Harry Braverman

Harry Braverman (9 December 1920 – 2 August 1976) was an American Socialist, economist and political writer. He sometimes used the pseudonym Harry Frankel.

Braverman was born on the 9th December 1920 in New York City. He became active in the American Trotskyist movement in 1937 and soon joined the newly founded Socialist Workers Party.

In the 1950s, Harry Braverman was one of the leaders of the so-called Cochranite tendency, a current led by Bert Cochran within the broader Socialist Workers Party. The Cochranites rejected revolutionary agitation under the dual pressures of relative post-World War II capitalist prosperity and the accompanying McCarthy-era anti-communist witch-hunt. They argued that the current capitalist expansion would last for an extended period, which precluded renewed revolutionary struggles by working people. Eventually the Cochranites, including Braverman, were expelled from the SWP. They formed the American Socialist Union, to whose journal Braverman was a regular contributor.

During the early 1960s, Harry Braverman worked as an editor for Grove Press, where he was instrumental in publishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Braverman's most important book was Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, which examines the degrading effect of capitalism on work in America. The book was published in 1974. He died from cancer in Honesdale, Pennsylvania on 2 August 1976.