Hal Draper

From Shamefacedness to Solid Brass

From Labor Action , 14 July 1941. Those very principled people, the Socialist Workers Party (Cannonites), have re-discovered the “defense of the Soviet Union.” This event occurs under very happy auspices. for them. While Russia was busy grabbing Poland and Finland, they were also for its defense — but not so happily. The masses of people (not to speak of Churchill, Sumner Welles and Alexander Kerensky) were quite annoyed with Stalin in those days, so the principled Cannonites kept their slogan under their hats. In their public press they merely called the invasions a “crime” and “de-emphasised...

Rediscovering Marx

Alan Johnson reviews 'The adventures of the communist manifesto' by Hal Draper, 1994 Download PDF

Hal Draper's leaflet on Cuba, 1961

Leaflet written by Hal Draper on Cuba, April 1961, from the pamphlet published in May 1961 by him . Public leaflet on the Cuban invasion, written by Hal Draper and published by the Socialist Party and the YPSL in the Bay Area, 25 April 1961 Five Questions On The Cuban Invasion Now that the CIA-organised invasion of Cuba has come to an inglorious end, President Kennedy's speech of April 20 has publicly admitted that he is heading toward open military intervention in Cuba by the forces of the U. S. - in violation of all promises, pledges, international agreements and morality. Any day now, the...

Max Shachtman on Cuba, 1961

Max Shachtman's presentation on Cuba, April 1961, from the pamphlet published in May 1961 by Hal Draper . How close this development has come to the finish that a totalitarian victory would represent, and how promising are the prospects of a reversal of this trend in this Cuban revolution - these are questions that may be on the verge of decision as we are sitting here. The invasion of the forces of the Revolutionary Council, as it is called, is now under way, and the two are locked in combat. What the actual development is down there militarily I do not know. I start my road to knowledge by...

For or Against The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba 1961: Max Shachtman Debates Hal Draper

The dispute over attitudes to the "Bay of Pigs" invasion was the first sharp break on a big world-political issue which separated the ageing Max Shachtman from long-time co-thinkers such as Hal Draper and Julius Jacobson. This pamphlet, published by Draper in May 1961, presents the dispute. Click here to download pdf (which includes excerpts from the contemporary press not transcribed below, giving factual background on the invasion). Contents and note Max Shachtman. Speech on the Cuban Invasion Hal Draper. Comments and Criticism Supplement: Hal Draper. Public leaflet on the invasion The...

The Irish Trotskyists of the 1940s condemn "Irish only" trade unionism

A leaflet produced by the small Irish Trotskyist group in the mid 1940s, after nationalists split the Irish trade union movement. This is a leaflet produced by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which was then the (small) Irish section of the Fourth International, some time soon after the splitting of the Irish trade union movement (Irish TUC) by Irish Transport and General Workers' Union leader William O'Brien and his allies. Protesting against alleged "British domination" in the Irish TUC, they formed a separate Congress of Irish Unions, made up solely of Irish-based unions, and rejecting...

1960s and 70s American "third camp" socialist archives now online

The Marxists Internet Archive has uploaded the journals of the Independent Socialist Clubs and the International Socialists, organisations which continued the revolutionary "third camp" socialism of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. In the late 1930s and early 40s, the Trotskyist movement (particularly in America) was split by a debate about whether the Soviet Union could be characterised as some form of "workers' state", or whether its society was based on exploitative class rule (variously characterised as "bureaucratic collectivist" or "state capitalist"). The "third camp" socialists were those...

ATOMIC ENERGY: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Atomic Age

"The impact of the bomb was so terrific that prac- tically all living things, human and animal, were liter- ally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pres- sure engendered by the blast." —From a Tokyo broad- cast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the "democratic" camp and dropped on what we were told was an "ape-like, bestial and inhuman" people are still reverberating throughout the entire capitalist world and shaking the very foundations...

Problems of Trotskyist history

Problems of Trotskyist history: introduction to Shachtman's Where is the petty-bourgeois opposition? George Santanyana’s aphorism, “Those who do not learn from history are likely to repeat it”, is not less true for having become a cliché. And those who do not know their own history cannot learn from it. Take the history of the Trotskyist movement — that is, of organised revolutionary Marxism for most of the 20th century. To an enormous extent the received history of that movement is not “history” but the all-too-often mendacious, and always tendentious, folklore generated by competing sects...

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