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Martin "Marty" Abern ( Martin Abramowitz; December 2, 1898 – April 1949) was a Marxist politician who was an important leader of the Communist youth movement of the 1920s as well as a founder of the United States Trotskyism movement.
Abern was a delegate to the 2nd World Congress of the Young Communist International (YCI), held in Moscow in June 1921, where he was made a member of the Executive Committee of the YCI. He also held a seat on the governing National Executive Committee of the Young Workers League of America (YWL) from May 1922 and was reelected by the convention of that organization held the following year. Abern served as Secretary of the YWL from May 30, 1922, to October 19, 1922, ostensibly resigning for reasons of health.
Abern was also sent to Moscow to attend the 4th World Congress of the Comintern late in the fall of 1922. Upon his return he was made a member of the Central Executive Committee of the now legal Communist Party, the Workers Party of America, where he would develop a close ideological affinity and working relationship with James P. Cannon, a leading light of the legal party.
Abern also briefly was part of a three-person Secretariat running the Young Workers League in the summer and fall of 1924 before being replaced as National Secretary on October 15 by John Williamson. In 1925 Cannon became the National Secretary of International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist movement, Abern joined him as assistant national secretary and thereafter dedicated most of his effort in an attempt to build the size and influence of that parallel mass organization of the Workers (Communist) Party.
In 1926, Abern wrote a two-part, two-day article entitled "Can the Workers Write for Our Press?
Abern then took an important leadership role in the adult Workers (Communist) Party of America, becoming the District Organizer of the party's important Chicago district in 1928 and sitting on the governing Central Executive Committee of the organization. Abern was a steadfast supporter of the majority faction of Foster-Cannon-Ludwig Lore during the bitter factional fighting that continued ceaselessly throughout the decade.
Abern was also a founding member of Workers Party of the United States in 1934, formed when the CLA merged with A.J. Muste's Workers Party. He was a member of the National Committee of that organization from 1934 to 1936. In that year he and other Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party en masse as part of the so-called "French Turn" tactic, a brief interlude ending with their expulsion late in 1937.
In 1938, Abern helped found the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he was on the National Committee of that organization from 1938 until 1940. The April 1940 convention of the SWP instructed the National Committee of the party to take disciplinary action against Abern, Shachtman, James Burnham, and their factional supporters if that group failed to abide by the decisions of the convention. In accordance with these instructions, the National Committee suspended Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern at its meeting of April 22, 1940, giving the members of this so-called "petty-bourgeois opposition" an opportunity to recant and return to the party. Burnham left the radical movement at this time, while Abern joined Max Shachtman's in establishing a new organization called the Workers Party of the United States (WPUS). The pair were expelled from the SWP by a Plenum Conference held in Chicago from Sept. 27 to 29, 1940."The Expulsion of the Shachtman-Abern Group: Resolution adopted by the Plenum Conference of the SWP held at Chicago, September 27 to 29, 1940. First published in The Socialist Appeal, October 5, 1940, reprinted in James P. Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1943; pp. 253-254.
Abern was elected to the governing National Committee of the WPUS at the time of its formation in 1940 and remained in the top leadership of that organization for the rest of his life.
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