Martin Glaberman: 1918-2001

I didn't know Marty well, but when I heard of his death on December 17, 2001, I felt I had lost an old friend. Marty was active in the workers' movement for almost 70 years, as a writer, agitator, activist and teacher. His death is a tremendous loss to those who knew him.

Marty Glaberman joined the Socialist Party youth group in 1932 when he was 13-years old. Although he came from a social-democratic family, he said he joined the SP because it was the only organization in his area. Asked why he joined at 13, he replied they would not take him any younger.

While in the Socialist Party, Marty met the American Trotskyists, who in 1933 had dissolved their public organization and entered the party. When they left in 1937 to form their own organization, the Socialist Workers Party, Marty went with them.

The following year Marty happened to see CLR James speak in New York. James, a brilliant speaker and writer, had come to the U.S. on a speaking tour and had been persuaded to stay. Marty described seeing James as a “remarkable experience...he left a first impression on me that I never forgot.”

When a faction fight broke out in the SWP in 1939 over the question of the nature of the Soviet Union, Marty, along with James supported the minority position. In 1940, the party split and 40 percent of the adult party and a majority of the youth split away to form the Workers Party. James and Marty were among those who left to form the Workers Party under the leadership of Max Shachtman.

In 1941 James and Raya Dunayevskaya, a former secretary of Trotsky who differed with Shachtman, formed a minority tendency in the WP, which became known as the Johnson-Forest tendency after the pseudonyms of its leaders James (Johnson) and Dunayevskaya (Forest). Grace Boggs was the third leader of the group.

The Johnson-Forest tendency left the WP to return to the SWP in 1946, but prior to formally joining they published the first English translations of some of Marx's early writings, a pamphlet on the American worker, works on state capitalism, and a remarkable study of Hegel. During this time they began the process that would reject the hallmark of Leninism, the vanguard party.

The Johnson-Forest tendency left the SWP in 1952 and became an independent organization with their own newspaper, Correspondence. One of the remarkable things about Correspondence was the method called by Dunayev- skaya “the full fountain pen.” The members of the group actively sought to hear from workers and wrote down their words.

Although he was a writer and an editor of Correspondence, Marty also spent 20 years in the automobile industry and the fruits of this can be seen in such pamphlets as Punching Out and Be His Wages High or Low. In the 1990s Bewick Editions published a collection of Marty's poems about life on the shop floor under the title The Factory Songs of Mr. Toad.

Organizing a radical group at the height of the McCarthy period was not an easy task. Just prior to the launching of the paper James had been deported. In 1955, the group split, with Dunayevskaya taking a majority to form News & Letters. A second split in the early 1960s further reduced the group.

While the themes of workers self-organization had an influence in the 1960s when libertarian socialism seemed more in accord with the times than the stodgy old left, it did little to help the fortunes of the group, now renamed Facing Reality. Marty taught a class on Marx's Capital to future members of DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, but he admitted this didn't translate into recruits, funds, or even articles for their newsletter. At Marty's insistence Facing Reality dissolved in 1970.

After Facing Reality wound down, but years before CLR James was “discovered” by the academy, Marty established Bewick Editions to keep James's work in print. Marty also taught at Wayne State University, wrote several books including Wartime Strikes and Working for Wages, and contributed a steady stream of letters and reviews to a number of radical journals across North America.

In his 1980 book Wartime Strikes, Marty discussed the struggle against the no-strike pact in the United Auto Workers during WWII. In the UAW, along with other unions there was pressure to sign a no-strike pact. At the 1944 convention resolutions in support of and in opposition to the no-strike pact were defeated. A compromise resolution, however, which called for a postal ballot was accepted. Less that half of the ballots were returned, but,, of those who bothered to vote, a majority re-affirmed the no-strike position. Coincidently, at the same time as this vote was taking place a majority of UAW members engaged in wildcat strikes. When asked about this Marty answered: “That was the whole point to Wartime Strikes. The idea that in the UAW in World War II, a majority voted to sustain the no-strike pledge and, while that vote was taking place, a majority of auto- workers went on strike. So what the hell do they believe: A no-strike pledge or that they had the right to go on strike? It's contradictory. They believed you should have a no-strike pledge, but when the foreman looked at them that way, they walked off the job.”