Mark Walker
Mark Walker, at eighteen, abandoned his native central Maine for what would become a fifteen year stint as a merchant seaman, itinerant worker, and Trotskyist revolutionary.
Radicalization
Arriving in Boston in 1937 during the Depression, he plunged into the "intellectual maelstrom that characterized leftist working class circles in those days". Mark and a friend took a cheap room in Charlestown, near Sullivan Square, surviving on peanut butter sandwiches while working at dead end jobs and exploring the big city.
A Boston Common orator led young Walker to a brief membership in the West End branch of the Young Communist League USA. When one of his comrades was dramatically expelled for talking with a Trotskyist, Walker protested and was himself kicked out. Later, "his relentless curiosity led him to throw in his lot with the fledgling Socialist Workers Party".
Radical seaman
Walker turned his modest kitchen skills into seven years before the mast, first as a messmate and later as an able-bodied seaman. Walker became involved in the struggles between the independent Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (later the Seaman’s International Union) and the Communist Party-led National Maritime Union. The Trotskyists, backed the independent militants, who refused to subordinate the sailors’ interests to Soviet foreign policy. Later the SWP split, "launching its youthful intellectuals such as Hal Draper, Max Shachtman, Irving Howe, and Dwight MacDonald into political careers more luminous than those of their former comrades James P. Cannon, Joe Hansen, Farrell Dobbs and George Novack.