The example of Max Shachtman and the Workers Party (WP) is an instructive example of how committed revolutionaries can be coopted by the Democratic Party.
The Workers’ Party, founded in 1940 as a split away from the Socialist Workers’ Party, evolved from an organization strictly opposed to the Democratic Party into one, by the 1950s, that backed Democrats. When the ISL finally entered the Socialist Party (SP), Max Schachtman helped to refine the realignment strategy that was eventually adopted by Michael Harrington and the (Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) in the 1980s.
The process happened incrementally. In the 1940s, the WP helped organize against the World War Two ban on wartime strikes against the leadership factions inside the UAW of Walter Reuther on one side and George Addes on the other, and took a principled stand against the Democratic Party, calling instead for a Labor Party.Insert Footnote After the war, Shachtman proposed that the WP support UAW leader Walter Reuther, based in part on the argument that Reuther supported a labor party.
As Eric Chester writes in his book Socialists and the Ballot Box:
The Workers’ party was convinced that Reuther was about to break from the Democratic Party in order to launch a major third-party effort… In March 1948, the UAW executive board reinforced these hopes by approving a resolution stating that the union “adopts as its official objective the formation after the 1948 election of a genuine progressive political party.” Although the WP focused on this part of the resolution, it tended to ignore the union’s activities during the next months of the 1948 campaign. United Auto Workers funds were funneled to liberal Democrats running for Congress, and in September the union reluctantly endorsed Truman. Even at the March 1948 executive board meeting, Reuther made it clear that the resolution advocating a new third party was a political guideline and not a call for immediate action.1
Despite these clear signs of the UAW’s hierarchy’s reluctance to definitively break with the Democratic Party, the Workers Party was convinced that the union was committed to the formation of an independent party once the elections were over. According to Chester, the WP/ISL “had taken at face value Reuther’s vague statements on the need for a labor party.”2 Along with this there developed an almost completely uncritical support of Reuther’s leadership in the UAW as the years went on.
By 1949, Shachtman was arguing that the party should support union-picked candidates running inside the Democratic Party, on the grounds that the presence of these candidates would “deepen and sharpen the conflict of interests between the bureaucracy of the official capitalist parties and the labor leadership… contributing to a separation between them.”3 This has parallels with the spurious argument made by some on the left today that backing Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others inside the Democratic Party will provoke a crisis and split inside the Democrats and prepare the way for a new independent party.
When Willoughby Abner, a Black activist and UAW staff representative ran for the Illinois State Senate, Shachtman argued that the ISL (The WP changed its name to the Independent Socialist League in 1949) should back him on the grounds that his campaign “represents, not in form but in essence…. labor’s self-reliance in the political field.”4 In 1954, the ISL changed its position on elections to allow for supporting labor candidates running as Democrats.
At this point, Shachtman still presented these shifts as remaining within a framework of supporting independent politics—in the future. Echoing Reuther, he wrote in 1958, as the ISL was waiting to merge with the Socialist Party, that the SP should “take the position that any local or state socialist body which wants to do so should be permitted to help labor and liberals in these [Democratic Party] primaries. In time, it is my belief, labor and liberals will see that their only road is independent politics.”5
Chester notes that this “belief” was soon dropped:
Once having entered the Socialist Party, Shachtman and his supporters quickly and totally adopted the perspective of working within the Democratic Party. Soon those who had been in the ISL were the SP’s most fervent backers of the Kennedy-Johnson administration. As ideologues trained in the Trotskyist tradition, the task of fully refining and articulating the politics of realignment fell on the shoulders of these former revolutionary socialists.6
1 Eric Chester, Socialists and the Ballot Box: A Historical Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1985), 116.
2 Ibid, 123.
3 Ibid., 119.
4 Ibid., 120.
5 Ibid., 125.
6 Ibid., 127.
Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.
