Max Shachtman Research Articles

Strategy and Tactics in a Revolutionary Period: U. S. Trotskyism and the European Revolution, 1943–1946

The outbreak of the Second World War found U. S. Trotskyism divided into two organizations: the Socialist Workers Party led by James Cannon, and the Workers Party led by Max Shachtman. The downfall of Mussolini on July 24, 1943 led to the appearance of a third current: a minority within the SWP led by Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort and Albert Goldman. Confronting the SWP leaders' line, according to which U. S. imperialism would operate in Europe through “Franco-type governments,” the minority argued that it would rely on democratic regimes to stem the advance of the revolution, propping them up with economic aid, and that it would be helped in this task by the Socialist and Communist Parties, which would revive the policy of class collaboration known as Popular Front. The task of the European Trotskyists was therefore to wrest control of the masses from those parties through democratic and transitional demands (a Democratic Republic, a Constituent Assembly, etc.) which would help the workers discover the anti-socialist agenda of their mass organizations through their own experience. The Morrow–Goldman–Heijenoort tendency's inglorious ending precluded any serious analysis of the dire consequences of the policies pursued by the SWP leadership.

George Bush's Philosophers

The politics of George W. Bush, unlike earlier American conservatisms, is animated by ideas and not merely by interests. That is, at least, what Bush's friends assert, and what his foes usually concede. But is it so? The ideas in question are well known, so much so that I need not enumerate them here. I will rather examine, as a whole, a school of thought and two groups of thinkers who adhere to it. The school is called neoconservative, its ideas match current policies, and its adherents often implement those policies. The question at hand is this: What is the direction of causation? Are the policies consequences of the ideas? Or were the ideas fabricated to justify the policies? The question is answerable only in the mean—any assemblage of humankind will include some knaves, some sincere fools, and various mixtures of wisdom with knavery and foolishness—but it is still worth asking. My method will be to look at historical origins. I will compare two groups that came together in the neoconservative movement of the late 1990s: the Straussians and the Shachtmanites. The thinkers they followed were obscure during their common lifetime, but the importance of both has grown in retrospect. Leo Strauss (1899–1973) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago. Max Shachtman (1904–1972) led a grouplet that evolved from Trotskyism to right-wing social democracy. Both left legacies of oral teaching and discipleship that far outweigh their writings.

Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933

Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933

Introduction Hal Draper: A Biographical Sketch

AbstractHal Draper was born in Brooklyn in 1914, to East European Jewish immigrant parents. In 1932 he became active in the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the Socialist Party youth section, the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). A leader of the Student Strikes Against War, he became an associate editor of Socialist Appeal in 1934. In 1937, the socialist youth, led by Draper and Ernest Erber, voted to support the Fourth International after Trotsky's followers entered the Socialist Party (SP). Draper opposed the subsequent split in the SP, which Trotsky and James P. Cannon deliberately provoked, but left with the Trotskyists and became the national secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party's youth group, a member of its first National Executive, and the secretary of the party's National Education Department. Irving Howe, a YPSL comrade, later recalled his admiration. Draper was, ‘genuinely learned in Marxism, with a mind that marched from one theorem to another as if God were clearing his way’, a youth leader who ‘would speak for us with a razored lucidity’ in debate with the Stalinists. Draper was part of the minority when the SWP split in 1940 over two issues, the ‘Russian question’ and the ‘bureaucratic conservatism’ of James P. Cannon's internal party regime. Draper became a founder member of the Workers’ Party (WP) , led by Max Shachtman, which developed an analysis of the Soviet Union as neither a ‘workers’ state’ nor state capitalist but a new form of exploiting class society, bureaucratic collectivism. The WP refused to ‘defend the Soviet Union’ and developed a distinctive democratic revolutionary Marxism, summed up by the slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but the Third Camp of Independent Socialism!’. And, in reaction to Cannon's monolithic conception of the party, the WP developed a highly democratic internal political culture marked by ‘an atmosphere of genuine tolerance’ unceasing internal debate carried in the public press, and untrammelled rights for minorities.

Victor Serge. Russia Twentv Years After. Translated by Max Shachtman. Newly edited by Susan Weissman. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1996. li, 345 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Victor Serge. Russia Twentv Years After. Translated by Max Shachtman. Newly edited by Susan Weissman. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1996. li, 345 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the "American Century."

Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the "American Century."

Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the "American Century"

Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the "American Century"

Max Shachtman and his left: a socialist's odyssey through the "American century"

A Communist from Harlem Trotsky's Commissar The New International War The Third Camp Between Reformism and Barbarism Beyond Lenin and Trotsky To the Right The American Century Conclusion Index.

Soviet “Socialism” and Democratic Capitalism

THERE ARE VERY FEW PEOPLE who are writing within the Marxist frame of reference in the United States these days. Even more scarce are writers who use for independent analysis of world problems. Most so-called Marxists are hacks associated with either the Communist Party or the Trotskyites, whose Marxism is confined to making the world conform to the current state of the party line. Max Shachtman is one of the rare exceptions to these observations. Although during his long political career, he at one time or another belonged to both the Communist and the Trotskyite movements, for more than twenty years he has been free of the kind of intellectual straitjacket which such membership involves. For most of the intervening period, he was head of his own dissident group known variously as the Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League, and always as the Shachtmanites. He is currently a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation. The present volumel reflects the evolution of Shachtman's thinking on one of the problems which has most concerned him over the years, the real nature of the Soviet regime. It is a compilation of articles on this subject which he published in his group's periodical The New International from 1940 until 1957, a fact which unfortunately makes the book somewhat repetitive, although it bears out the belief that Shachtman has been an important contributor to a better understanding of what kind of a system has been established in the U.S.S.R., and the true significance of changes in that system during the nearly half century of its existence. A preface brings the story up to date as of the time of the publication of the volume. Shachtman's analysis is within a Marxist frame of reference. By now it is not novel, although it was new and different at the time it was first elaborated in the Nineteen Forties and the early Fifties. According to Shachtman, the traditional Marxist belief that the only possible ruling classes in the present phase of human history are the capitalists or the workers has been proved erroneous. In the Soviet Union a new bureaucratic ruling class has evolved and come to dominate Soviet society to a degree never matched by the capitalists in bourgeois society. In other countries overrun by the Communists, the model of class rule first established in the U.S.S.R. was slavishly copied. 1 The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State. By Max Shachtman. New York: The Donald Press, 1962, 360 pp., $2.95.