Max Shachtman

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was only a sharp intervention by the ILO in 1933 that ended the fight.

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.

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.

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.

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.