Max Shachtman and his left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the American Century" Peter Drucker, Humanities Press, 1994 Max Shachtman was expelled from the CPUSA in 1928 for circulating Trotskyist materials smuggled out of Russia by Jim Cannon. Over the next 15 years, Shachtman helped affiliate some 25 national sections to the Fourth International, translated Trotsky into English, and was an important contributor to the Fourth International's theoretical journal, The New International. Shachtman and his followers later developed the position that the Soviet Union was not merely a corrupt outgrowth of a "workers' state," but represented a new counter-revolutionary social system -
"bureaucratic collectivism." Shachtman's Workers' Party agitated against both war camps during WWIl, coming increasingly into conflict with the Communist Party, which opposed all workers' demands which might hinder the war effort. Whereas most U.S. Trotskyists continued to see Stalinism - like social democracy - as conservative and fundamentally flawed parts of the labour movement. Shachtman's anti-Stalinism led the Workers' Party to ally itself with progressives and conservatives against the "reactionary, totalitarian and anti-proletarian" Communist current in the trade unions. While they opposed the McCarthyist witch hunts of the 1950s, their current -renamed the International Socialist League, degenerated into a pro-democracy sect, giving conditional support to imperialist forces in their cold war confrontations with the Stalinist states. How could such a collapse take place? Drucker shows how Shachtman's obssion with the dangers of Stalinism in the West, his cold-war pessimism, the belief that fascism and Stalinism had destroyed the conscious cadre of socialism, and the lack of a politically organised North American working class allowed him to cling to a succession of bureaucratic substitutes which could create an appearance of a socialist dynamic. He convinced himself that the AFLCIO [trade union federation] was almost a mass socialist movement, that the Democratic Party was almost a labor party, that [President] Johnson's Great Society had almost made African Americans equal, that the United States had almost saved Vietnam for democracy." As well as filling in an important gap in the history of the U.S. revolutionary left, this book is an honest attempt to understand and evaluate the trajectory of a traitor to the movement. Worth reading. [Reviewed by Ann Henderson]
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