Workers' Liberty

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.

Workers' Liberty Numéro 3/8

L’autre histoire du trotskisme américain

(Introduction du numéro 3/8 de novembre 2006 de la revue Workers’ Liberty qui reproduit quatre textes de Max Shachtman : Quel est le rôle de l’organisation révolutionnaire ? paru dans New International d’Avril 1945, Vingt ans du trotskisme américain et La fondation du Workers’ Party, parus dans New International de janvier - février 1954, L’accusation de Natalia Trotsky contre la Quatrième Internationale de Cannon de 1951. Ce numéro reproduit aussi la lettre de rupture de Natalia Sedova Trotsky du 9 mai 1951 adressée au comité exécutif de la QI et au comité politique du SWP.)

To the Executive Committee of the Fourth International and the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (USA)

In this mythic tale Shachtman played the role of the bad angel, Lucifer, the once-luminous lieutenant who rose in revolt against Trotsky, and against “the programme of the Fourth International”; and who was driven out of the ‘official’ Trotskyist movement to live a life of apostasy, sin, renegacy. Cannon was cast as the faithful Archangel, the Gabriel of Trotskyism, the incorruptible warrior for Trotsky and the working-class, the paragon of loyalty to "The Programme of the Fourth International."

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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.