Trotskyism in the United States by Paul Le Blanc

Author:Paul Le Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-753-2
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Notes

I borrowed the title of this essay from Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life (1978), a stirring memoir of herself and her husband, George, the Objectivist poet and Communist organizer. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, October–November 1992, pp. 52–57.

1. Among Novack’s most significant books and pamphlets are America’s Revolutionary Heritage (editor; New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), Democracy and Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), Empiricism and Its Evolution (New York: Merit, 1968), Existentialism versus Marxism (editor; New York: Delta, 1966), Humanism and Socialism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), Moscow versus Peking (New York: Pioneer, 1961), The Origins of Materialism (New York: Merit Publishers, 1965), Polemics in Marxist Philosophy (New York: Monad Press, 1978), Pragmatism versus Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), Understanding History (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), and Who Will Change the World? (Toronto: YSF, 1966).

2. Originally sympathetic to the Socialist Party, he became active in 1932 in the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, an affiliate of the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense. He joined the Communist League of America in the fall of 1933, assisted its fusion with the American Workers Party in 1934 to create the Workers Party of the United States in 1935, and then participated in the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party in 1936. In 1938 he became a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party, to which he belonged at the time of his death. He served on the National Committee from 1940 to 1973. Among the high points of his political career were his service as secretary of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky from 1937 to 1940; national secretary of the Civil Rights Defense Committee from 1941 to 1950; and associate editor of the International Socialist Review from 1965 to 1974.

3. I have surveyed Novack’s intellectual and political career in two books, James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York: New York University Press, 1978) and 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), as well in the entry on Novack in Bernard K. Johnpoll and Harvey Klehr, eds., Biographical Dictionary of the American Left (New York: Greenwood, 1986).

4. For the most part, George was regarded as likeable, even by those who abhorred his political views, such as the novelist James T. Farrell in his last decades. A few, such as Sidney Hook and Felix Morrow, utterly despised George all out of proportion to reason, and the former subjected me to a tirade of slander—personally and in correspondence with others—when he mistakenly concluded that I was somehow George’s political pawn.

5. The exact nature of this transformation remains under debate. In general, it appears that the SWP today rationalizes positions taken by the Castro leadership by the use of its own interpretation of some of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.