Marxists’ Internet Archive

Harry Braverman

1920 – 1976

“... the job is not to see where ‘Marx was wrong’ so much as to make a fresh application of his theory to the world around us as it is, not as it once was. To borrow a comparison from the field of physics, we need socialist Faradays and Maxwells or if we are lucky, Einsteins and Plancks, not people who confine themselves to knocking Isaac Newton.”
– Marx in the Modern World

Harry Braverman

Biography

Harry Braverman joined the Trotskyist movement in 1937 while a member of the YPSL, the Socialist Party youth movement. Although without formal academic training, he developed into a powerful theoretician and organiser. In the early 1950s he was a leader of the so-called Cochranite tendency and was expelled with them from the SWP. He then became editor of The American Socialist until its demise in 1959. During the early 1960s he worked as an editor for Grove Press, where he was instrumental in publishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In 1967 he took over the editorship of Monthly Review Press, where he worked until his death. His most important work was the classic Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, which was published shortly before his death from cancer in August 1976.

Note: When writing for Fourth International and The Militant, i.e. until 1952, he used the pseudonym Harry Frankel.

Works:

Jun. 1940	“Youth Are Not Interested in Politics,” ...
Feb. 1941	How They Let Hitler Take Power
Mar. 1941	Bourgeoisie Fears Study of Its Own Revolutionary Past
Mar. 1941	Phillip Murray’s Statement on the “Lease-Lend” Bill
Sept. 1941	LaGuardia Gets Stalinist Boost for Reelection
Sept. 1941	LaGuardia Denounced by TWU Convention
Mar. 1942	The 59th Anniversary of the Death of Karl Marx
Jan. 1943	The Renegades: Lewis Corey (review)
May 1944	A Defamer of Marxism (review)
Mar. 1946	Class Forces in the American Revolution
April 1946	How the Constitution Was Written
Dec. 1946	The Jackson Period in American History
Mar. 1947	Three Conceptions of Jacksonianism
Jan. 1949	New Deal Democrat Carries the Ball for the Steel Trust (letter)
Nov. 1950	John L. Lewis
Jan. 1952	Important Internal Developments in the USWA: What the Steel Convention Revealed
Mar. 1952	Does America Disprove Marx? Income Trends: Fact and Fiction
May 1952	The Structure of US Imperialism: America Nears the Crisis (extended review)
July 1952	How Many Capitalists in the US? The Brookings Report on Stock Ownership
Sept. 1952	Capitalism and Democracy
Oct. 1955	Automation: Promise and Menace
Feb. 1956	Big Business Moves in on the Farmer
April 1956	Which Way to a New American Radicalism
Sept. 1956	America Also Had A Revolution (extended review article)
Dec. 1956	Prosperity on Easy Payments
Feb. 1957	New Birth of Freedom
May 1958	Marx in the Modern World
Jan. 1959	The Nasser Revolution
Dec. 1971	A letter
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