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Max Shachtman

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Max Shachtman (September 10 1904 - November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist and close associate of Leon Trotsky. He is widely regarded as a principal forefather of neoconservatism.

Beginnings in the Communist left

Shachtman was born in 1904 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. In 1922, he joined the Workers' Council, a Communist organisation led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg which was critical of the Communist Party USA. He was pursuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become a organizer for the communist youth organisation and edit the Young Worker. After joining the Communist Party, he rose to become an alternate member of its Central Committee. He edited Labor Defender, a journal of International Labor Defense. He associated with a group of dissidents including Abern and James P. Cannon that became supporters of Leon Trotsky. [1]

Shachtman, Cannon and Abern were expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 after Joseph Stalin took control of the Communist International. These three and a handful of others formed a group around a newspaper called The Militant, which listed Shachtman as its managing editor, and shortly thereafter formed the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA). Shachtman took up a series of positions as a journalist which allowed him the time and resources to bring the American Trotskyists into contact with their co-thinkers. While holidaying in Europe during 1930 he became the first American to visit Trotsky in exile, on the island of Prinkipo, Princes' Islands.

In 1934, after the CLA merged with A. J. Muste's American Workers Party to form the Workers Party, Shachtman began editing the party's new theoretical journal, New International. Shachtman and the other Trotskyists soon entered the Socialist Party as a tendency around the newspaper Socialist Appeal. They were expelled from the SP in 1937 and founded a separate group, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23, 1939, a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), the combined Polish September Campaign (September 1 - October 6, 1939) which resulted in German and Soviet occupation of Poland and the Winter War occuring when the Soviet Union invaded Finland (November 30, 1939 - March 12, 1940), Shachtman broke with Cannon and others in the SWP. He felt that he could no longer give even critical support to the Soviet Union. While Cannon and his allies regarded the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state," Shachtman and his grouping believed that the Stalinist bureaucracy had become a new imperialist ruling class. In the summer of 1940 Shachtman led an exodus of almost 40 percent of the SWP membership, half of whom formed yet another organization called the Workers Party. [2] In 1948, the group was renamed the Independent Socialist League (ISL).

The development of the "Third Camp"

In the early 1940s Shachtman developed the idea of a "Third Camp" that would be equally distinct from Stalinism and Western capitalism. Shachtman no longer endorsed the Trotskyist conclusion that the Soviet Union was a "degenerated workers' state," a post-capitalist country in which political control had been won by a bureaucratic caste that was not a new ruling class. He classified the USSR as a "bureaucratic collectivist" state ruled by a reactionary bureaucratic class that could engage in imperialist invasions. By 1948, Shachtman regarded capitalism and Stalinism to be equal impediments to socialism. His ideology at this time was different from his later thinking that Communism was the greater obstacle. Shachtman's views were detailed in a famous debate with Communist leader Earl Browder during this period.

Shachtman's Workers Party became active in union struggles, though it never gained a considerable influence in the labour movement. In 1948, Shachtman's group dropped its self-description as a "party" and became the Independent Socialist League (ISL). The WP/ISL attracted many young intellectuals, including Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, Hal Draper, Sidney Hook, and Julius Jacobson. Shachtman also maintained contact with Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova, who generally agreed with his views at this time.

During the 1950s, Shachtman and the ISL moved from Marxism to an ideology more in line with democratic socialism. Despite Shachtman's ideological dedication to democracy, critics have argued that he maintained a top-down power structure and strict party discipline in the ISL that resembled negative aspects of democratic centralism. Organizational and programmatic disputes in the group caused a number of splits, most notably by Hal Draper, who left and formed the Independent Socialist Club in 1964.

Shachtman in the Socialist Party

In 1958 the ISL merged with the Socialist Party, which from its height in the 1910s had fallen in strength to approximately 1,000 members. Shachtman helped pressure the SP to work with the Democratic Party in order to push the Democrats to the left. This strategy, known as "realignment", proved to be somewhat successful. With the eager participation of the Shachtmanites, the SP took an active role in the civil rights movement and the early events of the New Left.

The Shachtmanites soon became irreparably divorced from the New Left because of their unwavering support for the Vietnam War (1957 - 1975). In 1972 Shachtmanites supported Democrat "Scoop" Jackson's presidential primary bid, as Jackson was by then the only major candidate who favored a continuation of the War. When George McGovern was nominated instead, the Shachtmanites chose not to endorse him.

Following the 1972 convention of the SP, Shachtman's followers, organized in the "Unity Caucus", gained control of the SP's leadership. After Shachtman's death on November 4 of that year, the Shachtmanites reconstituted the SP as Social Democrats USA (SDUSA). Harrington and the bulk of the party's membership soon left the organization.

Influence on Neoconservatism

After Shachtman's death in 1972, many Shachtmanites rose to prominent positions in government and organized labor. Supporters of Social Democrats USA (SDUSA) in the labor movement included Albert Shanker (president of the American Federation of Teachers), as well as AFL-CIO presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland.

The most lasting legacy of Shachtman may be the intellectual contribution that Shachtman's followers and colleagues made to neoconservatism. Many of the founders of neoconservatism, such as Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Sidney Hook, developed their thinking in the Shachtmanite milieu of the 1930s and 1940s. Jeane Kirkpatrick was a member of the Shachtmanite-dominated Young People's Socialist League as a university student. In the 1970s Paul Wolfowitz was a speaker at SDUSA conferences. Joshua Muravchik, Penn Kemble, Carl Gershman, and Peter Novick, leaders in the Young People's Socialist League, became right-wing think tank insiders.

Indeed, it has been suggested that much of the history of neoconservatism can be explained as a classic Leninist takeover of first the American left and then the American right by the followers of Max Shachtman.[3]

Further reading

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