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Written: 1964-1969.
First Published: 1971.
Source: A Bulletin Book for Labor Publications Inc., New York 1971.
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The Russian Revolution had a deep impact among American radicals just as it did throughout the world. October showed the empirically minded American socialists that the working class could come to power. The Russian party and its history were generally unknown to the native American radicals and its theoretical ideas were way, way beyond the comprehension of any of the radical socialists in the United States in that period. But the concrete act could be seen and in a general way understood. The challenge of October for American socialists was that, once recognising and supporting the revolutionary act and what emerged from it, would they be able to understand the theoretical development which produced the kind of party which carried through October?
The American Communist Party 1 was to carry over all the contradictions which had beset American working-class politics since the days of the birth of Marxism in the United States in the late 1860s. In this sense the CP was the legitimate heir of the American radical tradition. Certainly all other pretenders to that title – the IWW, the SLP and SP – soon passed into oblivion. However, as a legitimate heir of American radicalism, the evolution of the CP was significantly different from the traditional pattern in Europe and this difference is of considerable importance in understanding the struggle for Marxism In the United States.
Most European Communist parties were born out of rebellion against the degeneration of the major Marxist parties of Europe – the degeneration of the Second International as a whole. The American Socialist Party had never really been a Marxist party and, while it went through a number of crises, it would be incorrect to see its evolution as a degenerative one. Rather it would be proper to see the Communist Party as an outgrowth of a socialist party which itself was in the throes of being created. Thus the American left wingers who formed the Communist Party lacked the all-important background in struggle for Marxism against revisionism which many of the leading figures of the European parties had. The formation of the CP in 1919 was an attempt to create a Marxist party by people who had almost no knowledge of Marxism itself.
Quite naturally the overwhelming bulk of the Communist Party in its early years were members of foreign-language federations. In fact these foreign-language groups made up at least 90 per cent of the membership in this period. 2 Thus, in large part, the creation of the CP was a reflection of the impact of October on foreign-born workers, many of whom came from countries directly affected like Russia, Finland, Latvia, etc. In this respect the early Communist Party reflected in its composition the problems of the actual composition of the industrial working class.
In 1872 Sorge saw the American working class as composed primarily of Irishmen and Germans. In 1886 Engels noted that while native-born workers held the aristocratic positions in labour (some of them now second generation Irishmen and Germans) the poorer workers were new immigrants. By World War I this situation had become more severe. Now the immigrants were coming from the East European and Southern European countries by the million. While some of these immigrants had been workers in Europe and carried over to America European socialist traditions, the bulk of the immigrants by 1900 were of peasant stock, who not only had to become assimilated into a new country but into a new class position as well. This was particularly true of the Poles and Italians who entered the country in such immense numbers in this period. These language, cultural and even class differences in background of the American industrial working class were, in our opinion, the major factor in preventing the development of a class-conscious working class in this country for several generations to come. Only in the 1930s were these divisions overcome to the point where basic industry could be organised on a trade union level.
It was, however, the thin strata of native-born English-speaking radicals who gave the American Communist Party its first political ideas and who were to become the leadership of the party.
Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey) contributed more than any of the early CP leaders to the ideological development of the party. Fraina in his early youth was a member of the SP. Then he spent a good period in the SLP where he received his basic education in Marxist theory (De Leon’s version thereof). By 1912 he developed strong sympathies for the IWW and this led in time to a separation from the SLP. When he rejoined the SP to become active in its left wing in 1917 his ideas were a not-so-unusual mixture of SLP dogmatism and IWW syndicalism. It was with this theoretical outlook that he sought to understand the Russian Revolution and it was within this framework that he proselytised for the Bolsheviks within the SP left wing.
The central theoretical doctrine of the CP at the time of its birth was Mass Action. This concept was imported from Holland where it was first formulated by such ultra-lefts as Pannekoek. Essentially this concept held that the working class spontaneously and instinctively would rise up in massive class actions, such as a general strike (but also including in some ill-defined way ‘political mass action’) and overthrow the whole capitalist system. Considering this it was of course only proper for true revolutionaries to propagate the full programme of revolutionary overturn at every and all occasions and any emphasis on immediate demands was ‘sewer socialism’. Parliamentary action was seen as permissible only if one utilised parliament to advocate immediate insurrection. On the trade union level reformist unions like the AFL must be destroyed as agents of the ruling class and either the IWW was to be supported or we must call for new revolutionary unions which would again reflect the mass action of the class.
It was within this framework that the early Communists saw the Russian Revolution. Fraina declared it to be a demonstration of ‘the meaning and power of Mass Action’. 3 The acting secretary of the IWW at the time stated: ‘Bolshevism was but the Russian name of IWW.’ 4
The most important strain within native-born American sections of the early CP were those radicals who had some experience in the American class struggle. These included William Z. Foster (who joined the party a couple of years after its initial formation), Earl Browder, and James P. Cannon. These men had a syndicalist outlook – Foster and Browder as syndicalists working within the AFL and Cannon as a leading member of the IWW. Their background typified the native American working class. Foster had bummed around the country from one end to another working here and there on this and that, though doing his most significant trade union work in Chicago. Browder and Cannon came from Kansas which grew as many populists as it did ears of corn. They were deeply empirical practical people with no theoretical background of any kind. To the extent they held any theories at the time of their entry into the CP they were undoubtedly of the level of the views summarised earlier. They reflected the consciousness of the native American workers which had been expressed earlier in the Knights of Labor and the IWW and in the great class struggles of the past period.
While these men. especially Foster, had important experience in seeking to organise foreign-born industrial workers, generally this native-born stratum of workers in the early CP reflected a very different America from the America of the Jewish worker in a New York garment sweat shop or a Hungarian or Bohemian worker in a Pittsburgh steel mill, or a Polish worker on an auto assembly line in Detroit. When Jim Cannon thought of his father he thought of American populism, of the great expanding American West and the struggle of the farmers and other ‘small people’ against the banking interests of the East. When a Polish worker thought of his father he thought of a downtrodden peasant living in illiterate existence in the countryside of Poland. These are two very, very different worlds.
The Fosters, Cannons and Browders did not represent the American working class as a whole in the 1920s. They did, however, represent a very significant section of it. The foreign-language groups, in a distorted fashion as we shall see, represented another section of it. The American working class today – the first time in American history that a more or less culturally cohesive class has emerged – is a bit different from both these trends. The footloose meanderings of the Wobblies, their corn-fed rural-based populist cultural and political background – all this is quite alien to most American industrial workers. To the younger generation the life around the Polish or Slovenian home with its good companionship and polkas and its old-world culture is also quite alien.
The problems facing the fledgling Communist Party were immense. A party without any serious Marxist background, it needed to absorb the meaning of the whole history of the Marxist movement since Marx’s time. It was not enough to simply adhere to the Bolshevik Revolution and to call for insurrection here. What was needed was the creation in the United States of the kind of party which led the Russian workers to power. This was not a matter of mimicking the external forms of the Bolsheviks within the United States. It was rather a matter of developing a party capable of understanding Marxist theory and developing this theory in the course of the concrete struggle of the American workers – as an integral part of that struggle.
The equipment available to the American CP for this task was very meagre indeed. They had almost no theoreticians of any kind and those they had were trained in the sterile school of ultra-Ieftism, as distant from Marxist method as those who openly opposed all theory. Not a single one of the native American Communists who had any experience in the American class struggle had any real interest in or understanding of anything but the most rudimentary theory. Furthermore the critical section of the working class the Communists had to penetrate – the industrial workers in basic industry – were divided into a number of conflicting nationality groups.
What the early American Communists needed to do was to pull together out of all this a reasonably cohesive body of revolutionists – no matter how small – willing to learn theoretically and to begin to come to grips with the whole problem of developing a class movement in the United States both theoretically and practically. To accomplish this task it was necessary for at least some of the Communist Party leaders to really ‘go to school with the Russians’ – that is to learn the basic method of Marxism from the Bolsheviks and from the Communist International as a whole. The native-born working-class elements needed to develop an understanding and appreciation of the importance of Marxist theory. The intellectuals needed to develop a deeper understanding of the American working class by listening to those in the party who had played a role in the struggles of the class. The foreign-born workers needed first of all to learn English and begin to play a role as American workers rather than simply being extensions of revolutionary movements on the Continent. Both the English-speaking trade unionists and the English-speaking intellectuals needed to learn about and reach the foreign-born worker with the aid of the foreign-born workers in the party.
The early history of the CP was a history of constant struggle, split and reunification, and the various sections which made up the organisation battled with each other for control of the organisation. From the beginning the foreign-language federation leaders sought to control the organisation. They looked down upon the English-speaking party members as inferior politically and theoretically, as untrustworthy and opportunist. However, the foreign-language federation leaderships themselves were quite similar to the early German Marxist groups in the United States. Isolated from their homeland, the federations were essentially circles of radicals with their hearts elsewhere. They did little to reach even workers of their own language in industry and devoted themselves rather to maintaining their small fraternal organisations in the foreign language ghettos of the major cities. They advocated the most extreme of revolutionary theories – but they advocated these views safely within the confines of the foreign circle existence. They were, in reality, quite conservative organisations which needed to be broken down if the CP was to reach foreign language workers in struggle in basic industry itself.
The native working-class leaders were as anti-theoretical as the foreign-language sections accused them of being. In the whole first period none of them showed any real signs of theoretical development. They did have a much better feel for American reality than the federation leaders and for this reason generally received the support of the Communist International in the internal disputes of the time. These were the people who led the fight to take the CP out of its self-imposed underground existence, to begin serious trade union work, and to develop a programme to bring the basic idea of class politics to the American workers.
The early Communist Party learned theoretically from the Russians. It learned certain lessons so well that American radicalism was never to be the same again. Basically the Russians were able to break the early American Communists from their sectarian ultra-left outlook. They taught them to work in the traditional organisations of the class despite their conservatism and to fight there for a class line. They taught them the importance of transitional demands such as the Farmer-Labor Party and broke them out of the dichotomy of immediate demands as contrasted to the full programme. They taught them, in other words, how to approach the class in development, how to represent the future within the present, as Engels had told them in the 1880s.
By and large the Americans learned these things. Whatever sectarian or opportunist errors American radicals were to make in the years to come they would be within a different, more advanced framework. The Americans learned these things from the Russians because they could see their practical value for the effective building of an organisation in the United States. When Americans went to international gatherings there was only one question any of them expressed any real interest in – the American question. The great revolutionary developments in Germany, the internal evolution of the USSR and the beginnings of the great battles within the Bolshevik party, the struggles to create parties in Italy, France, England and to properly judge the tempo of the development of capitalism in Europe and on a worldwide basis, and in a later period the great Chinese Revolution – these events, though dutifully reported in the Communist Press, were never really understood by the Americans. The Americans played no real role in the internal theoretical life of the Communist International. The great educational experience of the first four congresses of the CI, unparalleled in importance since the death of Marx, left the Americans largely untouched. This is understandable considering the whole past of American radicals.
There can be no doubt that the Russian leaders understood this basic weakness of the Americans and did their very best to encourage healthy development of the Americans. Theodore Draper makes a passing reference to one such example of this. In 1920 Louis Fraina came to the USSR, the first intellectual directly in the leadership of the party to make the trip. Fraina was, undoubtedly, the most gifted theoretically of the political leaders during the first years of the party. Ruthenberg was little more that a capable administrator and Cannon was a mass worker with a deep disdain for intellectuals and theory. Fraina had two conversations directly with Lenin. In the first conversation Lenin urged upon him the concept of a Labour party, which he rejected. In the second discussion Lenin interestingly shifted the area of discussion. ‘During the second interview, which took place while the Red Army was knocking on the gates of Warsaw, Lenin tried to impress Fraina with the need for philosophy in the revolutionary movement.’ 5 Sadly Fraina was soon to leave the organisation and whatever impact Lenin made on Fraina was not to be transmitted to the American party.
This conversation was, in our opinion, an extremely important event. All Lenin needed was one conversation with Fraina on the labour party to see what was basically missing in the outlook of the leadership of the American Communist Party. The party had not the slightest understanding of the basic method of thought of Marxism. It was one thing for the Americans to empirically apply this or that proposal of the Russians to their work in the United States. It was quite another thing for the Americans to break with a way of thinking more deeply rooted in American consciousness than in the consciousness of any other people on the globe. But as long as the Americans borrowed a correct recipe from the Russians without really learning how to cook, they might very well end up borrowing quite a few incorrect recipes in the time to come. This is, of course, just what happened. And every leader, every faction within the early Communist Party was responsible for this outcome.
By 1924 the American Communist Party was still very far from being a Marxist party. It had made substantial progress with the aid of the Communist International. It had broken out of underground existence; it had dispensed with much of the ultra-left baggage inherited from the old left wing; the foreign language federations were no longer the power they once were. But lacking real maturity and devoid of any serious theoretical development, the party was torn asunder by a deep factional division between Ruthenberg-Lovestone on one side and Foster-Cannon on the other. This factional battle was an all-consuming project and the factionalists were concerned above all else with the progress of the faction. Meetings of the International became places primarily devoted to manoeuvres to get international support for one’s faction.
Of course there was a certain political basis for the factions. Basically the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group were the ‘politicals’ in part supported by the remnants of the foreign-language groups while the Foster-Cannon group were the ‘trade unionists’ having the support of the bulk of the native workers in the party. Thus in a distorted way the old dichotomies of American radicalism were perpetuated. On concrete American issues the Foster-Cannon formation generally had a better feel of things – especially when Pepper, a footloose international meddler, called the tune in the Ruthenberg camp.
The 1925 convention of the party put the Foster-Cannon faction in control of the party. But this victory was to be shortlived, for Stalin, through a personal agent, Gusev, rearranged the leadership in such a way as to give a majority to Ruthenberg-Lovestone. This development was the beginning of a new chapter in the American Communist Party ‘ – the Stalinization of the party.
The Stalinization of the American Communist Party was to be a much easier task than the Stalinization of the European parties. These parties by and large, had certain Marxist traditions going back before 1919. This was certainly true of the German, Polish, and Bulgarian parties. Furthermore the leaderships of these parties had played more decisive roles in the internal life of the CI before 1924. They were thus much more developed theoretically, had a much deeper understanding of Marxism, than the small American party. E.H. Carr notes this difference when he comments on the American party: ‘in the years between 1923 and 1926 it reflected with unusual precision the shifts and variations of the Comintern line’. This he attributes to ‘its remoteness from American political realities’ 6 Considering that men like Foster and Cannon had a pretty good grasp of American reality in this period, it would be more proper to view this weakness of the CP in relationship to a changing CI as a reflection of the failure of the early American CP to develop theoretically.
Needless to say hardly anyone in the CP understood in the least 7 what was going on in Russia. Lovestone, who was to succeed Ruthenberg as head of that faction when Ruthenberg died, simply latched on to the current head of the CI, Bukharin, hoping in this way to maintain his control over the American CP. Foster twice sought to oppose the interference of the CI into American party affairs but his opposition was an empirically based one. Cannon broke with Foster primarily because Foster wished to oppose Comintern policy.
From 1925 on, the factional strife within the CP was aggravated by the Comintern, which was seeking to wear down the two opposing factions, not trusting either of them. Whatever political differences had existed between the factions prior to 1925 quickly disappeared and the overriding issue was power ‘ – and power depended on getting the nod from the Kremlin. In time Stalin was able to either break or expel the prominent leaders of the party and create a new Stalinist leadership out of the remnants of the former factions around Browder. This leadership survived solely by supporting every twist and turn of international Kremlin policy.
The Stalinization of the American Communist Party was not a matter simply of the degeneration of a healthy Marxist party. It was rather a process of deformation of a party at a very early stage of developing into a Marxist party. The challenge facing the few Marxists who emerged from the CP in 1928 was not to go back to the healthy days of the early CP. It was rather to begin again, on the basis of the CP’s early work, the task of creating a Marxist party, a task not yet completed in even an elementary form in the United States.
It is very important for the purposes of this study that we pay special attention to one particular figure in the early CP, James P. Cannon. While the other leaders disappeared from American radical politics or played the despicable role of tools of the Kremlin, Cannon was to play an important part in the continuing struggle to create a Marxist party after the Stalinization of the CI.
Jim Cannon was an American-born radical from that great homeland of agrarian radicalism, Kansas. His father had been successively a supporter of the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Bryanites, and then the Socialist Party. Cannon joined the IWW and received within the IWW his basic training in the class struggle. The IWW experience taught him two basic things. First and foremost was his deep confidence in the revolutionary potentiality of the American working class. Second was an understanding of the necessity to organise the class into an effective revolutionary instrument to battle the capitalists. This he felt at the time could be done simply with the IWW’s ‘One Big Union’.
It is easy to understand the tremendous attraction the Russian Revolution had for Cannon and why he thus became a part of the left wing in the SP, which soon emerged as a Communist Party. What is more critical, however, is exactly what concretely Cannon learned from the Russian Revolution.
Interestingly Cannon’s own writings in the 1950s, in which he reminisces over his own past and the past history of American radicalism, reveal the essential lessons which Cannon, as well as others drew from the Russian experience. Cannon’s long essay on Debs shows this very clearly. 8 In a section entitled ‘Debs and Lenin’ he contrasts the two leaders to show what he feels was the greatest weakness in pre-war American radicalism, expressing itself even in the greatest leader of the pre-war period – Debs. Lenin, by contrast, illustrates for Cannon that essential new element which he and others learned from the Russian experience – that essential new ingredient which he added to his outlook when joining the Communist Party. Lenin’s great contribution was – the disciplined combat vanguard party, what Cannon called ‘Lenin’s theory of the party’. 9 The same essential point is made in his companion essay on the IWW. 10
There is, of course, no question of the extreme importance of this lesson if it is really understood. The victory of October was made possible by the kind of party Lenin struggled to create for fifteen years. But this involves far more than a ‘theory of the party’. To Lenin the organisational form of the party was at every moment directly related to the theoretical development of that party. It was precisely Lenin’s great struggle for Marxist method and theory which made possible the creation of a party capable of overthrowing capitalism. Lenin’s specific theory of party organization was but one part of his whole theoretical outlook.
Cannon, and most others in the early CP as well, did not understand this. They responded empirically to the Russian experience and sought to abstract from this experience a useful implement with which to overturn capitalism in the US. To Cannon this implement was the disciplined combat party. So now he was equipped with three essentials – his deep understanding of the revolutionary potential of American workers, his conviction of the need to organise these workers into a fighting class organisation on the economic front, and his recognition of the additional need of a disciplined party to lead the workers in the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
Essentially Cannon’s role in the Communist Party flowed from this outlook. He was from the very beginning in battle for the interests of the native American section of the party as against the foreign-born federations. He played an important role in the fight to bring the party out of its self-imposed underground existence and to begin to develop serious work in the class. He joined in a common faction with Foster in a battle for a line of work in the United States which reflected existing American realities and to gain control of the party apparatus for the ‘trade unionist’ elements within the party.
The primary concern of Cannon from the moment he joined the party until the moment he was expelled in 1928 was the American question. His task, as he saw it, was to keep the party in touch with American realities and to struggle to build the party as an organisation. Cannon never evinced any interest in the great questions of Marxist theory and politics which occupied the major attention of the Communist International in this period. The basic political positions of the movement and its international line and analysis was something to be produced for the party by the CI. The task of the Americans was to accept this as given and to proceed with the practical work of building an organisation in this country. Thus the only questions upon which Cannon was to form definite opinions and fight for were the tactical questions which came out of the American situation. On these questions he had strong opinions – and by and large he was right.
In 1923, at a time when the fight with Ruthenberg-Pepper-Lovestone was just beginning, Cannon made a characteristic statement of his attitude towards Marxist theory.
The American movement has no counterpart anywhere else in the world, and any attempt to meet its problems by the simple process of finding a European analogy will not succeed. The key to the American problem can only be found in a thorough examination of the peculiar American situation. Our Marxian outlook, confirmed by the history of the movement in Europe, provides us with some general principles to go by, but there is no pattern, made to order from European experience, that fits America today. 11 [Emphasis ours]
Of course Cannon was absolutely right in criticising those, like Pepper, who sought to impose in a mechanical fashion a European experience on the United States. But he was dead wrong when he saw Marxism as only ‘some general principles to go by’. Marxism is essentially a scientific method of understanding reality so as to enable us to change reality – American reality as much as European reality. Marxism is neither the imposition of mechanistic formulas on an unknown reality nor is it an unconscious and empirical absorption of that reality unguided by a real understanding of theory.
Virtually no one in the American party, least of all Cannon, either understood or was really interested in the great struggles going on within the CI and the Bolshevik party – struggles affecting all the most important issues of revolutionary politics of the day and in fact of all time. Cannon, like the rest of them, was concerned only to the extent that these struggles affected the American party and most specifically the struggles of his own faction within the party. In fact William Z. Foster was to show greater resistance to the Stalinization of the CI than Cannon – though, of course, only in an empirical way. In 1925 the Foster-Cannon faction split into two factions precisely over this issue. When Stalin had manoeuvred to remove the Foster-Cannon faction from control of the CP, Foster wished to protest this. Cannon insisted that the faction accept and support the CI decision without protest, hoping to get CI endorsement at a later date. On this issue the faction split and Cannon formed his separate faction.
In 1927 when Stalin was preparing his ‘left’ turn and struggle against Bukharin, the Red Trade Union International sought to impose on the Americans a sectarian ‘dual’ trade union line. Foster once again rebelled and Cannon once again supported the International and flailed at Foster.
There was, however, a certain difference in the nature of the Foster and Cannon groups, in addition to this question of loyalty to Stalin, which it is important to note. Basically Foster and those who supported him were trade unionists first and foremost and Communists in the second place. The party, to them, was simply a vehicle to advance their trade union work. Cannon, on the other hand, had developed beyond this level in becoming a Communist. This lesson of the importance of the party organisation, if not understood theoretically, had been assimilated practically deep into his outlook. His supporters within the CP tended to include more organisers and party apparatus men than was the case with Foster. This, of course, explains in part his greater concern as against Foster for the decisions of the CI.
All commentators, including Cannon himself, testify to the fact that Cannon’s support to Trotsky came as a deep shock to all in the CP. In no way had the party been prepared for it. In this sense Cannon’s evolution contrasted even with that of Maurice Spector 12 in the Canadian party. Spector had had doubts over the evolution of the situation in the Bolshevik party since 1923-24 and these doubts were well known within the Canadian organisation. This was not the case with Cannon, who had shown neither interest in this great dispute nor independence from the Kremlin.
Shachtman, certainly not an unprejudiced judge of Cannon, claims that Cannon’s adherence to Trotskyism was purely ‘accidental’. 13 This, of course, leads us nowhere – for instance, we could only conclude that Shachtman’s own adherence to Trotskyism was an accidental response to Cannon’s accident for he had no pre-history on this question either. Cannon’s own explanation of his conversion also is not totally satisfactory. Interestingly, Theodore Draper, the painstaking historian of the early CP, was not overly satisfied with Cannon’s account as he probed Cannon once again on the question several years after his first discussions with him on it. 14
Cannon claimed a certain dissatisfaction with the whole trend of the International before 1928, a certain unexpressed doubt. Then, when he accidentally saw a copy of Trotsky’s critique of the program of the CI, 15 he suddenly saw the light and agreed with every word of it and remained a convinced Trotskyist thereafter. 16
There can be no doubt that by 1927 Cannon was very much in a blind alley inside the Communist Party. Against the will of the majority of the party he and Foster had twice been denied their rightful place in the leadership of the party. His personal experience with Foster since 1925 had not been overly friendly and he had almost as much to fear from a party run by Foster as he had from one run by Lovestone. By 1927 it was becoming increasingly clear that whoever was to finally end up in control of the CP it was not to be Cannon and his group. In many ways his whole life work had come to a dead end. Instinctively he turned away from preoccupation with the factional struggle and devoted himself to mass work. Only the persistent pressure of his co-factionalists got him to attend the Sixth Congress of the CI in 1928 in the first place.
So he came to Moscow a disillusioned man in many respects. His struggle to create an American revolutionary movement seemed constantly to be thwarted – and it was in Moscow that the major problem always was. Cannon reports that Trotsky’s document ‘hit us like a thunderbolt’. 17 But Cannon never explains exactly what in the document hit home with him. This is why his own account of his conversion raises so many questions in one’s mind. The document is a very fundamental critique of Communist strategy and tactics since the death of Lenin. A large section is devoted to the Chinese Revolution, a question Cannon is not known to have shown the slightest interest in previous to this moment. No, we can see no reason why the discovery of Stalin’s errors on China should strike Cannon, the American radical personified, in such a way.
We feel it was that essential thesis of Trotsky’s whole analysis – the conflict between Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country and the struggles of Communists in other lands to overthrow capitalism – which went right to the heart of Cannon’s whole being, which touched all that was fine and healthy in Cannon and in American radicalism as a whole. 18 Now he could finally understand why his own efforts to create an American revolutionary party always went aground in international seas. Why Lovestone was forced upon the American party, why policies which hindered rather than helped the party’s work in this country were supported by the Cl – this all was now clear to him. Having no future within the party but having a deep conviction of the need to create a revolutionary party in the United States, his siding with Trotsky is understandable.
Cannon’s break with the Stalinized CP was no more prepared for by Cannon’s own theoretical development prior to 1928 than the formation of the CP in 1919 was prepared for by the prior theoretical development of the American revolutionists who initiated that venture. Having only four or five years of collaboration with a healthy international force the early communists were unable to create a real Marxist party in the United States. They learned much from the Russians but they did not learn that essential thing – the need to break from American empiricism and to develop a movement with a vital theoretical life and a real understanding of Marxist method. Cannon’s break was to give the American communists another chance to go to school with the Russians – this time Trotsky – and to learn what they did not learn in the earlier period. It was not a matter of maintaining a lost orthodoxy from an earlier period. This time the American communists needed to make a qualitative advance over the whole past history of American radicalism by definitively breaking with empiricism – the method of thought of their own ruling class. They could have found no better teacher and guide in this project than Trotsky. That, fundamentally, was the real challenge facing the American Trotskyists in 1928.
1. Throughout its early period the Communist movement in the United States went through a number of splits and reunifications appearing under a number of different names: Communist Labor Party, United Communist Party, Workers Party, etc. As this is not a party history we are simply using the term ‘Communist Party’ to designate the Communist Movement as a whole whatever its specific name or names may have been at the time.
2. Draper. op. cit., p. 190.
3. Ibid., p. 90.
4. Ibid., p. 111.
5. Ibid., p. 253.
6. Carr, E. H. Socialism in One Country 1924-26, Vol 3, Part 1 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London, 1964), p. 237.
7. There were, however, two minor exceptions – Ludwig Lore and Max Eastman. Lore, the editor of a German paper, was personally friendly with Trotsky and supported him in 1924. Shortly thereafter he was expelled from the party with the support of those with whom he was in a factional bloc at the time – Foster and Cannon. Eastman, a well-known intellectual figure in the United States, was the sole propagator of Trotsky’s views from 1925 until the Cannon expulsion in 1928. Eastman, however, was never a real party man and played no role at all in the CP.
8. Cannon, James P. The First Ten Years of American Communism (Lyle Stuart, New York, 1962), ‘Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Movement of His Time’, pp. 245 ff.
9. Ibid., p. 275.
10. Ibid., The IWW – The Great Anticipation, pp. 277 ff.
11. Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia (Viking Press, New York, 1960), p. 82.
12. Maurice Spector was a prominent member of the Canadian Communist Party who attended the Sixth World Congress of the CI with Cannon. He adhered to Trotskyism at the same time as Cannon and later came to the United States where he played a role in the intellectual work of the American Trotskyist movement in the 1930s.
13. Shachtman, Max. ‘Twenty-five Years of American Trotskyism’, New International (Vol. XX, No. 1, Jan-Feb 1954), p. 17.
14. Note Cannon’s reply to a fresh request in a letter dated May 27, 1959 (Cannon., op. cit., p. 224). The bulk of Cannon’s correspondence with Draper is dated 1955. Draper’s book was published in 1960.
15. Published later in full as: The Third International After Lenin, Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1957).
16. Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1954), pp. 40-50.
17. Draper. op. cit., p. 374.
18. Cannon himself gets closest to clarifying this point when he writes in 1954: ‘When I read Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program at the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, I was convinced at once, and for good – that the theory of "Socialism in One Country" was basically anti-revolutionary and that Trotsky and the Russian Opposition represented the true program of the revolution – the original Marxist program.’ (Cannon, op. cit., page 27). This is the only mention he has ever made of the specific content of the book.
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