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Workers Party (United States)
The Workers Party (WP) 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 and Leon Trotsky's belief that the USSR under Joseph Stalin was still innately proletarian, a "degenerated workers' state." They included Max Shachtman, who became the new group's leader, Hal Draper, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Abern, Joseph Carter, Julius Jacobson, Phyllis Jacobson, Albert Glotzer, Stan Weir, B. J. Widick, James Robertson, and Irving Howe. The party's politics are often referred to as "Shachtmanite." At the time of the split, almost 40% of the membership of the SWP left to form the Workers Party. The WP had approximately 500 members. Although it recruited among workers and youth during World War II it never grew substantially, despite having more impact than its numbers would suggest. Early years By 1941, the WP had developed a minority tendency, l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman (; September 10, 1904 – November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany. Beginnings Shachtman was born to a Jewish 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Degenerated Workers' State
In Trotskyist political theory, a degenerated workers' state is a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class' democratic control over the state has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Leon Trotsky in ''The Revolution Betrayed'' and in other works. Soviet experience Trotsky held that in Russia between the 1917 October Revolution and to Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power, there was a genuine workers' state. The bourgeoisie had been politically overthrown by the working class and the economic basis of that state lay in collective ownership of the means of production. Contrary to the predictions of many socialists such as Lenin, the revolution failed to spread to Germany and other industrial Western European countries although there were massive upheavals of working people in some of those countries and so the Soviet state began to degenerate. That was worsened by the material and political degeneration of the Russian working ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shachtmanite
Shachtmanism is the form of Marxism associated with Max Shachtman (1904–1972). It has two major components: a bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Soviet Union and a third camp approach to world politics. Shachtmanites believe that the Stalinist rulers of proclaimed socialist countries are a new ruling class distinct from the workers and reject Trotsky's description of Stalinist Russia as a "degenerated workers' state". Origin Shachtmanism originated as a tendency within the US Socialist Workers Party in 1939, as Shachtman's supporters left that group to form the Workers Party in 1940. The tensions that led to the split extended as far back as 1931. However, the theory of "bureaucratic collectivism," the idea that the USSR was ruled by a new bureaucratic class and was not capitalist, did not originate with Shachtman, but seems to have originated within the Trotskyist movement with Yvan Craipeau, a member of the French Section of the Fourth International, and Bruno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irving Howe
Irving Howe (; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America. Early years Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie (née Goldman) and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. His father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade. Howe attended City College of New York and graduated in 1940, alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol; by the summer of 1940, he had changed his name to Howe for political (as distinct from official) purposes. While at school, he was constantly debating socialism, Stalinism, fascism, and the meaning of Judaism. He served in the US Army during World War II. Upon his return, he began writing literary and cultural criticism for the CIA-backed ''Partisan Review'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Robertson (Trotskyist)
James Robertson (1928–2019) was the long-time and founding National Chairman of the Spartacist League (US), the original national section of the International Communist League. In his later years, Robertson was consultative member of the ICL's international executive committee. Biography Born in 1928, Robertson joined the Communist Party in Richmond, California, in December 1946. He was active in its youth organization the American Youth for Democracy. While studying chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, he left the CP to join Max Shachtman’s Workers Party shortly before it changed to the Independent Socialist League in May 1949. He was active in the WP/ISL’s youth organization, the Socialist Youth League, and its successor, the Young Socialist League (YSL). Max Shachtman and his supporters then considered themselves Trotskyists, though they had broken with Trotsky’s Fourth International in 1940, abandoning the Trotskyist program of unconditional mi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stan Weir (academic)
Stan Weir (1921–2001) was an influential blue-collar intellectual, socialist, and labor leader. A rank-and-file worker for most of his life, Weir worked as a seaman in the Merchant Marine during World War II, as an auto worker, longshoreman, truck driver, and painter, before taking a position at the University of Illinois, where he taught courses to union locals. Politically, he was a leading figure in the "Third Camp" tendency of Trotskyism, and was a member of the Workers Party and its successor the Independent Socialist League. The character Joe Link in Harvey Swados’s novel ''Standing Fast'' was based on Weir. In the 1980s he co-founded Singlejack Books, a publishing house for worker writers. A close friend to James Baldwin, Staughton Lynd and C.L.R. James, Weir was at the forefront of much of the labor movement during the second half of the twentieth century. References Voices from the Rank and File: Remembering Marty Glaberman and Stan Weirby Staughton Lynd S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Glotzer
Albert Glotzer (1908–1999), also known as Albert Gates, was a professional stenographer and founder of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. He was best remembered as the court reporter for the 1937 John Dewey Commission that examined the Stalinist charges against Trotsky in Mexico City and as a memoirist and activist in the social democratic movement in his later years. Biography Early years Albert Glotzer was born November 7, 1908, to a Jewish family in Pinsk, Belorussia (modern-day Belarus), then part of the Russian Empire. Glotzer and his family emigrated to Chicago when he was four. Political career Politically active since childhood, he was selling socialist literature on the street corners by age eight, and joined the Young Communist League at fifteen.Tim Wohlforth"Albert Glotzer (1908-1999): Obituary," Revolutionary History, www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/ By the end of the 1920s Glotzer was elected a member of the National Executive Committee of the Yo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phyllis Jacobson
Phyllis Jacobson (1922 – March 2, 2010) was an American socialist. Together with her lifetime political and personal partner Julius Jacobson, she co-edited the independent left journal '' New Politics'' from the 1960s until the end of the 20th century. Biography Born into a New York City Jewish working-class family, she joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) affiliated with the Socialist Party as a teenager in the 1930s, where she met Julius Jacobson. Together they were persuaded of revolutionary socialism in its Trotskyist expression and they played a role in successor youth organizations to the YPSL associated with the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party. Between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when the Communist Party had sway over much of the left in the United States, the Jacobsons were associated with a radically democratic current of the socialist movement which rejected Stalinist bureaucratic collectivism and understood the Soviet Union to be a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julius Jacobson
Julius Jacobson (1922 – March 8, 2003) 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. Biography Jacobson came from an East European Jewish immigrant family in New York City. The family was politically leftist and he was politically active at a very young age, first joining the Communist Party's Young Communist League, but soon leaving that group for the Young People's Socialist League of the Socialist Party of America, where he became a Trotskyist and met his wife Phyllis Jacobson. Drafted into military service during World War II, he saw combat in Europe and participated in the liberation of Paris. While in Europe, he participated in contact between European and American Trotskyists. An early ally of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, he follow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Carter (socialist)
Joseph Carter (1910–1970) was the pseudonym of Joseph Friedman, a founding member of the American Trotskyist movement. Friedman was expelled from the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Communist Party of America, in 1929 for his Trotskyist sympathies. He became a charter member of the Trotskyist Communist League of America and with Emanuel Geltman and Albert Glotzer created Young Spartacus, the youth newspaper of the Communist league. Friedman was the original editor of ''Labor Action,'' the official organ of the Workers Party, the organization established by James Burnham, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern in April 1940 following their departure from the Socialist Workers Party. He was one of the originators of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism. He dropped out of political activity after World War II.Ernest E. Haberkern and Arthur Lipow, editors, ''Neither Capitalism nor Socialism'', Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1996. References External links Prod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
