Larry Trainor

For the DC Comics superhero character, see Negative Man.

Larry Trainor (April 20, 1905 – July 22, 1975) was a leading activist of the Socialist Workers Party (US) in Boston and a member of the party's National Committee.

Trainor was a noted socialist educator, giving classes on Marxism, the history of the American socialist and Trotskyist movements and especially on Stalinism. He was the author of an extensive oral history ^[1] of American socialism.

Barry Sheppard wrote: "Larry had no formal higher education, but he knew more about politics and the world than any professor I had ever known...a true worker-intellectual, always reading when he was not explaining something. He had a very strong character."^[2]

Trainor's role in discussions of organizational questions in the SWP in the 1960s is referred to in articles by George Breitman^[3] and Frank Lovell.^[4]

References

1. "Holt Labor Library Collection Audio Index". www.marxists.org.
2. Barry Sheppard. 'The Party: A Political Memoir, Vol. I: The Sixties'. Resistance Books, 2005.
3. "Don't strangle the party". Angelfire. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
4. "The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 2020-05-26.