Morris Slavin
Morris Slavin, (1914-2006) was a veteran of the “Old Left” of the 1930s and member of Democratic Socialists of America.
Early life
Morris Slavin was born to parents from the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia in 1913. Emigrating to Youngstown, Ohio, in 1923, he began his political life the Young People’s Socialist League, youth section of the Socialist Party USA of Norman Thomas. He joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, after having read Leon Trotsky’s My Life.[1]
Socialist activism
In the 1940 split in American Trotskyism, Slavin, like many of the younger Trotskyists, went with Max Shachtman to found the Workers Party, later the Independent Socialist League, which advocated a revolutionary socialism that saw nothing innately progressive in the Stalinist USSR. Unlike Shachtman, he remained on the radical left after the ISL dissolved.
Academic career
Slavin became an assistant history professor at Youngstown State University in 1961, teaching there for 20 years before retiring as emeritus professor. He wrote three major books on the French Revolution after his “retirement”: The French Revolution in Miniature: Section Droits de l’Homme, 1789–1795 (1984), Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Gironde (1986), and The Hébertistes to the Guillotine: Anatomy of a “Conspiracy” in Revolutionary France (1994), followed by a collection of essays entitled The Left and the French Revolution (1995). He was honored with a Festschrift, Rebels Against the Old Order (1994), edited by Boris Blick and Louis Patsouras. Slavin remained a Marxist throughout his life and wrote for many journals, including Jewish Currents, New Politics, Against the Current, and Cahiers Léon Trotsky.[2]