Markin comment:
In the introduction to a recent posting that started a series entitled From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) I noted the following that applies to this series on the roots of the American Communist Party as well:
“In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive…..”
I am continuing today in that vane in what I also anticipate will be an on-going series on the early days of the American Communist party from which we who are students of Leon Trotsky trace our roots. Those roots extend from the 1919 until 1929 when those who would go on after being expelled, led by James P. Cannon, to form the Socialist Workers Party which also is part of our heritage. That is not the end of the matter though as the American Communist Party also represented a trend in the 1930s, the Popular front strategic policy, that has bedeviled revolutionaries ever since in one form or another. Those 1930s issues need to be addressed as well.
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Additional comment on this article-Markin
A certain amount of caution is needed in dealing with the Stalinized American Communist Party, as with the Communist International, because the Stalinists, then and now, were more than happy to slander political opponents on their left, and to rewrite history for their own purposes. Hardly a new idea among those who “win” whatever battle they are fighting. But a little bit tough on those of us who are trying to draw the lessons of the past for today’s left-wing militants. This series starts with the reflections of that early Communist leader mentioned above, James P. Cannon, who had his own axes to grind politically, no question. However, as Theodore Draper who wrote the definitive study on the history of the early American Communist Party in two volumes noted, of all the people whom he interviewed for the his books James Cannon was the one that stood out as wanting to remember as truthfully as he could that early history. I will use that statement as the touchstone for using Cannon’s work first. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and the others will get their chance later.
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James P. Cannon
Letters to a Historian
(1954 – 1956)
* * *
These articles from the magazines Fourth International and International Socialist Review are based on letters Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper who was then researching his two-volume series on the history of the US Communist Party
Written: March 1954 to February 1956.
Published: Fourth International, Summer 1954–Spring 1956, & International Socialist Review, Summer 1956–Spring 1957. Source: Original bound volumes of Fourth International and International Socialist Review and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
Origin of the Policy on the Labor Party
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, pp.56-58.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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May 18, 1954
Dear Sir:
This replies to your inquiry of May 15 on the origins of the labor party policy.
I think this whole question of the party’s activity in farmer-labor party politics in the first half of the Twenties ought to be separated into two parts. First, the original policy and how it came to be adopted by the party; second, the perversions of this policy in the experiments, more correctly the fantastic adventures in this field, under the tutelage of Pepper. Here I will confine myself entirely to the first part of the subject – the origins of the labor party policy – reserving the second part for a separate report.
There is not much documentation on this question and I find that my memory is not so sharp as to details as it is on the fight over legalization. That is probably because the real fight was over legalization. The labor party policy, the development of the trade-union work, and the whole process of Americanizing the movement, were subsumed under that overall issue of legalizing the party. Insofar as they took a position on the related questions, the factions divided along the same lines.
With considerable effort I have to reconstruct my memory of the evolution of the labor party question in the American movement. I may err on some details or miss some. My general recollection however is quite clear and is not far wrong. The approach to the question zigzagged along a number of high points in about this order:
(1) To start with, the left wing of American socialism had been traditionally rigid and doctrinaire on all questions – revolution versus reform, direct action versus parliamentary action, new unions versus the old craft unions, etc. The publication of Lenin’s pamphlet on left communism marked the beginning of their comprehension that realistic tactics could flexibly combine activities in these fields without departing from basic revolutionary principle. We needed the Russians to teach us that.
(2) The first approach of the left wing to the question of the labor party was inflexibly sectarian and hostile. I recall an editorial by Fraina in the Revolutionary Age or in the Communist in 1919 or early 1920 against “laborism,” i.e., the policy and practice of the British Labor Party and the advocates of a similar party in this country, who were fairly numerous and vocal at that time. In that period Fraina, who was the most authoritative and influential spokesman of the left wing, was an ultra-leftist. He seemed to be allied with this tendency in the Comintern, which was centered around the Dutch communists and some German leftists. This tendency, as you know, was vigorously combatted and defeated by Lenin and Trotsky at the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921). (Incidentally, you will find Trotsky’s two volumes on The First Five Years of the Communist International, published by Pioneer Publishers, informative reading on this period. It impinges on America at least to this extent: that Trotsky polemicized against Pepper (Pogany), who had been in Germany with a Comintern delegation, and at that time was himself an ultra-leftist.)
This article or editorial by Fraina expressed the general attitude of the party, which was ultra-leftist all along the line in those days. Perhaps I recall this particular article or editorial because I was a quite pronounced “right winger” in the early Communist Party, and I thought that people who were advocating a labor party were a hell of a long way out in front of the labor movement as I knew it in the Midwest. However, I must say that it never occurred to me at that time that we could be a part of the larger movement for a labor party and remain communists. Engels’ perspicacious letters on this very theme were unknown to us in those days.
(3) The theoretical justification for such a complicated tactic – conditional support of a reformist labor party by revolutionists – came originally from Lenin. I think it is indisputable that Lenin’s proposal to the British communists that they should “urge the electors to vote for the labor candidate against the bourgeois candidate,” in his pamphlet on Left-Wing Communism, and his later recommendation that the British Communist Party should seek affiliation to the British Labor Party, gave the first encouragement to the sponsors of a similar policy in this country, and marks the real origin of the policy.
I don’t think this contradicts the statement you quote, from the Foster-Cannon document of November 26, 1924 – which was probably written by me and which I had long since forgotten – that the Comintern’s approval of a labor party policy in 1922 was obtained “mainly on the strength of the information supplied by our delegates, that there was in existence a strong mass movement towards a farmer-labor party.”
Lenin’s intervention in England provided the original justification for revolutionists to support a labor party based on the unions. Our contention in Moscow in 1922 was simply that a realistic basis existed for the adaptation of this policy to America. There was considerable sentiment in the country for a farmer-labor party at that time. The Chicago Federation of Labor was for it. The Farmer-Labor Party had had a presidential candidate in 1920, who polled about half a million votes.
It seemed to us – after we had assimilated Lenin’s advice to the British – that this issue would make an excellent basis for a bloc with the more progressive wing of the trade-union movement, and open up new possibilities for the legitimization of the communists as a part of the American labor movement, the expansion of its contacts, etc. But 1 don’t think we would have argued the point if we had not been previously encouraged by Lenin’s explanation that revolutionists could critically support a reformist labor party, and even belong to it, without becoming reformists.
(4) I do not recall that the question of a labor party was concretely posed in the factional struggle between the liquidators and the undergrounders-in-principle. The real issue which divided the party into right and left wings, was the legalization of the movement. On all subsidiary questions – labor party, realistic trade-union program, predominance of native leadership, Americanization in general – the right wing naturally tended to be for and the left wing against.
As far as I can recall, all the liquidators readily accepted the labor party policy. After the leftists had been completely defeated on the central question of party legalization, any resistance they might have had to the labor party policy collapsed. I do not recall any specific factional struggle over the labor party by itself.
(5) Furthermore, it was the Comintern that picked up our information and our advocacy of a labor party policy at the time of the Fourth Congress, and formulated it most clearly and decisively. I am quite certain in my recollection that the Comintern letter to the Communist Party of the US, announcing its decision in favor of the legalization of the movement, referred also to the labor party policy. The letter stated that the formation of a labor party in the US, based on the trade unions, would be “an event of world historical importance.”
If you will check this letter, which it seems to me was printed either in the Worker or the Communist early in 1923, I think you will find the definitive answer to the question of the origin of the labor party policy.
(6) Pepper certainly had no part in initiating the policy in Moscow “before and during the Fourth Congress.” He was in America at that time. In answer to your-question: “Or did he pick up that ball and run with it after. he came to the US?” – I would simply say, Yes, but fast; in fact he ran away with it.
(7) Valetski, the Comintern representative to the American party in 1922, was one of the leaders of the Polish Communist Party. I met him when he returned to Moscow after the Bridgeman Convention, and heard him speak in the American Commission several times. He did not fully support the liquidators and I had a number of clashes with him. His position after he returned to Moscow would indicate quite clearly that he had not been sent to America with a predetermined decision of the Comintern to support legalization. Rather the contrary.
The change of position and the eventual decision was made in Moscow as a result of our fight there and not on the recommendation of Valetski. He began to shift his position in the course of the debates, but he didn’t go all the way. He tried to get us to agree to a compromise to blunt the edge of the decision, but we refused. I recall Zinoviev saying privately to us, when we complained to him about Valetski’s position: “He is changing. but he is not fully on our line yet.”
Valetski was obviously a learned and quite able man. I think he had originally been a professor, but he apparently had a long record in the Polish movement. They had had all kinds of faction fights in the Polish party. His experience would have qualified him to be sent as representative of the Comintern to a young and comparatively inexperienced party torn to pieces by factional struggle.
Factionalism and faction fights are frequently derided by side-line critics as aberrations of one kind or another, a disease peculiar to the radical movement. But I never knew a political leader of any consequence who had not gone through the school of factional struggles. To be sure, I have also known factional fighters – quite a few of them – who were no good for anything else: who became so consumed by factionalism that they forgot what they started out to fight for. But that’s part of the overhead, I guess.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
P.S. I had never heard that Lenin raised the labor party question with Fraina in Moscow already in 1920. That is very interesting. I think it also supplies corroboration to my own conception, set forth above, that Lenin was the real originator of this policy. He must have turned over in his mausoleum, however, when he saw what was later done with his idea. – JPC
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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
Fraina – The Founder
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, pp.58-60.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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June 15, 1954
Dear Sir:
Fraina: (Re. your letter of May 10.)
It is certainly correct to list Fraina as one of the most important personalities in the formative period of American communism. In my History of American Trotskyism, I stated my opinion that he should be recognized as the founder of the movement.
I believe that John Reed and the Liberator did most to popularize the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the broad public of the American left wing. Fraina’s influence was somewhat narrower; his Revolutionary Age was essentially an internal party paper. In that field he did more than anyone to shape the ideology of the young movement of American communism. At the same time he put the stamp of his own romanticism and sectarian rigidity upon it.
The official propaganda of later years, assigning the role of “founder” to Ruthenberg, always offended my sense of historical justice. Ruthenberg was a big man – in his way – and a strong man among the pioneers, but he was by no means the originator, the “founder.”
* * *
I did not know Fraina personally. I first met him only casually at the National Left Wing Conference in New York in June, 1919. I met him a second time when he returned to this country as a member of the “Pan American Agency” of the Comintern with the mission to unify the two parties. This must have been late in 1920 or early in 1921. The other two members of this “Pan American Agency” were Charley Johnson (“Scott”) and Katayama, the old Japanese socialist then living in New York, who later went to Moscow and remained there. I think this was a joint meeting of the negotiating committees of the two parties.
The only memory I have of the meeting is that Fraina spoke there impartially, on behalf of the Comintern, for unity and conciliation. As in all the joint meetings to negotiate “unity” in these days, the discussion must have been somewhat heated. I remember Charley Scott telling me afterward that Fraina had referred to my conduct at the joint meeting as “factional.” This was probably not inaccurate, as I was decidedly hostile to the manifest ambition of the “Federationists” to “control” a united party. Scott’s remark about Fraina’s impression of me remained in my memory and enables me to peg the meeting.
Fraina left soon afterward on a mission for the Comintern in Latin America. Later we heard about his defection and the report that he had failed to account for some Comintern funds.
I recall a statement by Charley Scott in New York (it must have been late in 1921) to the effect that Fraina had misappropriated Comintern funds and that the matter was therefore out of the party’s hands. Scott said: “For that he will have to account to the Comintern,” or words to that effect. Somehow or other I remember that definitely. After that Fraina seemed to drop entirely out of the consciousness of the party leadership.
* * *
I cannot recall anything coming up about Fraina in Moscow in 1922. I have no recollection of any kind of official consideration of his case during my long stay there.
But here I can report an incident which may be of interest in piecing the Fraina story together. During one of my trips to New York (it must have been in 1924 or possibly in 1925) I was handed a letter from Fraina. I cannot remember who handed me the letter, but I am pretty sure it was addressed to me personally. In this letter Fraina stated that he was working and saving all he could from his wages; that he wanted to make arrangements to pay his debt in installments and to work his way back into the party, and asked me to help him. My recollection of this letter is sharp and clear.
On my return to Chicago I took the letter before the Political Committee and it was discussed there. The decision was made that since his affair concerned Comintern funds, it was outside the jurisdiction of the American party; and that Fraina would have to address himself to the Comintern and straighten out his relations there before the party could do anything about it. I conveyed this decision to Fraina through the comrade who had acted as intermediary – again for the life of me I can’t recollect who it was – and that’s the last report I had of Fraina until, years later, he began to write again under the name of Corey.
* * *
I never met him personally in those later days. But strangely enough, we came close to meeting. He appeared to be breaking with the political line of the official Communist Party, while remaining a communist, and there were some indications that he was becoming sympathetic to the Trotskyist position. It was soon after the Hitler victory, when a new party of anti-Stalinist communists was in the air. In a discussion I had with V.F. Calverton, Sidney Hook, and a few others associated with Calverton’s magazine at that time, we discussed the question of a new party. They asked what our attitude would be toward such people as Fraina, with whom they evidently had some contact and association.
I told them that I really didn’t know what to say, because the old financial scandal would put a cloud over Fraina until it was cleared up, in one way or another. Nevertheless, I was very much interested in Fraina, and hoped a way could be found to collaborate with him. When I visited Trotsky in France in the fall of 1934, I took up the question of Fraina and asked his opinion.
Trotsky also was interested and sympathetic and thought that we should by no means reject an overture from Fraina. He finally suggested the following policy: That the new party would be too weak to take upon itself the responsibility of an outstanding personality who had a financial scandal hanging over him. Our defense of him would not be effective enough to do any good, while involvement in the scandal would hurt the party. Fraina should go back to the Communist Party and straighten out his financial entanglements and get an official clearance from them. After that the new party we were forming could accept him as a member without any reservation.
That seemed to me to be the soundest position to take and I agreed to proceed along that line. Upon my return we became deeply involved in the final stage of negotiations with the Muste group, building up to our joint Convention in December. I think I relayed Trotsky’s advice to Fraina through the Calverton group, but I am not absolutely sure of it. At any rate, we never had any direct contact with Fraina; and soon after that he began to move away from the communist movement altogether.
* * *
Fraina was truly a tragic figure. The deportation proceedings brought against him in the last year of his life, after he had fully renounced his youthful communism, added a final stroke of savage irony to a life which was offered to two opposing causes and was rejected by both.
In spite of all, the best part of Fraina – the young part – belongs to us. When one considers how primitive the American left-wing movement had been in matters of theory, and its desolating poverty of literary-political forces, the pioneer work of Fraina in this field stands out by contrast as truly remarkable. I think it no more than just to say that Fraina was the first writer of pioneer American communism. He did more than anybody else to explain and popularize the basic program of the Russian Bolsheviks. American communism, which stems directly from the primitive American left-wing movement, owes its first serious interest in theoretical questions primarily to Fraina.
It is quite useless, however, to demand more from people than they can give. Fraina was too weak to be a leader. He could not stand up against the brutal bulldozing of the Russian Federation leaders who had the power of organizations and finances and wielded their power as a club. Fraina’s capitulation to the Hourwich group, after the National Left Wing Conference in 1919 had decided to continue the legal fight within the SP, certainly did a lot of damage.
The premature split of the SP, and the monstrous absurdity of the split of the communist movement into two parties at the moment of its formal constitution; and then the hasty, ill-considered, and in my opinion, unnecessary plunge into total illegality-were calamitous mistakes, if not crimes, of leadership in which Fraina was more the intimidated accomplice than the author.
Nobody knows how many thousands of American radical socialists – potential communists – were lost and scattered as a result of these insane procedures, imposed upon the movement by the Russian Federation madmen. I have always believed that two people made it possible for this wrecking crew to work such havoc. They could not have done it alone. They needed both Fraina and Ruthenberg, and got them both for different reasons.
In my own mind I have always blamed Ruthenberg more than Fraina. Fraina was weak, and there is not much that can be done about that. Ruthenberg was far stronger, but he was swayed by an overreaching personal ambition. I ascribe more blame to him precisely because of that. The history of American communism would quite possibly have taken a different course, with far greater advantages in the long run, if Fraina in 1919 had been propped up and supported by people who knew what the movement needed and were strong enough to enforce their policy.
Instead of that, Fraina was brutally clubbed down by the strong bosses of the Russian Federation and left without support by Ruthenberg, who then, as always, thought too much of himself, his own position and his own role. Ruthenberg would probably have been greatly surprised if someone had told him, in those critical days, that the most important service he could render to the cause of American communism was to reinforce the position of Fraina; to create conditions for him to do his work as a political writer with a certain amount of latitude.
The sprawling left-wing movement, just emerging from the theoretical wasteland of its pre-history, needed time to study, to learn and to assimilate the great new ideas which had exploded in the Russian Revolution. The self-centered Ruthenberg could not possibly have understood that Fraina’s work of exposition, at that time, was more important than his own, and that he should lend his strength to support it.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
Four Ways of Viewing the Early Communist Party
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, p.60.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
July 20, 1954
Dear Sir:
I enclose a manuscript (see Fourth International, Fall 1954 – Ed.) which attempts to explain the transformation of the Communist Party in the last half of the Twenties and gives my view of the basic causes. You will note that I have left out all reference to the various incidents and turns of events which you inquired about in your letters dealing with this time. I will answer these questions separately, as well as I can from memory. But the more I thought about this period, the more it became clear to me that the factual story can be meaningful only if it is placed within a framework of interpretation.
As I see it, there are at least four ways to approach a history of the Communist Party in this period, leaving out the official CP version, which isn’t worth mentioning:
1.It can be described as a dark conspiracy of spies and “infiltrators.” (This theme has already been pretty well exploited.)
2.It can be told as a story of the doings and misdoings of more or less interesting people who fought like hell about nothing and finally knocked themselves out.
3.It can be written as an item of curiosa about an odd lot of screwballs who operated in a world of their own, outside the main stream of American life and exerted no influence upon it; something like the books about the various utopian colonies, which from time to time occupy the attention of various professors, Ph.D. thesis writers and others who are interested in things remote from the work-a-day world.
4.Or, one can treat the evolution of the CP in its first decade as a vital part of American history, which was destined to have a strong influence on the course of events in the next two decades.
This last is my point of view. The historian who wants to write a serious work, regardless of his own opinion of communism, will probably have to consider this approach to the subject. Otherwise, why bother with it?
The historical importance of the first ten years of American communism, particularly the latter half of this decade, really comes out when one gets into the New Deal era and attempts to explain the various factors which contributed to Roosevelt’s astounding success in steering American capitalism through the crisis and the Second World War without any substantial opposition on his left.
My own opinion is that Roosevelt was the best political leader crisis-racked American capitalism could possibly have found at the time; and that his best helper – I would go farther and say his indispensable helper – was the Communist Party. The CP did not consist, as the current popular version has it, of the Ware-Chambers groups of spies who infiltrated some Washington offices and filched out a few secret documents. That was a mere detail in a side-show tent.
The CP itself operated during the Roosevelt regime as a first-class force in support of Roosevelt in the broad arena of politics and the labor movement. It played a major role first in promoting the expansion of a new labor movement and then in helping Roosevelt to domesticate it, to blunt its radical-revolutionary edge, and to convert it into his most solid base of support in both domestic and foreign policy.
Furthermore, the Communist Party had to be prepared for this role by the gradual and subtle, but all the more effective and irreversible transformation it went through precisely in the five years preceding the outbreak of the crisis.
Things might very well have happened differently. Let us assume that the CP had developed in the last half of the Twenties as a party of the Leninist type; that it had retained the strongest leaders of that time and they had remained communists and, in the meantime, had learned to work together as a team; that the party had used its monopolistic leadership of the new mass upsurge of labor militancy to impose upon the new union movement a genuine class-struggle policy.
Assume that the CP had contested with Lewis-Hillman-Murray in the struggle for leadership of the new union movement instead of abdicating to them for reasons of foreign policy; that the new union movement under communist influence had launched a radical labor party instead of submerging in the Rooseveltian People’s Front in the Democratic Party; that the CP and the big segment of the labor movement which it influenced had opposed the war instead of becoming its most ardent and most reliable supporters.
All that is just about what a genuine Communist Party would have done. What would American history in the Roosevelt era have looked like in that case? It certainly would have been different. And it is not in the least visionary to imagine that such a different course was possible. The key to the whole situation was the evolution of the CP in the last half of the Twenties.
That, in my opinion, removes the study of early communism from an exercise in speculation about a bizarre cult and places it right where it belongs – in the mainstream of American history.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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