Subject: Re: M-I: Draper, Engels and Sects
From: jschulman-AT-juno.com (Jason A Schulman)
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 1997 10:33:59 EST


On Fri, 10 Jan 1997 Rob Schaap writes:
> Pardon my ignorance, but who's Hal Draper and where's 
>the best place to start reading him? 

Hal Draper was a originally a Trotskyist in the 1930s.  He followed the
Trotskyists out of the Socialist Party of America into the Socialist
Workers Party.  However, where the majority of the Trotskyists considered
the USSR a "degenerated workers' state" worthy of unconditional defense,
Draper and a minority tendency saw this view as increasingly
unsupportable after the Hitler-Stalin pact and the invasion of Poland and
Finland.  Seeing a new "bureaucratic collectivist" ruling class as having
emerged in the USSR, Draper and co. left the SWP and formed the Workers
Party.  The WP proceeded to become the sole socialist opposition tendency
in the US working-class movement for the whole period of World War Two. 

 By the late 1940s, the hoped-for post-war World Revolution not having
occured, the WP reoriented itself.  It realized that it was not a "party"
except in name, that it was a propaganda group at best, and it renamed
itself the Independent Socialist League.

In the late 1950s, Max Shachtman and the majority of the ISL merged into
the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, and proceeded to drift
increasingly rightward, leaving "Third Camp" politics behind and
supporting the US invasion of Cuba and the Viet Nam War.  Draper and a
few others, however, remained true to their Marxist roots, and left
Shachtman and co. behind.  Draper helped found the Independent Socialist
Clubs which appeared on a few college campuses, and played a prominent
role in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. The IS Clubs
became the International Socialists, and were initially connected with
the group of the same name in the UK (which later called itself the SWP).
 The IS proceeded to play a crucial role in the formation of Teamsters
for a Democratic Union, and merged with other small groups in 1986 to
form Solidarity. 

Draper left the IS in 1971 and proceeded to write a brilliant four-volume
work entitled *Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution*, published by Monthly
Review.  His work remains a great testament ro revolutionary democratic
Marxism, and exerts a great influence on journals such as *Against the
Current*, *New Politics* and *Workers' Liberty.*

-- Jason
______
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They
get run over."
Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), British Labour politician. Quoted in: Observer
(London, 9 Dec. 1935).






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