New International

NEW INTERNATIONAL. Founded by the Communist League of America (an early incarnation of the Socialist Workers Party-U.S.), the New International billed itself as “an organ of revolutionary Marxism” from 1934-1952 and a “Marxist Review” from 1952-1958. Its inaugural issue featured a note from Leon Trotsky in which he proclaimed that “your magazine will serve as an invaluable weapon in the establishment of the new International on the foundations laid by the great masons of the future: Marx, Engels, Lenin.” And in Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983), Irving Kristol wrote that the New International taught him “how to read an intellectual discourse” as well as “how to write one.”

From 1934 to 1940 the New International advocated on behalf of orthodox Trotskyist positions on such issues as the transitional program, the fight against fascism, and the nature of the Soviet Union. Following the 1939-1940 split inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the journal was published by the newly launched Workers Party, which renamed itself the Independent Socialist League in 1949. After the split, the New International adopted a “third camp” position which counterposed the “submerged, smoldering, working masses of the world” against both Western capitalism and Soviet “bureaucratic collectivism.” Compared to the SWP’s replacement journal, Fourth International (1940–1956), the New International was bolder, brasher, and in later years less certain of itself and of Trotskyism. The New International ceased publication when the Independent Socialist League abandoned vanguard party-building by entering the Socialist Party at the end of the 1950s.

While Trotskyism in the United States never became a mass movement, it attracted a sizable number of writers and intellectuals, many of whom published articles and reviews in the New International. The journal also sometimes featured pieces by socialists who were not affiliated with the Trotskyist movement. Some of the more prominent names to appear in its pages included Grace Lee Boggs, C.L.R. James, John Dewey, Raya Dunayevskaya, Max Eastman, James T. Farrell, Michael Harrington, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Harold Isaacs, Dwight Macdonald, Ernest Mandel, C. Wright Mills, Diego Rivera, Meyer Schapiro, Ignazio Silone, and Victor Serge. In addition, the New International regularly reprinted classic essays in socialist thought by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Marx, Franz Mehring, Leon Trotsky, and Gregory Zinoviev. At different periods in its twenty-five-year history the journal’s main editors were James Burnham, Hal Draper, Albert Gates, Julius Jacobson, and Max Shachtman.

Breitman, George, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan Wald. Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations. Second edition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Kristol, Irving. Reflections of a Neoconservative. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

A complete archive of the New International can be found on the Marxists.org website at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/index.htm.