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. The Marxist tendency associated with his beliefs is known as Shachtmanism.
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.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957; pp. 340–341. Shachtman thereby joined the official communist movement by virtue of the Workers' Council's dissolution by merger.
Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the communist youth organization 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, which he made the first photographic magazine on the U.S. left. As editor of Labor Defender he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police.
Through most of his time in the Communist Party Shachtman, along with Abern, associated with a group led by James P. Cannon. Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International (Comintern), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky.Biographical/Bibliographical data from Lubitz Trotskyana.net
Trotskyist leader
Shachtman, Cannon and Abern were expelled from the Communist Party in October 1928 as Joseph Stalin took control of the Comintern. These three and a handful of others formed a group around a newspaper called The Militant. Winning new support, including an important group of trade unionists in Minneapolis, the group shortly thereafter formed the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA). As Tim Wohlforth notes, Shachtman was already noted as a talented journalist and intellectual: The Militant listed Shachtman as its managing editor. 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. The CLA often gave him responsibility for contact and correspondence with Trotskyists in other countries. While holidaying in Europe during 1930, he became the first American to visit Trotsky in exile, on an island called Prinkipo in Russian, one of the Princes' Islands near Istanbul, Turkey. He attended the first European conference of the International Left Opposition in April 1930 and represented the CLA on the International Bureau of the ILO.
Shachtman's working relationship with Abern was strengthened in 1929 and 1930. They invited Albert Glotzer, already an old friend and political colleague of Shachtman from their days as leaders of the Communist youth organization, to work with them.
Shachtman's journalistic and linguistic skills allowed him to become a successful popularizer and translator of Trotsky's work and to help found and run the Trotskyists' publishing house, Pioneer Press. He was known for the liberal use of humor and sarcasm in his polemical speeches. A division of labor developed within the CLA in which Cannon led the organization while Shachtman directed its literature and international relations.
Differences with Cannon and Trotsky Frictions between Shachtman and Cannon, especially over Shachtman's work when representing the League in Europe, broke out into a factional struggle in 1932. Trotsky and other leaders of the International Left Opposition complained to the CLA that Shachtman had intervened against them within the ILO's fragile European affiliates.
These tensions were amplified by the social differences within the leadership: the older trade unionists supported Cannon; Shachtman and his allies Abern, Albert Glotzer and Maurice Spector were young intellectuals. Stanton and Tabor explain that the CLA's modest progress also increased the frustration between the factions. During this time, Cannon experienced a spell of depression, during which the CLA's organizing secretary was Abern while Shachtman worked on The Militant. Writing in 1936, Shachtman would criticize Abern's habit of nourishing secret cliques of friends and supporters by supplying them with insider information about debates in the League's leadership. Wohlforth's History reports a factional battle upon Cannon's return, in which the Minneapolis branch successfully backed Cannon's return to leadership against Abern and Shachtman. Glotzer's memoir mentions age as a factor: Cannon and other leaders were older than Shachtman, Abern, Maurice Spector, and himself. It was only a sharp intervention by the ILO in 1933 that ended the fight. Although the line-up of opponents largely anticipated Shachtman's 1940 split from the mainstream Trotskyists, the years from 1933 to 1938 restored the co-operation between Cannon and Shachtman.
In 1933, in an internal party document entitled "Communism and the Negro Question," Shachtman dissented from Trotsky's view that Black self-determination was a transitional demand for recruiting Black workers in the United States to a socialist program, a position that was later more fully developed by C.L.R. James. His views, later published by Verso as Race and Revolution in 2003, launched the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism within the U.S. Marxist movement, later to be further developed by Daniel Guérin, Richard S. Fraser, and James Robertson. Race and Revolution was harshly critical of what it saw as white and Black reformism both within and outside the Socialist and Communist Left; it criticized the "petty bourgeois" proposals of major Black figures such as W.E.B. du Bois and NAACP official Walter Francis White, believing they rested on narrow, class-bound visions of Black progress.
Workers' Party Merger Early in 1933, Shachtman and Glotzer traveled to Europe. While in Britain, the pair were able to meet with Reg Groves and other members of the recently formed Communist League with whom Shachtman had corresponded. When Trotsky's household moved to France in July 1933, Shachtman accompanied them on their journey from Turkey.
The Trotskyists expanded their role in the U.S. labor movement through their leadership of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike, which broadened into a citywide general strike. Important to the strike's victory was the strike daily The Organizer; although Farrell Dobbs was listed on its masthead as the editor, Shachtman wrote much of it and organized its production.Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion, New York: Monad Press, 1972, pp. 149–150 The Trotskyists' role in Minneapolis brought them closer to A. J. Muste's American Workers Party, which had played a similar role in the Toledo general strike that same year.
In 1934, after the CLA merged with the AWP to form the U.S. Workers Party, Shachtman began editing the party's new theoretical journal, New International.Online Archive of New International, in the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line. During this time, he wrote a notable booklet on the Moscow TrialsMax Shachtman, Behind the Moscow Trial, Pioneer Publishers, New York 1936. and translated Leon Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (in 1937)Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification, Pioneer Publishers, New York 1937. and his Problems of the Chinese Revolution (originally published in 1932).Leon Trotsky, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Pioneer Publishers, New York 1932.
When the development of the WP was cut short by the rapid growth of the Socialist Party, George Breitman recalls that Shachtman and Cannon successfully proposed that the U.S. Workers Party, should dissolve, so that its members could recruit to Trotskyism from inside the Socialist Party.
The Fourth International
After the Trotskyists were expelled from the SP in 1937, Shachtman became a leader of their new organization, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Shachtman gave the report on the political situation at the SWP's 1938 convention. The SWP included socialists like James Burnham who had come from A. J. Muste's party rather than from the Trotskyist tradition. At the SWP's founding congress, Burnham proposed that the USSR was no longer a degenerated workers' state: Shachtman spoke for the majority view that it remained a workers' state, and considered it important enough to hold a vote by roll call on the resolution. In March 1938, Shachtman and Cannon were part of a delegation sent to Mexico City to discuss the draft Transitional Program of the Fourth InternationalThe Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program), in the Trotsky Internet Archive. with Trotsky: they would later teach a series of classes together in New York about the Program.
Shachtman came into closer contact with other left-wing intellectuals in or around the SWP, including James Burnham, Dwight Macdonald and the group around Partisan Review. Shachtman became a focal point for many in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals.
In the same period Shachtman worked with Trotsky on international issues, arranging Trotsky's move from Norway to Mexico and playing a prominent role at several Trotskyist conferences that Trotsky could not attend. When the first congress of the Fourth International met in a village outside Paris in 1938, Shachtman led its presiding committee.Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left, Highland Park NJ: Humanities Press, 1994, pp. 97–101
In January 1938, as editor of the SWP weekly, Socialist Appeal, Shachtman had given front-page coverage ("Boss Court Holds Beal on Old Score") to a campaign to prevent recommittal of Fred Beal in North Carolina where he had been convicted in 1929 for conspiracy in the strike-related death of a policeman. Beal, returned from exile in the Soviet Union, had just published a memoir, Proletarian Journey, in which he identified the Soviet party-state bureaucracy as a "new exploiting class", a formula Shachtman was later to adopt.
Break with Trotsky
In 1938, Shachtman shocked Trotsky by publishing an article in the New International in which James Burnham declared his opposition to dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism.James Burnham, "A Little Wool Pulling", New International, Vol.4 No.8, August 1938, pp.246–247. Although Trotsky reassured Shachtman, "I did not deny in the least the usefulness of the article you and Burnham wrote,"Trotsky to Shachtman (March 9, 1939), Trotsky Archives 10339 the issue would soon be revived as Shachtman and Trotsky clashed on the outbreak of World War II.