Martin Glaberman

Martin Glaberman (December 13, 1918 – December 17, 2001) was an influential American Marxist writer on labor, historian, academic, and autoworker.

Biography

Glaberman was associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a radical left group that split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which understood the Soviet Union as a state capitalist society rather than as a degenerated workers' state.

In 1950, the Johnson-Forest Tendency left the Trotskyist movement and became known as the Correspondence Publishing Committee. When this group suffered a major split in 1955 with a large number supporting Raya Dunayevskaya (or "Forest" of "Johnson-Forest") and forming a new group called the News and Letters Committees, Glaberman remained loyal to C.L.R. James ("Johnson") and the Correspondence group. James advised Correspondence from exile in Britain. It remains a matter of dispute whether the majority in 1955 supported James or Dunayevskaya. Glaberman has claimed in New Politics that the majority supported James but historian Kent Worcester claimed the opposite in an important biography of C.L.R. James.

In 1962, when Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, Lyman Paine, and Freddy Paine split from Correspondence Publishing Committee in a third worldist direction, Glaberman and a small number of other activists remained loyal to C.L.R. James, largely in Detroit and started a new group to continue James' legacy. He was a major figure in the new group, Facing Reality, until he proposed its dissolution in 1970, over the objections of C.L.R. James because Glaberman felt it was too tiny to operate effectively. He continued to write and publish widely until his death and established a now defunct publishing company, Bewick Editions to keep James' work in print. He was for many years, until his death, a sponsor of New Politics and served as an associate editor of Radical America, along with individuals such as Paul Buhle.

Glaberman has been described as a legendary figure in Detroit radical circles and he influenced activists that would play a major role in the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He was a professor and later professor emeritus at Wayne State University as he resumed his academic path after retiring from factory work.

Works

Books

• Wartime Strikes: The Struggles Against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW during World War Two
• Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organisation (editor)

Pamphlets

• Punching Out (1952)
• Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes (1955)
• Negro Americans take the Lead - A Statement on the Crisis in American Civilization (1964)
• Be His Payment High or Low: The American Working Class of the 1960s (1965)
• Mao as Dialectician (1971)
• The Working Class and Social Change (1975)
• Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency(1999) (co-authored)

Personal Papers, Archives

The Martin and Jessie Glaberman Papers at the Walter P. Reuther Library in Detroit, Michigan contain over 30 linear feet of archival material related to the life and work of the Glabermans. Documents, "reflect their many years of involvement in the labor, civil rights and women's movements. Material includes correspondence, radical publications, speeches, and interviews on their involvements and interests such as the Correspondence Publishing Committee/Company, C.L.R. James and the Socialist Workers Party." The collection is open for research.

Sources

• Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)

External links

• Marty Glaberman page Rich Gibson's web page
• Martin Glaberman archive at Marxist Internet Archive.
• Voices from the Rank and File: Remembering Marty Glaberman and Stan Weir by Staughton Lynd, from Viewpoint Magazine