Beginnings
Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905.
At an early age, he became interested in Marxism and was sympathetic to the radical wing of the Socialist Party. Having dropped out of City College, in 1921 he joined the Workers Council, a Communist organization led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg which was sharply critical of the underground form of organization of the Communist Party of America. At the end of December 1921 the Communist Party launched a "legal political party," the Workers Party of America, of which the Workers' Council was a constituent member. Shachtman thereby joined the official Communist movement by virtue of the Workers' Council's dissolution by merger.
Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the Communist youth organization and edit the Young Worker. After joining the Communist Party, he rose to become an alternate member of its Central Committee. He edited Labor Defender, a journal of International Labor Defense, which he made the first photographic magazine on the US left. As editor of Labor Defender he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police.
Through most of his time in the Communist Party Shachtman, along with Abern, associated with a group led by James P. Cannon. Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International (Comintern), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky.
Read more about this topic: Max Shachtman
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