Max Shachtman correspondence with Leon Trotsky

Max Shachtman was born in Warsaw on September 10, 1904 and emigrated to the United States with his family in early childhood. At a quite young age Shachtman was attracted to communism and became a prominent American Marxist and labor activist. He was the author and editor of many books, including Sacco and Vanzetti (1927), Ten Years: The History and Principles of the Left Opposition (1933), and Behind the Moscow Trials (1936). He also co-translated some works by Leon Trotsky and was general editor of the latter's Selected Works (1936). Shachtman's activities dropped off after 1940. He died in 1972.

Along with James P. Cannon and Martin Abern, Max Shachtman split from the Communist Party in late 1928 to found the Communist League of America (Left Opposition), a pro-Trotsky group opposed to the dominant, Stalinist orientation of the Third International. Shachtman, Cannon and Abern immediately founded the newspaper The Militant. After Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR in January 1929, this core group of American Trotskyites entered into direct correspondence with him in an attempt to coordinate the international struggle against Stalinism, which they understood as a bourgeois-nationalist distortion of the internationalist communism of Lenin.

The American Trotskyite movement gained momentum throughout the 1930s through participation in labor disputes and the increasingly unattractive behavior of Stalin. Trotsky's move to Mexico in 1936, after spending 1933-1936 in France and Oslo, Norway, was a powerful stimulus for his American followers. In 1933, they founded the journal The New International. In the late 1930s it engaged in a short-lived merger with the Socialist Party, an experience that left it with the new name of Socialist Workers Party. It was allied with the Trotskyite Fourth International, convened at Paris in 1938. By 1940, Shachtman, along with James Burnham, had soured on the USSR to such a degree that they left the Socialist Workers Party in order to move towards non-Marxist socialism. It was at this point that Trotskyism was struck with the murder of its leader, Leon Trotsky, in his Mexican exile, on August 20 1940.