Glaberman, Martin

GLABERMAN, MARTIN (1918-2001). The leading follower of C.L.R. James, Glaberman played a significant role in the Detroit Left for more than forty years, first as a militant autoworker, later as a study group leader or advisor to younger generations of various backgrounds.

Born and raised in a Jewish, middle class home in New York, Glaberman joined the Young People’s Socialist League as a teenager. In 1938, he was expelled from the Socialist Party/YPSL for his support of Trotskyism and became a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party. He graduated from City College of New York with a degree in Political Science in 1939. In 1940, Glaberman left the SWP with Max Shachtman and others for the “Third Camp” tendency that became the Workers Party (WP). He soon joined the “Johnson Forest Tendency” within the WP. In 1942, he moved to Detroit to work in the auto plants. During 1947, this group rejoined the Socialist Workers Party and in 1950 declared its political independence. Glaberman later claimed to be the only Trotskyist recruit from YPSL who entered Detroit factories and remained in them decades afterward.

Being a militant factory worker during World War II, with the wildcat strikes of other autoworkers, constituted for Glaberman one of the major experiences of his life. He remained in the factories until the later 1960s, devoting essays and a small volume of poetry to what he had learned and to his conclusions.

Correspondence, a unique tabloid published by the Johnson-Forest group, admiringly described the daily behavior of ordinary workers and even appreciated their choice of television programs. Johnson-Forest fell into disarray a few years after James’s expulsion from the United States and split in 1955. The followers of Raya Dunayevskaya, holding similar views on many subjects but abandoning sympathy for popular culture, would publish their own long-lasting tabloid, News & Letters.

Glaberman became central to the smaller group that called itself Facing Reality, after the title of the pamphlet written by James and others published in the wake of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. James’s efforts to lead the group from abroad, mostly from Britain but also Trinidad during his stint within the independence movement led by Prime Minister Eric Williams, proved unsuccessful. But the small group managed to publish a unique series of pamphlets highlighted by Negro Americans Take the Lead (1964). In the meantime, James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs abandoned the group in 1962 for their own, more race-oriented entity. Those closer to James published a newsletter, Facing Reality, with Glaberman as editor.

Conducting discussions about Marx with leaders of the Dodge Revolutionary Movement and the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, Glaberman served as an advisor or senior figure for young revolutionaries of color. He also established Bewick Editions to reprint shorter writings by Johnson-Forest or solely by C.L.R. James, and to distribute them personally.

A yet smaller successor to Facing Reality, Friends of Facing Reality, folded in 1970 after internal disputes and against the advice of James himself. Thereafter, as James became more involved in supporting Third World movements, Glaberman viewed himself as carrying on “Johnsonism” even against the inclinations of “Johnson,” i.e., James. Workers, Glaberman continued to insist, were not racist on the shop floor and that the continued daily activity of the diverse working class continued to shape, in some ways, the inner logic of capital.

After his retirement from factory work, Glaberman became a lecturer at Wayne State University, lending his influence to another generation of young radicals. He had participated actively in the popularization of James to the New Left generation far from Detroit, suggesting contents and writing the introduction to the 1970 “CLR James Anthology” published as a special issue of Radical America, distributed to the young as distant as Canada, the Caribbean and the UK.

Glaberman’s long-time wife, Jessie Glaberman (1922-1981, nee Jane Cohn), also worked in the Detroit war plants, later becoming prominently involved in the labor, civil rights and feminist movements of the area.

Lynd, Staughton, “Voices from the Rank and File: Remembering Martin Glaberman and Stan Weir,” Viewpoint magazine posting, Jan.23, 2012.

Ward, Stephen. In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Martin and Jessie Glaberman Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. https://reuther.wayne.edu/files/LP000621.pdf