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
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:
Last updated on 22 May 2016