Max Shachtman

Max Shachtman (September 10 1904 - 1972) is best known as an American Trotskyist theorist. After leaving the pro-Soviet Communist Party, Shachtman was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and was the editor of its theoretical journal New International.

In 1940 Shachtman led nearly half the members of the SWP in a factional struggle concerning the party's internal regime, a dispute which also involved theoretical differences over the "class nature" of the USSR.

By the early 1940s Shachtman adopted what was known within Trotskyism as the ¨Third Camp¨position, a rejection of both Western capitalism and the "bureaucratic collectivism" of Soviet society. Shachtman continued to regard the Russian state as superior, in terms of its economic organisation to capitalism and, like more orthodox Trotskyists, called for the overthrow of Stalinism by a workers revolution. However by 1948 Shachtman concluded that the Russian state was economically and socially more reactionary than liberal capitalism. A view which he described in detail in a famous debate with former Communist leader Earl Browder.

Shachtman and his supporters were expelled from the SWP and founded the Workers Party which became the Independent Socialist League in 1948. Initially the League described itself as an anti-Stalinist, Marxist-Leninist organization. However, Shachtman became disillusioned with revolutionary socialism and the League shifted its philosophy to a more "democratic socialist" orientation. While the ISL would always remain a small organization, it benefited from a very dedicated core of activists which would come to include such notables as Hal Draper and Michael Harrington within its ranks.

In 1958 the ISL merged with the Socialist Party. Shachtman greatly influenced the American Socialist movement by encouraging socialist participation within the left-wings of the Democratic Party and the American labor movement. This strategy proved surprisingly successful. To some extent, the social programs proposed by the Lyndon Johnson administration were inspired by the writings and activism of intellectuals associated with Shachtman and the Socialist Party.

Within the SP, Shachtman's followers were referred to as the Shachtmanites. The ambition of the Shachtmanites energized the Socialist Party, which became an important though largely unacknowledged participant in the US civil rights movement, anti-poverty activism, and other issues.

Ultimately, however, the Shachtmanite tendency to affiliate with large, powerful institutions came at a price. The ties established with the Johnson administration made criticism of the Vietnam War difficult. Many on the left felt that Shachtman and, by extension, the Socialist Party had abandoned the peace camp. In the end many Shachtmanites openly championed the Cold War, which they saw as a showdown between democracy and totalitarianism.

In the early 1970s, the increasingly right-leaning Shachtmanites seized the leadership of the party and changed the organization's name to "Social Democrats, USA." After the name change many of the older socialists of the Norman Thomas generation left the Party, as did the former Shachtmanite Michael Harrington.

After Shachtman's death in 1972, many Shachtmanites rose to prominent positions in government and organized labor. Their legacy has been very ambiguous from the perspective of the left. Generally the Shachtmanites have promoted pro-labor policies while supporting unbridled US military intervention abroad. In the AFL-CIO they often focused their attention overseas, working within the State Department to support liberal trade unions organizing in socialist countries, like Solidarity in Poland.

In 1976. Shachtmanites supported the presidential candidacy of Henry "Scoop" Jackson due to his hardline foreign policy.

The most lasting legacy of Shachtman may be the intellectual contribution that Shachtman's followers and colleagues made to neoconservatism. Their displeasure with Carter's "peacenik" agenda led many Shachtmanites to support Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. More generally, many of the founders of neoconservatism, such as Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Sidney Hook, developed their thinking in the anti-Stalinist milieu of the Trotskyist left 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 Social Democrats, USA conferences.

Indeed, the enthusiasm with which many neoconservatives championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq may reveal some of the same idealistic and internationalist spirit of their Trotskyist origins.

External links

• Max Shachtman Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/index.htm)

• Shachtman, Max and Earl Browder. Is Russia a Socialist Community? The Verbatim Text of a Debate (http://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1950/03/russia.htm). March 1950 debate moderated by C. Wright Mills. Published in The New International: A Monthly Organ of Revolutionary Marxism, Vol.16 No.3, May-June 1950, pp.145-176. Retrieved June 6, 2005.

Further reading

Max Shachtman Papers 1917-1969. Tamiment 103; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. Online guide (http://dlib.nyu.edu:8083/tamwagead/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=shachtman.xml&style=saxon01t2002.xsl) retrieved April 20, 2005.