Comrades,
I'm very saddened to announce the passing of a veteran of American radicalism.
Martin Glaberman, professor emeritus of Social Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, passed away on Sunday. An autoworker, shop steward, and union comitteeman for twenty years, Marty was one of the greats of the generation of radicals who had come to politics through the American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s.
A comrade of the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James, Marty had left the Socialist Workers Party twice with his political co-thinkers. When they broke with the Trotskyist movement definitively in the early 1950s, they set about to reinvent Marxism in light of conditions in post-WWII America. Inspired by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, they had an unflagging faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class, and denounced the bureaucratic societies of the Eastern Bloc as simply another form of capitalism.
Author of an innovative study of the Wildcat strikes in the American auto industry during WWII, Marty was legendary in Detroit radical circles. The black revolutionaries who would go on to found the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and League of Revolutionary Black Workers had studied Capital with Marty, and withour a doubt his ideas about the self-liberation of the working class made its mark on the RUM projects.
Recently, some comrades and I in Detroit had befriended Marty, and like those revolutionaries before us, were in the midst of a study of Marx's Capital. We remember with fondness our Sunday afternoon discussions about class composition, the nature of Soviet society, and the race question. Marty had an encyclopedic knowledge of Marx, Lenin, and his comrade James, was delightfully adverse to bullshit and cant, and had a wonderful sense of humor. He will be sorely missed.