Shachtman, Max

SHACHTMAN, MAX (1904–1972). A teenage enthusiast of the Russian Revolution, a Trotskyist leader, and finally an opponent of US withdrawal from Vietnam, Max Shachtman journeyed over five decades from one extreme to the other of the US Left. Along the way he trained generations of young followers in Marxism, winning lasting devotion from some and causing bitter disillusionment in others.

A Jew born in Warsaw in 1904, Shachtman came with his mother to New York the next year. He learned socialism from his garment-worker father, his East Harlem neighbors (who nearly elected Socialist Morris Hillquit to Congress in 1916), and his history teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School. He dropped out of City College and spent his time cheering the most radical speakers at “Trotsky Square” (110th Street and Fifth Avenue), hoping someone would recruit him. When he was seventeen he joined the Workers (Communist) Party.

Soon he moved to Chicago and began editing the Young Worker. In 1926 Party leader Jim Cannon, whose Midwestern Wobbly radicalism and impressive oratory Shachtman admired and imitated, made him editor of Labor Defender. He made it the US Left’s first photographic magazine. As Labor Defender editor he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police. He supported Cannon in the Communist factional warfare of the 1920s.

Cannon won Shachtman over to Trotskyism in 1928. From a minor Communist leader Shachtman became a major Trotskyist leader. He edited the Trotskyists’ newspaper, the Militant, and their journal, the New International, and founded Pioneer Publishers to publish Trotsky’s works. He was Trotsky’s admiring and trusted “commissar for foreign affairs,” arranging Trotsky’s moves from Turkey to France and Norway to Mexico and representing him at European conferences. When the first congress of the Fourth International met in a village outside Paris in 1938, Shachtman presided.

Shachtman’s antagonism toward Stalin’s regime deepened when he helped expose the 1936–1938 Moscow trials. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland he rejected Trotsky’s call to defend the Soviet Union. The Trotskyists split. Shachtman decided that the Soviet Union was a new class society, “bureaucratic collectivism.” He opposed the World War II, calling for Hitler’s defeat by resistance movements instead of Allied troops. He attended the United Auto Workers’ 1944 convention, convinced its Rank and File Caucus to stand fast against the no-strike pledge, and was vindicated when the convention voted it down.

After the war, as much of the Trotskyists’ small working-class base gradually found a place in labor’s Cold War consensus, Shachtman’s support for United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther and his horror at the spread of Stalinism in eastern Europe pulled him away from the Fourth International. He called for a rethinking of Marxism as profound as Lenin’s. He supported driving Communists from the Congress of Industrial Organizations and urged his followers to back labor candidates in Democratic primaries. He also left his second wife and New York City, moving with his third wife to a Long Island suburb. He joined the Socialist Party (SP) in 1958 and found new allies among top officials of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) as well as key civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin.

Once inside the SP, Shachtman moved further to the right, refusing to condemn the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Within labor, he moved away from Walter Reuther and closer to AFL-CIO president George Meany. Initially arguing that the civil rights movement could be a wedge to split the Democratic Party and bring about political “realignment,” he swung by 1964 to trying to keep the Democratic Party united behind Lyndon Johnson, as Shachtman ally Rustin pressured the Mississippi Freedom Democrats to accept an offer of two token delegates at the Democratic Convention. Soon, however, Shachtman’s dream of a labor-based, liberal-led Democratic Party was shattered by the Vietnam War. For five years, he kept his small band of followers in line behind a vague call for negotiations. But while the New Left influenced some Socialists, it repelled him. When he spoke out against US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1970, his old supporters Michael Harrington and Irving Howe denounced him. His distaste for George McGovern’s presidential campaign was splitting apart the Socialist Party when he died in 1972.

Shachtman captivated his followers with his slashing wit and irony, awed them with his knowledge of Marxist theory, and swept them up in his fierce emotional loyalties. Admiration turned into intense feelings of betrayal among those who recoiled from his politics. Shachtman felt betrayed in his turn by the many followers who he felt had deserted him. His last years were filled with bitterness at these deserters, whom he blamed for his repeated failures to win a mass following for socialism. But his final resolve to support the “goddamn Democrats” was tempered by nostalgic, even sentimental warmth toward those he had worked with in the 1930s to create the anti-Stalinist Left.

D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. New York: Free Press, 2003.

Drucker, Peter. Max Shachtman and His Left. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1994.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: BasicBooks, 1995.

Shachtman, Max. Papers. Tamiment Library, New York University.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Marxist Writers: Max Shachtman. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/index.htm