Harry Braverman (1920 – 1976) was an American Communist and political writer. He sometimes used the pseudonym Harry Frankel.

Braverman became active in the American Trotskyist movement in 1937 and soon joined the newly founded Socialist Workers Party.

In the 1950s, Harry Braverman was one of the leaders of the so-called Cochranite tendency, a fraction within the Socialist Workers Party lead by Bert Cochran. The Cochranites recoiled from revolutionary activity under the dual pressures of relative post-World War II capitalist prosperity and the accompanying McCarthy-era anti-communist witch-hunt. They argued that the current capitalist expansion would last for an extended period of time, which precluded the possibility of renewed struggles by working people. Eventually the Cochranites, including Braverman were expelled from the SWP. They formed the American Socialist Union, to the magazine of which Braverman contributed regularly.

During the early 1960s, Harry Braverman worked as an editor for Grove Press, where he was instrumental in publishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Braverman wrote a lot of books himself, and his most important work was Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, which was published shortly before his death from cancer in August 1976.

External links

• Harry Braverman’s Writings on Marxists Internet Archive.

American communists | American political writers | 1920 births | 1976 deaths