Hal Draper did not just retreat to his study

It is not a surprise that Hal Draper and his post-IS era comrades come off so poorly in Andrew Higgins' collection. It is interesting that he seemed unable to find anyone who actually worked with Draper after Hal left the IS. I would have been happy to help out. In any case, I think it is also of interest that Higgins at first was going to attempt — as did Alan Johnson before he too turned in another direction — a biography of Hal but for some reason gave up and instead relied on the memories of an aging population of ex-Draper (even anti-Draper) followers, for the most part, to shape a particular narrative.

It is a myth that Hal simply retreated to his study — although he did do so in large part — in fact, I challenged him on that very decision when I first met him as a fellow guest with Nigel Harris who happened to be staying with me at the time in Berkeley. Hal did not appreciate the insinuation, and understandably, that he had retired from active politics. Over the next few years I worked closely with him on a variety of projects including organising socialist classes as well as active intervention in the labour movement and the Central American solidarity movement. Of course, the primary focus of our work together was intellectual — I served as a research assistant on the KMTR volumes as well as the Marx-Engels Cyclopedia. And we co-authored a book on socialist feminism, The Hidden History of the Equal Rights Amendment.

However, these direct personal experiences aside, the clearest myth created by the Higgins volume is the blithe dismissal of Hal's understanding of Marx's approach to trade unions. This is largely the result of his selection of contributors, none of whom seem to understand what Hal and Marx really understood about the trade union movement — a class movement not a plaything for sectarian politics. I would highly recommend the Reorient materials as well as the key chapters in KMTR on Marx and the trade unions to your readers. These set forth a straightforward and practical class-based approach to socialist activity in the labour movement. This approach is all the more critical to revive in the current period where, at least in the US, we see the sectarianism of the authoritarian left groups such as DSA once again on the rise.

As just one example, Ernie Haberkern (whom Martin Thomas scandalously dismisses as Hal's "sidekick") and I worked side by side as University of California employees for five years on a statewide union organising campaign that resulted in 60,000 U.C. workers agreeing to unionise — in the Reagan era! I feel quite confident in saying that the principles that the Reorient group argued for — against the "industrialisation" policy of the sectarian left — were critical in our success against many obstacles, not the least of which came from other left wing groups as well as union bureaucracies and the state itself. That organising campaign also set the stage and helped birth the early presence of the UAW in the UC system as it began its effort to organise graduate students and others in the UC system.

I will note that I am not an uncritical supporter of Hal's positions. I am sceptical, even dismissive, of the "theory" of bureaucratic collectivism and, in retrospect, find the decision to back the NLF even in a limited way post-Tet to have been a major blunder that likely only fed into the stalinoid hysteria of the post-SDS radical movement. Joanne Landy and Tom Harrison were right, even if their analysis at the time suffered from a very weak understanding of the internal dynamics of South Vietnamese politics.

A response: We weren't trashing Draper

It is good to get a "post-1971 Draperite" slant on our pull-out covering the history of the ISC/IS and "Third Camp" socialism in the USA. But Stephen Diamond is surely wrong to think we are trashing Draper, or even that Andrew Stone Higgins is.

Higgins: "While I am very grateful to Hal and the rest of the Reorient Tendency for their continued political work after the split, I do wish they had managed to find some way to remain within the IS because I think they could have continued to exert a positive influence on it".

Diamond finds it scandalous that I describe Ernie Haberkern as Draper's "sidekick". Merriam-Webster defines it as "a person closely associated with another as a subordinate or partner". Draper, not Haberkern, was the author of the many volumes of Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution. Haberkern worked with Draper. It is no "dismissal" to say that he was the secondary figure in that partnership.

The reference to Haberkern in my comment was to what Haberkern said at a London Workers' Liberty forum where we invited him as speaker. We wanted to hear from him! Our pull-out on the ISC/IS recommends Draper's "five valuable volumes"!

The pull-out contains three main criticisms of Draper. Diamond does not refute any of those. In fact he adds his own criticism of Draper.

We say that after 1971 Draper no longer worked at building an independent Marxist organisation. To disagree on that does not mean thinking the IS's frantic "industrialisation" perspective was right, or that what Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution says on trade unions is wrong.

When Draper separated from the IS, the reason he gave was not to pursue a better trade-union policy, but on his own account to pursue a different mode of socialist organising with an editorial board seeking educational influence rather than tight activist organisation. Neither Higgins nor we stated that Hal Draper "simply retreated to his study", or disdained his and Anne Draper's work with unions, but we record that, whether Draper's "alternative" was right or wrong, he didn't do it. We did not say that "Hal simply retreated to his study". But Diamond himself records: "he did do so in large part".

Second: in a personal comment on Higgins's interview I criticise Draper's version of "bureaucratic collectivism". Diamond is dismissive of "bureaucratic collectivism" wholesale.

Third: we criticise the view of some latter-day Draperites that "independent socialism" as enounced in the pamphlet Two Souls of Socialism was an entirely new doctrine superior to any development from Trotsky's Trotskyism. Diamond gives no opinion on that.

It may well be that Diamond is right in endorsing Landy's and Harrison's view on Vietnam. (We didn't comment in the pull-out). There is a sketch of their view in New Politics, and part of the debate can be traced in the Marxist Internet Archive and in Draper's ABC of National Liberation Movements.

Martin Thomas