situation at the SWP's 1938 convention. The SWP included socialists like James Burnham
which had come from A. J. Muste
's party rather than from the Trotskyist tradition. At the SWP's founding congress, Burnham proposed that the USSR was no longer a degenerated workers' state
: Shachtman spoke for the majority view that it remained a workers' state, and considered it important enough to hold a vote by roll call
on the resolution. In March 1938, Shachtman and Cannon were part of a delegation sent to Mexico City
to discuss the draft Transitional Program
of the Fourth International
with Trotsky: they would later teach a series of classes together in New York about the Program.
Shachtman came into closer contact with other left-wing intellectuals in or around the SWP, including James Burnham
, Dwight Macdonald
and the group around Partisan Review
. Shachtman became a focal point for many in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals
.
In the same period Shachtman worked with Trotsky on international issues, arranging Trotsky's move from Norway to Mexico and playing a prominent role at several Trotskyist conferences that Trotsky could not attend. When the first congress of the Fourth International met in a village outside Paris in 1938, Schachtman led its presiding committee.
in which James Burnham declared his opposition to dialectical materialism
, the philosophy of Marxism
. Although Trotsky reassured Shachtman, "I did not deny in the least the usefulness of the article you and Burnham wrote," the issue would soon be revived as Shachtman and Trotsky clashed on the outbreak of World War II.
Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
(August 23, 1939, a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union), the combined Invasion of Poland
(September 1 - October 6, 1939) resulted in German and Soviet occupation of Poland
. Inside the SWP, Shachtman and James Burnham argued in response that the SWP should drop its traditional position of unconditional defense of the USSR in war. The differences intensified with the outbreak of the Winter War
(November 30, 1939 - March 12, 1940), when the Soviet Union invaded Finland. Shachtman and his allies broke with Cannon and the majority of the SWP leadership, which along with Trotsky continued to uphold unconditional critical defense of the USSR.
A bitter dispute opened up in the SWP. The case against Burnham and Shachtman's position is reflected in books by Cannon and Trotsky. Trotsky was especially critical of Shachtman's role as a member of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International. At the start of World War II, the Fourth International was placed under the control of a resident committee formed by IEC members who happened to be in New York City. Shachtman's tendency held a majority of the resident IEC. Trotsky and others criticized Shachtman for failing to convene the resident IEC or using its authority to reduce the tensions developing in the SWP.
A year into the debate, a special convention was held in April 1940. After the April 1940 convention of the SWP, when Shachtman and his supporters on the new Political Committee refused to a vote on a motion pledging each member to abide by the convention decisions, they were expelled from the party. The minority excluded from the SWP represented 40% of its membership and a majority of the youth group. Even before the Workers Party
was formally founded, James Burnham resigned from membership and renounced socialism. Many of those who had left the SWP did not join the Workers' Party: according to George Novack, a member of the Cannon/Trotsky faction, around half did.
", Shachtman and his party argued that the Stalinist
bureaucracy was following an imperialist
policy in Eastern Europe
. After a four-sided debate in 1940-41 in the new Workers Party between advocates of different theories, a majority concluded that the bureaucracy had become a new ruling class
in a society they called "bureaucratic collectivist."
Alongside the WP's paper Labor Action, Shachtman continued to edit New International
, the Trotskyist magazine which his supporters had taken with them on resigning from the SWP.
", an independent revolutionary force, made up of the world working class, movements resisting fascism and colonial peoples in rebellion, that would side neither with the Axis nor the Allies. Beginning in 1943, he predicted that the Soviet army would impose Stalinism in Eastern Europe, and added democratic resistance to Stalinism to his conception of the Third Camp. By 1948, Shachtman regarded capitalism and Stalinism to be equal impediments to socialism. Nonetheless, his ideology at this time was different from his later thinking that Soviet Communism was the greater obstacle. Shachtman's views were detailed in a famous debate with Communist leader Earl Browder
during this period.
Shachtman's Workers Party became active in union struggles. Although its influence in the labor movement remained limited, it played a central role in the fight against the wartime no-strike pledge in the United Auto Workers
. Shachtman was present in Grand Rapids for the 1944 UAW convention, helped convince its Rank and File Caucus to stand fast against the no-strike pledge, and felt triumphant when a convention majority voted the pledge down.
In 1949, Shachtman's group dropped its self-description as a "party" and became the Independent Socialist League (ISL). The WP/ISL attracted many young intellectuals, including Michael Harrington
, Irving Howe
, Hal Draper
, and Julius Jacobson
. Shachtman also maintained contact with Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova
, who generally agreed with his views at that time.
During the 1950s, Shachtman's supporters in the UAW abandoned their opposition to President Walter Reuther
and increasingly took staff positions at UAW headquarters. As early as 1949 they supported the purge of CP-linked unions from the CIO
. Internationally they gave up their identification with the Fourth International after a failed attempt in 1947-48 to reunify with the SWP, and aligned with the left wings of the British Labour Party
, other European social democratic parties, and nationalist forces like the Indian National Congress
party in colonial and ex-colonial countries. Shachtman and the ISL moved from Leninism to an avowedly Marxist version of democratic socialism
. In the same period Shachtman left his second wife and New York City, moving with his third wife Yetta to the Long Island suburb of Floral Park.
In 1962, Shachtman published The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist States. This collected and codified Shachtman's key thoughts on Stalinism, and reworked some of his previous conclusions.
, which from its height in the 1910s had fallen in strength to approximately 1,000 members. Shachtman helped pressure the SP to work with the Democratic Party
in order to push the Democrats to the left. This strategy was known as "realignment." With the eager participation of the Shachtmanites
, the SP took an active role in the early events of the New Left
and the civil rights movement. Shachtman developed close and enduring ties to African-American pacifist and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin
, and thought up the name for the 1966 Freedom Budget that Rustin developed as director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. By contrast, Shachtman's initial ties to the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
frayed after the 1964 Democratic Convention, when he and his allies backed the Johnson Administration's decision to seat only two delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
.
During this time, Shachtman started the research for a major book on the Communist International. Although the book was never completed, his views were collected in a working paper prepared for a 1964 conference of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University
. Shachtman's research notes for the book are held at the Tamiment Library.
In 1961 Hal Draper
criticized Shachtman's refusal to condemn the Bay of Pigs Invasion
, and in 1964 Draper helped to form the Independent Socialist Club
. Shachtman favored a negotiated peace settlement rather than a unilateral US withdrawal from the Vietnam War
.
Individuals influenced by Shachtman's organisations have shared his opposition to Stalinism. A number of political organizations have emerged from the Trotskyist movement which have considered themselves to be Marxist. This broad tendency is described as "Left Shachtmanism
", but does not include followers of Tony Cliff
such as the International Socialist Tendency
as Cliff himself was greatly critical of Shachtman's entire political life and theoretical work.
Glotzer argues that Shachtman's theory of bureaucratic collectivism
has also informed unorthodox approaches within Marxism towards the class nature of the Eastern Bloc
.
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO
AFL-CIO
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL–CIO, is a national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, made up of 56 national and international unions, together representing more than 11 million workers...
President George Meany
George Meany
William George Meany led labor union federations in the United States. As an officer of the American Federation of Labor, he represented the AFL on the National War Labor Board during World War II....
.
Beginnings
Shachtman was born to a JewishHistory of the Jews in Poland
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the...
family in Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905.
At an early age, he became interested in Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and was sympathetic to the radical wing of the Socialist Party
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
. Having dropped out of City College
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
, in 1921 he joined the Workers Council
Workers' Council of the United States
The Workers' Council of the United States, commonly known as the "Workers' Council," was a short-lived organized faction of former Socialist Party of America members who had wanted the party to affiliate with the Comintern. Failing that, they agitated for the creation of an open communist party...
, a Communist organization led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg
Alexander Trachtenberg
Alexander "Alex" Trachtenberg was an American publisher of radical political books and pamphlets and activist in the Socialist Party of America and later the Communist Party USA...
which was sharply critical of the underground form of organization of the Communist Party of America. At the end of December 1921 the Communist Party launched a "legal political party," the Workers Party of America
Workers Party of America
The Workers Party of America was the name of the legal party organization used by the Communist Party USA from the last days of 1921 until the middle of 1929. As a legal political party the Workers Party accepted affiliation from independent socialist groups such as the African Blood Brotherhood,...
, of which the Workers' Council was a constituent member. Shachtman thereby joined the official Communist movement by virtue of the Workers' Council's dissolution by merger.
Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern
Martin Abern
Martin Abern was a Marxist politician who was an important leader of the Communist youth movement of the 1920s as well as a founder of the American Trotskyist movement.-Early years:...
to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the Communist youth organization and edit the Young Worker. After joining the Communist Party, he rose to become an alternate member of its Central Committee. He edited Labor Defender, a journal of International Labor Defense
International Labor Defense
The International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...
, which he made the first photographic magazine on the US left. As editor of Labor Defender he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police.
Through most of his time in the Communist Party Shachtman, along with Abern, associated with a group led by James P. Cannon
James P. Cannon
James Patrick "Jim" Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.Born on February 11, 1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, he joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911...
. Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
(Comintern), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
.
Trotskyist leader
Shachtman, Cannon and Abern were expelled from the Communist Party in October 1928 as Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
took control of the Comintern. These three and a handful of others formed a group around a newspaper called The Militant
The Militant
The Militant is an international Socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party and the Pathfinder Tendency. It is published in the United States and distributed in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, Iceland, and New...
. Winning new support, including an important group of trade unionists in Minneapolis, the group shortly thereafter formed the Trotskyist Communist League of America
Communist League of America
The Communist League of America was founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern late in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism. The CLA was the United States section of Leon Trotsky's International Left Opposition and initially positioned itself as...
(CLA). As Tim Wohlforth
Tim Wohlforth
Timothy Andrew Wohlforth , is a United States former Trotskyist leader. Since leaving the Trotskyist movement he has become a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented non-fiction....
notes, Shachtman was already noted as a talented journalist and intellectual: The Militant
The Militant
The Militant is an international Socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party and the Pathfinder Tendency. It is published in the United States and distributed in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, Iceland, and New...
listed Shachtman as its managing editor. Shachtman took up a series of positions as a journalist which allowed him the time and resources to bring the American Trotskyists into contact with their co-thinkers. The CLA often gave him responsibility for contact and correspondence with Trotskyists in other countries. While holidaying in Europe during 1930, he became the first American to visit Trotsky in exile, on an island called Prinkipo in Russian
Büyükada
Büyükada is the largest of the nine so-called Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara, near Istanbul, with an area of about two square miles...
, one of the Princes' Islands
Princes' Islands
The Princes' Islands , are a chain of nine islands off the coast of Istanbul, Turkey, in the Sea of Marmara. The islands also constitute the Adalar district of Istanbul Province...
near Istanbul
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
, Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
. He attended the first European conference of the International Left Opposition in April 1930 and represented the CLA on the International Bureau of the ILO.
Shachtman's working relationship with Abern was strengthened in 1929 and 1930. They invited Albert Glotzer, already an old friend and political colleague of Shachtman from their days as leaders of the Communist youth organization, to work with them.
Shachtman's journalistic and linguistic skills allowed him to become a successful popularizer and translator of Trotsky's work and to help found and run the Trotskyists' publishing house, Pioneer Press. He was known for the liberal use of humor and sarcasm in his polemical speeches. A division of labor developed within the CLA in which Cannon led the organization while Shachtman directed its literature and international relations.
Differences with Cannon and Trotsky
Frictions between Shachtman and Cannon, especially over Shachtman's work when representing the League in Europe, broke out into a factional struggle in 1932. Trotsky and other leaders of the International Left Opposition complained to the CLA that Shachtman had intervened against them within the ILO's fragile European affiliates.These tensions were amplified by the social differences within the leadership: the older trade unionists supported Cannon; Shachtman and his allies Abern, Albert Glotzer
Albert Glotzer
Albert Glotzer , also known as Albert Gates was a professional stenographer and founder of the Trotskyist movement in the United States...
and Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector was the Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada for much of the 1920s and an early follower of Leon Trotsky after his split from the Communist International....
were young intellectuals. Stanton and Tabor explain that the CLA's modest progress also increased the frustration between the factions. During this time, Cannon experienced a spell of depression, during which the CLA's organizing secretary was Abern while Shachtman worked on The Militant. Writing in 1936, Shachtman would criticize Abern's habit of nourishing secret cliques of friends and supporters by supplying them with insider information about debates in the League's leadership. Wohlforth's History reports a factional battle upon Cannon's return, in which the Minneapolis branch successfully backed Cannon's return to leadership against Abern and Shachtman. Glotzer's memoir mentions age as a factor: Cannon and other leaders were older than Shachtman, Abern, Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector was the Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada for much of the 1920s and an early follower of Leon Trotsky after his split from the Communist International....
and himself. It was only a sharp intervention by the ILO in 1933 that ended the fight. Although the line-up of opponents largely anticipated Shachtman's 1940 split from the mainstream Trotskyists, the years from 1933 to 1938 restored the co-operation between Cannon and Shachtman.
In 1933, in an internal party document entitled "Communism and the Negro Question", Shachtman dissented from Trotsky's view that black self-determination was a transitional demand
Transitional demand
In Marxist theory, a transitional demand either is a partial realisation of a maximum demand after revolution or an agitational demand made by a socialist organisation with the aim of linking the current situation to progress towards their goal of a socialist society.-Development of transitional...
for recruiting black workers in the United States to a socialist program, a position that was later more fully developed by CLR James. His views, later published by Verso as Race and Revolution in 2003, launched the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism
Revolutionary integrationism
Revolutionary Integrationism is an analysis, philosophy, and program for resolving the "black question"--the problem of the superoppression of blacks, and their liberation—in the United States.-Origins:...
within the U.S. Marxist movement, later to be further developed by Daniel Guérin
Daniel Guérin
Daniel Guérin was a French libertarian and author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the...
, Richard S. Fraser
Richard S. Fraser
Richard S. Fraser was an American Trotskyist and the principal theoretician of the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism in the 1950s within the Socialist Workers Party , against George Breitman's advocacy of support for black nationalism. He joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, and was a...
, and James Robertson
James Robertson (Trotskyist)
James Robertson is National Chairman of the Spartacist League of the United States, which is a section of the International Communist League , an international organization of small Trotskyist groups...
.
Workers' Party Merger
Early in 1933, Shachtman and Glotzer traveled to Europe. While in Britain the pair were able to meet with Reg Groves and other members of the recently formed Communist League with whom Shachtman had corresponded. When Trotsky's household moved to France in July 1933, Shachtman accompanied them on their journey from Turkey.The Trotskyists expanded their role in the US labor movement through their leadership of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike, which broadened into a city-wide general strike. Important to the strike's victory was the strike daily The Organizer; although Farrell Dobbs
Farrell Dobbs
Farrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist and trade unionist.He was born in Queen City, Missouri where his father was a worker in a coal mine. They moved to Minneapolis, and he graduated from North High School in 1925. In 1926, he left for North Dakota to find work, but returned the following fall...
was listed on its masthead as the editor, Shachtman wrote much of it and organized its production. The Trotskyists' role in Minneapolis brought them closer to A. J. Muste
A. J. Muste
The Reverend Abraham Johannes "A.J." Muste was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. Muste is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, and the US civil rights movement.-Early years:...
's American Workers Party
American Workers Party
The American Workers Party was a socialist organization established in December 1933 by activists in the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, a group headed by A.J. Muste.-Formation:...
, which had played a similar role in the Toledo general strike that same year.
In 1934, after the CLA merged with the AWP to form the U.S. Workers Party
Workers Party of the United States
The Workers Party of the United States was established in December 1934 by a merger of the American Workers Party led by A.J. Muste and the Trotskyist Communist League of America led by James P. Cannon. The party was dissolved in 1936 when its members entered the Socialist Party of America en...
, Shachtman began editing the party's new theoretical journal, New International
New International
New International is a magazine of Marxist theory published by the Socialist Workers Party of the United States between 1934 and 1940, and since 1983.The magazine was founded and edited by Martin Abern and Max Shachtman...
. During this time, he wrote a notable booklet on the Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
and translated Leon Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (in 1937) and his Problems of the Chinese Revolution (originally published in 1932).
When the development of the WP was cut short by the rapid growth of the Socialist Party, George Breitman
George Breitman
George Breitman was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a long-time editor of that organization's weekly paper, The Militant. Breitman also supervised and edited several important...
recalls that Shachtman and Cannon successfully proposed that the U.S. Workers Party
Workers Party of the United States
The Workers Party of the United States was established in December 1934 by a merger of the American Workers Party led by A.J. Muste and the Trotskyist Communist League of America led by James P. Cannon. The party was dissolved in 1936 when its members entered the Socialist Party of America en...
, should dissolve, so that its members could recruit to Trotskyism from inside the Socialist Party.
The Fourth International
After the Trotskyists were expelled from the SP in 1937, Shachtman became a leader of their new organization, the Socialist Workers PartySocialist Workers Party (United States)
The Socialist Workers Party is a far-left political organization in the United States. The group places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba...
(SWP). Shachtman gave the report on the political situation at the SWP's 1938 convention. The SWP included socialists like James Burnham
James Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
which had come from A. J. Muste
A. J. Muste
The Reverend Abraham Johannes "A.J." Muste was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. Muste is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, and the US civil rights movement.-Early years:...
's party rather than from the Trotskyist tradition. At the SWP's founding congress, Burnham proposed that the USSR was no longer a degenerated workers' state
Degenerated workers' state
In Trotskyist political theory the term degenerated workers' state has been used since the 1930s to describe the state of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in or about 1924...
: Shachtman spoke for the majority view that it remained a workers' state, and considered it important enough to hold a vote by roll call
Roll call
Roll call is the calling of the names of people from a list to determine the presence or absence of the listed people . The term applies to the calling itself, to the time moment of this procedure, and to a military signal that announces it Roll call is the calling of the names of people from a...
on the resolution. In March 1938, Shachtman and Cannon were part of a delegation sent to Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
to discuss the draft Transitional Program
Transitional Program
The Transitional Program, the full name of which is The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, is a political platform adopted by the 1938 founding congress of the Fourth International, the international Leninist organization founded by Leon Trotsky...
of the Fourth International
Fourth International
The Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...
with Trotsky: they would later teach a series of classes together in New York about the Program.
Shachtman came into closer contact with other left-wing intellectuals in or around the SWP, including James Burnham
James Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
, Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.-Early life and career:...
and the group around Partisan Review
Partisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
. Shachtman became a focal point for many in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals
The New York Intellectuals
The New York Intellectuals were a group of Jewish American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist...
.
In the same period Shachtman worked with Trotsky on international issues, arranging Trotsky's move from Norway to Mexico and playing a prominent role at several Trotskyist conferences that Trotsky could not attend. When the first congress of the Fourth International met in a village outside Paris in 1938, Schachtman led its presiding committee.
Break with Trotsky
In 1938, Shachtman shocked Trotsky by publishing an article in the New InternationalNew International
New International is a magazine of Marxist theory published by the Socialist Workers Party of the United States between 1934 and 1940, and since 1983.The magazine was founded and edited by Martin Abern and Max Shachtman...
in which James Burnham declared his opposition to dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
, the philosophy of Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
. Although Trotsky reassured Shachtman, "I did not deny in the least the usefulness of the article you and Burnham wrote," the issue would soon be revived as Shachtman and Trotsky clashed on the outbreak of World War II.
Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
(August 23, 1939, a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and the Soviet Union), the combined Invasion of Poland
Invasion of Poland (1939)
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe...
(September 1 - October 6, 1939) resulted in German and Soviet occupation of Poland
History of Poland (1939–1945)
The history of Poland from 1939 to 1945 encompasses the German invasion of Poland as well as the Soviet invasion of Poland through to the end of World War II. On 1 September 1939, without a formal declaration of war, Germany invaded Poland...
. Inside the SWP, Shachtman and James Burnham argued in response that the SWP should drop its traditional position of unconditional defense of the USSR in war. The differences intensified with the outbreak of the Winter War
Winter War
The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939 – three months after the start of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland – and ended on 13 March 1940 with the Moscow Peace Treaty...
(November 30, 1939 - March 12, 1940), when the Soviet Union invaded Finland. Shachtman and his allies broke with Cannon and the majority of the SWP leadership, which along with Trotsky continued to uphold unconditional critical defense of the USSR.
A bitter dispute opened up in the SWP. The case against Burnham and Shachtman's position is reflected in books by Cannon and Trotsky. Trotsky was especially critical of Shachtman's role as a member of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International. At the start of World War II, the Fourth International was placed under the control of a resident committee formed by IEC members who happened to be in New York City. Shachtman's tendency held a majority of the resident IEC. Trotsky and others criticized Shachtman for failing to convene the resident IEC or using its authority to reduce the tensions developing in the SWP.
A year into the debate, a special convention was held in April 1940. After the April 1940 convention of the SWP, when Shachtman and his supporters on the new Political Committee refused to a vote on a motion pledging each member to abide by the convention decisions, they were expelled from the party. The minority excluded from the SWP represented 40% of its membership and a majority of the youth group. Even before the Workers Party
Workers Party (US)
Not to be confused with the modern Marxist-Leninist party, Workers Party, USA.The Workers Party was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland. They included Max Shachtman,...
was formally founded, James Burnham resigned from membership and renounced socialism. Many of those who had left the SWP did not join the Workers' Party: according to George Novack, a member of the Cannon/Trotsky faction, around half did.
Political evolution
While Cannon and his allies regarded the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' stateDegenerated workers' state
In Trotskyist political theory the term degenerated workers' state has been used since the 1930s to describe the state of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in or about 1924...
", Shachtman and his party argued that the Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
bureaucracy was following an imperialist
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
policy in Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
. After a four-sided debate in 1940-41 in the new Workers Party between advocates of different theories, a majority concluded that the bureaucracy had become a new ruling class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
in a society they called "bureaucratic collectivist."
Alongside the WP's paper Labor Action, Shachtman continued to edit New International
New International
New International is a magazine of Marxist theory published by the Socialist Workers Party of the United States between 1934 and 1940, and since 1983.The magazine was founded and edited by Martin Abern and Max Shachtman...
, the Trotskyist magazine which his supporters had taken with them on resigning from the SWP.
The development of the "Third Camp"
In the early 1940s, Shachtman further developed the idea, already used by Trotskyists in the 1930s, of a "Third CampThird camp
The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism which aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism, by supporting the organised working class as a "third camp"....
", an independent revolutionary force, made up of the world working class, movements resisting fascism and colonial peoples in rebellion, that would side neither with the Axis nor the Allies. Beginning in 1943, he predicted that the Soviet army would impose Stalinism in Eastern Europe, and added democratic resistance to Stalinism to his conception of the Third Camp. By 1948, Shachtman regarded capitalism and Stalinism to be equal impediments to socialism. Nonetheless, his ideology at this time was different from his later thinking that Soviet Communism was the greater obstacle. Shachtman's views were detailed in a famous debate with Communist leader Earl Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
during this period.
Shachtman's Workers Party became active in union struggles. Although its influence in the labor movement remained limited, it played a central role in the fight against the wartime no-strike pledge in the United Auto Workers
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
. Shachtman was present in Grand Rapids for the 1944 UAW convention, helped convince its Rank and File Caucus to stand fast against the no-strike pledge, and felt triumphant when a convention majority voted the pledge down.
In 1949, Shachtman's group dropped its self-description as a "party" and became the Independent Socialist League (ISL). The WP/ISL attracted many young intellectuals, including Michael Harrington
Michael Harrington
Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, professor of political science, radio commentator and founder of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Personal life:...
, Irving Howe
Irving Howe
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Life and career:...
, Hal Draper
Hal Draper
Hal Draper was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement and is perhaps best known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called...
, and Julius Jacobson
Julius Jacobson
Julius Jacobson was an American socialist writer and editor who edited Anvil, New International, and New Politics, all publications in the Third Camp tradition of socialism, a democratic Marxist tradition sometimes called "Shachtmanite" after its significant theorist, Max...
. Shachtman also maintained contact with Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova
Natalia Sedova
Natalia Ivanovna Sedova is best known as the second wife of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary. She was, however, also an active revolutionary in her own right and wrote on cultural matters pertaining to Marxism...
, who generally agreed with his views at that time.
During the 1950s, Shachtman's supporters in the UAW abandoned their opposition to President Walter Reuther
Walter Reuther
Walter Philip Reuther was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century...
and increasingly took staff positions at UAW headquarters. As early as 1949 they supported the purge of CP-linked unions from the CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
. Internationally they gave up their identification with the Fourth International after a failed attempt in 1947-48 to reunify with the SWP, and aligned with the left wings of the British Labour Party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
, other European social democratic parties, and nationalist forces like the Indian National Congress
Indian National Congress
The Indian National Congress is one of the two major political parties in India, the other being the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is the largest and one of the oldest democratic political parties in the world. The party's modern liberal platform is largely considered center-left in the Indian...
party in colonial and ex-colonial countries. Shachtman and the ISL moved from Leninism to an avowedly Marxist version of democratic socialism
Democratic socialism
Democratic socialism is a description used by various socialist movements and organizations to emphasize the democratic character of their political orientation...
. In the same period Shachtman left his second wife and New York City, moving with his third wife Yetta to the Long Island suburb of Floral Park.
In 1962, Shachtman published The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist States. This collected and codified Shachtman's key thoughts on Stalinism, and reworked some of his previous conclusions.
Shachtman in the Socialist Party
In 1958, the ISL dissolved so that its members could join the Socialist PartySocialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
, which from its height in the 1910s had fallen in strength to approximately 1,000 members. Shachtman helped pressure the SP to work with the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
in order to push the Democrats to the left. This strategy was known as "realignment." With the eager participation of the Shachtmanites
Shachtmanism
Shachtmanism is the form of Marxism associated with Max Shachtman. It has two major components: a bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Soviet Union and a third camp approach to world politics...
, the SP took an active role in the early events of the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
and the civil rights movement. Shachtman developed close and enduring ties to African-American pacifist and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, pacifism and non-violence, and gay rights.In the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation , Rustin practiced nonviolence...
, and thought up the name for the 1966 Freedom Budget that Rustin developed as director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. By contrast, Shachtman's initial ties to the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
frayed after the 1964 Democratic Convention, when he and his allies backed the Johnson Administration's decision to seat only two delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was an American political party created in the state of Mississippi in 1964, during the civil rights movement...
.
During this time, Shachtman started the research for a major book on the Communist International. Although the book was never completed, his views were collected in a working paper prepared for a 1964 conference of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
. Shachtman's research notes for the book are held at the Tamiment Library.
In 1961 Hal Draper
Hal Draper
Hal Draper was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement and is perhaps best known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called...
criticized Shachtman's refusal to condemn the Bay of Pigs Invasion
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, less than three months...
, and in 1964 Draper helped to form the Independent Socialist Club
International Socialists (US)
The International Socialists was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States.The roots of the IS went back to the fall of 1964 when the Berkeley locals of the SP-SDF and YPSL left with 16 members to found the Independent Socialist Club led by Hal Draper and Joel Geier...
. Shachtman favored a negotiated peace settlement rather than a unilateral US withdrawal from the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
.
Death and legacy
Max Shachtman died on November 4, 1972 from coronary failure. He was 68 years old at the time of his death.Individuals influenced by Shachtman's organisations have shared his opposition to Stalinism. A number of political organizations have emerged from the Trotskyist movement which have considered themselves to be Marxist. This broad tendency is described as "Left Shachtmanism
Shachtmanism
Shachtmanism is the form of Marxism associated with Max Shachtman. It has two major components: a bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Soviet Union and a third camp approach to world politics...
", but does not include followers of Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff , was a Trotskyist who was a founding member of the Socialist Review Group which went on to become the Socialist Workers Party...
such as the International Socialist Tendency
International Socialist Tendency
The International Socialist Tendency is an international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations based around the ideas of Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain...
as Cliff himself was greatly critical of Shachtman's entire political life and theoretical work.
Glotzer argues that Shachtman's theory of bureaucratic collectivism
Bureaucratic collectivism
Bureaucratic collectivism is a theory of class society. It is used by some Trotskyists to describe the nature of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and other similar states in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere .- Theory :...
has also informed unorthodox approaches within Marxism towards the class nature of the Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
.
Original writings
- Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg Chicago: Young Workers LeagueYoung Communist League, USAThe Young Communist League USA is the fraternal youth organization of the Communist Party USA. Although the name of the group has changed a number of times over the years, it dates its lineage back to 1920, shortly after the establishment of the first communist parties in America.-Early years:The...
1925 - 1871: the Paris commune Chicago: Daily WorkerDaily WorkerThe Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, some attempts were made to make it appear that the paper reflected a...
1926 (The little red library #8) - Sacco and Vanzetti, labor's martyrs New York: International Labor DefenseInternational Labor DefenseThe International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...
1925 - Ten years : history and principles of the left opposition New York: Pioneer Publishers 1933; subsequent editions titled Genesis of Trotskyism alternate link 1 alternate link 2
- The price of recognition: an exposure of the Soviet agreement with the United States Sydney?: Workers Party of Australia 1934
- The people’s front : the new panacea of Stalinism s.l.: Workers Party of Australia 1935
- Behind the Moscow trial; the greatest frame-up in history New York: Pioneer Publishers 1936 alternate link
- For a cost-plus wage New York; The Workers party 1943
- The Struggle for the New Course New York: New International Pub. Co. 1943; originally published together with Trotskys The New Course
- Socialism: the hope of humanity New York: New International Pub. Co. 1945
- The Fight For Socialism: the principles and program of the Workers Party New York: New International Pub. Co. 1946
- An open letter to Dean Acheson : "the marine corporal is right" New York: Socialist Youth League, 1952
- Two views of the Cuban invasion (with Hal DraperHal DraperHal Draper was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement and is perhaps best known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called...
) Oakland, California, Hal Draper 1961 - The bureaucratic revolution : the rise of the Stalinist state New York: Donald Press, 1962
- Leon Trotsky on labor party: stenographic report of discussion held in 1938 with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (with others) New York: Bulletin Publications 1968
- "Radicalism in the thirties: the Trotskyist view" in As we saw the thirties: essays on social and political movements of a decade Edited by Rita James Simon. UrbanaUrbanaUrbana can refer to:In geography:United States*Urbana, Illinois**Urbana , a Christian convention formerly held in Urbana, Illinois*Urbana, Indiana*Urbana, Iowa*Urbana, Maryland*Urbana, Missouri*Urbana, New York*Urbana, Ohio...
: University of Illinois PressUniversity of Illinois PressThe University of Illinois Press , is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic projects...
1969 - Marxist politics or unprincipled combinationism? internal problems of the Workers Party New York, N.Y. : Prometheus Research Library 2000 (reprint of internal documents from the 1930s)
- Dog days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America 1931-1933 New York, N.Y. : Prometheus Research Library 2002
- Race and revolution (edited by Christopher PhelpsChristopher PhelpsChristopher Phelps is an American political and intellectual historian of the twentieth century. The subjects of his research and writing include philosophical pragmatism, concepts of class and labor in social thought, the fate of the American Left and the socialist ideal, and ideas of race in...
) London: Verso 2003
Translations and editions
- The strategy of the world revolution by Leon Trotsky, New York, Communist League of America 1930 (with introduction)
- http://digitool.fcla.edu:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?application=DIGITOOL-3&owner=resourcediscovery&custom_att_2=simple_viewer&forebear_coll=&user=GUEST&pds_handle=&pid=370366&con_lng=ENG&search_terms=Shachtman&adjacency=N&rd_session=http://digitool.fcla.edu:80/R/XGADESP9MYKE7H7892KQYP17A525TTRQJB19C331I6RQP6R7R2-00233Problems of the development of the U.S.S.R.; draft of the thesis of the International left opposition on the Russian question] by Leon Trotsky, New York, Communist League of America 1931 (with Morris Lewitt)
- Communism and syndicalism; on the trade-union question by Leon Trotsky, New York, Communist League of America 1931
- The permanent revolution by Leon Trotsky, New York, Pioneer Publishers 1931
- Distant worlds; the story of a voyage to the planets by Friedrich Wilhelm Mader, New York, Charles Scribner's SonsCharles Scribner's SonsCharles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...
1931 - Problems of the Chinese revolution by Leon Trotsky, New York, Pioneer Publishers 1932 (with introduction)
- The only road by Leon Trotsky, New York, Pioneer Publishers 1933 (with B.J. Field)
- The selected works of Leon Trotsky 2v. (general editor), New York, Pioneer Publishers 1936 -1937
- In defense of the Soviet Union by Leon Trotsky, New York, Pioneer Publishers 1937 (with introduction)
- Destiny of a revolution by Victor SergeVictor SergeVictor Serge , born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich , was a Russian revolutionary and writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator...
, London:National Book Association 1937 (published in America as Russia twenty years after New York, Hillman-Curl, Inc.) - The Stalin school of falsification by Leon Trotsky, New York, Pioneer Publishers 1937 (introduction and notes only)
- Terrorism and communism: a reply to Karl Kautsky by Leon Trotsky, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan PressUniversity of Michigan PressThe University of Michigan Press is part of the University of Michigan Library and serves as a primary publishing unit of the University of Michigan, with special responsibility for the creation and promotion of scholarly, educational, and regional books and other materials in digital and print...
1961 (introduction only)
Shachtman
- Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the "American Century" Peter Drucker Humanities Press, 1994. ISBN 0-391-03816-8.
- "Shachtman, Max (1904-72)" Peter Drucker, in Encyclopedia of the American Left, Mari Jo Buhle et al. eds., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990, pp. 694–695. ISBN 0-252-06250-7.
- Race and Revolution by Max Shachtman, ed. Christopher Phelps, Verso, 2003.
- Max Shachtman Papers 1917-1969. Tamiment 103; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. *Online guide (retrieved April 20, 2005). - The Fight for Socialism.
Shachtman and others, especially the Trotskyist traditions
- Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933 Emily Turnbull and James RobertsonJames RobertsonJames Robertson, Jim Robertson, Jimmy Robertson and Jamie Robertson is a name shared by the following individuals:-Public officials:...
(editors) Prometheus Research Library. - Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years (1933–40) Will Reisner (editor) Pathfinder Press, 1973.
- James P. CannonJames P. CannonJames Patrick "Jim" Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.Born on February 11, 1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, he joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911...
: The Communist League of America Fred Stanton and Michael Taber (editors) ISBN 0-913460-99-0. - The Founding of the Socialist Workers' Party George BreitmanGeorge BreitmanGeorge Breitman was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a long-time editor of that organization's weekly paper, The Militant. Breitman also supervised and edited several important...
(editor). - The History of American Trotskyism James CannonJames P. CannonJames Patrick "Jim" Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.Born on February 11, 1890 in Rosedale, Kansas, he joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911...
. - The Struggle for Marxism in the United States: A History of American Trotskyism Tim WohlforthTim WohlforthTimothy Andrew Wohlforth , is a United States former Trotskyist leader. Since leaving the Trotskyist movement he has become a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented non-fiction....
Labor Publications, 1971. - The Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939–40) Leon TrotskyLeon TrotskyLeon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
. - Trotsky: memoir and critique, Albert GlotzerAlbert GlotzerAlbert Glotzer , also known as Albert Gates was a professional stenographer and founder of the Trotskyist movement in the United States...
. - The Fate of the Russian Revolution - Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Sean MatgamnaSean MatgamnaSean Matgamna, also known as John O'Mahony is a Trotskyist theorist and activist. He was a founder of Workers' Fight in 1966 and is still a prominent member of the group, now called the Alliance for Workers' Liberty.- Early political experience :He joined the Young Communist League as a teenager...
(editor) Phoenix Press 1998.
Oral History
- "The reminiscences of Max Shachtman" Transcript of interviews conducted in 1962, 1963, and 1965 as part of the New York Times oral history program; available on microfilm.
External links
- Max Shachtman Internet Archive
- Browder, Earl and Max Shachtman. Is Russia a Socialist Community? The Verbatim Text of a Debate. March 1950 debate moderated by C. Wright MillsC. Wright MillsCharles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
. Published in The New International: A Monthly Organ of Revolutionary Marxism, Vol.16 No.3, May-June 1950, pp. 145–176. Retrieved June 6, 2005. - Norman Thomas and Max Shachtman Audio recording of a 1958 debate between Shachtman and Norman ThomasNorman ThomasNorman Mattoon Thomas was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.-Early years:...
. - The Lubitz TrotskyanaNet provides a biographical sketch and a selective bibliography of Max Shachtman