Preface
Phyllis Jacobson (1922–2010) and Julius Jacobson (1922–2003) were radicalized during the Depression and remained politically engaged for the remainder of their lives. They belonged to one of the most progressive generations in US history but maintained a decidedly non-conformist perspective on the landmark events of their era, from the New Deal and World War Two to the protest movements of the 1960s and the post-9/11 War on Terror.
Today, the Jacobsons are most often remembered for founding and editing the independent socialist journal New Politics and for defending a third camp perspective that was equally hostile toward Western capitalism and Soviet Communism, as well as political authoritarianism in general. They favored an unvarnished prose style that was hard-hitting and morally charged yet grounded in logic and a close reading of history. Some readers may have reservations about the merits of the Jacobsons’ third camp, democratic-revolutionary position. Their views have never commanded majoritarian support on the US left. But there is no denying the clarity and seriousness of their writerly voices.
Phyllis and Julius met and fell in love as young Trotskyists. By their late teens, they had abandoned ideological orthodoxy in favor of the heterodox neo-Trotskyism associated with Max Shachtman (1904–72) and the fledgling Workers Party, which was the product of a bitter faction fight within the Socialist Workers Party in 1939–40. They remained allied with Shachtman throughout the 1940s and 1950s but broke with their one-time mentor once he commenced his rightward march.1 They then set aside party building in favor of building a multivocal magazine in which their own views would be vigorously represented. Rather than forming an airtight “political center,” they embraced a model of socialist pluralism that was grounded in anti-war, democratic, and socialist-humanist principles.2 Their resources were modest, and they never enjoyed the type of institutional support that foundation officers and university faculty take for granted. Nevertheless, along with Hal Draper, Samuel Farber, Joel Geier, Thomas Harrison, Joanne Landy, and others, the Jacobsons played a crucial role in defending a left-Shachtmanism that draws on the perspectives that Shachtman himself helped formulate in the mid-century period.
Third Camp Socialism brings together Phyllis and Julius Jacobson’s most significant essays on topics ranging from labor, feminism, and civil rights, to Stalinism, intellectuals, and student politics. The earliest pieces were first published in the late 1940s, while the most recent appeared in the early 2000s. Most of these essays have never been reprinted and are long out of print. The volume also includes an extended version of an interview that first appeared in the Canadian journal Left History in 2014.3 Taken as a whole, the collection makes the case for revisiting and revaluing the Jacobsons’ contributions to the development of independent socialism during the second half of the twentieth century.
1 Biographical Overview
Phyllis Jacobson (née Garden) grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, while Julius – Julie to his friends – hailed from the Bronx. Their parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants from working-class backgrounds. Phyllis’s father worked as a waiter at a kosher dairy restaurant in lower Manhattan, while Julius’s father was an intermittently employed stevedore and teamster. They attended public schools and recalled their childhoods with fondness, although money was tight. And they were members of an ethnic and generational cohort that was decisively shaped by radical ideas and causes. As Alan Wald has observed, in the context of mapping the political trajectory of their near-contemporary, the poet Delmore Schwartz (1913–66):
To paraphrase Tennyson, in the spring of Revolution a young person’s fancy turns to Bolshevism. That’s certainly the way it was for Delmore, and many of the best and the brightest of his generation in the early 1930s. Capitalism was in crisis, memories of the international slaughter of World War I were only a decade in the past, and the Soviet Union was still the youthful experiment of idealists that deserved the benefit of the doubt.4
While their extended families were social democratic or pro-Soviet in outlook, Phyllis and Julius gravitated toward Leon Trotsky’s brand of revolutionary socialism. This opened a rift between Julius and his family that never fully healed. Prodded by his older brother Leon, Julius was initially attracted to the Communists and joined the party’s pre-teen youth group, the Young Pioneers, at the age of nine or 10. By the time he started ninth grade, Julius had jettisoned the Communists for the Socialist Party’s Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which provided a fertile recruiting ground for the Trotskyist organizers who launched the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1938.5 It was a heady time for the anti-Stalinist left, if not without certain perils. “These were the waning days of the unified American Trotskyist movement,” Barry Finger notes, “days in which Trotskyist meetings were violently disrupted by Stalinists; a few short years that formed an epoch in which capitalism seemed so rotted out that world revolution, “permanent revolution,” by the oppressed masses seemed the only realistic hope for humanity.”6
Phyllis and Julius were part of the circle around Max Shachtman, who along with James P. Cannon was one of the leading lights of the SWP. Peter Drucker confirms that young socialists would be Shachtman’s most loyal constituency. One of them, Julius Jacobson, remembered, “When Max spoke at a “big meeting” at Irving Plaza or Webster Hall we were always there. It was not merely that we were entertained by his razor-sharp wit, his polemical skills, his sense of irony, his robust humor but primarily because we were clearly in the presence of an exceptional political intelligence.”7 As Julius told another historian, Maurice Isserman, Shachtman was “a young man’s person. It was part of his personality. He was a kibitzer; he was fun to be with; you could make jokes with him; he was bawdy; he’d hug you; he’d pinch your cheek.” Phyllis recalled that Shachtman’s orations “were always full of irony; they had a very mordant wit. He knew words; he knew how to fire your imagination; he was a great mimic.”8 A sizable minority left the Cannonite SWP with Shachtman in 1940 – the figure of 40 percent is commonly cited – and the overwhelming majority of the group’s younger supporters opted to join the fledgling Workers Party (WP).9
In the years preceding and following the 1940 split, Phyllis and Julius attended political events of one kind or another almost every night of the week. But they also had to look after themselves. After graduating high school, Julius worked at the SWP’s printshop while Phyllis worked part-time and attended Brooklyn College. In those days, Brooklyn College was a hotbed of political activity, much of which centered around the Communist Party and its periphery.10 As an undergraduate, Phyllis helped build a campus branch that would yield new recruits well into the 1950s. Yet for the duration of the war, Workers Party members were encouraged to find jobs in basic industries. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1942, Phyllis worked at an electronics factory. Later on, she read scripts and novels for a movie studio, worked for a couple of labor unions, and launched a one-person travel agency. In addition, in the late 1950s and early 1960s Phyllis served as the Manhattan organizer for the Socialist Party.
Julius was drafted into the Army around the time that Phyllis was entering her senior year at Brooklyn College. He took part in the liberation of Paris, and “narrowly escaped death” during the Battle of the Bulge when “a mortar shell pierced the boxcar he was traveling to the front in, killing half the GI s inside.”11 During his stint in Paris, Julius became “close to a group of Greek Trotskyists residing in the French capital, including Michalis Raptis,” or “Pablo,” who became a polarizing figure within the postwar Fourth International. Julius “told us of ‘liberating’ substantial amounts of food and supplies from the US Army and hauling it to the comrades who were suffering the effects of wartime shortages,”12 Farber writes. As a result of his wartime experiences, Julius would evince a strong measure of sympathy for the pacifist position and resent the claim that WWII was “the good war.”13 Following demobilization, he labored in the Workers Party’s print shop and took classes as a part-time student at Brooklyn College, City College, and Columbia University. He never graduated, however. His real focus was on meeting a new generation of anti-Stalinist radicals via anti-war groups and the campus journal Anvil (1949–60). Julius then shifted from campus organizing to editing the New International. It was also in this period that he opened a machine shop below 14th Street in partnership with his close friend Herman Benson.14 He worked in the shop until his retirement in 1982.15 Phyllis and Julius were married in 1946; their only child, Michael, was born in 1953.
Politically speaking, the Jacobsons’ adult lives can be divided into two main acts. The first centered around building the Workers Party (1940–49) and its successor, the Independent Socialist League, or ISL (1949–58). Shachtman and his followers endeavored to create a new type of socialist grouping, one that was not only pro-labor and anti-authoritarian, but also pro-civil liberties and internally democratic. Julius’s childhood friend Irving Howe later described the Workers Party as “by far the most interesting and troubled” of “all the left-wing groups I’ve known over the years.” The group’s “political style,” he said, “was, in truth, very different from that of the Trotskyists. We were less sure of ourselves. We were softer in tone and texture … We wanted to maintain some version of Marxism while recognizing that both the Europe and the America of the postwar years seldom matched the expectations of the Marxist mind.”16 Dissent, the liberal-left magazine that Howe and his cothinkers cofounded in 1954, was an obvious rival when the Jacobsons launched their own quarterly a few years later.
Phyllis and Julius started thinking about their second act when their relationship with Shachtman began to fray. As the sixties dawned, they set out to publish a journal that could help elevate the level of debate and discussion on the socialist left. While they were sympathetic to Howe’s premise that postwar realities posed a challenge to the orthodoxies of the early twentieth century, they rejected the assumption that this unfamiliar terrain required burrowing inside the Democratic Party or abandoning their youthful ideals. They regarded Marxism as a “discourse of emancipation” but admitted that “150 years after The Communist Manifesto there is not a single socialist country in the world” and added that “one cannot lightly dismiss the arguments of social movement theorists who fault Marxism for its failure to fully appreciate the unique problems related to ecology, race and gender.” The Jacobsons made room in their magazine for critics of Marxism as well as for thoughtful Marxist arguments. But their outward orientation and heterodox/anti-sectarian ethos precluded a primary focus on Marxism itself.
“What was needed,” Phyllis later explained, “was a publication in which our views could be expressed that could reach beyond the usual milieu. We knew, of course, that there was already a growing civil rights movement. You could see that something was developing, and we wanted to be part of it. We envisioned a Debsian kind of magazine. We were willing to work with social democrats and so forth.”17 The lead editorial in the inaugural issue announced that New Politics (NP) would provide “a forum permitting and encouraging the free play of discussion, controversy and counterposition of ideas … an opportunity for all socialist views from the left to right to confront not only the political reality but also each other and their critics.”18 Socialist pluralism was inscribed in the journal’s DNA.
The Jacobsons oversaw the production of some forty-five issues of NP’s first series (1961–78). Phyllis’s contributions initially went unacknowledged, however. Sam Farber attests that Phyllis was “an excellent editor with a sharp eye for academic and sectarian nonsense, throat clearing and other writing vices.”19 But as Barry Finger points out, “this diminutive powerhouse did not formally join the editorial board – and then not as the coeditor – until the summer 1968 issue.” Finger adds that “until that point, there were no women either on the editorial board or on its sponsors’ list.”20 Phyllis was “quite conscious of coming out of a milieu, the neo-Trotskyist movement, which was, as she said, ‘far from generous to its women.’ ” In a “very real sense,” Finger concludes, “it was the rising tide of the women’s movement that liberated Phyllis within the New Politics milieu.”21
After an interval of nearly a decade, the Jacobsons launched a second series in 1986 that currently appears two times a year. With the second series Phyllis’s cardinal role was formally recognized, with Phyllis and Julie listed as coeditors from the first issue onwards.22 They continued to edit the journal for as long as their health permitted. Tragically, Phyllis suffered a debilitating stroke in 2000, and passed away in 2010. Her husband died in 2003 after a short illness.
As this biographical summary suggests, Phyllis and Julius Jacobson enjoyed an exceptionally close and long-lived partnership. From the 1930s onwards, Phyllis and Julius “were a team,” in the words of their daughter-in-law, the feminist political theorist Lynn Chancer. “In some ways,” Chancer adds,
their lives were conventional in terms of gender roles: Phyllis did more of the cooking, taking care of the house, more of the raising of Michael (it was, after all, the 50s), more of the administrative work for their long-standing publication New Politics – and more of the typing, transcribing and editing all of Julie’s articles. In other ways, though, their love – for I will always think of Phyllis and Julie’s story as, at one level, a love story – transcended gender hierarchies and conventions. I saw this very clearly after Phyllis’s tragic stroke when Julie, as so many men of his generation would never have done, refused to leave her bedside, setting up a telephone and bringing his books so that he could be by her side.23
And as Barry Finger notes,
Intellectually, they were joined at the hip. They struggled together over every phrase, every nuance and tone of each other’s writings. Julie freely admitted – and without a hint of patronization – that Phyllis was a very real coauthor with him, his indispensable editor, and his critical eye. And one can easily see this in their writing styles, as close as two different individuals might conceivably be. It was Phyllis who handled the day-to-day work of the journal. She cajoled authors and financial contributors to meet deadlines. She had the unique tact to convince often thin-skinned writers to accept editorial suggestions, and, when rarely necessary – editorial fiats. She maintained and meticulously updated the vast rolodex of contacts, donors, and subscribers. She coordinated the layout, printing and distribution. And she, unlike Julie, was the real schmoozer, with a rollicking laugh so infectious that rare indeed were those who could resist joining her.24
It is no accident that the numerous obituaries that appeared after their deaths emphasized their personal virtues as well as their principled steadfastness.
2 Shachtmanism
Virtually everything that Phyllis and Julius ever wrote for publication appeared in the WP/ISL press or New Politics.25 They contributed to the movement in a hundred different ways – selling papers, recruiting members, organizing talks, and so on – but for Julie in particular the written word would become central to his political identity. While Shachtman remained the tendency’s most prominent figure, during the 1950s Julius played an increasingly significant role in calibrating its responses to the issues of the day. Other leading members included Hal Draper,26 Gordon Haskell,27 Ernest Rice McKinney,28 and, in the 1940s, Ernest Erber29 and Irving Howe.30 While a full-scale political history of Shachtmanism has yet to be written, a growing number of biographies, memoirs, novels, and interviews map this fructiferous corner of the Anglophone left.31
From the outset, the Shachtmanites adopted a distinctive approach to the challenge of forging a mass party. On the one hand, they retained the formal accoutrements of socialist organization, such as public meetings, an agitational newspaper, a theoretical journal, a national office based in New York City, and even the occasional electoral campaign.32 On the other, they permitted a wider range of debate, both internally and in the pages of its press, than rivals like the SWP. In addition, the Shachtmanites supported free speech and civil liberties, were open to modernism in the arts, and cultivated friendly relations with Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, C. Wright Mills, Norman Mailer, Meyer Schapiro, and other New York intellectuals. Although the WP/ISL sometimes spun its wheels, it never indulged in philistinism. But Shachtmanism’s most distinctive feature was its bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Soviet system and its embrace of the third camp, a term that the group sometimes capitalized to underscore its importance. These positions demarcated the WP/ISL from other tendencies and spoke to the group’s hallmark emphasis on the centrality of democratic norms and values to the post-capitalist project.
Socialists had long been divided over the Russia question. The command economy/one-party state that emerged from what Leon Trotsky described as the revolution’s “betrayal”33 posed hard questions for those who placed democracy at the heart of the socialist vision. Orthodox Trotskyists maintained that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state, which suggested that even a tyrannical post-revolutionary state merited critical support. For the Workers Party, the Stalinist regime had not only snuffed out any semblance of workers’ control but represented “a new type of class society.”34 While the Trotskyists called for a political revolution that could overthrow the bureaucracy but preserve the state apparatus, the Shachtmanites argued that a social revolution would be required if the working class and its allies were to (re)gain power. Unlike supporters of the orthodox position, they rejected the assumption that the Soviet Union should be defended against capitalist incursions and viewed the USSR as a totalitarian antithesis of democratic socialism. Indeed, in contrast with virtually every other tendency on the left, Shachtmanites sometimes described themselves as “anti-Communists,” a position that Phyllis and Julius both defend in this volume.35
The notion of a “third camp” is equally constitutive of the Shachtmanite tradition, and equally unorthodox. But what was it? If western capitalism constituted the first camp, and bureaucratic collectivism the second, then the third camp consisted of forces arrayed in opposition to the first two. In the pages of the New International, Hal Draper explained that with the consolidation of the Stalinist regime, and its expansion after the war, socialists “face two enemies: a capitalism which is anti-Stalinist and a Stalinism which is anti-capitalist.” In this “three-cornered struggle for power,” the alternative to the third camp “is support of capitalism (vide the reformists) or left-handed support of Stalinism … From that dichotomy there is no escape to freedom.” In other words, it was “no longer true” that “anti-capitalist struggle automatically equals socialist struggle.”36
Julius Jacobson offered a related perspective in a 1950 piece that originally appeared in Anvil and Student Partisan, and is reprinted in this volume:
By Third Camp the socialist refers to all those whose interests are actually allied with socialism: the American worker fighting for a decent wage, the colonial fighting foreign rule, the Russian worker and the Polish peasant made servile by a Slave State. The Third Camp is the camp of the dispossessed and exploited. We are on their side. And if they feel that they have common interests with either of the two war camps it is our responsibility to convince them otherwise. Perhaps we will not be successful. The socialist Third Camp is as yet only a potential force.37
The case for the unity of the dispossessed was canvassed in the pages of Labor Action, which was a remarkably handsome and well-edited newspaper for a group with such modest resources.38 Throughout the war, the Shachtmanites churned out tens of thousands of copies of Labor Action on a weekly basis.39 Some copies were sold at newsstands and public events, but most were handed out at factory gates. Harvey Swados later described these party-building tactics in his novel Standing Fast (1970), which memorably captures the group’s early optimism as well as its decline in the 1950s.40 The group’s theoretical journal, the New International, elaborated on the third camp paradigm but inevitably reached fewer readers than Labor Action.
Under the pen name of Julius Falk,41 Julius Jacobson became a regular contributor to both Labor Action and the New International, and several of his Labor Action pieces ended up as drafts of longer essays for the New International. (A list of his articles for the WP/ISL press can be found at the end of this volume.42) While Labor Action was launched shortly after the 1940 split, the New International had been founded in 1934 by Martin Abern and Max Shachtman and served as international Trotskyism’s theoretical journal during the second half of the Red Decade. The circle around Cannon were angered when the Shachtmanites absconded with this “monthly organ of revolutionary Marxism,” and its valuable mailing list, after the 1940 split.43 They soon launched a similar albeit less lively periodical under the title Fourth International.
Julius started contributing to the New International in the early 1950s and served as its managing editor during its final stretch, from 1952 to 1958. Although Shachtman remained editor-in-chief, most of the editorial chores fell on Julius’s shoulders. During this period, he penned substantive essays for the ISL’s theoretical journal on civil rights, McCarthyism, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the nature of Stalinism. He also solicited and edited pieces by Herman Benson, Tony Cliff, Hal Draper, Gertrude Ezorsky, Michael Harrington, and other future New Politics contributors. In addition, Julius oversaw the publication of groundbreaking essays on the permanent war economy and its impact on international relations by the economist T.N. Vance.44
Prior to devoting himself to the group’s theoretical journal, Julius had served as the point person for the party’s efforts to create a third camp-oriented youth organization. In the late 1940s his primary focus was on building ties to campus activists. “Over Shachtman’s objections,” Drucker says,
Jacobson decided to look to the campuses to find a new generation of young radicals. Though radical students were hard to find at first in the depths of McCarthyism, by the early 1950s his Socialist Youth League [SYL] had members in about a dozen cities and universities. It inspired such groups as the New York Student Federation Against War and the Politics Club at the University of Chicago. At the height of the Korean War, it organized campus demonstrations against US support for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.45
Chicago’s Politics Club, the Eugene V. Debs Club at Oberlin College, and similar initiatives “leavened the atmosphere of retreat and discouragement that had taken hold of Shachtman’s followers” and introduced a new generation to third camp politics.46 While some of these groups were affiliated with the SYL, others enjoyed an informal connection to the national organization. But everyone was welcome at the League’s summer camps, which featured educational meetings, folk songs, and outdoor activities.47 A member of the Politics Club said their group provided “an arena in which different conceptions [of socialism] could clash freely and openly.”48 This is a formulation that could have been lifted from New Politics’ founding editorial statement.
Strictly speaking, it was the New York Student Federation Against War, a grouping of student clubs, that sponsored Anvil (1949–60). But Julius, working at the behest of the ISL, was the prime instigator and served as the journal’s inaugural editor (1949–52). In this capacity, Julius helped craft one of the most interesting student publications of the mid-century period. Over a span of twenty issues, the magazine featured polemics, personal essays, humor pieces, film reviews, roundtables, and poetry. It sold better than expected and filled a gap in the available literature at a time when the so-called Silent Generation was receiving a college education. Bogdan Denitch remembers that “we sold more than 1,000 at City College alone in 1951, and it was a big item on the slowly growing student left in Berkeley, Chicago, Brooklyn and other centers of student activism against the Korean war.”49 An enthusiastic contributor to Labor Action boasted that Anvil had steered clear of the “pitfalls of its predecessors” and gave “its readers serious, intelligent tools to join the fight against the coming war. Its slogan could well be ‘No Mush – Weapons!’ ”50
As this eccentric formulation suggests, Anvil paid special attention to issues of war and peace in the nuclear age. The challenges posed by militarism, superpower rivalries, and atomic weaponry became Anvil’s defining preoccupation. Yet it was also the first English-language periodical to excerpt Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and every issue featured pieces that strayed beyond the normal confines of the left press. Contributors ranged from first-time authors to public intellectuals like Paul Goodman, Conrad Lynn, Arthur Miller, A.J. Muste, Harold Rosenberg, Dan Wakefield, and Richard Wright. Remarkably enough, the widowed Eleanor Roosevelt contributed to two of its symposia. In addition, the magazine published cartoons by Jesse (“Carlo”) Cohen and, for two issues, Jules Feiffer. Although it was aimed at a campus audience rather than a general readership, Anvil served as a trial run for the anti-sectarian policy of socialist pluralism that would become the hallmark of New Politics.
3 New Politics
From the outset, New Politics billed itself as an “independent journal of socialist thought.” The inaugural issue appeared in the fall of 1961. In an opening statement, the editors laid out their rationale for launching a new magazine: “Our journal is sponsored by socialists and radicals of widely differing opinions. Thus, heterogeneity of opinion in its pages will be sought after. However, the sole criterion of editorial selection will be neither conformity nor heterogeneity, but rather the ability of articles to stimulate thought and debate, or to contribute in some way to thinking out acute questions of politics and theory.”51 In its original incarnation and beyond, the journal paid special attention to issues of civil rights, organized labor, and democratic struggles across the globe.52 But the magazine also featured book and film reviews, and articles on cultural topics. In recent years feminist and ecological themes have been added to the mix.
The first issue reflected these general editorial principles. It included articles on US labor, the early Marx, Hannah Arendt, and the civil rights movement by Sidney Lens, Michael Harrington, Lionel Abel, and Tom Kahn respectively. A highlight was a four-way exchange over the nature of Castroism. The issue also featured a debate between Julius Jacobson and Joseph Clark on the prospects for change in the Soviet Union. Subsequent issues addressed such topics as race and organized labor, the movement against the Vietnam War, the Democrats and the left, Soviet bloc political dissent, and the emergence of the campus-based New Left. The journal also published two widely reprinted essays: “What is Alienation? The Career of a Concept” (1962), by Lewis Feuer, and “An Open Letter to the Party” (1966), by the dissident Polish leftists Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski.
Aside from Julius Jacobson, Hal Draper was the most valuable contributor to NP’s first series. He served on its editorial board from 1961–73 and penned several weighty essays for the journal, including “Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformists” (1961), “The Mind of Clark Kerr” (1964), “In Defense of the ‘New Radicals’ ” (1965), and “The Two Souls of Socialism” (1966).53 Other key contributors included Burton Hall, Kim Moody, and Stan Weir, who wrote on union politics; Herbert Hill, who contributed pieces on labor and race; August Meier, who focused on the civil rights movement; and David McReynolds, who made the case for socialist pacifism. Other prominent contributors included Noam Chomsky, Christopher Lasch, Norman Thomas, Harvey Swados, and William Appleman Williams.54 A number of women wrote for the first series, including Anne Draper, Gertrude Ezorsky, Phyllis Jacobson, Joanne Landy, Laurie Landy, Joan Mellor, and Lois Weiner, as well as future New Yorker staff writer Renata Adler, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served as the District of Columbia delegate to the US House of Representatives since 1991. But the first series predominantly featured male writers.
Some of the material that appeared in the first series was reprinted in edited collections that featured new introductions and that helped the journal attract new readers. Julius Jacobson edited two of these volumes – The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968) and Soviet Communism and the Socialist Vision (1973) – while labor lawyer Burton Hall (1931–91) edited the third, Autocracy and Insurgency in Organized Labor (1973). From a commercial standpoint The Negro and the American Labor Movement was the most successful of the three. A reviewer for Industrial and Labor Relations Review found that “Jacobson has done a laudable job in bringing together in one volume exceptionally readable and consistently high-quality essays” and casts “in-depth insight on the problems Negroes face in seeking equal status with whites in labor organizations and leaves the reader with an appreciation of the complexity of the Negroes’ dilemma in the job market either as a union member or non-member.”55
Despite these achievements, it was difficult to keep the magazine going during the so-called “me decade.” As Phyllis later explained, “We were affected by the fact that the anti-war movement fell apart. We realized our time was up in the late 1970s when we couldn’t get people to write. It was not a question of being hostile to the journal, but rather a lack of interest, reflecting the increasing apathy and demoralization afflicting the political left.”56 Barry Finger notes that by “the end of the 1970s, the Jacobsons had quite literally exhausted themselves. Putting out a quarterly journal on a shoestring and editing the journal as a two-person operation had occupied nearly every non-working minute of their lives.”57
During their decade-long hiatus, the Jacobsons coedited a standalone volume, Socialist Perspectives (1983), that served as a bridge between the two series. Its contributors as well as its core themes would have been familiar to subscribers to either series of New Politics – Pyotr Adovin-Egides, Jeri Pelikan, and Daniel Singer on Soviet bloc politics; Alan Wald on the New York Intellectuals; Lynn Chancer on intra-feminist debates; Melvyn Dubofsky on organized labor; Richard Lichtman on socialism and freedom; and Manning Marable on “Why Black Americans are Not Socialists.” In a brief introduction, the Jacobsons acknowledged that they “represent a connection with the socialist past. We grew up in the socialist movement of the late thirties and have remained committed socialists to this moment. Hopefully in the pages of this publication we can help forge a link between the past and the present.”58
Encouraged by the relative success of Socialist Perspectives and discerning a broader revival of interest in leftist discussion, Phyllis and Julius Jacobson relaunched NP as a biannual publication in 1986. The second series has survived longer than the first and has featured an even wider range of material. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Phyllis took a special interest in feminism, literary culture, and protest movements, while Julius wrote on war, intellectuals, and the malignant impact of Stalinism on the left. Other key contributors included Murray Bookchin, Lynn Chancer, Sam Farber, Thomas Harrison, Joanne Landy, Michael Löwy, Scott McLemee, Kim Moody, David Roediger, Saskia Sassen, Steve Shalom, Jane Slaughter, Stephen Steinberg, and Reginald Wilson. An exceptionally prolific contributor remains the historian Paul Buhle, who collaborated with Julius in the 1990s on a project on “the tragedy of American labor” that generated a monograph that appeared under Buhle’s name alone.59 In our view, the current revival of socialist debate underscores the sagacity of the Jacobsons’ second act project.
4 Organization of the Book
Third Camp Socialism is organized into five sections: Social Movements, Left Debates, The Russian Question, War and Peace, and Students and Teachers. Each section opens with a short introduction that locates the selections in their historical context. As the reader will find, there is a significant degree of overlap and cross-fertilization between these sections. In particular, the intrinsic connection between socialism and democracy, the problem of Stalinism, and the importance of independent political action are canvassed across all five sections. We have corrected minor errors but otherwise each piece is unabridged. The volume closes with an in-depth interview, a bibliography, and a list of selected writings by the Jacobsons.
We would like to extend our thanks to Doug Barnes, Jon Bloom, Paul Buhle, Peter Drucker, Sam Farber, Michael Jacobson, Marie Mounteer, Martin Oppenheimer, Amy Pryor, Alan Wald, and Lois Weiner. We are also grateful for the support provided by the editorial board of the Historical Materialism Book Series, particularly Sebastian Budgen. In developing this project, we were fortunate to work with an advisory board that helped us identify suitable pieces for inclusion and served as an expert sounding board. The members of the board are Lynn Chancer, Barry Finger, Thomas Harrison, Scott McLemee, and Daniel Randall. This project would never have come to fruition without their efforts and encouragement.
5 About the Editors
Paul Heideman holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. He is the editor of Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900–1930 (2018) and is a regular contributor to Jacobin.
Kent Worcester’s books include C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (1996), Silent Agitators: Cartoon Art from the Pages of New Politics (2016), and A Cultural History of the Punisher: Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance (2023).
See, inter alia, Julius Jacobson, “The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman” (1973), reprinted in this volume; Drucker 1994; and Weir 1973. The Marxists Internet Archive maintains links to articles, reviews, and pamphlets that Shachtman penned between 1927–67 at
The case for abandoning the Leninist model in favor of building a political center was advanced by Hal Draper in privately circulated documents in the early 1970s (see Draper 1971 & 1973). While the Jacobsons found Draper’s approach insufficiently anti-sectarian, the term arguably captures their efforts to use the journal as a springboard for publishing books, promoting third camp initiatives such as the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (1982–2017; see Worcester 2017), and sponsoring panels at successive Socialist Scholars Conferences and Left Forums.
Worcester 2014, pp. 39–60.
Wald 2021.
As part of the so-called “French Turn,” US Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party in 1936 and formed a faction around the newspaper Socialist Appeal. Their strongest base of support was in the YPSL, as indicated by the fact that the Trotskyists took a majority of Socialist Party’s youth membership when they were expelled en masse in 1937. At the time of its founding, the Socialist Workers Party was the world’s largest Trotskyist organization, with approximately one thousand members plus several hundred active supporters. See, inter alia, Callinicos 1990; Cannon 1943; Palmer 2007 and 2021; Trotsky 1942.
Finger 2003.
Drucker 1994, p. 83.
“From the 1930s to the 1960s,” Isserman adds, “Shachtman’s greatest asset was his ability to attract talented disciples.” Isserman 2000, p. 116.
The relevant documents can be found at
Brooklyn College hosts a website that features links to “radical” newspapers, magazines, and flyers that circulated on campus during the mid-century period. See “All We Ever Wanted Was a Better World”: Radical Politics at Brooklyn College, 1930–1958,
Finger 2003.
Farber 2003. The Marxist Internet Archive maintains an incomplete selection of Pablo’s articles and pamphlets. See
Barry Finger describes an episode that took place late in the war when “Julie witnessed a large contingent of white soldiers firing as if in sport on an encampment of black American soldiers. The officers in charge displayed no interest, more accurately found it amusing, that their racist troops were engaged in target practice against their own countrymen. This episode of military lynching flagrantly contradicted the Popular Front nonsense that the Second World War was a conscious fight against fascism.” Finger 2003.
Herman Benson founded the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) in 1969 and remained a leading advocate of democratic trade unionism until his passing. See Daniel Randell, “Herman Benson, 1915–2020: No Socialism Without Democracy,”
Sam Farber reports that Julius “brought in the UAW to organize the workers in his shop. He also became the employer of last resort for many movement comrades who were unemployed and financially hard-up. Years later, Julie became a manager when the Bell and Howell Corporation bought his business. He was forced into retirement when Bell and Howell closed the shop in the early eighties, ‘deindustrializing’ Julie and his workers.” Farber 2003.
Howe 1982, pp. 80 & 107.
See “Third Camp Politics: An Interview with Phyllis and Julius Jacobson,” elsewhere in this volume.
“Why We Publish,” New Politics 1.1 (first series) Fall 1961, p. 5.
Farber 2010.
The original editorial board consisted of Julius Jacobson, Robert Alexander, Sam Bottone, Hal Draper, Albert Freed, James Kenney, George Rawick, and Samuel Shapiro. When the first series ended, Julie, Alexander, and Bottone were still on the board, having been joined by Phyllis, Ian McMahan, David McReynolds, and James Petras. The journal’s sponsors in 1961 included James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Erich Fromm, Murray Kempton, Bayard Rustin, Meyer Schapiro, Harvey Swados, and Norman Thomas: a veritable who’s who of the mid-century democratic left.
Finger says that “Phyllis – with Julie’s active participation to be sure – worked hard to see that the lack of women’s voices was not duplicated when the journal was resurrected a decade later. She campaigned for a properly consistent policy of gender, racial and generational diversity in the solicitation of contributors and in the choice of subject matter. And she never ceased to register her disappointment when these standards were not met.” Finger 2010.
The other founding members of the second series’ editorial board were Stanley Aronowitz, Sam Bottone, Gertrude Ezorsky, Thomas Harrison, A.W. Jackson, Joanne Landy, Arthur Lipow, and Marvin Mandell. The initial list of founding sponsors included Noam Chomsky, Rep. Ronald Dellums, Barbara Ehrenreich, Herbert Hill, and Daniel Singer.
Chancer 2010.
Finger 2010.
The main exceptions – Julius’s essays on “The Relevance of American Socialism” (1961), “Union Conservatism: A Barrier to Negro Equality” (1968), and “Reflections on Fascism and Communism” (1983) – are reprinted in this volume.
Born Harold Dubinsky, Hal Draper (1914–90) joined the Young People’s Socialist League as a teenager in the mid-1930s and was elected YPSL’s National Secretary at its 1937 convention. He was a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party but left the SWP with Shachtman and others in 1940. He later became a leading participant in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Draper’s contributions to the WP/ISL press can be found at
Gordon Haskell (1917–2002) was a coeditor of Labor Action in the early 1950s and later served as DSA’s first organizational director. He was also the first president of the Association for Union Democracy. Haskell’s contributions to the WP/ISL press can be found at
Ernest Rice McKinney (1886–1984) worked alongside A. Philip Randolph to organize Pullman car porters and joined the Communist Party in 1920 before leaving in 1926 with James P. Cannon and other Trotskyists. In the 1930s he served as the Vice President of the National Unemployed League and in the 1940s was the WP’s National Secretary. McKinney’s contributions to the WP/ISL press can be found at
Ernest Erber (1913–2010) was the national chair of the Young People’s Socialist League in the 1930s and the managing editor of the New International in the mid-1940s. His contributions to the WP/ISL press can be found at
Irving Howe (1920–93), born Irving Horenstein, edited Labor Action in the early 1940s and remained personally friendly with the Jacobsons after he resigned from the ISL in the early 1950s. Their relationship deteriorated, however, when Julie’s name was left off Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party. In the book’s Preface, Howe and Coser write that their “first and largest debt is to Julius Jacobson, our endlessly patient and hard-working collaborator, who performed a large share of the research and submitted early drafts for several chapters. Despite his disagreement with a number of points in the book, Mr. Jacobson has worked with us in the closest and most loyal relationship, a coauthor in all but name.” Howe and Coser 1957, p. x. Howe and the Jacobsons would subsequently adopt dramatically different stances toward the New Left and the Vietnam War. Howe’s books include The UAW and Walter Reuther (1949), Politics and the Novel (1957), World of Our Fathers (1976), and Socialism and America (1985). Howe’s contributions to the WP/ISL press can be found at
See the Bibliography at the end of this volume.
Max Shachtman was the WP’s NYC mayoral candidate in 1941 and ran “in the Bronx 23rd Congressional District [in 1940] election as an anti-war candidate.” (See Fisk 1977, chapter three.) Shachtman also campaigned for the 15th Congressional District in 1946, calling for “the immediate nationalization of all food industries under workers’ control.” Max Shachtman, “Shachtman Radio Speech Calls for Meat Control,” Labor Action, September 28, 1946.
Trotsky 1937.
Haberkern and Lipow 1996, p. xii. A useful summary of these debates can be found in van der Linden 2009.
Advocates of the third camp perspective have not always agreed with the position taken by Shachtman, the Jacobsons, and others on this question. In a recent interview, Sam Farber recalls that Phyllis and Julius “were complete Stalinophobes. And they never tempered or modulated their approach. Sometimes it is better to hold back a little in terms of saying everything that you think. I remember a panel that the Jacobsons organized at the Socialist Scholars Conference. It was awful. Julie ranted about being an anti-Communist without considering the term’s connotations.” Worcester 2021, p. 126.
Hal Draper, “The Triangle of Forces: Notes on the Czech Coup” (1948), reprinted in Haberkern and Lipow 1996, p. 137.
Julius Jacobson, “War, Realism, and the “Lesser Evil” ” (1950), reprinted in this volume.
“The poorer we got the more we tried to do,” Albert Glotzer later remembered. “We had about as much right putting out an eight page paper as we did putting out fifty thousand papers. We pushed ourselves. We pushed the comrades.” Bloom and Buhle 1985, pp. 13.
Milt Fisk reports that “by 1943 the press run was up to 40,000.” Fisk 1977, chapter three.
Swados 1970. One of Swados’s characters describes the Buffalo branch’s approach to distributing the paper: “Most of our bundle order is distributed every week at the gates of two UAW plants and one steel mill … Most of our local subscriptions are obtained through house-to-house distribution, now up to seven hundred copies a week. Our usual concentration is a housing project, since a team can cover three to four hundred families in half an hour. After the project has been carefully mapped, each work is assigned to a specific area, with the responsibility for every family getting the paper every week for four weeks in a row” (p. 261). Swados’s novel offers a wealth of thinly fictionalized detail about the internal life of the WP/ISL, as does Eva Kollisch’s roman à clef Girl in Movement (2000).
Falk was Julius’s mother’s maiden name.
It is unclear whether Phyllis contributed to the WP/ISL press. Her nom de plume may have been “Phyllis Hoffman,” but we have been unable to verify this. “Phyllis Hoffman” published a piece on youth and leisure in 1941 (“Time on Our Hands: What Are We Able to Do with It?”) for the WP’s short-lived youth paper, The Challenge of Youth (July 15, 1941), and a book review for the New International (“A Moral Breakthrough,” New International 24.1, Winter 1958). Both are consistent with Phyllis’s prose for NP, and the use of pseudonyms was ubiquitous in those days. But at this point we cannot be certain and have not included the Hoffman pieces in the bibliography. It is also quite possible that Phyllis and/or Julius wrote unsigned pieces for Labor Action.
The complete run of the New International (1934–58) can be accessed at
T.N. Vance was the pen name for Edward Solomon (1913–99), who also wrote for the WP/ISL press under the name Walter Oakes. See van der Linden 2019.
Drucker 1994, pp. 249–50. Unlike Shachtman, Julius saw “organizational prospects … not in the high schools or among “proletarian youth” but on campus, where returning GI s benefited from unprecedented educational opportunities.” Finger 2003.
Maurice Isserman interviewed “Betty Denitch, a student at Antioch College,” who recalled that club members “wore jeans, long hair, sandals, berets. We believed in sex. We knew the Beat poets. We were interested in some other way of life, some other values, some other symbols besides those we had grown up with.” Isserman 1987, p. 60. By the time that Denitch had joined the Antioch Shachtmanites, the SYL had merged with the Socialist Party’s Young People’s Socialist League to form the Young Socialist League (YSL). The “union of the YPSL and SYL in 1954 produced an organization with a grand total of eighty-three members … Tiny as the YSL was, it represented a major asset to the Shachtmanites in the 1950s, and it is doubtful whether they would have survived without it.” Isserman 1987, p. 62. See also Dorrien 2021.
The SYL’s 1949 summer camp included “one or two courses in the basic theories of Marxism, a number of symposiums on important political questions, [and] several lectures and seminars dealing with more specific problems facing the socialist movement … There will also be some social activity each evening: one night a special show by the Chicago SYL theatrical group, another evening a campfire with weenie roast and folk songs, another evening a showing of Max Eastman’s film Czar to Lenin.”
Dan Morgan, “Youth and Student Corner,” Labor Action, July 11, 1949.
Denitch 2010.
Toni Kleven, “Student Federation Publishes Anvil, New Mag,” Labor Action, December 5, 1949.
New Politics 1.1 (first series) Fall 1961, p. 2.
The journal maintains a website at:
These essays are reprinted in Draper 1992. Other key works by Draper include Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (1965); The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”: From Marx to Lenin (1986); and Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (1977, 1978, 1986, 1990, 2005).
On more than one occasion, editorial sponsors tendered public resignations in protest against the appearance of pieces that were not to their liking. These resignations spoke to the deepening divide between the radical and social democratic lefts during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, Harry Fleischman and Harry W. Laidler resigned as sponsors in protest against the publication of Julie Jacobson’s “Coalitionism: From Protest to Politicking,” which is reprinted in this volume. A few years later, Lionel Abel, Meyer Schapiro, and Harvey Swados all resigned when the journal published a critical review of Irving Howe’s Essential Works of Socialism (1971), although only Abel made his resignation public.
Glenn A. Zipp, untitled review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 22.4 (July 1969), p. 628. In 1970, both the Associated Press and the New York Times switched from “Negro” to “black”; by the mid-1970s the former had become passé. See
“Third Camp Politics: An Interview with Phyllis and Julius Jacobson,” reprinted in this volume. In a presentation at the Oral History of the American Left Conference, held at New York University on May 6–7, 1983, Phyllis said that “It was the political frustration and apathy that dealt the final blow to New Politics. Never an academic publication, although many academics wrote for us, we depended on writers who were committed, often participants in the political struggles. The fact that they grew apathetic meant a loss of articles, financial support, and general interest, all of which are essential ingredients for the maintenance of a lively and meaningful publication. Had there been an organization to sustain us during the bad times, we would have no doubt continued publication and then would have found ourselves caught up in the political reawakening that occurred just a few years later and continues today.” See
Finger 2003.
Jacobson and Jacobson 1983, p. viii.
See Buhle 1999. As Buhle notes in the Preface, “This project began with an extended essay written by Julius Jacobson on George Meany. I proposed to write several chapters around this essay, toward a jointly authored book, and I continued my end of the work, thinking of the process as collaborative. At last, the volume had so expanded and changed so much that Jacobson, no longer feeling an equal partner, reluctantly bowed out. If the phrase, “with the assistance of” did not connote a research aide, he would at least be entitled to this claim on the jacket. Still, the spirit of his work and the anti-bureaucratic temperament of the journal he co-edits, New Politics, remain herein, and I am proud to say so. He has, of course, no responsibility for the views expressed (or the errors committed) by myself along the way, but the book could not have been done without him” (p. vii).