MIA: History: ETOL: Documents: International Communist League/Spartacists—PRS 5
Introduction
by The Prometheus Research Library
Written: 2000
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 5, New York, 2000
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
This bulletin reprints Max Shachtman’s article, “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?”, originally published in February 1936 in the Internal Bulletin of the Workers Party of the United States.[1] The WPUS—formed in December 1934 through a fusion of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) and a leftward-moving centrist organization led by A. J. Muste called the American Workers Party (AWP)—was the revolutionary Trotskyist organization in the U.S. at the time. Shachtman’s document, written when he was a close collaborator of pre-eminent Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, is an excellent presentation of Leninist methods of internal party struggle, illuminated through the political disputes which had roiled the CLA in its last year of existence and were then carried over into the WPUS.
It was through these factional battles, which centered on the correct attitude and tactics toward reformist social-democratic parties internationally, that the young members of the former AWP were forged into Trotskyist cadre. Within the WPUS, a Leninist core around Cannon and Shachtman was pitted against both an ultraleft sectarian current led by Hugo Oehler and a rightist clique grouped around Martin Abern, Jack Weber and Albert Glotzer. In the course of the fight, Cannon and Shachtman won the WPUS majority. Oehler and his supporters were expelled in late 1935 for repeated, flagrant violations of party discipline. In this document, written after the expulsion of the Oehlerites, Shachtman aims most of his fire at the poisonous personalism which had led the Weber-Abern-Glotzer clique to obstruct the fight against Oehler. Shachtman’s goal, as he notes in his introduction, was to draw lessons from the recent internal struggle in order to train the members of the Workers Party, particularly its youth:
Through its bloodstream must run a powerful resistance to the poison of clique politics, of subjectivism, of personal combinationism, of intrigue, of gossip.... It must learn to think politically, to be guided exclusively by political considerations, to argue out problems with themselves and with others on the basis of principles and to act always from motives of principle.
The significance of “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” transcends the confines of the particular controversies which occurred over 60 years ago. The document is not only of broad political interest, but it also provides one of the only detailed accounts of the internal factional struggles in the later CLA and WPUS, written at the time by one of the participants. It should be read in conjunction with Cannon’s 1944 reminiscences, published as The History of American Trotskyism.[2] We include here as Appendix I the “Resolution on the Organizational Report of the National Committee” adopted by the CLA’s third and last convention in November 1934.[3] Although Shachtman wrote that he planned to append this resolution to his document, it did not appear in the WPUS Internal Bulletin as promised. As Appendix II we reprint a report on the Workers Party written by Cannon in 1935 and addressed to the International Secretariat (I.S.) of the International Communist League (ICL), the Trotskyist international organization, as well as an effort to refute this report by Albert Glotzer.[4] Both are referred to in Shachtman’s document. Appendix III lists the National Committee (NC) of the WPUS, established by the December 1934 fusion conference.
“Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” was written on the eve of the formal dissolution of the WPUS, which was a condition for its cadre to enter the American Socialist Party (SP). This entry tactic, which was first advocated in 1934 by Leon Trotsky for France, has become known as the “French turn.” Its implementation by the WPUS was made possible only by the sharp political struggle against Oehler, who opposed it in principle. The French turn proved more successful in the United States than elsewhere, and the Trotskyists emerged from the SP in the summer of 1937 with their membership doubled. They went on to found the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at a National Convention which ended on 3 January 1938. The SWP remained the revolutionary Trotskyist organization in the United States until its descent into reformism in 1960-65.
Cannon’s Tradition, Not Shachtman’s
While Max Shachtman was the author of “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” it does not represent the political positions or methodology attributable to the later political current that bears his name. Shachtmanism is correctly characterized by Shachtman’s renegacy—his flight from Trotskyism in 1939-40, when, under the influence of the petty-bourgeois anti-Communist hysteria which greeted the Hitler-Stalin pact, he abandoned the program of unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II. At that time, Shachtman allied himself with Martin Abern and James Burnham, who figure prominently in “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” Burnham, a philosophy professor at New York University and leader of the former AWP, is referred to in the documents we publish by his party name, West. In the course of the factional struggles detailed here by Shachtman, Burnham was won to revolutionary Trotskyism. But his time as a Marxist leader lasted only a few years. In 1939-40, Burnham was the central ideological leader of the petty-bourgeois opposition which has since become associated with Shachtman’s name.
Trotsky waged the last factional struggle of his life against Shachtman, Burnham and Abern. Their argument that the Hitler-Stalin pact negated the program of unconditional military defense of the USSR was a fundamental capitulation to bourgeois anti-Communism and represented a rejection of the Marxist methodology which Trotsky applied in characterizing the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. Burnham had in fact previously announced both his rejection of dialectical materialism and his view that the Soviet state represented not a degenerated form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but a new form of exploitative class society. In 1939-40, Shachtman and Abern did not openly reject the materialist foundations of Marxism as Burnham did. Moreover, Abern claimed to agree with Trotsky that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers state, while Shachtman declared himself agnostic on the class nature of the Soviet state. Nonetheless, as war began in Poland and Finland, Shachtman and Abern joined Burnham in rejecting the program of unconditional military defense of the world’s first workers state.
Trotsky’s devastating polemics against this wholesale repudiation of the Marxist worldview were subsequently collected and published by the SWP in an aptly titled volume, In Defense of Marxism.[5] Burnham proved the point when he decamped from the Marxist movement shortly after the minority left the SWP to found a new organization, the Workers Party. Still ensconced at NYU, Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941, which posited that a new bureaucratic ruling class was the wave of the future. During WWII, he alternately cheered on either Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, depending on which seemed to be winning at the time. Burnham eventually threw in his lot with the arch-reactionaries, sympathizers of clerical fascism and just plain snobs grouped around William Buckley’s National Review. In the 1950s, he was a surprise witness for the government at Justice Department hearings in which the Shachtmanites were attempting to get themselves removed from the Attorney General’s “subversive list.”
The Shachtmanite Workers Party, which claimed to be Marxist and even to support the Fourth International, went on to become an exponent of the view that the Soviet Union was a new, “bureaucratic collectivist” form of class society, although it did not lump together fascism and Stalinism. This revisionist Workers Party—not to be confused with the Trotskyist WPUS of 1934-1936—existed from 1940 to 1949, when it changed its name to the Independent Socialist League.
Under the intense pressure of U.S. imperialism’s anti-Soviet Cold War beginning in 1948, Shachtman came to see Stalinism as a danger greater than “democratic” imperialism—and to view it even as a new, world-encompassing system. In 1958, Shachtman liquidated his organization into the rabidly anti-communist American social democracy, the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation. He ended his days as an open supporter of U.S. imperialism and member of the Democratic Party, backing the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the vicious, losing imperialist war against the Vietnamese social revolution.
Shachtman had taken the first step along the road of reconciliation with U.S. imperialism in 1939. In rejecting the Trotskyist program on the Russian Question, Shachtman also rejected the Leninist methods of internal struggle which he so powerfully details in “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” In his seminal 1940 article “Struggle for a Proletarian Party,”[6] Cannon skewered Abern, Shachtman and Burnham for their unprincipled bloc and general petty-bourgeois approach to politics, which put incidental organizational grievances and personal ego over considerations of principle. This was a method condemned by the Shachtman of 1936 but practiced by the Shachtman of 1939-40. It was in reference to this flip-flop that Cannon later quipped, “Shachtman was always distinguished not only by an extraordinary literary facility, but also by a no less extraordinary literary versatility, which enabled him to write equally well on both sides of a question. I believe in giving every man his due, and Shachtman is entitled to that compliment.”[7]
Cannon was unsurpassed in his ability to explain complicated Marxist ideas in simple language. “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party,” written with Cannon’s spare sharpness, has a clarity lacking in Shachtman’s more lengthy and verbose “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” Yet both stand as major contributions to the arsenal of those seeking to build an international vanguard party in the Leninist tradition. Cannon’s book was supplemented in 1940 by Joseph Hansen’s essay “The Abern Clique,” an exposé of Abern’s underhanded methods—for example, selective release of restricted political material which enabled him to gain authority as the purveyor of the “real scoop.”[8] Hansen had only recently broken from the clique, and he explains how this gossip mill simply fostered ill will toward the Cannon leadership and its “organizational methods” with a corresponding disparaging of program and principle.
What Hansen doesn’t say, but Shachtman reveals toward the end of “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?”, is that the Abern clique had its origins in the “Shachtman faction” which had counterposed itself to the “Cannon faction” in a heated factional battle in the CLA from 1931 to 1933. Shachtman’s document refers not to the Abern clique but to the “Weber group” or the “Weberites” because in 1934-35 Jack Weber was the principal political spokesman for Abern’s circle. Widely discredited by his role in the CLA, Abern had refused to run for the National Committee and had withdrawn from an active leading role in the party. (For details, see the Resolution on the Organization Report of the National Committee, 30 November 1934.)
Thus, in 1936, Shachtman was polemicizing against those with whom he had allied in an essentially personalist fight against Cannon in 1931-33, and with whom he would ally again in 1939-40. The Abern clique was the Shachtmanites...without Shachtman. In this document, Shachtman reveals his intimate knowledge of the clique’s origins and mindset, reserving special venom for his longtime friend Albert Glotzer who, after 1939, would follow Shachtman through every twist and turn of his descent to social-patriotism. In later years, Glotzer referred to Shachtman’s 1936 treatise as “the dirtiest document ever put out” in the early American Trotskyist movement.[9]
It is therefore not surprising that those seeking to document the Shachtmanite tradition have sought to downplay, if not disappear, this major work by Shachtman. It does not appear at all in the massive tome of reprints of Shachtmanite articles produced in Britain by the Labourite social-patriot Sean Matgamna, who is seeking to appropriate Shachtman’s mantle.[10] And this lengthy work doesn’t even get a passing mention in Peter Drucker’s biography of Shachtman.[11] Nor does any mention of it appear in Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, which ostensibly stands in the tradition of Cannon.[12]
The Prometheus Research Library takes great pleasure in presenting to the radical public this document which the latter-day “historians” of Trotskyism have sought to disappear. Unlike the Stalinists, we do not disappear people from history and we do not denigrate the contributions made by renegades when they were still guided by Marxism and were active proponents of the workers’ struggle against capitalism. Rather, we follow the example of Lenin, who continued to urge his followers to study the early works of Plekhanov despite his social-patriotism during World War I and his opposition to the October Revolution. In earlier years, it was Plekhanov who not only translated Marx’s works into Russian but actively recruited a new generation to Marxism; one of those was Lenin. Shachtman’s document was written during the period when he collaborated closely with Cannon and Trotsky, and it belongs in our tradition.
The Communist League of America
The American Trotskyist movement was born in October 1928, when Cannon and two of his key faction lieutenants, Shachtman and Abern, were expelled from the Workers (Communist) Party for Trotskyism.[13] A delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, Cannon received a partial copy of Trotsky’s criticism of the draft program of the Communist International.[14] For the first time, Cannon had before him a political analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian party and state, which had been given ideological justification in Stalin’s dogma of “socialism in one country.” The disastrous defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 had fully revealed the anti-revolutionary implications of this new dogma.
In his introduction to Trotsky’s critique, which the expelled Trotskyists soon published in pamphlet form, Cannon wrote of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition’s fight against the Chinese Communist Party’s disastrous subordination to the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang:
The Stalin-Bukharin leadership rejected all these proposals of the Leninist Opposition in favor of the Menshevik policy of union with the liberal bourgeoisie which in actual practice gave the hegemony to the bourgeoisie, prevented the real development of the independent Communist Party and led to the defeat of the working class. The bourgeois “allies” of the proletariat became the hangmen of the revolution just as the Opposition foretold.[15]
Trotsky’s critique decoded the programmatic and international roots of Cannon’s manifest feeling of being at a dead end in the faction-ridden American party.[16] The CLA was founded in May 1929 by Cannon and some 100 of his former factional supporters in the Communist Party (CP), most of whom had been expelled simply for questioning the propriety of Cannon’s expulsion. They were won to Trotskyism by reading the sections of Trotsky’s critique which Cannon was able to smuggle out of the USSR after the Sixth Congress.
The American Trotskyists had the tremendous advantage of having functioned as part of an organized tendency in the old CP. However, like most of those won to Trotsky’s International Left Opposition (ILO), they also had to unlearn the scholastic cant and administrative methods that had often substituted for Leninism in the degenerating Comintern.
They had plenty of time for study. Almost simultaneously with the Communist League of America’s founding, the Communist International undertook a left turn which drastically undercut the Left Opposition’s appeal to disaffected elements who had previously been open to its criticisms of the growing opportunist practice of the Comintern. The purpose of the turn was to justify Stalin’s purge of his former bloc partners Bukharin and other rightists in the Russian party, whose disastrous policies of appeasement of the kulaks (well-off peasants able to hire labor) had brought the young Soviet Union to the brink of economic disaster (as the Left Opposition had predicted). Stalin’s flip-flop led to the brutal forced collectivization of agriculture and an adventurist rate of industrialization in the USSR. It was accompanied by the decreeing of a new “Third Period” of post-World War I capitalism, with socialist revolution imminent internationally. The Communist Parties declared the trade unions under reformist leadership to be hopelessly reactionary and undertook to build their own “revolutionary” unions. They declared the mass reformist social-democratic parties to be “social fascist” and refused to engage in any united-front actions with them.
The ILO identified itself as the international “Bolshevik-Leninist” current and considered itself an expelled faction of the Comintern, fighting to return the International to the program and practice that had animated it during its first four years of existence. This was a necessary orientation given that the Comintern still organized the vast majority of the most class-conscious and revolutionary-minded workers internationally. However, Stalin’s left turn politically froze out the small Trotskyist propaganda groups from Communist-led mass organizations, a phenomenon which was reinforced by slander, exclusion and violence. This was the root of what Cannon later referred to as the “dog days” of the Left Opposition.[17]
It was in this context that the personal and organizational tensions congealed in the CLA, creating a polarized organization in which a grouping of younger elements, centered around Shachtman, Abern, Glotzer and the Canadian Maurice Spector, fought against those around Cannon (Arne Swabeck, Oehler and the Minneapolis National Committee members Vincent Dunne and Carl Skoglund). These two factions fought on almost every detail of the organization’s work. In later years, Cannon identified the roots of the CLA’s factional polarization as follows:
As we began to get the writings of Trotsky, it opened up a whole new world for us. And they [Abern and Shachtman] discovered, that is my assumption, that while they had always taken what I said for gospel, they discovered that there were a lot of things I didn’t know. That I was just beginning to learn from Trotsky. What they didn’t know was that I was learning as well as they were. Shachtman at least, I think, had the idea that he had outgrown me.[18]
This polarization began to congeal in late 1931 and lasted through 1933. There were, however, no programmatic or principled differences. As Shachtman details in the final sections of “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?”, Trotsky intervened with great force to prevent a split and both factions agreed to dissolve in the spring of 1933.[19] Over the course of the summer and fall of that year, the polarization gradually subsided. Shachtman’s document gives a detailed account of the end of the Shachtman faction, which continued organized meetings into January 1934. By this time, Shachtman and a few of his supporters, like Morris Lewit and Sylvia Bleeker, had gone over to collaboration with Cannon. As Shachtman notes, “It is from that time that dates the birth of the Weber-Abern caucus!”
The New Party Orientation
Trotsky’s intervention to end the CLA’s factional polarization occurred just a few months before the ILO, on the basis of the manifest bankruptcy of the Comintern’s policy in Germany, declared the CI dead as a revolutionary force. As a result, the ILO raised the call for the construction of new parties internationally. It was the new possibility for intervention and growth coming off this turn, as much as Trotsky’s intervention, which laid the basis for transcending the Shachtman vs. Cannon polarization in the CLA. Shachtman collaborated with Cannon in the process of taking advantage of the new opportunities—centrally the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes and the fusion with the AWP—while most of his former factional supporters around Abern skulked and obstructed, stuck in the “circle spirit” of a small-group existence.
The Great Depression had thrown Germany into a crisis of a depth not seen since that provoked by the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923. From exile since 1929, Trotsky had been warning the German proletariat of the urgent need for joint action by the Social Democratic and Communist workers to smash the ominous threat posed by the fascists.[20] But the Stalinized Comintern, still in its “left” Third Period phase, denounced the Social Democrats as “social fascists,” effectively equating the reformists (and their working-class base) with the Nazis. Thus, despite its numbers and organization, the German working class was split and Hitler was allowed to come to power without any organized armed resistance. Following the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 by the German president, General Paul von Hindenburg, the Nazis moved to destroy the organizations of the German workers, both Social Democratic and Communist, and set Germany on the course to WW II.
The victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 marked not only the imminent prospect of a second imperialist world war but the death knell of the Comintern as an instrument for revolution. When no internal opposition was raised to the Comintern’s reaffirmation of the German Communist Party’s disastrous course, Trotsky argued that the Left Opposition could no longer function as an expelled faction of the Comintern—the ILO’s sections had to become the embryos of new parties.[21] At the same time, Trotsky saw that because of the manifest bankruptcy of the Comintern, left currents were emerging in and from the reformist social-democratic parties. He urged an orientation to these new forces. In August 1933, a plenum of the ILO officially adopted the new course toward formation of the Fourth International, and in September the CLA enthusiastically did likewise. The ILO reconstituted itself as the International Communist League.
The first fruit of the new policy internationally was “The Declaration of Four,” signed in August 1933 by the ILO and three centrist formations: the German Socialist Workers Party (S.A.P.), the Independent Socialist Party of Holland (OSP) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Holland (RSP). The declaration, written by Trotsky, presented an eleven-point synopsis of the German catastrophe and the failure of the Comintern to address it and called for the organization of a new (fourth) international.[22] It was presented to a conference of left Socialist and Communist organizations and was designed to be a step on the road to regroupment with leftward-moving centrist forces internationally. The formation of the Workers Party of the U.S. represented the successful application of this regroupment policy on the American terrain.
Negotiations with the American Workers Party
The turn to the new party orientation was accompanied in the United States by an upswing in the class struggle as the working class began to recover from the fear and economic uncertainty which accompanied the onset of the Great Depression. Hatred of the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover was such that Franklin D. Roosevelt rode into office in a landslide in 1932—an election which also saw a combined vote of over one million for the Communist and Socialist Party candidates. A wave of strikes hit the auto industry as 1933 began, impelling Roosevelt to sign the National Industrial Recovery Act which gave nominal legal sanction to the workers’ right to organize.
In early 1934, the CLA increased publication of the party press, the Militant, to three times a week in preparation for an industry-wide strike in the New York City hotels. A number of CLA members had been active in the union, including B. J. Field, who had been elected union secretary. Field was an intellectual who had been expelled from the CLA in 1931 for indiscipline but was readmitted at the urging of Trotsky. As the strike progressed, Field bent to the pressure of the newly created government Labor Board and disregarded the party fraction and leadership. Field and a few of his supporters were expelled from the CLA in the midst of the battle and led the strike to defeat.[23] The Fieldites complained bitterly about the “Cannon and Shachtman leadership,” the first time this amalgam was ever made in the CLA.[24]
The CLA had already initiated preparations for a new theoretical journal, the New International, as part of the regroupment orientation. The Trotskyists had also engaged in talks with Ben Gitlow’s group, a recent split from Jay Lovestone’s Right Opposition (supporters of Bukharin), though these talks went nowhere. In the midst of preparations for the hotel strike, the Trotskyists addressed an open letter to A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party proposing that negotiations be opened toward fusion. Formerly called the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), Muste’s organization had declared the necessity of building a new revolutionary party at its convention in late 1933, insisting:
The revolutionary struggle of the masses against the capitalist system which more and more depresses their standard of living, takes various forms.... The primary form is the economic struggles of the worker and farmer. The struggle is, however, inspired, coordinated, carried to its goal of taking power, by the revolutionary political party.[25]
Muste had been active in the labor movement since his involvement in the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike in 1919. A former pacifist and preacher in the Dutch Reformed church, he was director of the Brookwood Labor College to educate young workers organizers in the 1920s. Both Morris Lewit and Sylvia Bleeker of the CLA attended classes there.[26] Muste’s supporters had been the most visible force for “progressive,” but generally pro-capitalist, trade-union activism in the early years of the Depression. They were moving leftward under the hammer blows of the Depression and Hitler’s rise to power, but the AWP remained a heterogeneous organization, as Cannon later recalled:
In fact, it could be properly described as a political menagerie which had within it every type of political species. Put another way, the membership of the AWP included everything from proletarian revolutionists to reactionary scoundrels and fakers.[27]
The most well-known anti-communist social democrat in the AWP leadership was J. B. Salutsky-Hardman, editor of the journal of Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Other rightist opponents of fusion included Ludwig Lore and his son Karl. A columnist for the bourgeois New York Post, the elder Lore was in 1934 moving toward the open social-patriotism he later adopted.
Not only did the CLA leadership have to politically isolate or at least neutralize the AWP right wing, but they had to deal with a nascent opposition to the fusion perspective within the League itself. Hugo Oehler, a full member of the CLA National Committee, justified this opposition by arguing that the New York resident NC members, centrally Jim Cannon, Max Shachtman and Arne Swabeck, were moving too fast on negotiations with other organizations when they should have been concentrating on reorganizing and consolidating the League. By March 1934, Oehler was writing to the out-of-town NCers explaining that the New York resident committee was polarized on the question: “Jim, Max and Arne vs. Hugo. Marty [Abern] not taking a position yet.”[28]
Cannon had developed a close personal relationship with Oehler in the early 1930s. They had similar roots. Oehler had taken over the Kansas City Communist Party organization when Cannon moved into the central party leadership in the early 1920s. One of the CP’s best trade-union field operators, Oehler had been the organizer of District 10, which was headquartered in Kansas City and encompassed ten western states. He remained in the CP as an agent of the Trotskyists for the first year of the CLA’s existence and helped lead the heroic Gastonia, North Carolina textile strike in 1929. With little formal education, Oehler acquired most of his book learning in local libraries when he was a field organizer, waiting for the men to get off work.[29] He was to reveal the obtuseness and rigidity typical of an autodidact, but as Cannon later noted, “He was not a typical sectarian...yapping on the sidelines, telling everybody what to do.” Retaining a great respect for Oehler as a mass worker, Cannon recalled that their personal break was “a very agonizing separation.”[30]
It was not internal opposition but the class struggle which intervened in early 1934 to put CLA-AWP negotiations on the back burner. In May, the AWP led a strike at the Toledo Auto-Lite factory, mobilizing unemployed workers in mass picket lines and facing down the National Guard in a six-day pitched battle. That same month, CLA supporters in Minneapolis led an eleven-day citywide truck drivers strike, during which the union virtually controlled the city, finally winning union recognition for the Teamsters. However, the bosses attempted to renege on the deal, forcing the Trotskyists to lead the drivers out again for 36 days in July-August. They won a definitive union victory, breaking the power of the bourgeois Citizens Alliance and its gangs of thugs in what had been a notorious open-shop town. The Minneapolis victory occurred shortly after an eleven-week strike by San Francisco longshoremen ended with a government-brokered arbitration deal that eventually led to a union victory. The San Francisco battle, which had included a two-day citywide general strike in May, was led by supporters of the Communist Party.
As it won the victory in Minneapolis, the CLA moved ahead with the regroupment orientation. In July, they published the first issue of the New International. In August, they concretized plans to launch a united-front defense organization, the Non-Partisan Labor Defense League, modeled on the CP’s International Labor Defense under Cannon. They drew in Herbert Solow and some prominent liberals in the orbit of the AWP. In the fall, negotiations for unity between the AWP and CLA began in earnest, propelled by the victories that each organization had recently led.[31] By this time, however, the CLA was again in the midst of a serious factional battle, with Oehler leading an ultraleft opposition to Trotsky’s proposed tactics toward the reformist social-democratic party in France, the SFIO (French Section of the Labor [Second] International).
The French Turn and “Organic Unity”
The victory of fascism in Germany had a tremendous impact on the working class internationally. France was rocked by social crisis when French fascists carried out an armed demonstration in February 1934, targeting the French parliament. While not a serious military attack, the demonstration had its intended effect: the Daladier regime was replaced by a “strong” cabinet led by Gaston Doumergue. Also in February, the clerical-fascist Dollfuss government in Austria moved to militarily suppress the Austrian Social Democracy. Despite a general strike and armed resistance by the Vienna workers, they were defeated by government artillery and the Social Democracy was crushed.
Under the threat of fascism, French workers and youth began to flock to the SFIO and drive it to the left. Strong pressure was building in the working class base of the SFIO and the French CP (PCF) for unity against the fascists.
In March 1934, Trotsky proclaimed the urgency of the crisis in an article, “France Is Now the Key to the Situation”:
The Second and Third Internationals have played themselves out. Now they are only obstacles on the road of the proletariat. It is necessary to build a revolutionary organization corresponding to the new historic epoch and its tasks. It is necessary to pour new wine into new bottles. It is necessary to build a genuinely revolutionary party in every country. It is necessary to build a new International.
The thinking worker must recognize the iron logic of these conclusions. But doubt born of the all-too-recent disappointments rises in him. A new party? This means new splits. But the proletariat needs unity above everything else. This is simply a pretext, largely arising from a reluctance to face great difficulties.
We reply that it is not true that the proletariat is in need of unity in and of itself. It needs revolutionary unity in the class struggle. In Austria almost the whole proletariat was united under the banner of the Social Democracy; but this party taught the workers capitulation, not fight.... Opportunistic “unity” has proven itself to be the road to ruin....
We need genuine, revolutionary, fighting unity: for the resistance against fascism, for the defense of our right to live, for an irreconcilable struggle against bourgeois rule, for the full conquest of power, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the workers’ state, for the Soviet United States of Europe, for the Socialist World Republic.[32]
In France, where both the SFIO and the Communist Party were mass parties, there arose a proposal for “organic unity,” i.e., the actual fusion of the two parties into one. The urge for unity welling up from the ranks of the PCF and SFIO represented a healthy sentiment for class unity against a rightly perceived foe. But the Communists still ostensibly stood for the organization of the proletarian vanguard into a party separate from and opposed to the reformist, pro-imperialist social democracy. The PCF still held sway over the vast majority of workers who looked to the example of the Russian Revolution. A fusion with the SFIO would have represented a repudiation of the principled split in the workers movement which Lenin had carried out in the process of forming the Third International after the betrayal of the Second International in WWI.
Yet the SFIO was moving steadily to the left, in part because it was attracting leftward-moving elements repelled by the evident bureaucratic bankruptcy of the Stalinists, a trend which was also manifesting itself internationally. In November 1933, the SFIO expelled the right-wing members of its parliamentary fraction. At its Toulouse congress in May 1934, the party voted against forming further coalition governments with the bourgeois Radical Party and invited expelled left-wingers to rejoin the party.
In June, Trotsky proposed that the Ligue Communiste de France enter the SFIO:
The League (like other sections) was forced to develop as an isolated propaganda group. This determined both its positive sides (an honest and serious attachment to the principles) and its negative sides (observing the labor movement from the outside). In the course of the elaboration of the principles and methods of the Left Opposition, the positive sides of the League carried the day. At present, when it becomes necessary to circulate the accumulated capital, the negative sides are threatening to get the upper hand....
It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the united front, i.e., within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed. In actual practice, that means within the framework of the SFIO.[33]
It was impossible for the Trotskyists to function as a faction of the Communist Party—Stalinist lies, persecution, disruption and slander against the Left Opposition were about to escalate into outright murder and assassination. The only practical option was to enter the SFIO.
Trotsky had earlier criticized the French Ligue for not polemicizing sufficiently against the SFIO leadership. He now argued:
To exist as an independent organization and thereby not to demarcate oneself sharply from the Social Democrats means to risk becoming an appendage of Social Democracy. To enter openly (under the given concrete conditions) the Social Democratic party in order to develop an inexorable struggle against the reformist leadership means to perform a revolutionary act.[34]
The entry tactic known as the French turn was also applied in Belgium and a number of other countries from 1934 to 1936. The disastrous consequences of not employing Trotsky’s tactic were revealed in Spain. Preferring unity with the evolving reformists of the Spanish Right Opposition, the Bolshevik-Leninists in Spain, led by Andrés Nin, ignored the radicalizing Socialist Party despite Trotsky’s intense argumentation. This left the field open to the Stalinists, who captured the whole of the SP youth group in 1935, a key accretion of forces which helped give them the basis to betray the Spanish Revolution of 1936-37.
Opposition to the tactic in the French Ligue came from two quarters. A group around René Lhuillier opposed the turn in principle, arguing that it represented a liquidation of the vanguard party as propounded by Lenin; a small group around Pierre Naville also opposed the turn. In the German section of the International Communist League, the opposition was led by E. Bauer. What all these currents ignored, as Trotsky wrote, was that “the League is not yet a party. It is an embryo, and an embryo needs covering and nourishment in order to develop.”[35] That Lhuillier and Bauer’s “principled” opposition was simply the flip side of an opportunist desire to accommodate to social democracy became apparent within a year or two: Lhuillier’s group entered the SFIO and remained, even after the core of the Trotskyists were expelled, while Bauer’s abandoned the ICL for the centrist S.A.P.
While he continued to claim solidarity with the ICL, Oehler organized his opposition inside the CLA in solidarity with Lhuillier and Bauer. A representative of the Bauer group, Paul Kirchhoff (referred to here by his party name Eiffel), came to the United States to assist Oehler in organizing opposition to the Cannon-Shachtman leadership. Oehler and Eiffel won over Louis Basky, a founding CLA member and former leader of the CP’s Hungarian-language federation, and Tom Stamm, a young CLA cadre. Both Basky and Stamm had been supporters of the Cannon faction in the 1931-33 CLA faction fight.
The fight against Oehler’s ultraleftism was greatly complicated by the fact that the Weber-Abern group seized on the issue of “organic unity” to organize a third factional grouping. Though they supported the majority line on the French turn, Weber, Abern and Glotzer revealed their underlying opportunism by insisting that the ICL should also support the slogan of “organic unity,” which meant, in essence, a return to the Kautskyan conception of the “party of the whole class.” Cannon and Shachtman vehemently opposed the position of the Weberites, as well as that of Oehler, and won a slim majority of the CLA National Committee. Cannon was sent as the CLA delegate to an ICL plenum held in October 1934 to decide the issue. The NC issued the following instructions to Cannon:
1. To endorse the action taken by the French League in entering in bloc as an independent faction into the SFIO.
2. To recognize the Bolshevik-Leninist faction of the SFIO as the French section of the L.I.C. [ICL]—and no other. To urge that the dissident comrades of the minority shall subordinate themselves to this section. To declare that any arrangement of forces that the International Plenum may deem necessary for the French section (possible group outside of the SFIO, or fraction inside the CP, etc.) shall be conducted under the auspices and the direction of the above-mentioned French section of the L.I.C.
3. To oppose the standpoint that “organic unity” as such is a “progressive step,” and that the Bolshevik-Leninists shall become the proponents of such a slogan. That in all conditions and with all developments that may take place in the ranks of the working class or in the bureaucracy of the two principal parties, the Bolshevik-Leninists shall, under all circumstances, point out the illusory and reactionary character of “organic unity” as such (even under present “French conditions”) and to emphasize instead Unity on a Revolutionary program in a Revolutionary Party.[36]
The NC majority was certainly correct in its political thrust, but it should be noted that the practice of issuing such binding instructions is antithetical to Leninist decision-making, which requires discussion and deliberation in the highest party bodies, with delegates free to change their minds on the basis of the discussion. The international plenum approved the French turn. While Cannon arrived in Paris too late to take part in its proceedings, he was able to spend several days talking with Trotsky, who had taken refuge in southern France.
Fusion with the AWP
While Cannon was in France, Shachtman and Muste came to agreement on a Declaration of Principles for the proposed new party, defeating the AWP right wing and Stalinist-influenced elements like Louis Budenz who were attempting to prevent fusion. (Budenz was later to turn up as the editor of the Daily Worker.) Within the CLA, Oehler strongly opposed the draft Declaration. It was only after Cannon returned and renegotiated certain sections with Muste that Oehler and his supporters finally agreed to accept it as the basis for unity. Cannon thought Oehler had made far too much of an issue out of political imprecisions in the first draft. In outline notes for a speech on the subject, he wrote of Oehler, “He seized the faults of the first draft to sow panic and break. I saw it as a basis on main points of difference to force thru fusion on clear program.”[37] In additional speech notes Cannon wrote:
Don’t mean to question Oehlerites loyalty or to exclude or expel them but interests of our movement, the Int. and of the New Party demand their political defeat.[38]
The political confusion of the CLA’s Third National Convention, held in late November 1934, is described in detail in Shachtman’s “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?”[39] With three major factional groupings contending, none of the initial motions on fusion with the AWP was adopted. Cannon finally got a majority when he submitted a bare-bones motion that supported fusion while avoiding every other disputed question. The elections for the new National Committee (which was to become one-half of the fused party’s NC according to the fifty-fifty arrangement Cannon and Muste had worked out) resulted in a particularly messy all-night session. The CLAers went straight from this session into the fusion convention on 1-2 December 1934.
All of the CLA’s organized groupings agreed to dissolve and not take the fight into the WPUS. But the personal/political divisions went deep. In the face of these, the speech notes Cannon wrote for the convention banquet sound almost like a cry of defiance:
De Morticus nil nisi Bonum. In a sense we die—But also rebirth. We endured. We survived. Our opportunity has come. Our hour has struck. We are ready—prepared. The memory of 6 yrs is dear to us. Proud of them. Rich & fruitful time of preparation. LD: “Steeled.” Regret nothing & repent nothing. Go forward—& take our banner with us.[40]
One of the programmatic compromises agreed to by the CLA deserves special note—the WPUS was not to be an official section of Trotsky’s International Communist League:
The Party, at its launching, is affiliated with no other group, party, or organization in the United States or elsewhere. Its National Committee is empowered to enter into fraternal relations with groups and parties in other countries, and, if they stand on the same fundamental program as its own, to cooperate with them in the elaboration of a complete world program and the speediest possible establishment of the new revolutionary International. Action on any organizational affiliation must be submitted to a National Convention of the Party.[41]
This principled compromise correctly made the party’s participation in the preparations for the launching of the Fourth International a programmatic question. Oehler, who accused Trotsky’s ICL of unprincipled “liquidationism,” was more than happy to agree to the provision not to immediately affiliate. Oehler and his faction entered the WPUS determined to obstruct the party’s affiliation with the international Trotskyist movement.
“Organic Unity”: A Non-Issue
Soon after fusion, the wind was taken out of Glotzer, Weber and Abern’s sails when Trotsky wrote opposing the French Ligue’s raising the slogan of “organic unity”:
I already considered it wrong to raise the demand for organic unity in the abstract because the entire leadership of the SFIO defended this demand as their main demand every day. Under these circumstances and since, on the other hand, the demand itself met with a quite confused but very sympathetic and sincere reception among the masses, it would obviously be wrong to come out against this demand. But it was entirely sufficient to say to the masses: unity is very good, but we must immediately try to make it understood: Unity for what? We must use the discussion about organic unity to make propaganda for our program.[42]
In May 1935, soon after Trotsky wrote his letter, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with France—the Stalin-Laval pact—in which Stalin accepted the “national defense” of France against Germany. This heralded the abandonment of the Third Period in favor of the popular front. Under the guise of fighting fascism, the Stalinists advocated unity of the workers movement with the “progressive” and “democratic” elements of the bourgeoisie, i.e., those elements who were already in diplomatic alliance with the USSR and those with whom Stalin sought to make an alliance. This repudiation of the political independence of the working class was made explicit at the Comintern’s Seventh, and final, Congress, held in July-August 1935 and dubbed by Trotsky the “Liquidation Congress.”[43]
From this point on—except for a brief episode of ersatz Leninism during the Hitler-Stalin pact—the Communist Parties internationally gave up all but the barest pretense of standing on Lenin’s 1914 irreconcilable break with reformism and social patriotism. There were, however, substantial impediments to the unity of Stalinism and social democracy. When he was still a revolutionary Marxist, James Burnham explained:
Though there is now a temporary political coincidence in essential matters between the social democracy and Stalinism, the crucial fact remains that social democracy and Stalinism reach this position from different directions. Social democracy and Stalinism have been and remain the expression of different class forces and interests. The social democratic bureaucracy, in a crisis (war, insurrection), functions as the agent of finance capital within the ranks of the working class. The Stalinist bureaucracy, on the other hand, functions as the agent of the corrupt, parasitic and reactionary ruling strata of the Soviet Union—that is, of the workers’ state—within the ranks of the working class. For the moment, the interests of the two bureaucracies coincide, but because of the differing social roots, there can be no guarantee in advance that they will continue indefinitely in the future to coincide.
Stalinism must attempt to keep a free hand, to be in a position to make another sudden and sharp turn. For example, if the Franco-Soviet Pact should be repudiated, and a rapprochement between France and Germany take place, the entire Stalinist policy in France, and the war position of the CI as a whole would have to be profoundly altered. This would spike organic unity developments, since Blum and his companions of the SFIO leadership would in that event, though changing phrases, no doubt still remain basically devoted to the bourgeois fatherland.[44]
The degeneration of the Stalinists into outright social democrats did not occur until the advent of Eurocommunism in the 1970s. First in Spain and Italy and then in France, the major West European CPs broke their ties to Moscow as a signal of their fealty to the capitalist order. This was their admission ticket to the popular-front governments which have ruled these countries for the past decade or more. This process presaged the collapse of the ossified and discredited Stalinist bureaucracies in 1989-92 in the East European deformed workers states and the Soviet Union which culminated in capitalist counterrevolution.[45]
In any case, “organic unity” had always been essentially a red herring in the CLA, a pretext for the Weber-Abern clique to claim a political basis for existence. They soon found other pretexts, filling Muste’s ears with their objections to Cannon’s “organizational methods,” obstructing and muddying the fight against Oehler, as Shachtman lays out in his document.
The American Socialist Party
Even before the fusion with the AWP, the CLA leadership had been probing the emerging left wing within the American SP. The SP had begun to fracture after the death of longtime leader Morris Hillquit in October 1933. Lovestone’s Right Opposition was also assiduously following these developments, as was the Stalinist Communist Party. In a memorandum Shachtman submitted to the CLA resident committee in May 1934, he described the divisions in the SP as follows:
1. The group with the greatest number of delegates, the “Militants.” Its second program, just issued, is a typically centrist program, and not of the best type. Its victory is best calculated to save reformist right-wing socialism in the United States. It avowedly strives for a second (and consequently more miserable) edition of the 2 1/2 International of Vienna. Juggling with a few Marxian phrases, its objective role (and in some cases, at least, without any doubt, its subjective intention) is to prevent the movement of the left-wing workers in the SP toward communism.
2. The group with the smallest number of delegates, the Revolutionary Policy Committee [RPC]. Here is a centrist group of different kidney. It represents more clearly than any other current in the SP in the last dozen years the honest groping of revolutionary workers toward communism. Its program, unsatisfactorily brief (far terser than that of the Militants, and even inferior to it in certain secondary points) is closest to the communist program. It carries a good deal of Lovestone’s ideological baggage, but the latter is so light that an active, fermenting group, fraternally assisted by us, can throw off most if not all of it without too much difficulty.
3. The right-wing bureaucracy, probably carrying in tow on all decisive questions such honest fools as Norman Thomas and other professional confusionists. It appears that it will be, numerically, a minority, although it controls and will continue to control all the “heavy” and “opulent” institutions of official socialism in the country (Forward, Rand School, trade-union apparatuses and sinecures, etc., etc.).[46]
Shachtman advocated that the CLA attempt to form its own faction in the SP to fight for the Trotskyist program, seeking to win members of the RPC in particular away from the policy of conciliating the Militants. At the June 1934 SP convention, Thomas blocked with the Militants and they won the majority; the RPC collapsed. Cannon, who had been sent as an observer to the convention, advocated that the CLA regroup the leftist remnants of the RPC into a new national faction.[47] Over the next few months, as it moved toward fusion with the AWP, the CLA evidently also had some modest success with perspectives in the SP. SPers who were won to the CLA’s program were counseled to stay in the SP and fight. Chicago lawyer Albert Goldman, who had been won to the CLA from the Communist Party in early 1933 over Germany, refused to fuse with the AWP and announced he would enter the SP instead. He was expelled from the CLA, but the journal he founded in the SP, Socialist Appeal, would later prove very useful to the Trotskyists during their entry.
The Fight in the WPUS
In the months following the 1934 fusion, Cannon and Shachtman were busy isolating and defeating former AWP right-wingers like Budenz, who—on his way into the Communist Party—argued that the WPUS should present “socialism” as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Oehler, believing that Cannon and Shachtman’s real aim was to enter the SP, aimed his fire against the French turn. Entry into the American SP was an unrealistic perspective as long as the rightist SP “Old Guard” controlled the organization in New York, where the majority of WPUS members lived. But Cannon rightly argued that the WP had to pay attention to developments in the SP:
There is no reasonable ground that I can see for the assertion that our road leads through the Socialist Party, but I do believe most decidedly that the development of our movement into a mass party leads through a fusion of our party with the eventually developed left wing in the SP. We have a tremendous advantage over the revolutionary groups in Europe in the fact that we have a fairly secure independent position, a strong press and seasoned cadres. This ought to put us in a position to make terms with the left Socialists who eventually come to the point of a revolutionary position; but we will never get to this point if we do not have a correct and realistic tactic toward the SP. One of the really big and in my opinion irreconcilable issues between us and the Oehler-Zack combination is indeed over this question of the estimation of the SP and CP. We have a dozen instances in the past weeks from the positions they have taken to show that if they make a distinction between the CP and SP it is in favor of the former.[48]
Oehler began to campaign against the ICL’s “capitulation” to the social democracy, also charging that Trotsky wielded far too much authority in the international organization. He won a small following for his views, centered in the New York local and youth group. In a report to the International Secretariat, Cannon, Swabeck and Shachtman complained that the Oehlerites
advanced the charge that we are scheming to take the WP into the American Socialist Party. To this were added outrageous slanders to the effect that Cannon and Shachtman were already collaborating secretly with SP right wing and “Militant” leaders. Such contacts as we had in the SP were poisoned by this slander campaign, militating against our efforts to influence the leftward movements.[49]
The documents we reprint in this bulletin describe the WPUS discussion in detail, so we give only a brief overview here. Oehler and his supporters brought the fight into the open at the new party’s first national gathering, an Active Workers Conference held in Pittsburgh in March 1935. Cannon later described this event as a “factional shambles such as I have never seen before in such a setting.”[50] Nonetheless, at an NC plenum which convened in Pittsburgh at the same time, Muste and most of the former AWPers voted to condemn Oehler’s views and to collaborate with the ICL and the Dutch RSAP (Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party) of Henricus Sneevliet in preparations for a founding conference of the Fourth International.[51]
After the Pittsburgh meetings, Cannon and Shachtman moved to politically defeat the Oehlerites and stop them from paralyzing the party’s activity. They took aim at Joseph Zack, who had joined forces with Oehler soon after coming over to the WPUS from the Communist Party. Zack, who retained a good dose of Third Period dual unionism, was expelled for publicly asserting views which were not those of the WPUS.
An NC plenum was called for June, and Cannon and Shachtman geared up for an all-out fight. But Muste, his ears filled with Weber-Abern poison against Cannon’s “organizational methods,” balked. The political basis for Muste’s virtual bloc with Oehler and the Weber-Abern clique at this time was later explained by Cannon:
By the time of the June Plenum Muste had become more and more suspicious that we might possibly have some ideas about the Socialist Party that would infringe upon the integrity of the Workers Party as an organization. He was dead set against that, and he entered into a virtual, though informal, bloc with the Oehlerites.[52]
The plenum only narrowly carried (by a vote of eight to seven) a resolution by Cannon and Shachtman calling on the WP to sign the “Open Letter for the Fourth International.”[53] This document, following on the earlier “Declaration of Four,” was cosigned by the ICL and RSAP as well as the Workers Party. It established a Provisional Contact Committee to issue an internal bulletin and make preparations for an international Trotskyist conference. Muste advocated that the German S.A.P. also be approached to sign the Open Letter but his motion failed five to ten.[54] Muste’s proposal represented a step backward from the political and programmatic clarification that had been achieved since the signing of “The Declaration of Four.”
At the June Plenum, the Cannon-Shachtman leadership was in a minority on most other issues: Muste’s bloc with Oehler, bolstered by the Abern-Weber clique, carried the day. The plenum voted to open a party discussion on international relations and on the party’s attitude toward the CP and SP. This was a fluid situation, and for many of the former AWP members it was their first experience of factional political struggle. One such was Ted Grant, a worker from Ohio who came from the AWP into the Workers Party. His recollection of the June Plenum showed what a powerful impact Cannon had:
When the plenum finally returned to the agenda I could see Jim with sleeves rolled up, a carton of milk for his ulcer in front of him, his face icy calm as he concentrated on his notes. He looked like a fighter waiting for the bell. When he rose to speak an unusual thing happened—the hubbub subsided and the stormy hall became silent. We fully expected him to shout brutal insults, loud denunciations, etc., but to our complete surprise Jim spoke quietly, calmly, and convincingly in language that any ordinary worker could understand. He began with a rich, all-sided examination of the rapid changes that were taking place in the SP, painstakingly explaining why it was important for us to give our major attention to its emerging left wing. Because the SP was much larger than we were, the ferment in its ranks was attracting and recruiting worker activists and rebel youth while the WP was stymied. There wasn’t much time to take advantage of this opportunity because the Stalinists and Lovestoneites were ready to move in and grab off these militants. He reminded us that the WP was not yet a party, simply the propaganda nucleus with which we could build a mass workers’ party. He spelled out the methods we would use, e.g., more articles about them in our press, personal contacts, establishment of Trotskyist fractions. Exactly how we would unify our forces organizationally with their best elements would have to await further developments. Finally, he said, this question will not be settled here; we will launch a full-scale democratic discussion of the political differences with the aim of educating the whole party. Then the rank and file of the party will make the final decision at a convention—that’s the Marxist method.
This Bolshevik method of a free, democratic, organized factional struggle to settle serious differences over program and policy was brand new to us....
Jim’s speeches gave us our first lesson in the ABCs of principled Marxist politics as he fairly but mercilessly dissected the political position of each group in our bloc. We noticed at once that Jim didn’t stoop to petty debater’s points or misrepresent an opponent’s position. He stated each position fully and fairly and answered them squarely in such a way as to obtain the maximum educational value for the membership. Oehler, the die-hard sectarian, was opposed in principle to turning our attention to the SP now or ever. We had seen how disruptive the Oehlerites were at the Pittsburgh Active Workers Conference in March. Their arguments were completely sterile and unrealistic. Muste was opposed on the grounds that we should be exerting all our efforts to recruit to the WP, a policy that could lead us into stagnation and decay. Abern, the perennial cliquist who substituted personal relations for party discipline, had no interest in political questions, only used them to serve his organizational ends.
Jim’s critical analysis was a revelation. For the first time it became apparent to us that each member of our bloc had different principles and motives for joining the bloc. Jim put the right name on it—an unprincipled bloc. He stressed that rigid ultra-leftism and organizational fetishism could seriously restrict the party’s freedom to make the tactical moves necessary to consolidate all potentially revolutionary militants on a Marxist program, and build a workers’ combat party. We could easily understand this last point because we were leading mass organizations and were going through similar experiences in the field; in fact, this point illuminated the very essence of the different positions at the plenum.[55]
Shachtman’s document expresses the political clarity that was won in the course of battle under Cannon’s leadership.
The practice in the CLA and WPUS of maintaining “discipline” of higher party bodies against the membership—forbidding members of these bodies to report disputes within leading committees to the membership as a whole for debate—has nothing in common with the Leninist conception of party leadership. While it is generally advisable to debate questions in the leading bodies first to gain as much clarity as possible for further party discussion, it is the right and duty of a Leninist party leader to attempt to mobilize the membership behind his position and, in the case of matters of principle or programmatic questions, to build a faction. In fact, “committee discipline” was honored only in the breach in the WPUS.
After four months of internal discussion, the bloc between Muste and Oehler was shattered. At the October 1935 Plenum, the Oehlerites’ position was rejected and they were given stern warnings to cease any further violations of party discipline. They ignored these and shortly after were expelled from the party.[56] This meant that the WPUS was ready to move quickly to take advantage of the situation when the rightist Old Guard finally split from the SP in December 1935 to found the Social Democratic Federation. At the March 1936 WPUS convention held the month after “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” was published, the Cannon-Shachtman leadership finally obtained a decisive mandate in favor of the policy of the French turn as applied to the Socialist Party in the U.S.
The entry into the SP is outside the scope of this bulletin. We note that in the course of their year-and-a-half entry, the American Trotskyists more than doubled their membership. When the Socialist Workers Party was founded in January 1938, it had some 1,500 members. The new party had acquired the majority of the SP youth and valuable accretions of trade unionists in the maritime industry. Cannon later noted with some satisfaction that the entry dealt a death blow to the SP:
Since then the SP has progressively disintegrated until it has virtually lost any semblance of influence in any party of the labor movement.... Comrade Trotsky remarked about that later, when we were talking with him about the total result of our entry into the Socialist Party and the pitiful state of the organization afterward. He said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single member.[57]
Shachtman on His Way to Renegacy
When Shachtman rejoined the Abern cliquists in 1939-40, his authorship of “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” caused him no small embarrassment. In response to repeated taunts about this polemic against Abern’s tendency to put organizational grievances against Cannon above all questions of program and principle, Shachtman was finally forced to reply:
I have no intention of evading the famous “Abern question.” I have had in the past many sharp disputes with the old Weber-Abern group in general, and with Comrade Abern in particular. Indeed, I once wrote a very harsh and bitter polemical document against that group which Cannon flatteringly calls a “Marxist classic.” If a historical study-circle were to be formed tomorrow to consider that period in our party history, there is much in that document I would repeat, much I would moderate, and much I would discard.[58]
Shachtman’s later disdain notwithstanding, “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” stands up very well in the harsh light of historical hindsight and other available documentation from the period. We agree with Cannon: it’s a Marxist classic.
Prometheus Research Library
August 2000
1. Workers Party Internal Bulletin No. 3, Sections 1 and 2 (February 1936).
2. James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944 [Pathfinder Press, 1972]), 169-233. Hereafter referred to as History.
3. Reprinted from the original mimeographed version in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library. The resolution was also published in James P. Cannon Writings and Speeches: The Communist League of America 1932-34 (New York: Monad Press, 1985), 374-379.
4. “Letter Written by Cannon to International Secretariat,” 15 August 1935 and “Letter by Glotzer to International Secretariat,” 20 November 1935, both from International Information Bulletin No. 3, published by the National Committee of the Workers Party U.S., 12 February 1936.
5. Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942 [Pathfinder Press, 1973]). In January 1939, Burnham and Shachtman had co-authored “Intellectuals in Retreat,” an article which was published in the SWP’s theoretical magazine, New International, which they jointly edited. Shachtman here announced that Burnham’s rejection of dialectical materialism had no bearing on his concrete politics. Trotsky called this assertion “the greatest blow that you, personally, as the editor of New International, could have delivered to Marxist theory” (In Defense of Marxism, 46).
6. James P. Cannon, “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party,” 1 April 1940, originally appeared in SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. II, No. 3, April 1940. It was reprinted along with correspondence and other documents of the 1939-40 faction fight in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1943 [Pathfinder Press, 1972]).
7. Cannon, History, 214.
8. Joseph Hansen, “The Abern Clique,” originally mimeographed and circulated internally in the SWP, 1940. It was reprinted by the SWP in an Education for Socialists bulletin, September 1972.
9. Albert Glotzer, interview with PRL, 2 April 1997.
10. Sean Matgamna, ed., The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, Volume 1 (London: Phoenix Press, 1998). For a critique of Shachtman’s theory of bureaucratic collectivism see “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class’ Theories; Tony Cliff and Max Shachtman: Pro-Imperialist Accomplices of Counterrevolution,” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 55, Autumn 1999.
11. Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the “American Century” (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994). Drucker does not mention the fight against Oehler either.
12. George Breitman, Paul Le Blanc and Alan Wald, Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). Breitman’s essay was published posthumously.
13. The Workers Party was the name adopted by the American Communist movement when it moved to unify and legalize its status in December 1921. The name was modified to Workers (Communist) Party in 1925 and finally changed to Communist Party in 1929. The Workers Party of the 1920s is not to be confused with either the Workers Party of the U.S. of 1934-36 or the revisionist Shachtmanite organization of the 1940s. To avoid confusion, we will refer to the Workers Party of 1921-29 as the Communist Party (CP).
14. The work is today better known under the title The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1936 [Pathfinder Press, 1970]).
15. James P. Cannon, 3 January 1929, introduction to The Draft Program of the Communist International, published as a Militant pamphlet. Unfortunately, Cannon’s introduction does not appear in James P. Cannon Writings and Speeches: The Left Opposition in the U.S. 1928-31 (New York: Monad Press, 1981). It was included as an appendix to the 1936 edition of The Third International After Lenin, though it is not listed in the table of contents. The 1929 pamphlet contained the first and third sections of Trotsky’s critique of the Sixth Congress program, the portions of the document which Cannon obtained when he attended the Congress in 1928. The second section, “Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch,” was published in 1930 as a pamphlet under the title The Strategy of the World Revolution.
16. For the record of the Cannon faction in the early Communist Party see James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches 1920-1928 (New York: Prometheus Research Library, 1992).
17. Cannon, History, 80-100.
18. James P. Cannon, unpublished interview with Harry Ring, 13 February 1974, 16.
19. In “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?” Shachtman, evidently misreading the dates on some personal correspondence, wrongly dated Trotsky’s intervention as Spring 1934. All the letters he quotebs were written in 1933, and we have corrected the dates here.
The PRL has collected copies of the available documentation of the fight, including Internal Bulletins, mimeographed documents, personal correspondence and minutes. Cannon’s major writings on the subject appear in James P. Cannon Writings and Speeches: The Communist League of America 1932-34, op. cit. Trotsky’s letters are published for the most part in Writings of Leon Trotsky, Supplement 1929-33 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979).
20. Trotsky’s major articles concerning Germany in the early 1930s appear in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971). Many of the articles in this collection were serialized in the CLA’s paper, the Militant, in 1931-33. In addition, the CLA published several as separate pamphlets: “The Turn in the Communist International and the German Situation”(1930), “Germany—The Key to the International Situation” (1931) and “The Only Road for Germany” (1932).
21. Leon Trotsky, “It Is Impossible to Remain in the Same ‘International’ with Stalin, Manuilsky, Lozovsky and Company,” 20 July 1933, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 17-24 and “For New Communist Parties and the New International,” 27 July 1933, ibid., 26-27.
22. Leon Trotsky, “The Declaration of Four; On the Necessity and Principles of a New International,” 26 August 1933, ibid., 49-52.
23. Cannon, History, 126-135.
24. B. J. Field, A. Caldis, J. Carr, D. Levet, A. Russell, P. Myers, E. Field, “The Lessons of the New York Hotel Strike,” n.d. [March 1934]. In the collection of the PRL.
25. quotebd in “An Open Letter to the American Workers Party,” Militant, 27 January 1934.
26. Morris Lewit, interview with PRL, 21 April 1993.
27. Cannon, History, 171.
28. Hugo Oehler, letter to John Edwards, 5 March 1934, published in International News, Special Number 039, n.d., published by the Left Wing Group in the Workers Party U.S.A., from the Revolutionary Workers Collection, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University.
29. Hugo Oehler, interview with PRL, 7 June 1977.
30. James P. Cannon, unpublished interview with Harry Ring, 8 March 1974.
31. Cannon, History, 221. Cannon notes that the idea of speeding up the fusion negotiations was hatched while he was in Minneapolis.
32. Leon Trotsky, “France Is Now the Key to the Situation: A Call for Action and Regroupment After the French and Austrian Events,” March 1934, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34, op. cit., 240-241.
33. Leon Trotsky, “The League Faced with a Turn,” June 1934, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 33-36.
34. Leon Trotsky, “The League Faced with a Decisive Turn,” June 1934, ibid., 43-44.
35. Leon Trotsky, “The League Faced with a Turn,” op. cit., 38.
36. “Statement by National Committee,” CLA Internal Bulletin, No. 17, October 1934, 24. Oehler opposed the entire resolution, and Abern, Glotzer and Spector opposed the section on “organic unity.” Weber was not a member of the CLA National Committee.
37. James P. Cannon, “Oehler’s Theory of Pressure,” speech notes, 1934, James P. Cannon and Rose Karsner Papers 1919-1974, Archives Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter referred to as the Cannon Papers) Box 28, Folder 4.
38. James P. Cannon, “Where Does Oehler’s Position Lead?”, Cannon Papers, Box 28, Folder 4.
39. Partial draft minutes of the Third National Convention of the CLA confirm Shachtman’s account. These typed minutes with handwritten annotations are in the collection of the PRL.
40. James P. Cannon, notes for speech at CLA convention, Cannon Papers, Box 28, Folder 4.
41. Declaration of Principles and Constitution of the Workers Party of the U.S., Workers Party pamphlet, n.d. [1935].
42. Leon Trotsky, letter to Glotzer and Weber, 2 March 1935, Albert Glotzer Papers in the Archives of the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, Box 3. Translation from the German by the PRL.
43. Leon Trotsky, “The Comintern’s Liquidation Congress,” 23 August 1935, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 84-94.
44. John West [James Burnham], “The Question of Organic Unity,” New International, February 1936, 21.
45. See especially: Joseph Seymour, “On the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe,” and Albert St. John, “For Marxist Clarity and a Forward Perspective,” Spartacist (English-language edition), No. 45-46, Winter 1990-91 and How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled, Spartacist Pamphlet, August 1993.
46. Minutes of CLA National Committee, 29 May 1934.
47. Minutes of CLA National Committee, 25 June 1934.
48. From “Excerpts from J. Cannon’s letter to Muste,” 22 May 1935, Exile Papers of Lev Trotskii, the Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter referred to as the Trotsky Exile Papers), 13906.
49. Cannon, Shachtman, Swabeck, “Report to the International Secretariat,” undated but from internal evidence written in late June or early July 1935, Trotsky Exile Papers, 15907.
50. Cannon, History, 201.
51. The Dutch OSP, which signed “The Declaration of Four,” merged with Sneevliet’s RSAP in 1935. The other signatory, the German S.A.P., had since moved to the right, dropping the demand for a new international altogether.
52. Cannon, History, 210.
53. Leon Trotsky, “Open Letter for the Fourth International; To All Revolutionary Working Class Organizations and Groups,” Spring 1935, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, op. cit., 19-28.
54. Minutes of the June WPUS National Committee Plenum, as well as of the subsequent October Plenum, were approved and mimeographed. Copies exist in the PRL.
55. Ted Grant essay in James P. Cannon As We Knew Him (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 93-98.
56. A few later rejoined the Trotskyists; see Max Shachtman, “Footnote for Historians,” New International, December 1938, 377-379.
57. Cannon, History, 252.
58. Max Shachtman, “The Crisis in the American Party; An Open Letter in Reply to Comrade Leon Trotsky,” Socialist Workers Party Internal Bulletin, Vol. II, No. 7, January 1940, 18.