American Socialist

AMERICAN SOCIALIST. An eclectic magazine bridging the gap between Old Left and New Left, the American Socialist was published between 1954 and 1959. It originated with a political faction, expelled from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman. The two gathered around themselves a loosely-knit following of perhaps a hundred members. This group retitled itself the “Socialist Union” in search of a wider appeal for their ideas within the existing Left and beyond. Their American Socialist magazine was intended, as Cochran wrote, not to “create a special sect, cult, or church which seeks to draw people out of the broad currents into its backwater,” but one intended instead to “join with others in advancing the existing struggles to a higher stage and on a broader front.” That is to say, they wished to break with the standard Leninist view of the Bolshevik party leadership of the Left and sought something closer in spirit to the pre-1920 Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs.

Differences between Cochran and the SWP leadership had first materialized at a United Automobile Workers (UAW) convention in 1947, when the Cochran-led faction voted their solidarity with a Communist bloc against UAW president Walter Reuther, who was then imposing a Cold War-style loyalty oath upon union members. When SWP leader James Cannon heard of the anticipated vote, he ordered his members to support Reuther. Opposition to the Communist regulars was viewed as absolute, a stepping stone to recreate a vanguard party. The restless followers of Cochran spent six subsequent years fighting for their positions within Trotskyism but also looking a way out.

The Socialist Union adopted a modest role for itself, aiming to bring about a movement that could transcend the differences undercutting unity among leftists of various kinds, many of them now cut loose from their respective organizations. The American Socialist offered a wide array of contributors, ranging from the aged savant W.E. B. Du Bois to young lawyer Ralph Nader, and an eclectic offering of topics, foreign and domestic, historical to current day. Unlike Monthly Review or Dissent, two contemporary Left journals, the American Socialist was heavily illustrated and intended to be more appealing to ordinary readers.

In the magazine’s pages, Braverman himself notably raised some of the ideas that reached full maturity in his classic study Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974). “Alienation,” a popular topic of the day discussed and debated from novels to the pages of Fortune magazine, appeared to pose limits upon the satisfactions offered to the working class by the consumer economy. To this discussion, Braverman added Marxist dimensions from the recently translated Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Could work itself be made a satisfactory part of modern life, and how?

The American Socialist successfully reached out to small circles of young people, some of whom formed local clubs, mostly on campuses, imitating the formation of the British New Left seeking a way forward. It could not draw sufficient support from a scattered and demoralized older Left in the era of McCarthyism. The final issue, dated December, 1959, announced that the magazine, or at least its subscription list, had been merged into Monthly Review. Braverman would become the editor of Monthly Review Press a few years later. Cochran accepted an invitation from Zbigniew Brzezinski to become part of Columbia University’s Research Institute on International Change. His monograph, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (1977), rehearsed the familiar Cold War themes of Communism’s ill effects on American union activities.

The editors of the American Socialist, in a parting note, looked back upon their limited success injecting “a sense of mature political analyses, a rejection of petty bickering and theological hair-splitting,” their “attempt to transcend the simplistic world of hackneyed sloganeering and parrot-like repetition of unexamined dogmatics, a resolve to grapple with the unique and in many ways baffling problems of our new society in a world embroiled in cold war and up against nuclear menace, a realization that socialism in the West has to be redefined and restated to cope with the changing times.”

The American Socialist. Marxist Internet Archives. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/index.htm