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Hal Draper (bornHarold Dubinsky; September 19, 1914 – January 26, 1990) was an Americansocialist activist and author who played a significant role in theBerkeley, California,Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought ofKarl Marx and Marxian socialism.
Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called "socialism from below", that is, self-emancipation by the working class, in stark opposition to bothcapitalism andStalinist orBolshevik bureaucracy. He was one of the creators of theThird Camp tradition, a form ofMarxist socialism emancipated fromState apparatus.
Harold Dubinsky was born inBrooklyn,New York, in 1914, the son ofJewish immigrants fromUkraine, then part of theRussian Empire.[1] His father, Samuel Dubinsky (d. 1924), was the manager of a shirt factory.[2] His mother, Annie Kornblatt Dubinsky, ran a candy store to make ends meet following her husband's death.[2] He was one of four children, andTheodore Draper was his younger brother.[1]
When Hal was eighteen, his mother insisted upon changing the family name to the "American-sounding" name "Draper" to shield the children from anti-Semitism as they entered their careers.[2]
Hal graduated fromBoys High School and earned a bachelor's degree fromBrooklyn College in 1934.
During his teenage years he joined theYoung People's Socialist League (YPSL), then the youth affiliate of theSocialist Party of America, and he became a leader of the national student movements of the day that organized against fascism, war, and unemployment.
Draper's political choices were in contrast to those made by his brotherTheodore Draper, afellow traveler of theCommunist Party in the 1930s who would later be disillusioned withCommunism and become a prominent historian. Their sister Dorothy (Dora) Draper would marry Jacob Rabkin (1905–2003), one of the intellectual founders of US tax law.
Within the YPSL, Hal Draper was won over toTrotskyism and became an important leader of the YPSL's Trotskyist "Appeal Tendency" during 1936 and 1937. He was elected the organization's national secretary, its top post, at its September 1937 convention, which renounced theStalinistThird International in favor of a new TrotskyistFourth International.[3] The great majority of the YPSL supported that position and left or was expelled by the Socialist Party in the fall of that year. Along with his YPSL activity, Draper took part in the founding of theSocialist Workers Party in 1937–1938.
As debates erupted within the newly formed SWP, Draper aligned with those who objected to the internal regime of that party and were developing an analysis of theSoviet Union underJoseph Stalin as a new form of society, neither socialist nor capitalist, in which a new class, the state bureaucracy, held social and state power. In 1940, that faction, led byMax Shachtman,James Burnham, andMartin Abern, split from the SWP to form theWorkers Party. Draper joined them in founding the new organization. During the war, he and his wifeAnne Draper, the former Anne Kracik, lived inLos Angeles, where they were active among shipyard workers and in antifascist and antiracist campaigns. Returning to New York in the mid 1940s, Draper became a major writer and functionary for theWorkers Party. He would often write and edit almost the entire contents of issues of the group's paper,Labor Action.
By 1948, the Workers Party came to believe that the prospects for revolution were receding and that it must adopt a more realistic strategy, given the diminished prospects. Therefore, it changed its name to the Independent Socialist League, an acknowledgement that its size and capacities did not warrant the name "party." 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, which occurred in 1958. Although Draper personally opposed the decision, he submitted to the majority. He regretted the rightward tendency of the organization, however, and in 1962, Draper, by then resident inBerkeley, California, as a part-time microfilm acquisitions librarian at theUniversity of California, Berkeley,[4] broke with the Socialist Party to form the Independent Socialist Club (ISC), which had a heavy youth composition. During this period, Draper received a master's degree from Berkeley in 1960.
In 1964, Draper was heavily involved in theFree Speech Movement, an important precursor of that decade'sNew Left, on the Berkeley campus. He was a mentor to leaderMario Savio and others.[5] In the introduction to Draper'sBerkeley: The New Student Revolt (1965),[6] Savio acknowledges Draper's encouragement and friendship and cites the influence of Draper's pamphletThe Mind of Clark Kerr (October 1964) on the development of the Free Speech Movement.[7]
In 1968, ISC became theInternational Socialists as it expanded nationally. Draper left the organization three years later, arguing that the group had become a sect.[8] From then on, he worked as an independent radical scholar, producing a stream of scholarly works on Marxism and the workers' movement.
Draper died of pneumonia at his home in Berkeley, California, on January 26, 1990.[9]
Draper's magnum opus is his five-volumeKarl Marx's Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1977–1990), a seminal re-evaluation of the whole of Marx's political theory, based on an exhaustive survey of the writings of both Marx and Engels. He saw their political perspective as summarized by the phrase "socialism from below," which he had introduced in his pamphletThe Two Souls of Socialism.
Draper was also the editor of a three-volumeMarx-Engels Cyclopedia, detailing the day-to-day activities and writings of the two founders of modern socialism.
Besides his overtly political writings, Draper wrote the short storyMs Fnd in a Lbry, a satire of theinformation age, in 1961.
In 1982, Draper also published an English translation of the complete poetic works of the 19th-century German poetHeinrich Heine, the fruit of three decades of work conducted alongside his better-known political activity.
During his life, he was a member of the following organizations:
He was also a member of the editorial board ofNew Politics.
Quotations related toHal Draper at Wikiquote