Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire.
As editor of Labor Defender he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police.
Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International (Comintern), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky.
Shachtman took up a series of positions as a journalist, which allowed him the time and resources to bring the American Trotskyists into contact with their co-thinkers.
They invited Albert Glotzer, already an old friend and political colleague of Shachtman from their days as leaders of the Communist youth organization, to work with them.
Shachtman's journalistic and linguistic skills allowed him to become a successful popularizer and translator of Trotsky's work and to help found and run the Trotskyists' publishing house, Pioneer Press.
Trotsky and other leaders of the International Left Opposition complained to the CLA that Shachtman had intervened against them within the ILO's fragile European affiliates.
These tensions were amplified by the social differences within the leadership: the older trade unionists supported Cannon; Shachtman and his allies Abern, Albert Glotzer and Maurice Spector were young intellectuals.
Writing in 1936, Shachtman would criticize Abern's habit of nourishing secret cliques of friends and supporters by supplying them with insider information about debates in the League's leadership.
His views, later published by Verso as Race and Revolution in 2003, launched the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism within the U.S. Marxist movement, later to be further developed by Daniel Guérin, Richard S. Fraser, and James Robertson.
du Bois and NAACP official Walter Francis White, believing they rested on narrow, class-bound visions of Black progress.
[5] During this time, he wrote a notable booklet on the Moscow Trials[6] and translated Leon Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (in 1937)[7] and his Problems of the Chinese Revolution (originally published in 1932).
Shachtman came into closer contact with other left-wing intellectuals in or around the SWP, including James Burnham, Dwight Macdonald and the group around Partisan Review.
[13] In 1938, Shachtman shocked Trotsky by publishing an article in the New International in which James Burnham declared his opposition to dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism.
Shachtman and his allies broke with Cannon and the majority of the SWP leadership, which along with Trotsky continued to uphold unconditional critical defense of the USSR.
At the start of World War II, the Fourth International was placed under the control of a resident committee formed by IEC members who happened to be in New York City.
Trotsky and others criticized Shachtman for failing to convene the resident IEC or using its authority to reduce the tensions developing in the SWP.
Even before the Workers Party was formally founded, James Burnham resigned from membership and renounced Marxism, and adopted the position of "evolutionary" or moral socialism.
[19] While Cannon and his allies regarded the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state", Shachtman and his party argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was following an imperialist policy in Eastern Europe.
After a four-sided debate in 1940–41 in the new Workers Party between advocates of different theories, a majority concluded that the bureaucracy had become a new ruling class in a society they called "bureaucratic collectivist."
Alongside the WP's paper Labor Action, Shachtman continued to edit New International, the Trotskyist magazine which his supporters had taken with them on resigning from the SWP.
In the early 1940s, Shachtman further developed the idea, already used by Trotskyists in the 1930s, of a "Third Camp," an independent revolutionary force, made up of the world working class, movements resisting fascism and colonial peoples in rebellion, that would side neither with the Axis nor the Allies.
Although its influence in the labor movement remained limited, it played a central role in the fight against the wartime no-strike pledge in the United Auto Workers.
[29] Glotzer argues that Shachtman's theory of bureaucratic collectivism has also informed unorthodox approaches within Marxism towards the class nature of the Eastern Bloc.
Barsh attended Tuley High School in Chicago, where she and her future husband Nathan Gould were chosen to give the commencement address for the class of 1932.
[36] Bellow delivered a eulogy at her funeral, crediting her with introducing him to politics and Marxism, and describing her as "one of those persons who draw you into their lives and also install themselves in yours".