- Bert Cochran
Bert Cochran (
December 25 1913 ? –June 6 1984 ) was an AmericanCommunist politician and author.Cochran's family came from
Poland to theUSA in the early 1900s. In the 1930s, Cochran attended theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison where he was recruited to theTrotskyist movement byMax Shachtman . In 1938 when a group of American Trotskyists under the leadership ofJames P. Cannon formed the Socialist Workers Party, Bert Cochran was one of them. For a number of years, Cochran was part of the "National Committee", the leading body of the SWP and became the party's main leader inDetroit . Under the pen-name E.R. Frank he was a regular contibutor to the magazine of theFourth International , which the SWP supported.In the beginning of the 1950s, Bert Cochran became the leader of a faction inside the Socialist Workers Party that opposed the leadership of Cannon and instead favoured the approach of
Michel Pablo , a leader of theFourth International . The faction, known to their opponents as the "Cochranites", argued that the SWP was abstaining in a sectarian manner from the opportunity to intervene into the radical layers around the Communist Party. The SWP's leadership interpreted this as meaning that the current around Cochran no longer believed a revolution in the United States was possible, and that they had recoiled from revolutionary activity under the dual pressures of relative post-World War II capitalist prosperity and the accompanying McCarthy-era anti-communist witch-hunt. Cochran was also criticised for proposing to remove the image ofTrotsky from the masthead of the SWP's newspaper, "The Militant ".Eventually, Bert Cochran and the "Cochranites" were expelled from the SWP in 1954, which meant that the party lost a great deal of its members in Detroit and the
Cleveland area.James P. Cannon sentEd Shaw to lead the reconstruction of the party's branch in Detroit.Bert Cochran, with
Harry Braverman and about one hundred of his supporters founded theSocialist Union of America , which existed from 1954 to approx. 1959. After a short period out of regular political activity, he became a sponsor of theThird Camp journal, "New Politics (magazine) ", and remained so until the journal's demise in 1976. Cochran taught labor relations at theNew School for Social Research andEmpire State College and was a senior fellow at the Research Institute on International Change atColumbia University . He wrote six books, one of which, "Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions" (1977), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He died fromcancer the summer of 1984 before the re-launch of "New Politics" in the mid-1980s.Notable works
* "Through the Rearview Mirror: Past Book Reviews on Still Present Social Issues", Times Two Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-930077-75-0. (A collection of book reviews, published posthumously.)
* "Welfare Capitalism — and After", Schocken Books, 1984, ISBN 0805238689.
* "Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions", Princeton University Press, 1977, ISBN 0691046441.
* "Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency", Funk & Wagnalls, 1973, ISBN 0308100441.
* "Adlai Stevenson, Patrician Among the Politicians", Funk & Wagnalls, 1969.
* "The War System: An Analysis of the Necessity for Political Reason", Macmillan, 1965.
* "The Cross of the Moment", Macmillan, 1961.
* "American Labor in Midpassage", Monthly Review Press, 1959 (editor and contributor).External links
* [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/cochran/ Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank) Internet Archive]
* [http://www.trotskyana.net/Trotskyists/Bio-Bibliographies/bio-bibliographies.html The Lubitz TrotskyanaNet] provides a biographical sketch and a selective bibliography on Bert Cochran
* [http://www.marx.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/index.htm The American Socialist]
* [http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/reflections_on_the_cochranites.htm Reflections on the Cochranites]
* [http://www.thebertcochranlegacy.com/ The Bert Cochran Legacy]
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