Mr Sputnik comes to town

This is an issue of “The American Socialist”, a magazine published during the Cold War by the Socialist Union, a leftist group headed by Bert Cochran. While the group had Trotskyist origins, they evolved in a more “broad” direction, as can readily be seen in this issue, the penultimate one.

One of the articles is written by Fenner Brockway, the former leader of the Independent Labour Party and a political opponent of Trotsky. The article correctly predicts that major struggles will erupt in Africa, especially southern Africa. Bert Cochran himself has written a positive review of Isaac Deutscher's famous Trotsky biography. While Cochran still supports Lenin and Trotsky against Stalin, he feels that Trotsky didn't move fast enough against his sly opponent, and that the Bolsheviks weren't democratic enough. Cochran seems to support the so-called Workers' Opposition, a dissident faction within the Bolshevik Party which was sharply condemned by Trotsky. Several other articles call for détente and disarmament. There is also an extremely sarcastic piece titled “Mr Khrushchev Comes to Town”. It's almost entirely devoid of analysis, instead concentrating on heckling stupid American commercialism. (The Soviet premier visited the United States in 1959.)

As already mentioned, this was the next-to-last issue of “The American Socialist”. In the last one, the editorial board says that they don’t want to become another “messianic sect” and simply close shop, while (correctly) predicting that the 1960's might become more exciting than the 1950's…