Workers' Liberty

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By Sean Matgamna

"The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflict to oblige humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas.

Memories of Leon Trotsky by Max Shachtman

By Max Shachtman

The 1917 revolution was one of the greatest democratic moments in history.

By Max Shachtman

It is an axiom by now that the defeats and setbacks suffered by the working class throughout the world [in the Twentieth Century] have been due not to the vigour and stability of the exisiting social order, but to the absence or immaturity of the conscious revolutionary vanguard.

By Paul Hampton
Over the past ten years there has been a good deal of discussion in this magazine about the ideas of Max Shachtman. Shachtman was in the 1940s the foremost critic of Trotsky's view of Stalinism in the USSR, and together with his comrades in the Workers' Party/Independent Socialist League (WP/ISL), developed a distinctive analysis of the Stalinist Russia, which they called "bureaucratic collectivism". Unfortunately most socialists in Britain are most likely to approach Shachtman through the prism of Tony Cliff's essay, 'The Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: a Critique', which appears as an appendix to his State Capitalism in Russia (1988), and in his selected works, Neither Washington nor Moscow (1982).1

By Paul Hampton

SELDOM does history record the former head of a government, deposed by social revolution, facing up in an open debate 34 years later to a modern representative of the same ideological current which swept him from power. This was the situation in the February 8 [1951] debate at the University of Chicago where Max Shachtman confronted Alexander Kerensky, the head of the régime which was overthrown by the great Russian Revolution.

WE consider ourselves as heirs of the Trotskyist movement when it was a living movement in the full sense of the word, when it represented the imperishable tradition of revolutionary Marxism. And today, 25 years after the founding [in 1928] of that movement, looking backward with a minimum of maudlin sentimentality and a maximum of calm, objective and reasoned analysis — what do we celebrate on this 25th anniversary?

AS noted in the accompanying summary of the debate, Kerensky spent much of his time working over scraps of quotations from Lenin — from different periods, contexts, and articles indiscriminately, — la Boris Shub — under the heading of a discussion of the Russian Revolution and democracy.

By Max Shachtman

IT is impossible to discuss any important political problem of our time, let alone take a part in resolving it, without a clear understanding of what Stalinism really signifies.

By Max Shachtman

The best way of facing the facts and, thereby, answering the question “What do the Russians want in the occupied countries” is to ask “What do the Russians do in the occupied countries?”

Enough data has now been collected to establish the following outline of Russian economic policy in the occupied countries:

1. Russia strips the industries of machinery and other equipment and transports it to Russia. (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Korea and Manchuria.)

By Max Shachtman

THE fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917, has been celebrated all over Russia and in many other countries. The triumph of that revolution marked the most important dividing line in the history of mankind: between the end of the age of capitalism and the beginning of the age of socialism. That is how every thoughtful person judged it at the time, and the judgement remains fundamentally sound.

By Max Shachtman

THE Independent Socialist League does not subscribe to any doctrine called Leninism. It does not have an official position on the subject and I am pretty certain that nobody could get the League to commit itself officially on a term which has been so varyingly and conflictingly defined as to make discussion of it more often semantic than ideological or political.

By Max Shachtman

TWO years ago, an assassin in the employ of the Stalinist camarilla that rules Russia drove a pickaxe into the head of Leon Trotsky and killed him.

By Max Shachtman

Our criticism of Trotsky’s later theory of the “workers’ state” introduces into it an indispensable correction. Far from “demolishing” Trotskyism, it eliminates from it a distorting element of contradiction and restores its essential inner harmony and continuity. The writer considers himself a follower of Trotsky, as of Lenin before him, and of Marx and Engels in the earlier generation.

Cassius: Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states yet unborn and in accents yet unknown.
Julius Caesar

It is now twenty-five years since the Trotskyist movement was launched in the United States under circumstances which had already ceased to be unusual for that movement. The date was 27 October 1928.

By Max Shachtman

The Workers Party was organised as a result of the factional struggle that broke out in the American Trotskyist movement (the Socialist Workers Party and its youth organisation) when the Second World War began, and ended in a split. Those who founded the new party had reason to be confident.

By Max Shachtman

The letter of Natalia Sedova Trotsky, in which she breaks off relations with the Fourth International and with the Socialist Workers Party, is a document of outstanding political importance.

Some people refuse to learn. Others refuse to remember. And still others remember what they have learned only up to the moment when events call upon them to put it into practice, whereupon they start to forget. Critics of the Independent Socialist League’s position on the war are asking that we support the United States in the war, not only in Korea, but in the Third World War that is being prepared.

By Max Shachtman

THE invaluable assistance given the imperialists by the social democracy in the last World War is too well remembered to require elaboration even at a distance of twenty-five years. If the leaders of the Second International had not sown such demoralisation and confusion among the workers by their chauvinistic activity. their repetition of the official imperialist lies, it is doubtful if the war would have lasted half as long as it did. There is indeed good reason to believe that if the rulers of France, Germany, Austro-Hungary and England felt that they could not rely upon their agents in the labour movement, the fear of proletarian revolution might even have curbed their otherwise uncontrollable lust for settling inter-imperialist rivalries on Europe’s battlefields. For this we have the involuntary confirmation of no less a patriotic authority than the then and present leader of the French trade unions, Leon Jouhaux, who confessed in a speech delivered on 1 August 1937 at Toulouse, on the twenty-third anniversary of Jean Jaures’ murder in Paris: “If on the day of the assassination of Jaures his friends had not spoken to the people of Paris, the revolution would have preceded the war, for the workers thought that the hand of the assassin was armed less by the love of country than by the desire to shatter an obstacle to the war.”

By Max Shachtman

THE foreign policy of the United States is a disaster. It was that under the late Roosevelt’s War Deal, it remained that during Truman’s Fair Deal, and it has got worse in the first 100 days of the Eisenhower administration.

By Max Shachtman

Nineteen Americans who," “although connected with different political groups or parties in the United States, are democratic socialists by conviction,” have addressed an appeal “To Our Friends in Asia,” which is in reproduced for discussion in the February 11, 1951, issue of Janata, the newspaper of the Socialist Paryu of India. The signers include such old, as well as recent, converts to “democratic socialism” as August Claessens, William Bohn, Harry Laidler, Clarence Senior, Norman Thomas, J.B.S. Hardman, and, in their latest incarnations, of course, Upton Sinclair, Sidney Hook and James T. Farrell.

By Steve Cohen
The revolution is not just about storming the barricades – though that’s one of the best bits. It is also about art and the imagination and living the politics of daily life – with its responsibilities, its eroticism, its building of the socialist project and the obligation to make sense of the relationship between all these.

By Max Shachtman

The defeat of the September 1923 insurrection in Bulgaria and the October retreat in Germany, followed a few months later by the crushing of the Reval uprising in Esthonia, opened up a new period of development in Europe, replete with far-reaching consequences. The retreat in Germany gave the bourgeoisie the breathing space it sought and needed... In England, the MacDonald Labour government came into power for the first time. In France, the liberal Herriot ministry was established....

Max Shachtman (1904-1972) was the foremost writer of the Trotskyist
movement, after Trotsky himself, in Trotsky's lifetime, and a key
figure in keeping alive the Third Camp tradition of independent
working-class politics.

Father Rice presents the case for religion

The Catholic Church is not out to capture the world in the sense in which that phrase is used. We would be out to capture, perhaps, the souls and hearts of all the people in the world if they want to embrace the true religion. But we are not setting out any revolutionary procedure such as the Marxists have entered upon, or such as the fascists have entered upon.

Introduction: a sketch of Raya Dunayevskaya and the theory of state-capitalism

A discussion article by Chris Ford

Published below is a rare account of a debate on the ‘Russian Question’ between by Raya Dunayevskaya and Max Shachtman, two theorists of the old Workers Party in the USA.

Not all our supporters agreed with Solidarity’s emphasis and use of slogans during the recent war on Iraq. The following contribution is by Mark Sandell. It was written in May. We will print responses in the next issue. We welcome other short contributions on this topic.