What do you think?
Rate this book
Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey Through the "American Century"
A key figure in the 1960s civil rights, labor, and peace movements, Max Shachtman was originally a Communist from Harlem, a leader in the fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti, Trotsky's "commissar for foreign affairs," an organizer of the 1934 Minneapolis general strike, and a principled opponent of World War II. He helped chart the strategy of the civil rights movement through associates like Bayard Rustin and Stokely Carmichael, and built a network of influence for the AFL-CIO within the Democratic Party. But, ultimately, Shachtman's support for the Vietnam War helped to break apart the progressive network he had so painstakingly pieced together and contributed to the decimation of the U.S. Left. Drawing on previously untapped archives and recent interviews, this first full-length biography of Max Shachtman and comprehensive study of his thought adds a new dimension to the study of U.S. labor and socialism.
- GenresBiography
346 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1993
1 person is currently reading
40 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 16, 2021
Not impartial — which makes sense since no one but a Trotskyist would probably endeavor to write such a thorough text on Shachtman — but, if you are well-versed and inoculated enough to let such things slide, this is a very worthwhile concept. Shachtman is fairly unknown by virtue of his complete late-period degeneracy but his trajectory is *the* trajectory of the desiccated American Left. As such, it has to be understood — and Shachtman, who knew Marxism and left voluminous material justifying his every rightward lurch, is a subject worth being intimately familiar with.
January 13, 2017
Drucker's biography of Max Shachtman proceeds in two different stages. In the first, he covers S's youth and his involvement in the CP, the CL/SWP and finally as the leader of the WP until after the war. Whereas these years were characterized by an increasing radicalization of S's politics against American capitalism and social-democratic and Stalinist orthodoxies, the second period that begins with the onset of the Cold War during which he led the ISL and the SP shows his increasing deradicalization and accommodation to the moderating forces of the trade union bureaucracy, social democracy and eventually liberal centrism.
The author identifies the different contexts and ideological moorings that underpinned S's politics during each of these two periods, in a way not dissimilar to what Harding does in the two sections of Lenin's Political Thought. In the first, his radicalization was conditioned by an authentic working-class immigrant culture of Eastern-European Jewish New York, influenced by socialist traditions in the homeland which was profoundly influenced by 1917 and became a major component in the early CP, with S as not the least of its main protagonists. In the second, his deradicalization was conditioned by the disappearance of the kinds of immigrant working-class communities and cultures that Shachtman was a product of, and the labor movement's acceptance of a second-fiddle political role to Democratic Party liberalism in exchange for the high wages and living standards that underlay the postwar boom.
Arguably Shachtman was at the peak of his powers during the 1940s. In this period comes his most significant contributions: on bureaucratic collectivism, on the role nationalism in the colonial world, on the Third Camp in the Second World War, with which he identified not only the scattered revolutionaries of the Fourth standing in for the radical working-class upsurges that were to come, but with partisans in Italy and Yugoslavia, nationalist revolutionaries in India, Burma and Indonesia, &c. The Third Camp remains the one most enduring and significant of his contributions, at a time when multipolarity in the world is returning with a vengeance and revolutionaries find themselves pressured into siding with either the US or its imperialist rivals. This decade was also when Shachtman had the most significant contributions to working-class struggle in the US, when the tiny WP on the strength of its handfuls of members and sympathizers in key sectors of the war economy won a large audience to agitation against labor and the CP's no-strike pledge and became an essential component of the reconstruction of a working-class militant minority that began to emerge during the 30s only to be put on hold by the CP's and CIO's accomodation to FDR.
Much ink has been spilled on Shachtman's anti-Stalinism which turned into anti-Communism, and which is often invoked as a kind of demiurge for his turn rightwards in the 50s. Drucker fortunately does not follow these accounts, thus breaking from the sad trend of some left-wing biographies to recount a number of ideas that change in various articles over time, and which tends to see apostasy as the result of the protagonist's original mistaken understanding of some idea or another in the Marxist corpus. Instead, he shows how S repeatedly and eloquently defended united action with the CP when possible, how as late as 1949 in the US defended CP members from incipient McCarthyism, and called alongside a substantial fraction of the Trotskyist movement for support to Socialist and Communist coalitions in France and Italy. While his anti-Communism does have ideological roots, these changing ideas are inseparable from the changing circumstances in which Shachtman and his supporters were operating.
Even in his decline, Drucker makes a compelling case that his right-wing adjustments were one possible logical outgrowth of his clear-headed analysis of the possibilities for socialists to re-establish the necessary link with the labor movement. At first, S tried to reassert the need for working-class independence and Third Camp ideology in a period of relative quiescence and prosperity. When the potential for this period to extend into the 60s became clear as opposed to S's and other Trotskyists' initial assessment that it would not last a few years beyond the war, the ground was cut out from under him. Cannon and the SWP, faced with the same prospects, decided to build a relatively insignificant but independent Marxist group with clear politics. Since S saw this as sectarian, once he abandoned hope of revolutionary developments in the US, Europe and the developing world for the foreseeable future, he fell back on various substitutions for the working class vanguard: in the US, the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO bureaucracy, in Europe the traditional social democratic parties, in the former colonies, middle-class anti-Communist nationalists such as Nehru and Sukarno.
I don't have much to say in criticism of this book. It is essential and necessary for all of us on the US revolutionary left, and needs badly to be republished for those activists in Marxist organizations which take their stand on the Third Camp of S's height. Lastly I wanted to mention a good discussion near the end of Shachtman's differences with Michael Harrington. Although both oriented around the Democratic Party, S's emphasis on the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, in itself a strange distortion of his earlier emphasis on the revolutionary role of the working class under capitalism, led Harrington to break with S's politics as they became, in line with his sponsors, increasingly pro-war, anti-social movements and profoundly hostile to the New Left in favor of the "New Politics" coalition which reached its height with the McGovern campaign. As Drucker writes the results of this were a strange, politically unique version of right-wing social democracy that Shachtman identified with at the end of his life, which had a brief and bizarre period of influence as the "Scoop Jackson socialists": Social Democrats, USA, which was a formative influence on the neoconservative movement. In recent years a similar trend has emerged on the British left in response to the Arab revolutions and the residual Stalinism of the UK trade-union movement. Both because of this and the recent resurgence of interest in Harrington's politics in the form of DSA after the end of the Sanders campaign, Drucker's discussion of the origins of this split can be useful for further analysis.
The author identifies the different contexts and ideological moorings that underpinned S's politics during each of these two periods, in a way not dissimilar to what Harding does in the two sections of Lenin's Political Thought. In the first, his radicalization was conditioned by an authentic working-class immigrant culture of Eastern-European Jewish New York, influenced by socialist traditions in the homeland which was profoundly influenced by 1917 and became a major component in the early CP, with S as not the least of its main protagonists. In the second, his deradicalization was conditioned by the disappearance of the kinds of immigrant working-class communities and cultures that Shachtman was a product of, and the labor movement's acceptance of a second-fiddle political role to Democratic Party liberalism in exchange for the high wages and living standards that underlay the postwar boom.
Arguably Shachtman was at the peak of his powers during the 1940s. In this period comes his most significant contributions: on bureaucratic collectivism, on the role nationalism in the colonial world, on the Third Camp in the Second World War, with which he identified not only the scattered revolutionaries of the Fourth standing in for the radical working-class upsurges that were to come, but with partisans in Italy and Yugoslavia, nationalist revolutionaries in India, Burma and Indonesia, &c. The Third Camp remains the one most enduring and significant of his contributions, at a time when multipolarity in the world is returning with a vengeance and revolutionaries find themselves pressured into siding with either the US or its imperialist rivals. This decade was also when Shachtman had the most significant contributions to working-class struggle in the US, when the tiny WP on the strength of its handfuls of members and sympathizers in key sectors of the war economy won a large audience to agitation against labor and the CP's no-strike pledge and became an essential component of the reconstruction of a working-class militant minority that began to emerge during the 30s only to be put on hold by the CP's and CIO's accomodation to FDR.
Much ink has been spilled on Shachtman's anti-Stalinism which turned into anti-Communism, and which is often invoked as a kind of demiurge for his turn rightwards in the 50s. Drucker fortunately does not follow these accounts, thus breaking from the sad trend of some left-wing biographies to recount a number of ideas that change in various articles over time, and which tends to see apostasy as the result of the protagonist's original mistaken understanding of some idea or another in the Marxist corpus. Instead, he shows how S repeatedly and eloquently defended united action with the CP when possible, how as late as 1949 in the US defended CP members from incipient McCarthyism, and called alongside a substantial fraction of the Trotskyist movement for support to Socialist and Communist coalitions in France and Italy. While his anti-Communism does have ideological roots, these changing ideas are inseparable from the changing circumstances in which Shachtman and his supporters were operating.
Even in his decline, Drucker makes a compelling case that his right-wing adjustments were one possible logical outgrowth of his clear-headed analysis of the possibilities for socialists to re-establish the necessary link with the labor movement. At first, S tried to reassert the need for working-class independence and Third Camp ideology in a period of relative quiescence and prosperity. When the potential for this period to extend into the 60s became clear as opposed to S's and other Trotskyists' initial assessment that it would not last a few years beyond the war, the ground was cut out from under him. Cannon and the SWP, faced with the same prospects, decided to build a relatively insignificant but independent Marxist group with clear politics. Since S saw this as sectarian, once he abandoned hope of revolutionary developments in the US, Europe and the developing world for the foreseeable future, he fell back on various substitutions for the working class vanguard: in the US, the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO bureaucracy, in Europe the traditional social democratic parties, in the former colonies, middle-class anti-Communist nationalists such as Nehru and Sukarno.
I don't have much to say in criticism of this book. It is essential and necessary for all of us on the US revolutionary left, and needs badly to be republished for those activists in Marxist organizations which take their stand on the Third Camp of S's height. Lastly I wanted to mention a good discussion near the end of Shachtman's differences with Michael Harrington. Although both oriented around the Democratic Party, S's emphasis on the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, in itself a strange distortion of his earlier emphasis on the revolutionary role of the working class under capitalism, led Harrington to break with S's politics as they became, in line with his sponsors, increasingly pro-war, anti-social movements and profoundly hostile to the New Left in favor of the "New Politics" coalition which reached its height with the McGovern campaign. As Drucker writes the results of this were a strange, politically unique version of right-wing social democracy that Shachtman identified with at the end of his life, which had a brief and bizarre period of influence as the "Scoop Jackson socialists": Social Democrats, USA, which was a formative influence on the neoconservative movement. In recent years a similar trend has emerged on the British left in response to the Arab revolutions and the residual Stalinism of the UK trade-union movement. Both because of this and the recent resurgence of interest in Harrington's politics in the form of DSA after the end of the Sanders campaign, Drucker's discussion of the origins of this split can be useful for further analysis.
November 16, 2015
Drucker's biography of Shachtman is sympathetic to the point of advocacy, particulary of Schactman's revolutionary period in the 20s and 30s. The books is strongest when charting the evolution of Shachtman's analysis from revolutionary Communist to defender of the AFL-CIO status quo. Drucker fails to scrutinize Shactman's lack of a meaningful personal life, which, in my view, may be a clue as to why his political alliances took on the tinge of dysfunctional family drama. Drucker leaves unanswered the question as to whether, like many of his Trotskyist brethren, Shachtman's drift to the right was justified or a predictable reaction to the evolution of Soviet Communism and the evolution of global politics. Neither does Drucker weigh the influence of the revolutionary Shachtman of the pre-WWII era with the reactionary Shachman whose followers became key players in the evolution of neoconservatism. A deeper analysis of the origins of the toxic combination of Leninist discipline with the defense of American power that Shactman hatched is needed as a compliment to Drucker's thorough intellectual biography.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews