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 brother, Theodore Draper, is best known for his studies of the Communist Party of the United States of America and himself an activist in the socialist movement.
Draper was initially a member of the Young People's Socialist League, then the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America. He was won with that organization to Trotskyism. Along with the YPSL he took part in the founding of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.
By 1940 he was part 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 bureaucratic collectivist society in which a new class, the state bureaucracy, held social and state power. In 1940 they became the Workers Party led by Max Shachtman.
By 1948 the WP 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 groups 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. This was a development that Draper opposed although he went along with 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 SPA. 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.
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In 1968 ISC became the International Socialists as it expanded nationally. But in 1971 he quit the IS due to his concern that the group was no longer placing the working class at the center of its analysis. From then onwards he produced a stream of scholarly works on Marxism and the workers' movement.
His most enduring legacy is likely to be his five volume study Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, a seminal re-evaluation of Marx's whole political theory. Its main arguments are summarised in the pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism.
Organizations he was a member of:
- Young People's Socialist League
- Socialist Workers Party
- Independent Socialist League
- Socialist Party of America
- Berkeley Free Speech Movement
- Independent Socialist Club
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.
Draper also published an English translation (Surkampf/Insel, 1984) of the complete works of the German 19th c. poet Heinrich Heine, the fruit of three decades of work conducted alongside his better-known political activity.
Hal Draper's brother, Theodore Draper, was a historian of the American Communist movement. Unlike Hal, Theodore Draper had been a Stalinist in the 1930s before breaking with the Communist Party and abandoning Marxism to become a liberal anti-Communist.
