Joseph Carter

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For others with similar names, see Joseph Carter (disambiguation).

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Joseph Carter (1910-1970) was the pseudonym of Joseph Friedman, a founding member of the American Trotskyist movement.

Friedman joined the youth section of the US Socialist Party in 1924, and that of the Communist Party in 1928. He was a founding member of the Communist League of America in 1929, and then the Workers Party in 1936, which became the Socialist Workers Party (US) in 1938. At the SWP's founding congress he was elected to the national committee and was appointed its national education director. He unsuccessfully proposed to that conference that the Soviet Union was no longer a degenerated workers' state. Indeed, he would go on to become a major theorist of bureaucratic collectivism as an explanation of the economic system of the Soviet Union.

In collaboration with James Burnham and Max Shachtman he built a tendency in the SWP which split in 1940; Carter followed the half of that current which regrouped to form the Workers Party (US) and later the Independent Socialist League. In 1943, he penned an important critique of the views of the famous socialist, C.L.R. James, referring to James by his party name, Johnson, entitled "Johnson's Mystification of Marxism: Or a Case of Unproductive Self-Expansion." In 1948, the Independent Socialist League adopted an analysis of the USSR and the global political situation based on Carter's unique contribution to the theory of bureaucratic collectivism. He left the Shachtmanite movement in the early 1950s.