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As Halloween is now upon us, and I’m gonna be changing my name back to normal tomorrow, thought I’d drop a quick thread on the dude who my Halloween Twitter name (“HELL DRAPER”) is a tribute to: Hal Draper. (See what I did with the pun? Pretty good, I think you’ll agree.) 
Hal Draper was born in Brooklyn in 1914 to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He became active in the socialist movement in the 1930s and joined a Trotskyist group inside the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the Socialist Party of America.
He went on to become one of the foremost writers and organisers of “third camp” socialism, a broadly-libertarian, revolutionary socialist tendency that asserted independent working-class politics against the “two camps” of Stalinism and western capitalism.
He worked in shipyards and was involved in rank-and-file struggle in the union movement, and later, as a librarian at Berkeley, was involved in the “Free Speech Movement” there in the 1960s: marxists.org/archive/draper…
Such was his role that the young leaders of the FSM amended their slogan “never trust anyone over 30” to add “...except Hal Draper.”
His written contributions to the revolutionary socialist tradition are immense. His greatest work is probably ‘Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution’, a peerless, multi-volume examination of the politics of Marx as they actually were.
Unlike some of his former comrades, most notably Max Shachtman, Draper never concluded that backing the lesser evil of US capitalism was the best that could be hoped for against Stalinism. He remained a revolutionary socialist until the end of his life, in 1990.
A lot of his work is available online here: marxists.org/archive/draper…. He wrote on an incredibly wide range of topics, always insightfully.
His work on the state; trade union organising; rank-and-file versus the bureaucracy; Israel/Palestine and other international issues; and more, still serve as vital provocations against the Stalinist-influenced common sense that predominates on these issues on the far left today.
He wasn’t right about everything, and I’ve got my criticisms of him, but on pretty much every issue on which he wrote, his work has much to teach socialists today.
Draper, along with his close comrades like Anne Draper, Julius Jacobson, and Phylis Jacobson, shows us is that we don’t have to pick between rival barbarisms; that we don’t have to settle for backing the lesser evil.
On a left where it’s common to find apologism for Assad, Putin, or the Iranian state, because they’re allegedly “anti-imperialists”, Draper’s third-camp socialism provides an ideological perspective that doesn’t require us to subordinate our class’s interests to *any* oppressor.
Gonna end the thread with two of my favourite quotes of his. This one (from marxists.org/archive/draper…)...
...and this one (from workersliberty.org/story/2013/10/…).
Happy Halloween. Be More Hal Draper. [/Thread]
