Hal Draper

1940: Max Shachtman's reply to Leon Trotsky - A “petty bourgeois” opposition?

Where Is the Petty Bourgeois Opposition? A Repeated Challenge Remains Unanswered. In his open letter to Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Shachtman, repeating the challenge issued by the Minority since the moment it was accused of representing a petty-bourgeois tendency in the party, declared: “... it is first necessary to prove (a) that the Minority represents a deviation from the proletarian Marxian line, (b) that this deviation is typically petty-bourgeois, and (c) that it is more than an isolated deviation — it is a tendency. That is precisely what has not been proved.” Comrade Trotsky has been the...

Why This Profit System and Its Government Bar a Democratic Foreign Policy

Is the U.S. Defending Democracy - or Capitalism? (Article from Labor Action's annual May special issue, 1951) When an Indian tribe went on the warpath to grab a 
neighbor's choice hunting ground, it is not likely that the
 braves spent too much time convincing each other that the
 scalps were necessary to further an idealistic crusade. They 
knew what they were fighting for because the real object
 of the war was also in the interest of the entire tribe. There 
was no overweening need for sloganized deception. Bewilderment and demagogy over "war aims" has been
 an accompaniment of...

The first mass workers' revolts

Like a brilliant gleam of light in the gathering darkness of the post-war years, the rising of the German working class has already shattered myths and shamed despair. It has already answered a host of questions that had been posed by those who became panic-stricken before the seemingly invincible strength of Stalinist tyranny. These June days may well go down in history as the beginning of the workers’ revolution against Stalinism — the beginning, in the historical view, quite apart from any over-optimistic predictions about the immediate aftermath to be expected from this action itself. Is...

Fight in Germany is nationwide

While the sharpest struggles in East Berlin have been lulled, resistance action in the whole of the East German zone, which followed hard in the wake of the Berlin rising, is still continuing with at least sporadic strikes and riots. The Russian occupation authorities have formally executed 22 so far. The first was a West Berliner, Willi Goettling; the twenty-second was the CP mayor of Doebernitz, in Saxony-Anhalt, H W Hartmami, who was accused of knocking down a Volkspolizei cop who had fired or was about to fire into a crowd of demonstrators. Beginning Saturday, completely authenticated...

Stalinist imperialism

There is a paradox — only an apparent one — in the development of Stalinist imperialism. Stalinism arose out of the counter-revolution in Russia under the slogan of building “socialism in one country” as against the perspective of “world revolution” represented by the Bolshevik left wing under Trotsky. An historic internal struggle took place within the party under these different banners, in which, as everybody knows, the Stalinist wing won out. To the Stalinists, the theory of “socialism in one country” which they put forward meant: Let’s keep our eyes fixed on our problems at home; let’s...

What to learn from Stalinism

Whoever has not been able to learn lessons of the greatest importance from this, whatever movement has not been able to assimilate and readapt its conceptions to this, is doomed to impotence and worse — but to impotence only at the very best. What our independent Socialist movement has learned from the rise of Stalinism would take much more than this page to present. We select only five of the most important lessons here. They are basic to “our kind of socialism”, that is, to a genuinely socialist re-adaptation of Marxist policy for our era — not a mere “reaffirmation”, not a parroting of...

Why is the working class central?

Hal Draper answers the question: why is the working class fundamental to the socialist project? Why do socialists believe there is a special connection between their own great goal of a new society and the interests of labour, this one segment of society? Is it because we “idealise” workers as being better, or more clever, or more honest, or more courageous, or more humanitarian, than non-workers? Isn’t it rather true that the workers have time and again followed reactionary courses and leaders and have by no means shown any invariable affinity for progressive causes? ... Aren’t they filled...

A forgotten newspaper of critical Trotskyism

Socialists will have unprecedented access to a largely-forgotten but incredibly valuable body of literature, following the Marxist Internet Archive’s digitisation of the entire run of Labor Action. Labor Action was the newspaper of the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League (ISL)), an American organisation which split from the Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the contemporary British group of the same name) in 1940 over what attitude to take to the Stalinist USSR. It also developed a more open attitude to questions of party organisation and internal democracy. In AWL’s...

Complete run of Labor Action online

David Walters has announced the completion of a major milestone for the Left Opposition Digitization Project for the Marxist Internet Archive: the complete run of Labor Action, the newspaper of the Workers Party (U.S.) and Independent Socialist League from 1940 through the Autum of 1958. Writers for this paper included, among others, Max Shachtman, James T. Farrell, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, and Irving Howe. The 19 years of Labor Action represents approx. 1,000 issues published, over half of which are full broadsheet in size. Presented in beautifylly digitaly optimized PDFs...

The heart of the “third camp”

In Solidarity 242, we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. This week, we publish contributions from Herman Benson, one of the last surviving founder members of the 1939/40 Workers Party and former industrial editor of its paper Labor Action, and Gabe Gabrielsky, who was a member of the...

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