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Young Socialist
[New York City]
(1957 — 1972 )

The Young Socialist was the magazine of the Young Socialist Alliance, associated with the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. The early years of the YS however, reflected a regroupment of revolutionary socialist forces among young people and radicals in the 1950s that was beginning to take place around the various events of the era, most notably the Khrushchev revelations from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s 20th Party Congress in 1956 along with the Soviet invasion to crush the Hungarian workers revolution that year had a profound effect on Marxists across the board. The ending in that decade with the victory of the Cuban Revolution capped this new world situation that socialists were reacting too. Domestically the progressive and socialist back-lash to McCarthyist-era repression against the Left dovetailing with the rise of the new Civil Rights movement started drawing young people from the enforced cultural and political lethargy into active political action around these issues.

The Independent Socialist League, a small grouping based in New York City, led by Max Shachtman, was accelerating in this period in its drift to the far right of American social-democracy and an accommodation with U.S. Imperialism. One of several currents in the I.S.L. reacting to this right-wing lurch was a group of young socialists in the ISL's youth group, the Young Socialist League. They began to adopt Trotskyist political politics and made contact with the US supporters of the Fourth International, the Socialist Workers Party.

Working initially with SWP leader Murray Weiss, these young people were recruited to the program of the SWP and together with youth who were already in the SWP, launched the Young Socialist as a paper of this regroupment in Autumn of 1957.

When the Young Socialist Alliance was launched in April of 1960 and the YS became the monthly journal of the YSA. The YS appeared as a monthly tabloid into the early 1960s when it was re-cast in small magazine format. It went through various formats until it resumed as a tabloid in the early 1970s.

Digitization of the Young Socialist was the project of the Riazanov Library Digitization Project organized by Dr. Martin Goodman and Robin Palmer and the bound volumes of the Young Socialist provided by the Holt Labor Library in San Francisco, D. Walters, Director. This effort is part of the Encylodpedia of Trotskyism On-Line’s Left Opposition Publications Digitization Project on the Marxists Internet Archive