Hal Draper

Hal Draper (1914 -1990) was a socialist activist, Marxist, left-wing Shachtmanist, and author. Initially a member of the Youth Socialist League (Young Peoples Socialist League), he was led with that organization towards Trotskyism. Together with the YPSL he took part in the founding of the Socialist Workers' Party in 1938.

Biography

By 1940 he was part of a faction within the SWP which opposed the internal regime of that party and developed an analysis of the USSR in which he described it as a bureaucratic collectivist society, in which a new class, the bureaucracy of state, controlled social and state power. In 1940 this faction became the Workers' Party, led by Max Shachtman.

By 1948 the WP believed that the future for a revolution was stagnant, and that it should become a propagandist group. So the Independent Socialist League was formed, and Hal Draper continued as one of its leading writers and officials.

With a small number of members, though his youth work was thriving, the ISL leadership around Shachtman decided it was time to join forces with the Socialist Party of the United States of America and in 1958 they merged with them. This was a move that Draper opposed, though he went along with it largely due to a lack of alternative orientation.

In 1962, after receiving an ultimatum from Joel Geier, who would later become the leader of the Independent Socialists, Draper, who at the time was residing in Berkeley, California, formed the Independent Socialist Club (ISC) outside of SPUSA.. In 1964 Draper became actively involved in the movement for freedom of expression, an important precursor of the New Left (New Left), on the Berkeley campus.

In 1968 the ISC became the Independent Socialists and expanded nationally. But in 1971 Draper resigned from the IS because of his concern that the IS no longer put the working class at the center of its analysis. Since then he produced a stream of scholarly works on Marxism and the labor movement.

His greatest legacy would be his four-volume study Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (1977-1989). Although his main arguments are summarized in the pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism (The Two Souls of Socialism, 1964).

Membership of Organizations

Organizations of which he was a member:

• Socialist Workers Party (Socialist Workers Party).
• Independent Socialist League.
• Berkeley free speech movement (Movimiento para la libertad de expresión de Berkeley).
• Independent Socialist Club.

For those interested in politics, Draper's most important creation would be the short story Ms Fnd in a Lbry, a satire of the information age, written in 1961.