Max Shachtman

Letter: Neither "October" was a coup

Eric Lee (Solidarity 681) is right, I think, to say that the Bolsheviks thought the 1917 workers' revolution had to spread to more advanced countries or be crushed

Clara Zetkin: founder of International Women's Day

The death of Clara Zetkin removes from the revolutionary labor movement one of that diminishing handful of true founders of the Communist International still left in its ranks. More than half a century of undivided devotion to the cause of working class freedom lay behind the great militant whose last public act was her appearance a few months ago in Berlin to preside, as senior member, over the last session of the Weimar Reichstag before its dissolution by those same snarling brutes in brown shirts whom she compelled to listen to the eloquent defiance of a tongue which proclaimed the...

Karl Marx: sixth campist

Eric Lee’s column in Solidarity 626 gives a potted social-democratic history of NATO, and all but makes the claim that Karl Marx would have supported NATO against Russia, as he supposedly supported “British and French troops in the Crimean War” against the Tsar. Solidarity and Eric Lee both trace our political inheritance back to the erstwhile American Trotskyist Max Shachtman, who fought for independent working class politics in the face of a Trotskyist movement which lent its support to the imperialist Russian state, but in old age moved towards the right and supported American imperialism...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

Use the coming weeks to study

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

Shachtman's mistakes are not our model

For more debate on US politics, see here Martin Thomas ( Solidarity 569 , 28 October 2020) states that in 1954 “the heterodox Trotskyist Independent Socialist League [ISL] decided to back trade-union candidates… in Democratic primaries; and in the general elections if they won the primaries”. He denies that this turn contributed to their political drift to the right. Instead, it was “‘Sanders campaigning’ on a small scale 60-odd years before the fact”. Similarly, Thomas Carolan, ( Solidarity 566 , 7 October 2020) wrote: “The experience of Max Shachtman moving to the right once in the...

Was Stalinism the new barbarism?

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 66 January 2001. Paul Hampton analyses the arguments used by Tony Cliff and others to rubbish the ideas developed in the 1940s by Max Shachtman and the “unorthodox” Trotskyists in the USA about the USSR. This is the second part of an article whose first part appeared in Workers’ Liberty 62. By the late forties Shachtman came to the conclusion that Stalinism was “the new barbarism”. Cliff understood that there were two meanings of the term “barbarism’; the first sense meant a description of the period since 1917, given the belatedness of the socialist...

Stalinism in theory and history

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 62 March 2000 In theories of Stalinism, as Haberkern comments in his review of The Fate of the Russian Revolution (WL59-60), plainly there are many nuances, and valuable contributions from the likes of Burnham, Carter and Draper which ought to be more widely known. But the book, criticised by Ernie for its failure to include more such texts, was not intended as a compilation of theories of bureaucratic collectivism. It is rather a critique of the ideas of latter-day Trotskyism, from the premises of Trotsky and by his most ardent followers. Many...

The dynamics of bureaucratism

Left Oppositionists in Siberian exile, late 1920s Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No.59/60 December 1999 / January 2000 The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One is a significant contribution to the literature of the anti-Stalinist left. Long buried in the archives the polemics and analyses of those socialists who refused to accept the definition of Stalin’s barbaric regime as a “workers’ state” simply because property was nationalised and private property, large and small, was obliterated, deserve to see the light. My criticism of this anthology...

Penetrating but unsound

Statue of Stalin toppled in the 1956 Hungarian revolution Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No. 53 February 1999 I welcome the publication of The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One a sort of library in itself. It is a handy compendium of the sweep of Max Shachtman's journalism, and of his co-thinkers. Always penetrating, often witty, and never without interest, Shachtman was a very gifted revolutionary journalist. But he was no theoretician. This puts him well ahead of James P Cannon, who was neither, but journalism is what it is, and not theory. The...

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