The secretariat was composed of those committee members who happened to be in the city, most of whom were co-thinkers of Shachtman.

" With a shrinking membership ( although its youth work was buoyant ) the ISL leadership around Shachtman decided that the time had come to join forces with the Socialist Party of America and in 1958 fused into it.

In December 1937 an agenda was published by the Convention Organizing Committee, naming Cannon as the primary reporter on the Trade Union question, Shachtman on the Russian Resolution, Goldman on the Spanish Resolution, Canadian Maurice Spector on the International Resolution, Burnham on the Declaration of Principles of the new organization, and Abern on Party Organization and Constitution.

However, the theory of " bureaucratic collectivism ," the idea that the USSR was ruled by a new bureaucratic class and was not capitalist, did not originate with Shachtman, but seems to have originated within the Trotskyist movement with Yvan Craipeau, a member of the French Section of the Fourth International, and Bruno Rizzi.

Although Shachtman groups resignation from the SWP was not only over the defence of the Soviet Union, rather than the class nature of the state itself, that was a major point in the internal polemics of the time.

Max Shachtman (; September 10, 1904 – November 4, 1972 ) was an American Marxist theorist.

Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the Communist youth organization and edit the Young Worker.

As Tim Wohlforth notes, Shachtman was already noted as a talented journalist and intellectual: The Militant listed Shachtman as its managing editor.

During this time, Cannon experienced a spell of depression, during which the CLA's organizing secretary was Abern while Shachtman worked on The Militant.

In 1933, in an internal party document entitled " Communism and the Negro Question ", Shachtman dissented from Trotsky's view that black self-determination was a transitional demand for recruiting black workers in the United States to a socialist program, a position that was later more fully developed by CLR James.

Important to the strike's victory was the strike daily The Organizer ; although Farrell Dobbs was listed on its masthead as the editor, Shachtman wrote much of it and organized its production.

When the development of the WP was cut short by the rapid growth of the Socialist Party, George Breitman recalls that Shachtman and Cannon successfully proposed that the U. S. Workers Party, should dissolve, so that its members could recruit to Trotskyism from inside the Socialist Party.

At the SWP's founding congress, Burnham proposed that the USSR was no longer a degenerated workers ' state: Shachtman spoke for the majority view that it remained a workers ' state, and considered it important enough to hold a vote by roll call on the resolution.

While Cannon and his allies regarded the Soviet Union as a " degenerated workers ' state ", Shachtman and his party argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was following an imperialist policy in Eastern Europe.

Several prominent members adhered to the " bureaucratic collectivist " position associated with Max Shachtman, but by the late 1970s, the majority position in the group was clearly " state capitalist ", outlined most clearly in Abbie Bakan's pamphlet, The Great Lie.

However Cliff himself was insistent that his ideas owed nothing to those of Max Shachtman, or earlier proponents of the theory such as Bruno Rizzi, and made this clear in his Bureaucratic Collectivism-A Critique.

He was an ally of Max Shachtman against Cannon in the factional fighting of this period.

Social democrats influenced by Shachtman rejected calls for an immediate cease-fire and the immediate withdrawal of U. S. forces from Vietnam, but rather opposed bombings in Vietnam and supported a negotiated peace that would allow labor unions and government-opposition to survive.

Shachtman became a focal point for many in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals.

Trotsky and others criticized Shachtman for failing to convene the resident IEC or using its authority to reduce the tensions developing in the SWP.

Shachtman developed close and enduring ties to African-American pacifist and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and thought up the name for the 1966 Freedom Budget that Rustin developed as director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

During this time, Shachtman started the research for a major book on the Communist International.

Back in America, Cannon and his close associates in the ILD such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, dubbed the " three generals without an army ," began to organize support for Trotsky's theses.

The Communist League of America ( Opposition ) was founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern late in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism.

* Max Shachtman The Struggle for the New Course New York: New International Pub.

His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U. S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of Revolutionary integrationism, as Davis, like Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as French anarchist Daniel Guérin, argued that the struggle of blacks in the U. S. was for equality, that this struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U. S. bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist revolution in the U. S.

Shachtman and his co-thinkers argued for the establishment of a broad " third camp " to unite the workers and colonial peoples of the world in revolutionary struggle against the imperialism of the German-Soviet-Italian and Anglo-American-French blocs.

Shachtman concluded that the USSR's policy was one of imperialism and that the best result for the international working class would be the defeat of the USSR in the course of its military incursions.

Shachtman gave the report on the political situation at the SWP's 1938 convention.

After the April 1940 convention of the SWP, when Shachtman and his supporters on the new Political Committee refused to a vote on a motion pledging each member to abide by the convention decisions, they were expelled from the party.

The April 1940 convention of the SWP instructed the National Committee of the party to take disciplinary action against Abern, Shachtman, James Burnham, and their factional supporters if that group failed to abide by the decisions of the convention.

Shachtman helped pressure the SP to work with the Democratic Party in order to push the Democrats to the left.

The minority faction, led by Shachtman, held that the USSR should not be supported in its war with Finland.

The minority faction led by Shachtman eventually split away almost 40 % of the party's membership as well as its youth organization, the Young People's Socialist League, forming the Workers Party.

A division of labor developed within the CLA in which Cannon led the organization while Shachtman directed its literature and international relations.

Inside the SWP, Shachtman and James Burnham argued in response that the SWP should drop its traditional position of unconditional defense of the USSR in war.

In accordance with these instructions, the National Committee suspended Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern at its meeting of April 22, 1940, giving the members of this so-called " petty-bourgeois opposition " an opportunity to recant and return to the party.

The Militant, edited by James P. Cannon, Martin, Abern, and Max Shachtman, was the official organ of the Communist League of America throughout its six years of existence.

Julius Jacobson ( 1922-March 8, 2003 ) was an American socialist writer and editor who edited Anvil, New International, and New Politics, all publications in the Third Camp tradition of socialism, a democratic Marxist tradition sometimes called " Shachtmanite " after its significant theorist, Max Shachtman.

An early ally of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, he followed them out of the Socialist Workers Party and with them was one of the founding members of the Workers Party, later known as the Independent Socialist League, eventually becoming editor of its journal New International.