John Keracher

John Keracher (1880–1958) was a Scottish-born American Marxist politician who founded the Proletarian Party of America in 1920.

John Keracher was born on January 16, 1880, in Dundee, Scotland. In his early twenties, Keracher left Scotland for England, where he lived for a number of years. He emigrated to the United States in 1909, settling in Detroit.

In Detroit, Keracher was the proprietor of the Reliance Shoe House, a retail shoe store located at 112 Dix Avenue.

In April 1910 Keracher joined the Socialist Party of America.

Keracher was an extremely orthodox Marxist who specialized on expositions of Marx's Das Kapital, particularly on the topics of value and surplus-value, as well as the doctrine of historical materialism. Keracher believed in the primacy of Marxist education of the working class to prepare them for governance upon the inevitable assumption of power through socialist revolution. This program took shape through the formation of a number of local "Proletarian Clubs," later united under the banner of the "Proletarian University," the proto-party organization headed by Keracher.

After the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Keracher and his followers became more and more aligned with the Bolsheviks and he was eventually expelled from the Socialist Party of America along with the rest of the Socialist Party of Michigan in May 1919.

Keracher was a delegate to the June 1919 National Conference of the Left Wing in New York City, called by the organized Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party. He attended this meeting together with four other delegates from the Socialist Party of Michigan: Oakley C. Johnson, Dennis Batt, Al Renner, and A.J. MacGregor.

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