Hal Draper

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Hal Draper (1914-1990) was a Third Camp American socialist activist, Marxist and author, perhaps best known for his role in the Berkeley, California Free Speech Movement. His "Third Camp" focus differed from that of Max Shachtman in its emphasis on the "grass roots" as the "third" alternative to capitalism and bureaucracy domination. According to Draper's analysis, the grass roots represented the potential for "socialism from below" in opposition to capitalism and socialist bureaucracy, which represented the domination from above.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Writings 3 Footnotes 4 External links

[edit] Biography

Hal Draper's first appearance on the political radar was as an active member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) during the depression, then the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America. Draper was an important leader of the Trotskyist "Appeal Tendency" in the YPSL during 1936 and 1937 and was elected the organization's National Secretary at its September 1937 9th Convention, which renounced the social democratic Second International in favor of a new Trotskyist Fourth International.^[1] The great majority of the YPSL supported this position and either left or was expelled by the Socialist Party in the fall of that year. Along with his YPSL activity, Draper took part in the founding of the Socialist Workers Party at the end of December 1937.

Draper was an adherent of a faction within the SWP which objected to the internal regime of that party and was developing an analysis of the USSR as a new form of society, neither socialist nor capitalist, in which a new class, the state bureaucracy, held social and state power. In 1940 this faction, led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Martin Abern, split from the SWP to form the Workers Party.

By 1948 the Workers Party believed that the prospects for revolution were receding and that it must transform itself into a propaganda group. Therefore it became the Independent Socialist League and Hal Draper continued as one of its leading writers and functionaries. Based in his native New York, Draper would often write and edit almost the entire contents of issues of the group's paper.

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. Although Draper personally opposed this decision, he submitted to the majority for lack of an alternative orientation.

In 1962, after an ultimatum from Joel Geier (later a leader of the International Socialists), Draper — now resident in Berkeley, California — formed the Independent Socialist Club (ISC) outside the Socialist Party. In 1964 Draper was heavily involved in the Free Speech Movement, an important precursor of that decade's New Left, on the University of California, Berkeley campus. During this time, he was employed by the University as a microfilm acquisitions librarian[1].

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In 1968 ISC became the International Socialists as it expanded nationally but in 1971 Draper quit arguing that the group had become a sect.^[2] From then onwards he worked as an independent radical scholar, producing a stream of scholarly works on Marxism and the workers' movement.

Hal Draper's brother, Theodore, was a historian of the American Communist movement, the author of an exhaustive two-volume history in the late 1950s. Unlike Hal, Theodore Draper had been active in the Stalinist youth movement in the 1930s before breaking with the Communist Party and abandoning Marxism to become a liberal anti-Communist.

Hal Draper's sister, Dorothy (Dora) Draper married Jacob Rabkin (1905-2003), one of the intellectual founders of US tax law.

[edit] Writings

Draper's most enduring legacy is likely to be his five volume magnum opus, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, a seminal re-evaluation of the whole of Marx's political theory, based on an exhaustive survey of the writings of both Marx and Engels. He saw their political perspective as summarized by the phrase "socialism from below," which he had introduced in his pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism.

Draper was also the editor of a three volume Marx-Engels Cyclopedia, a reference work detailing the day-to-day activities and writings of the two founders of modern socialism.

In the Introduction to Draper's Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (1965),^[3] Mario Savio acknowledges his encouragement and friendship, and cites the influence of his earlier pamphlet The Mind of Clark Kerr (October 1964) on the development of the Free Speech Movement.^[4]

Outside his overtly political writings, Draper's most outstanding work is arguably the short story Ms Fnd in a Lbry, a satire of the information age, written in 1961.

In 1982, Draper also published an English translation of the complete works of the 19th Century German poet Heinrich Heine, the fruit of three decades of work conducted alongside his better-known political activity.

Hal Draper died of pneumonia on January 26, 1990 at his home in Berkeley, California.^[5]

During his life, Hal Draper was a member of the following organizations:

• Young People's Socialist League
• Socialist Workers Party
• Independent Socialist League
• Socialist Party of America
• Berkeley Free Speech Movement
• Independent Socialist Club

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

• Center for Socialist History
• The Two Souls of Socialism
• Hal Draper Internet Archive