Hal Draper

Socialists will have unprecedented access to a largely-forgotten but incredibly valuable body of literature, following the Marxist Internet Archive’s digitisation of the entire run of Labor Action.

In Solidarity 242, we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. This week, we publish contributions from Herman Benson, one of the last surviving founder members of the 1939/40 Workers Party and former industrial editor of its paper Labor Action, and Gabe Gabrielsky, who was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League and later the International Socialists.

I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on the South Side of Chicago. My Dutch immigrant grandfather, John Cornelius La Botz, became a socialist in Chicago during the Great Depression.

Most of the references one hears to the student movement of the thirties, and most published references too, are quite wrong in one basic respect: they speak as if “the thirties” represented a single, homogeneous period for the student movement.