Bewick

Martin Glaberman Archive

Martin Glaberman, who died in December 2001, was a life-long activist in the workers' movement . This page contains a small fraction of his writings. We hope to add more materials shortly.

Martin Glaberman speaking at the Solidarity unionism conference in Youngstown, OH, June 8, 1999. Photograph : Bruce Allen

" Martin Glaberman, Professor Emeritus in the Interdisciplinary Studies program, Social Science Division, of the College of Life Long Learning at Wayne State University died Monday, December 17 in Detroit. He was 83.

"Prof. Glaberman worked for 20 years in auto plants, and brought that experience to his distinguished political journalism, his teaching, and his work as a labor historian. A Socialist since the age of thirteen, he was a life long Marxist who never lost faith in the transforming power of the working class. He was associated since 1940 with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the organization formed and led by C.L.R.James, noted Marxist historian, It broke with Trotskyism, concluding that the Soviet Union was not a workers' state, but a state capitalist society; and it rejected the Vanguard Party: the idea that elites were needed to organize social change. They found great hope in the Workers' Councils of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as a basis for reorganizing society. In the early1950's despite the McCarthyite witch-hunt the group began publishing Correspondence, a newspaper that was a forum for the expression of working class views and activities. It was a forerunner of the grass roots newspapers that flourished in the 1960's. Prof. Glaberman was its editor.

"Prof. Glaberman and Jessie Glaberman, in their marriage of over thirty years, kept a house that was open to the world as a way station, a meeting place, and a refuge. In 1957 the Glabermans and a neighbor, Mrs. Winifred Jenkins, started the nation's first inner city Little League, the North Detroit Little League. Prof. Glaberman acted as league president, keeping the bats and balls in his basement.

"In the 60's Prof. Glaberman quit factory work and resumed an academic career that had been interrupted when he dropped out of the master's degree program in Economics at Columbia University to more fully engage in political work. He received a master's degree from the University of Detroit and a Doctorate from Union Graduate School. He retired from Wayne State University in 1989, continuing to teach part time.

"From the 1970's until his death, Prof. Glaberman gave classes in Marxís Capital to interested young people, and ran Bewick Editions, which published and distributed the works of C.L.R. James long before their value was acknowledged by world scholars.

"Martin Glaberman was the author of many books, pamphlets, essays, and poems including Wartime Strikes; Working For Wages, the Roots of Insurgency (with Seymour Faber); Unions and Workers: Limitations and Possibilities; Be His Payment High or Low: The American Working Class in the Sixties; Mao as a Dialectician; Punching Out; and The Factory Songs of Mr. Toad. Staughton Lynd is editing a collection of Prof. Glaberman's essays, to be published in late 2002 by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. of Chicago, which will also carry the Bewick Editions list.

"Prof. Glaberman was a keynote speaker this year at C.L.R. James centenary conferences first at the Charles H Wright Museum of African-American History and Wayne State University in Detroit, and then at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, Jame's home country.

"He is survived by his companion, Prof. Diane Voss of Grosse Pointe Park MI; a son, Peter Glaberman, of Ann Arbor MI; a brother, Eugene Glaberman, of New York; foster sons Ralph Hamann of Venice FL., Gary Hamann of Los Angeles, and Farrell Hamann of Sacramento; granddaughters Ursa Brown Glaberman of Albuquerque NM and Rosaruby Glaberman of Brooklyn NY; and many friends and comrades worldwide. There will be a memorial meeting at Wayne State University on February 17, 2002."

Seymour Faber