# Bert Cochran > Mediated Wiki article. Canonical URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Bert_Cochran > Markdown URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Bert_Cochran.md > Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Cochran > Source revision: 1339743901 > License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) {{Refimprove| date=April 2020}} '''Bert Cochran''', born '''Alexander Goldfarb''' (December 25, 1913 – June 6, 1984) was an American [Communist](/source/Communist) politician and writer. A [Trotskyist](/source/Trotskyist), he was a member of the [Socialist Workers Party](/source/Socialist_Workers_Party_(U.S.)) from the 1930s to the 1950s. ==Biography== Cochran was born in Poland in 1913 and moved to the US at an early age. In the 1930s, Cochran attended the [University of Wisconsin–Madison](/source/University_of_Wisconsin%E2%80%93Madison) where he was recruited to the [Trotskyist](/source/Trotskyist) movement by [Max Shachtman](/source/Max_Shachtman). In 1938 when a group of American Trotskyists under the leadership of [James P. Cannon](/source/James_P._Cannon) formed the [Socialist Workers Party](/source/Socialist_Workers_Party_(United_States)), Bert Cochran was one of them. For a number of years, Cochran was part of the ''National Committee'', the leading body of the SWP and became the party's main leader in [Detroit](/source/Detroit). Under the pen-name E.R. Frank he was a regular contributor to the magazine of the [Fourth International](/source/Fourth_International), which the SWP supported. In the 1930s and 1940s, Cochran was a district organizer for the [Mechanics Educational Society of America](/source/Mechanics_Educational_Society_of_America) (MESA), a radical independent union which drew the ire of the federal government for refusing to not strike during World War II. Cochran also organized with the [United Autoworkers](/source/United_Autoworkers) (UAW).{{cite web |title=Biographical Sketch |url=https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/cochran/bio-bibl_cochran.pdf |website=[Marxists Internet Archive](/source/Marxists_Internet_Archive) |accessdate=6 April 2020}} In the beginning of the 1950s, Bert Cochran became the leader of a faction inside the Socialist Workers Party that opposed the leadership of Cannon and instead favoured the approach of [Michel Pablo](/source/Michel_Pablo), a leader of the [Fourth International](/source/Fourth_International). The faction, known to their opponents as the ''Cochranites'', argued that the SWP was abstaining in a sectarian manner from the opportunity to intervene into the radical layers around the Communist Party. The SWP's leadership interpreted this as meaning that the current around Cochran no longer believed a revolution in the United States was possible, and that they had recoiled from revolutionary activity under the dual pressures of relative post-World War II capitalist prosperity and the accompanying [McCarthy](/source/McCarthyism)-era anti-communist witch-hunt. Cochran was also criticised for proposing to remove the image of [Trotsky](/source/Trotsky) from the [masthead](/source/Masthead_(British_publishing)) of the SWP's newspaper, ''[The Militant](/source/The_Militant)''. Eventually, Bert Cochran and the Cochranites were expelled from the SWP in 1954, which meant that the party lost a great deal of its members in Detroit and the [Cleveland](/source/Cleveland) area. [James P. Cannon](/source/James_P._Cannon) sent [Ed Shaw](/source/Ed_Shaw_(activist)) to lead the reconstruction of the party's branch in Detroit. Bert Cochran, with [Harry Braverman](/source/Harry_Braverman) and about one hundred of his supporters founded the [Socialist Union of America](/source/Socialist_Union_of_America), which existed from 1954 to approx. 1959. After a short period out of regular political activity, he became a sponsor of the [Third Camp](/source/Third_Camp) journal, ''[New Politics (magazine)](/source/New_Politics_(magazine))'', and remained so until the journal's demise in 1976. Cochran taught labor relations at the [New School for Social Research](/source/New_School_for_Social_Research) and [Empire State College](/source/Empire_State_College) and was a senior fellow at the Research Institute on International Change at [Columbia University](/source/Columbia_University). He wrote six books, one of which, ''Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions'' (1977), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He died from [cancer](/source/cancer) the summer of 1984 before the re-launch of ''New Politics'' in the mid-1980s. ==References== {{reflist}} ==Notable works== * [https://archive.org/details/ProspectsOfAmericanRadicalism ''Prospects of American radicalism''] New York, N.Y. : American Socialist Publications, 1954 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20210121125504/https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000956349 ''American Labor in Midpassage''], Monthly Review Press, 1959 (editor and contributor). * ''The Cross of the Moment'', Macmillan, 1961. * ''The War System: An Analysis of the Necessity for Political Reason'', Macmillan, 1965. * ''Adlai Stevenson, Patrician Among the Politicians'', Funk & Wagnalls, 1969. * ''Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency'', Funk & Wagnalls, 1973, {{ISBN|0-308-10044-1}}. * ''Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions'', Princeton University Press, 1977, {{ISBN|0-691-04644-1}}. * ''Welfare Capitalism — and After'', Schocken Books, 1984, {{ISBN|0-8052-3868-9}}. * [https://web.archive.org/web/20090805080151/http://www.thebertcochranlegacy.com/throughtherearviewmirror.htm ''Through the Rearview Mirror: Past Book Reviews on Still Present Social Issues''], Times Two Publishing, 2005, {{ISBN|1-930077-75-0}}. (A collection of book reviews, published posthumously.) ==External links== * [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/cochran/ Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank) Internet Archive] * [http://www.trotskyana.net/Trotskyists/Bio-Bibliographies/bio-bibl_cochran.pdf The Lubitz TrotskyanaNet] provides a biographical sketch and a selective bibliography on Bert Cochran * [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/index.htm The American Socialist] * [http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/reflections_on_the_cochranites.htm Reflections on the Cochranites] * [https://web.archive.org/web/20110202103246/http://thebertcochranlegacy.com/ The Bert Cochran Legacy] {{Authority control}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Cochran, Bert}} Category:1913 births Category:1984 deaths Category:American communists Category:American Marxists Category:Polish emigrants to the United States Category:Members of the Socialist Union of America Category:Socialist Workers Party (United States) politicians from Michigan Category:20th-century American writers Category:Trade unionists from Michigan Category:The New School faculty Category:Empire State University faculty Category:20th-century American trade unionists Category:20th-century American male writers --- Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Bert Cochran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Cochran) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Cochran?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.