America as Overlord (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781456571849)

From 1932 until his death in 1990, Hal Draper was a prolific Marxist writer and a socialist activist. He is one of the few people from that era who maintained and expanded the American socialist tradition which has almost disappeared. World War II and the Cold War were a political space-time warp and very few individuals or political tendencies passed through it intact. This is true of the socialist movement worldwide of course but the damage was greatest in the United States. Draper is one of the few who, instead of abandoning the movement in despair and rejecting his own political past, analyzed what was happening with the combination of rigorous research and passionate outrage that is the stamp of the Marxist tradition. In the 50s, a time of general collapse and demoralization in the American left, Draper edited the weekly Labor Action, a political journal widely read in Europe as well as the United States because of its uncompromising rejection of the American consensus which did not depend on accepting that other form of despair-the slavish defense of "real existing socialism" as the only alternative.