George Breitman (1916-1986) More than half a century of revolutionary dedication AFTER ALMOST thirty years of unremitting illness, George Breitman died on April 19. He was seventy years old. Although he was in constant pain in the last period of his life and grew progressively weaker over the past several months, he continued to spend much of his waking time in productive political work, dictating three letters from his hospital bed only two days before his death. Statement by the Editorial Board of the
Bulletin in Defense of Marxism
Breitman joined the Spartacus Youth League in 1935, at the age of 19, and later that year the Workers Party of the US, a forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. From that time until his death fifty-one years later he never wavered in his dedication to building the revolutionary socialist movement. He was a delegate to the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party in 1937, and remained a loyal and dedicated member of that organization until 1984.
In that year the present SWP leaders - who had developed profound political differences with the historical program of the party which Breitman continued to defend -shamefully expelled him and dozens of his comrades on trumped up charges of "disloyalty." After his expulsion from the SWP Breitman immediately set out to organize the expellees and to try to save the party and its program. He helped to found the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and was an editor of its journal, the Bulletin in Defense of Marx ism.
During his years in the SWP Breitman served in many capacities. He was a candidate ten times on the party ticket, for offices ranging from State Assembly in New Jersey to the US Senate. He set such a good personal example with his election campaigns that James P Cannon, the founder of the American Trotskyist movement, referred jokingly to his "perennial" candidacies and suggested that Breitman was going to be regarded as a chronic office seeker.
In 1941 he began his first of several terms as editor of The Militant. Except for the two and a half years he spent in the army as a draftee during World War II, he served continuously on the party National Committee from 1939 to 1981, and was several times a member of its Political Committee. He took on the tasks of organizer, branch secretary, financial director, recruiter, educator, campaign manager and writer, along with many others. George Breitman during World War II
Perhaps his greatest strength was his ability to explain difficult ideas so that they could be understood by people who were unfamiliar or uncomfortable with movement terminology or jargon. He had a knack for seeing opportunities to apply the party's program to the day to day life of working people. And he had an informal, unpretentious style in writing and speaking that made it easy for his audience to understand him. These qualities made him an outstanding candidate for office in the party's election campaigns and a particularly effective speaker and educator.
Breitman also helped in many efforts of the party to defend itself or its members from victimization by the government. The most famous of these was the "case of the legless veteran," James Kutcher. The Veterans Administration tried to fire Kutcher from his job as a clerk and
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986
take away his veteran's benefits during the witch-hunt years of the 1950s because of his membership of the SWP, despite the fact that he had lost both of his legs in Italy as a GI in World War II. Breitman, along with others, helped Kutcher in his political and legal campaign against the government's attack. After a long battle the case won. Breitman collaborated with Kutcher in writing his book about this experience, and the two remained lifelong friends. Kutcher was expelled from the SWP in 1983, after a terrible slander campaign against him.
In the 1960s Breitman made one of his best-known contributions to revolutionary Marxism when he helped develop an analysis of the profound revolutionary implications of Black nationalism in the US. In particular, he became an authority on Malcolm X, and wrote The Last Year of Malcolm X, The Evolution of a Revolutionary, a book put out by Merit Publishers in 1967. He also edited, in whole or in part, many of Malcolm's writings and speeches for publication. These included the books Malcolm X Speaks and By Any Means Necessary, as well as the pamphlet Malcolm X on Afro-American History.
In the late '60s, the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance began to gain members from the radicalizing youth on the campuses, in the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Black struggle, and the beginnings of the women's liberation movement. The party was looking for ways to educate its new recruits in revolutionary Marxism. Breitman proposed an extensive project for Pathfinder Press: to collect and publish the writings of Leon Trotsky, who was, with Lenin, the foremost leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
Breitman chose Trotsky for three reasons. First, because unlike the writings of other outstanding figures of revolutionary history, Trotsky's writings had never been collected and published in a systematic way. Second, Breitman considered Trotsky to be the greatest popularizer of Lenin's ideas, just as Lenin had been Marx's most outstanding interpreter. Trotsky could present the most important ideas of Marx and Engels and Lenin in a way that contemporary young radicals could appreciate. Moreover, Trotsky's own seminal contributions to the Marxist heritage - his theory of permanent revolution, the Transitional Program, his analysis of nationalism — were of paramount importance for the revolutionary movements of today.
Breitman took primary responsibility for the project of locating, selecting, translating from many languages, editing and annotating the massive
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986 amount of Trotsky's writings and shaping it into cohesive form. Ultimately this consisted of fourteen volumes in the series Writings of Leon Trotsky, covering the years of Trotsky's last exile (1929-40). At the same time, he oversaw the work leading to the publication of several volumes of Trotsky's writings on specific countries and political themes - the Spanish revolution and civil war of the thirties, the rise of fascism in Germany, the French popular front, and many others. The result was that revolutionists now have an incomparable resource available to study the history and theory of revolution. "Trotsky Square"
George was born and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. His mother was a maid for better-off families, and his father was an iceman who carried 50-pound blocks of ice up six flights of tenement stairs in the days before refrigeration. When his father died at the age of 40, George's older sister Celia had to quit school to help support the family. She was by far the most important influence on George as a child. She became a member of the Young Communist League and combined her babysitting responsibilities and her political ones by bringing George to meetings while he was still quite young. It was as a baby brother that he attended a demonstration, with hundreds of Newark residents, to protest the execution of the Boston anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927.
As a youngster, George read voraciously. Mostly he read junk - the hundreds of adventure and pulp novels for boys that were the diet of a generation before television turned reading for pleasure into an obsolete activity. But he also read good novels and short stories. His hangouts were his neighborhood cor ner, which later became known to many as "Trotsky Square" because so many of his gang joined the Trotskyist youth, and the Newark public library. Years later, George still spoke of the Newark public library with affection.
At the age of 16, in 1932, George graduated from Central High School during the depths of the Depression and joined the ranks of the unemployed. During the summer of 1933 he was often in a playground near his home playing baseball and editing the playground's mimeographed newspaper. The whole year after he graduated from high school he spent writing a novel about his neighborhood, which he later destroyed. In 1934 George went to Alabama as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal outfit intended to get unemployed youth off the streets. Here he received some copies of The Militant from a neighborhood friend.
After returning to Newark in 1935, Breitman joined the Trotskyist movement and turned his attention to mass work in the unemployed movement. He joined the organization of the unemployed, the Workers Alliance of America, which was thriving in New Jersey with several thousand members. He was soon in the thick of battles to protect the rights of unemployed workers and to gain higher pay on government-sponsored Works Progress Administration jobs. He was elected New Jersey state organization secretary of the Workers Alliance in 1936.
In August of that year he was the youngest (at age 20) of seven Workers Alliance leaders arrested and charged with "inciting to riot." They were organizing strikes and closing down WPA projects in Burlington County. Breitman spent a week in jail on that occasion, The charges were eventually dropped, the strikes were won and the strikers got a 5-cent hourly raise. This is only one incident in scores of such strikes in those years in which Breitman participated. He served as the state Workers Alliance secretary in 1936 and 1937, and then as Essex County secretary. During several of those years he was also editor of the news bulletin of the New Jersey Workers Alliance. He recruited many unemployed workers to the revolutionary movement.
In 1936 the organized unemployed occupied the state capitol in Trenton, forcing the state legislature to abandon the legislative chambers and begin negotiations for improved unemploy. ment benefits. Breitman helped to organize the Trenton siege and later wrote a pamphlet about it.
The unemployed movement of the thirties was the main opportunity Breitman had to participate in the mass movement and to test himself and his politics in action. In 1941, eighteen leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, charged under the Smith Act with advocating the forcible overthrow of the US government, were imprisoned on the day the US entered World War II. The eighteen included Felix Morrow, editor of The Militant. Breitman was asked to take over as editor of the paper, a post he held until he was drafted in 1943 and sent to France.
In March 1946 he attended a preWorld Congress meeting of the Fourth International in Paris as an observer. The meeting was broken up by the police, who arrested all the partici-
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OBITUARY pants. The conference continued in a French jail, but Breitman was released in a few hours and shipped home.