Haim Kantorovitch (November 4, 1890 – August 17, 1936) was an American socialist teacher, writer, and Marxist theoretician. Kantorovitch is best remembered as one of the intellectual leaders of the Militant faction of the Socialist Party of America in the early 1930s and as a founder and editor of The American Socialist Quarterly, the SP's theoretical magazine.
Biography
Early years
Haim Kantorovitch was born of ethnic Jewish parents in Lakhva, Belarus, then part of the Russian empire, on November 4, 1890. Kantorovitch came to radical politics as a young man, joining the Bund (Yiddish: אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בּונד אין ליטע פוילין און רוסלאַנד — Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia.)
Kantorovitch emigrated to the United States in 1907, following the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution. In America he worked in the garment industry of Boston, Massachusetts making raincoats. Kantorovitch helped to unionize the factory in which he worked, with the union first affiliating with the Industrial Workers of the World before moving to the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union at a later juncture.
Kantorovitch was a native speaker of Yiddish but he was also able to read and write fluently in Russian, German, and English. He wrote two books in Yiddish — The History of the Labor Movement in America and In the Light of Marxism.
Political career
In America, Kantorovitch was initially a "labor Zionist," a member of the Poale-Zion movement. Highly regarded for his knowledge of political history and Marxist theory, in the 1920s Kantorovitch was employed as a teacher in the high school operated by the Workman's Circle (Yiddish: אַרבעטער־רינג — Arbeiter Ring), a Jewish fraternal organization based in New York City. Kantorovitch was also the director of the children's camps sponsored annually by the Workman's Circle organization.
In 1926, Kantorovitch left the Poale-Zion movement to join the successor to the Jewish Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America — the Jewish Socialist Verband. Kantorovitch was a frequent contributor to the publications of the Verband before becoming the editor of the official organ of the organization, a newspaper called Der Wecker.
Kantorovitch continued to teach at various Workmen's Circle schools in Baltimore, Waterbury, Newark, and New York City. While in Baltimore he published his first English-language article, "The Rise and Decline of Neo-Communism," a critical analysis of Communism and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The editor of the Modern Monthly, V.F. Calverton, was so impressed with Kantorovitch and his ideas that he was made an Associate Editor of the magazine, to which he frequently contributed.
As the 1930s began, Kantorovitch moved his main activity to the English-speaking Socialist movement. He was an early and enthusiastic adherent to the Militant faction of the Socialist Party which emerged in 1930-31. At the end of 1931 Kantorovitch joined forces with two teachers at the Rand School of Social Science, Anna Bercowitz and David P. Berenberg, as a founder and co-editor of the American Socialist Quarterly, a magazine dedicated to socialist theory and in depth analysis of current questions of policy. The magazine would gain official status as the theoretical journal of the Socialist Party of America during its second year of publication. It was also approximately this same time that Kantorovitch first contracted tuberculosis, the disease which would later claim his life at the age of 46.
Kantorovitch was the author of several political pamphlets advocating a move of the SPA towards a perspective of revolutionary socialism. Despite this perspective, Kantorovitch was consistently critical of the Communist Party (CPUSA), particularly hostile to the party's equation of social democrats with fascists and their activity building dual trade unions up through 1934 under the aegis of the Trade Union Unity League.
When in 1935 the Militants made common cause with the "Progressives" around SP Presidential candidate Norman Thomas and launched a newspaper of their own called The Socialist Call in opposition to the organ of the Old Guard faction, The New Leader, Kantorovitch was a regular contributor. Although in ill health throughout his life with chronic tuberculosis, he continued to write for The Call and The American Socialist up to the time of his death.