George Breitman

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George Breitman (1916 - 1986) was an American communist.

Breitman was born in a working-class neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, Breitman found work in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and later in the Works Progress Administration. By 1935, he had joined the Trotskyist movement as a member of the Spartacus Youth League, and then as a member of the Workers Party of America. He also became a leading activist and officer in the New Jersey Workers Alliance, an organization of the unemployed.

Breitman was a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. In 1941 he assumed editorship of the SWP's weekly paper, The Militant. Drafted and sent to France in 1943, he was able to establish contact with a number of European Trotskyists and to help in the rebuilding of the war-battered Fourth International.

After his return to the United States, he was again editor of The Militant in the late 1940s and early 1950s. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Breitman worked as a proofreader and was a member of the International Typographical Union. In this period he was also the leader of the Detroit branch of the SWP. With his wife Dorothea, and Frank and Sarah Lovell, he initiated the Friday Night Socialist Forum (later called the Militant Workers' Forum), a weekly series that attracted a broad range of activists from the labor, left, student and African-American movements.

Through this period, Breitman used several pseudonyms, including Albert Parker, Philip Blake, Anthony Massini, John F. Petrone, and Chester Hofla. Returning to New York in the late 1960s, Breitman assumed responsibility for the SWP's Pathfinder Press and was best-known for editing the 14-volume Writings of Leon Trotsky 1929-1940 (1969-1979), for his work on various collections of the writings of James P. Cannon, and for his pioneering work on Malcolm X, including his Malcolm X Speaks (1965). In the course of these activities Breitman corresponded with leading scholars and added to his already substantial collection of Trotskyist documentation.

In the late 1970s Breitman opposed the growing trend among the SWP leadership toward what he viewed as a politics focused on the Castroist leadership of the Cuban Communist Party. Among the hundreds expelled from the SWP in the early 1980s, he played a leading role (despite an accumulation of serious illnesses) in establishing the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, which sought to unify U.S. supporters of the Fourth International. Breitman died of a heart attack in 1986.