Breitman, George

BREITMAN, GEORGE (1916–1986). A socialist writer, editor, and organizer, George Breitman may be best known for helping to disseminate and popularize the works and ideas of the revolutionary black nationalist Malcolm X, making them available to perhaps millions of people through his edition of Malcolm X Speaks as well as his influential study The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. In addition, he was chief editor of the fourteen-volume Writings of Leon Trotsky (1929–1940).

Breitman was born in Newark, New Jersey, and during the Great Depression found work in the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. He joined the Workers Party of the United States in 1935 and was also a leading activist in the New Jersey section of the Workers Alliance. A founding member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), he was an organizer of the Newark and Detroit branches of the party, also serving on the National Committee and Political Committee of that organization. He functioned at various times as editor of the weekly Militant. In the late 1960s Breitman became centrally involved in the SWP’s Merit Publishers (soon renamed Pathfinder Press), helping to expand greatly its titles—not only works by such people as Trotsky, James P. Cannon, Che Guevara, and Ernest Mandel, but also a variety of pamphlets on black liberation, feminism, the youth radicalization, and socialism (plus a few innovative cultural works on Afro-American poetry and jazz, Lenny Bruce, and surrealism).

In 1984 Breitman was expelled from the SWP (along with many others) as a result of opposition to policies of the party’s new leadership. He became a leader of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, a small group that sought to reunify revolutionary socialists in the United States around the program of the Fourth International.

Allen, Naomi, and Sarah Lovell, eds. A Tribute to George Breitman, Writer, Organizer, Revolutionary. New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1987.

Breitman, George. Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution: The Writings of George Breitman. Anthony Marcus, ed. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005.

Breitman, George. Papers. Guide. Tamiment Library, & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_169/index.html

Breitman, George, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan Wald. Trotskyism in the United States: Recollections and Reconsiderations. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996.

George Breitman Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/breitman/index.htm