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 where he was recruited to the
Trotskyist movement by
Max Shachtman. In 1938 when a group of American Trotskyists under the leadership of
James P. Cannon formed the
Socialist Workers Party, 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. Under the pen-name E.R. Frank he was a regular contributor to the magazine of the
Fourth International, which the SWP supported. In the 1930s and 1940s, Cochran was a district organizer for the
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 (UAW). 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, a leader of the
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-era anti-communist witch-hunt. Cochran was also criticised for proposing to remove the image of
Trotsky from the
masthead of the SWP's newspaper,
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 area.
James P. Cannon sent
Ed Shaw to lead the reconstruction of the party's branch in Detroit. Bert Cochran, with
Harry Braverman and about one hundred of his supporters founded the
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 journal,
New Politics (magazine), and remained so until the journal's demise in 1976. Cochran taught labor relations at the
New School for Social Research and
Empire State College and was a senior fellow at the Research Institute on International Change at
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 the summer of 1984 before the re-launch of
New Politics in the mid-1980s. ==References==