James P. Cannon On Anarchism
The following letter to Myra Tanner Weiss from James P.
Cannon has never been previously published.
Los Angeles, Calif.
July 29, 1955
Dear Myra:
I received your letter of June 9. Sending you my IWW
pamphlet was really a bit of sly calculation on my part. I
knew my IWW pamphlet would stir up the old Wobbly
in you.
Murry may be partly right in interpreting my sending
the pamphlet to you as a recognition that you are an
“anarchist.” But he is dead wrong to deprecate the term
as such. Anarchism is all right when it is under the control
of organization. This may seem a contradiction in terms,
but if it were not for the anarchism in us as individuals
we wouldn’t need the discipline of organization. The
revolutionary party represents a dialectical unity of opposites.
In one sense it is, in effect, the fusion of the rebel
instincts of individuals with the intellectual recognition
that their rebellion can be effective only when they are
combined and united into a single striking force which
only a disciplined organization can supply.
In my young days I was very friendly to the anarchists,
and was an anarchist myself by nature. I dearly loved that
word “freedom,” which was the biggest word in the
anarchist vocabulary. But my impulse to go all the way
with them was blocked by recognition that the re-organization
of society, which alone can make real freedom
possible, cannot be achieved without organization, and
that organization signifies discipline and the subordination
of the individual to the majority. I wanted to have
my cake and eat it too—in fact, I still have the same
idea—but I have never yet been able to figure out exactly
how it could be done.
People who have grown up since the Russian Revolution
and the First World War don’t know and can’t have
a real feel of what the anarchist movement was before that
time, before its theoretical assumptions had been put to
the decisive test. Anarchism was then regarded as the
most extreme form of radicalism. The anarchists had
some wonderful people; they claimed the heritage of the
Haymarket martyrs, and they were greatly respected in
all radical circles. When Emma Goldman and Alexander
Berkman came to Kansas City on lecture tours, we Wobblies
used to pitch in and promote their meetings as a
matter of course.
Goldman was a great orator, one of the best I every
heard, and Berkman was a heroic figure of pure nobility.
It was he who organized the first defense committee and
movement for the defense of Tom Mooney, after he had
been convicted and was on the way to the gallows, when
everybody else was cowed and afraid to raise a voice. I
remember his coming to Kansas City on a nation-wide
tour to arrange the first net-work of Mooney Defense
Committees, and I recall fondly and proudly the fact that
I was an active member of this first committee organized
by Berkman. (Me and Browder!)
The impulses of the original anarchists were wonderful,
but their theory was faulty, and it could not survive
the test of war and revolution. It is shameful to recall that
the Spanish anarchists became ministers in a bourgeois
cabinet in the time of the Spanish Revolution; and that
old-time American anarchists in New York, or rather
what was left of them, became social patriots in the
Second World War. Nothing is so fatal as a false theory.
If I get wound up some day I will write something
about the anarchist movement in America, as it was in the
days before the First World W a r.
So you’re really living it up these days as a full-time
party functionary and housewife. You had better not let
Murry read my chapter in “America’s Road to Socialism”
about the coming jail-break of the housewives from their
kitchens. He might get so scared at the prospect as to turn
against socialism, and we don’t want to risk that.
The weather’s cool and crisp here today, as usual in
this time of the year. How are things on the weather front
in New York? The L.A. papers have been printing a lot of
scare stories about the devastating heat in all parts of the
country outside California. What’s bad weather really
like? I can’t remember.
Fraternally,
J.P. Cannon
No comments:
Post a Comment