The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For A Workers Government

Click on the headline to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for an online copy of his 1940s documents on the labor party question in the United States in his time.


These notes (expanded) were originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.

I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in this space as well.
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The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]

For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.

That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.

Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.

Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.

The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).

Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)

So much then for the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).

America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were.

Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is about what happened when those efforts started.

[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]


Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.

And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- 1930s American Socialist Workers Party Leader Max Shachtman-The Question of a Labor Party-(1938)

Click on the headline to link to a Max Shachtman Internet Archives online copy of The Question Of The Labor Party (1938)(with then SWP leader James Burnham

Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
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Markin comment on this article:

Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism back in the 1930s and believe it. Later he could speak that language only at Sunday picnics and the like as he drifted back into the warm embrace of American imperialism. James Burnham's ability to "speak" Marxism was of much shorter duration and quicker denial.

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-Early Years of the American Communist Movement-Origin of the Policy on the Labor Party

Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of Early Years of the American Communist Movement-Origin of the Policy on the Labor Party

Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-American Communist Party Leader William Z. Foster- An Appraisal of the Man and His Career((1954-58)

Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of American Communist Party Leader William Z. Foster- An Appraisal of the Man and His Career((1954-58)


Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-The Lessons of The Great Minneapolis Strikes of 1934 (1944)

Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of The Lessons of The Great Minneapolis Strikes of 1934 (1944)

Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.

From The Archives Of The International Communist League- For Class Action Against the War: Against NPAC Pop Fronts (1971)

Markin comment:

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 than 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. Debs' 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. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:

Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.

What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.

That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
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For Class Action Against the War: Against NPAC Pop Fronts
Spartacist Supplement, July 1971

The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe’s threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP’s much-touted "mass movement" accomplished?—the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism—there can be no way forward.

Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year—an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion—produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivaling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.

The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres of students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoades to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fitzsimmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons—labor’s "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.

The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed—at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to face down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.

It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters, who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country’s strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes—a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.

What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.

NPAC’s Predecessor

The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year’s "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officially endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew" —a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidarize with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.

In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions, Committees, Conferences, Caucuses, Congresses, Conventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party’s proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobilizations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world—by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie’s program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.

"Mass Actions"

To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:

"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War."
(Militant, 28 May 1970)

And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions," Jenness’ statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla, at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP’s "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back-handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.

Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP’s current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism’s continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrell Dobbs—then and now a principal leader of the SWP—wrote:

"… the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along we must be in the unions… ."
—SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15, No. 6, March 1953 [our emphasis]
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simply a matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.

Clear-Cut Choice

Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course—the course of class collaboration and betrayal.

On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration—the SWP’s conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWP electoral campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism—like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question—tail-ending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967—recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)

The SWP Rediscovers Workers

The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP’s usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces that NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.

But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlain with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left’s attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS’s "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP’s Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.

To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartke) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers’ own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP’s sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most self-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity—a unity based on a program of international class struggle:

Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence" the SWP-NPAC leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement. The major activity of the movement’s "mass actions" has been to provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.

2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the adherence of "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.

A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.

3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.

4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation of the SWP-NPAC—no negotiations, no timetables! We must make it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions—de-escalation, troop shifts, moratoriums—to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in Asia!

5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution—No Confidence in Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands "self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People’s Peace Treaty). All Indochina Must Go Communist!

[Inset box]

It Takes One to Know One
In an article on the antiwar movement, veteran anti-communist Michael Harrington evaluated the role of the "Trotskyist" SWP in the single-issue, anti-war movement to which it has devoted so much attention since 1965. Discussing the April 24 demonstration, Harrington showed he and his co-thinkers have reason to be grateful to the SWP for the results of its "leadership" in the anti-war movement:

"… to the extent that the Trotskyists did influence the event, they carried out one of the most remarkable exercises in dupery in our political history: they duped themselves. For they are sworn opponents of the ‘class collaborationists’ in the Kennedy and McCarthy movements and bitter foes of the notion that Democratic Congressmen can end the war—and yet they helped assemble a gigantic audience which demonstrated in favor of just such an approach. What happened was that the Trotskyists, who were organizing the rally at the start and doing their best to attract a reasonably large crowd, so successfully adapted to the position of the masses they were supposed to be manipulating that they did yeoman work pushing views they regard as dangerous and illusory." (Michael Harrington in the New York Times magazine, 30 May 1971)

*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party -At The Communist International Sixth Congress (1928)

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.
********
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

**********

James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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At the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern

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Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.18 No.2, Spring 1957, pp.61-65.
Original bound volumes of 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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February 1, 1956

Dear Sir:

There is very little I can add to what I have already written about the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern (1928) in the History of American Trotskyism. That report on the Congress as a whole is meager enough, and the reason for it is frankly explained there. The simple truth is that in the first period after our arrival in Moscow, I, like all the other American delegates, was far more concerned about the fight over the American question than the work of the Congress in general. Then, after I got hold of a copy of Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program, my interest and attention was concentrated on that and what I would do about it after I got back home.

Maurice Spector, a top leader of the Canadian party, read the Criticism at the same time and his reaction to it was the same as mine. Thereafter we lost interest in the official proceedings. We made a compact to fight for Trotsky’s cause, but we knew that it would be futile and tactically unwise to begin our fight in Moscow. We held a continuous “Congress” of our own about Trotsky’s great document and its implications. As I said in the History, “We let the caucus meetings and the Congress sessions go to the devil while we studied this document.”

I realize that this puts me down as a poor reporter and convicts me of one-sidedness. This quality, however, is sometimes useful in a political worker. It certainly was so in this case; the “one side” represented by Trotsky’s criticism of the draft program was far more important than all the rest of the Congress put together.

* * *
My History of American Trotskyism will have to stand as my recollection of that time. Everything was fresher in my mind when it was written 14 years ago, and I can’t think of anything important to add to it. This book had a curious history. Like practically all my writing, it happened more or less by chance, incident to other work in the movement. It was not planned at all. In the winter of 1942 the comrades in charge of the party school in New York asked me to give a couple of lectures on party history to fill out some open dates on their forum schedule. I thought that would be a small chore and I agreed rather light-mindedly, having nothing more in mind than to relate a few reminiscences about the main points.

Then, when I sat down to make the notes for the first lecture, it occurred to me that I should explain how our movement originated in the Communist Party. But the story of this experience in the CP also required some explanatory background. Before I fully realized what I was undertaking to do I was back in the beginning, making notes about the early days of American communism. I got so bogged down in notes about that period that it took me three lectures to get out of the Communist Party, before I could start on the subject of our independent activities after our expulsion. The interest of the attending audience stimulated me to keep going along that line until the course was strung out to l2 lectures. The lectures were not written, but spoken free-style, from notes usually made on the day of the lecture. The only research I did was to leaf through the bound volumes of The Militant to fix the various events in their proper order of continuity. All the rest came from my memory at the time.

The eventual publication of the lectures also happened without prior design on my part. Sylvia Caldwell, who was my secretary at that time, took the lectures down in shorthand on her own initiative, and later transcribed her notes. There was some casual talk among us of publishing the lectures some time, but I did nothing about it and left the typescripts sleeping in the file for another year and a half. They would still be there, probably, except for another incident over which I had no control. In November, 1943, we got notice that our appeal from our conviction in the 1941 trial at Minneapolis had been denied by the Supreme Court, and that we would have about a month to get ready to go to Sandstone Prison. Then, under pressure of time, I hastily corrected some of the grammatical mistakes in the typescripts of the lectures and handed them over to Pioneer Publishers just under the deadline. The accidental book was finally published the following spring. Others have to judge what the book is worth. All I know for sure is that it is all true.

* * *
My comment on Stalin’s policy at the time of the Sixth World Congress must be qualified by the observation that I know more now about what was going on in the Russian party and the Comintern, than I did then. Consequently I have to be on guard against coloring my recollections of various incidents by interpretations I arrived at later.

It is safe to say that all of us in the American opposition were aware of the muted struggle going on against the right wing in the Russian party; and that we drew the conclusion that in one way or another this would be advantageous to us in the factional struggle at home. I don’t think we realized at that time how deep the cleavage had become between Stalin and Bukharin. This was obscured by the fact that Bukharin was put forward as the leader of the Congress to make the chief political report.

There was a great deal of speculation as to what was really going on in the Russian party, but no one seemed to know. I personally got a good deal of information from Hathaway, a member of our faction, who had just finished a three-year term in Moscow as a student in the Lenin School. Hathaway, like all the other students of this misnamed institution, had been trained to scent the wind in the Russian party, and he was a fully indoctrinated Stalinist. He parroted the official line against Rykov, Tomsky and a number of others whom he designated as right-wingers in the Russian party, but I can’t recall that he was very definite about Bukharin.

Stalin evidently wanted to utilize the Congress as a final mopping-up operation against the Left Opposition before bringing the fight against Bukharin into the open. The American opposition delegates were cagey about getting out on a limb in connection with the internal affairs of the Russian party. They denounced the Lovestoneites as representatives of the right-wing tendency in the International without specifying who were the Russian leaders in this right wing. I cannot recall that Bittelman or any other member of the American opposition attacked Bukharin openly. I am pretty sure it didn’t happen.

* * *
We were told that rumors of the fight in the Russian party had been taken up in the Senioren Konvent, but I do not recall any report that Lovestone had raised the question. (This Senioren Konvent was a sort of advisory body made up of the heads of delegations. I think it also included some other especially prominent delegates. If I am not mistaken Foster was also a member of the Senioren Konvent. It was translated as “Council of Elders.”)

What sticks in my mind is the report that Stalin, at a special session of the Senioren Konvent, had denied any conflict in the Russian leadership, and that this had a restraining influence on any delegates in the Congress who might have been inclined to press the question.

The Congress was buzzing all the time with rumors about the differences in the Russian party; but I heard nothing about any organized or semi-organized movement that could be considered a “Corridor Congress.” I am inclined to think this expression was manufactured by the Lovestoneites after their expulsion, when they no longer had anything to lose. My personal testimony, of course, is not conclusive; my standing in Moscow was such that I could not have been invited into such a cabal.

But Foster would have been considered eligible; and I never heard anything from Foster to indicate that he was part of any “Corridor Congress.” If he had been so connected, it seems almost certain that he would have reported it. He reported the even more confidential matter of his personal talk with Stalin, on the latter’s invitation, in which Stalin told him that he did not trust Lovestone, as I related in a previous letter.

* * *
As far as I know, Stalin’s devious method of political manipulation was absolutely unique. There was no criterion by which to estimate what he was driving at at any particular moment. In one of his comments about the early days of the struggle of the Left Opposition in the Russian party – perhaps it was in his autobiography – Trotsky said the party functionaries were kept in the dark as to what the majority faction intended by this or that action. They were required to “guess” what it meant and to adapt themselves in time. Selections of people and promotions were made by the accuracy of their guesses at each stage of development in the factional struggle. Those who guessed wrong or didn’t guess at all were discarded. This guessing game was played to perfection in the period of Stalin’s preparation to dump Bukharin. I don’t think many people knew what was really going on and what was already planned at the time of the Sixth Congress. Everybody was guessing, and it is quite evident that the Lovestoneites guessed wrong.

Here an interesting speculation arises. If Lovestone and Wolfe had known about the so-called “Corridor Congress,” and had also known that Stalin was behind it – would they still have clung to Bukharin as the representative of an obviously losing cause? Permit me to doubt it – or rather, permit me to say categorically, No.

The main concern of Lovestone and Wolfe was not the general direction of policy in the Russian party and the Comintern, but their own stake in the leadership of the American party. When the showdown came at the party convention the following year, their attempt to propitiate Stalin by proposing the expulsion of Bukharin, was a revealing gesture. Their failure to cut loose from Bukharin at the time of the Sixth Congress really doesn’t deserve to be considered as a sign of their quixotic devotion to Bukharin’s cause. It was just a bad guess.

* * *
As I have previously reported, I do remember the meeting during the Sixth Congress referred to in Lovestone’s cable to his factional supporters in America, submitted by Gitlow to one of the hearings of the Un-American Activities Committee. I recall it rather as a meeting of the American Commission than as a joint meeting of the American and Russian delegations. However that may be, I definitely do not remember Stalin being present and speaking. It is highly doubtful that I could have forgotten that, because Stalin’s personal appearances at such gatherings were rare events, and were apt to be remembered. What fixes the memory of this meeting in my mind was Lovestone’s unprecedented action in making a rude and angry attack on Losovsky, and his remark in obvious reference to Losovsky’s differences with Lenin in the October days: “Nobody in our party ever fought Lenin.”

It could be that the Lovestone faction had private meetings with Stalin and Bukharin and that Stalin at such a meeting gave them some grounds to think they could count on his support. That could have been part of his devious game of putting Bukharin off guard until he was ready to cut his throat. But that, of course, is speculation. Nothing was clear to anybody then. And all that’s clear now is that Stalin at the time of the Sixth Congress, was planning to open fire on Bukharin and to finish off his supporters in the International in the process, but that he wasn’t ready to disclose his whole plan at that time.

* * *
The opposition platform entitled The Right Danger in the American Party was submitted to the American Commission by the official Congress delegates of the opposition bloc. The signatures – J.J. Johnstone, M. Gomez, W.F. Dunne, J.P. Cannon, Wm.Z. Foster, Alex Bittelman and G. Siskind – were apparently the signatures of the regularly designated delegates. (A number of other oppositionists such as Browder, Hathaway and others, present at the Congress, were evidently not regular delegates.) The document was presented in the name of the opposition delegation as a whole. As far as I know there were no dissenters. The chief author of the document was Bittelman. The order of the signatures had no significance.

I do not remember the American oppositionists’ protest against Paragraph 49 of the Congress Theses on the ground that it failed to emphasize sufficiently the “growing contradictions confronting American imperialism, etc.” In any case, it could not be considered as a serious conflict but rather as an attempt to put a little pressure to have the American resolution brought into line more precisely with the new orientation of the Comintern and, to help the opposition in its fight in the American party. It was a custom in these faction fights in the Comintern for every faction to demand a little more than it expected to get in the hope that it would get something by way of compromise.

* * *
At the time we submitted the platform of the opposition on The Right Danger everything was still more or less normal in the opposition bloc. There was not the slightest sign of objection by the Fosterites to my participation, since there could be no hope of winning a majority in the party unless the bloc held together. The objection to me, rather, was that I was not sufficiently active and aggressive in the struggle before the American Commission. This discontent with my conduct became accentuated after I read Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program. Then I began to slow down and lose interest in the faction fight altogether. The others may have known, or suspected the reasons, but I am sure they could not bring themselves to believe that I would do anything foolishly impractical about it. They didn’t care what anyone’s secret thoughts might be as long as they were not compromised by some overt action.

The delegates of the “Cannon group” were especially discontented with my increasing indifference to the factional struggle in Moscow and what it might portend; their own positions in the party stood to be affected adversely by my default. They started a pressure campaign to induce me to snap out of it and get back into the fight in earnest. The repudiation of Foster by his own faction had created a sort of vacuum in the leadership of the combined opposition and they felt, not without some justification, as things were at that time, that I was far better qualified to fill it than any of the other members of the Foster group. All this led to an incident which is perhaps worth reporting, since it compelled me to make the decision which was to have far-reaching consequences.

A meeting was called of all the members and sympathizers of our faction in Moscow. About a dozen, all told, were there, including our Congress delegates, the students in the Lenin School and a number of others. Spector was also present. There the proposition was flatly put to me – that if I would quit dragging my feet and go all-out in the factional struggle, they would pledge me their support all the way to the end as the logical candidate for the central position of leadership in the party when the Lovestone regime was overthrown.

I did not give a definite answer at the meeting. Spector and I held our own caucus on the question for a couple of days. We discussed it solely from the point of view of how best to serve the cause of Trotsky, to which we were by then fully committed. The proposal had an attractive glitter. In the first place, even though we were less optimistic than the others, we recognized that the objective outlined in the meeting was not unrealistic. If the indications of a Comintern swing to the left were fully developed there was good ground to think that the opposition’s chances for gaining the majority in the party would steadily improve.

Secondly, with Foster discredited and repudiated by his own former supporters, it was obvious that my claim to a more important role as the central leader of the opposition, and eventually of the party, was far stronger than that of Bittelman or any of the others in the Foster faction. Bittelman suffered from a number of disqualifications, which he himself was well aware of. He was distinctively an internal party man, not a mass worker and orator suited to the role of public leader. Browder had no standing as a political leader and was not even thought of in that connection. The other people of the Foster group were of even lesser caliber. We speculated that if I could secure the central position in the official apparatus of the party, I would be in a position to swing far more substantial support for the International Left Opposition when the time came to make a decisive open break. The fly in the ointment was that in order to carry out such a maneuver I would have to adapt myself to the official Comintern line against Trotskyism, and even make up for previous derelictions by excessive zeal in this respect. I would, in effect, be winning the party for the program of Stalinism.

Could I then, at some indefinite future time, reveal my own secret program and overcome the effect of the miseducation which I had helped to disseminate? Was there not a danger that I myself would become compromised and corrupted in the process and find it impossible to extricate myself at some future time?

I must state frankly that Spector and I discussed the proposition between ourselves very seriously before deciding against it. Only after thorough consideration of the maneuver from all sides, did we finally decide to reject the proposition. We came to the conclusion that the cause of Trotskyism would be served better in the long run if we frankly proclaimed his program and started the education of a new cadre on that basis, even though it was certain to mean our own expulsion and virtual isolation at the start of the new fight.

The choice of alternatives would present no difficulties to people who have been raised and educated in the Trotskyist school of principled politics, which our movement has consistently represented since 1928. The decision we made at that time would seem to be an easy one, to be made out of hand. It was not so easy for us in those days. Since the death of Lenin, the politics of the Comintern had become a school of maneuverism, and we ourselves had been affected by it. Trotsky’s document on the Draft Program was a great revelation of the meaning of principled politics. But for us at that time it was a new revelation. We were profoundly influenced by it, but we were only beginning to assimilate its full significance.

That accounts for our hesitation, for our toying for a day or two with the possibility of a self-deceiving maneuver which might well have gravely injured the cause of genuine communism in this country. And not only in this country, for the expelled and slandered defenders of the banner everywhere were then in their darkest hour. They needed to hear an American voice in their support. Our demonstrative action in publicly unfurling the banner of Trotsky in 1928 – at a time when he was exiled and isolated in Alma Ata – greatly encouraged the scattered forces of the International Left Opposition throughout the world.

* * *
The Fosterites had never talked to us about their own family affairs. Consequently, the big explosion at the joint caucus of the delegates of the two groups in Moscow came as somewhat of a surprise to us. To judge from the intensity of the feelings expressed, the revolt against Foster must have been brewing for a long time; it could hardly have been caused by the difference on trade-union tactics alone. It is more likely that the trade-union dispute, in which Bittelman and Browder could draw courage from being on Losovsky’s side, triggered an explosion built up out of many accumulated grievances.

One of Foster’s traits which I especially detested, after I got to know him well, was his different manner and attitude in dealing with different people. To those whom he thought he needed, such as Bittelman and myself, he was always careful and at times even a bit deferential. To those who needed him, such as Browder and Johnstone, he was brusque and dictatorial. They must have stored up many resentments against that.

I remember one rather dramatic incident during the discussion. Foster stood over Johnstone threateningly, with his fist clenched, and tried his old trick of intimidation with the snarling remark: “You’re getting pretty bold!” Johnstone, almost hysterical, answered: “You have been trampling on me for years, but you’re not going to trample on me any more.” Johnstone and Browder gave the impression at this meeting of people who had broken out of long confinement and were running wild.

Bittelman’s conduct was more difficult for me to understand. During all the time that we had been together in one group, and I had known everything that was going on with respect to personal relations, Foster had never presumed to bulldoze Bittelman. Yet at this meeting Bittelman’s tone and language seemed to be that of a man who was out to settle personal scores long overdue. He was absolutely ruthless in his attack on Foster, and even contemptuous of his arguments.

* * *
It was remarkable that not a single person in the meeting spoke up in defense of Foster. The whole faction was in revolt against him, with Bittelman in the lead and Browder and Johnstone close behind him. The funny thing about the whole business was that this fight, of almost unprecedented violence, which ordinarily would signify a complete break of personal and political relations between the participants, was apparently carried on with no thought of such consequences.

The Fosterites in revolt were still dependent on Foster’s name and prestige whether they liked it or not. At that time they had no prospect of playing a big role in the party without him. Foster, for his part, had nowhere else to go except to become a captive of the Lovestoneites, and that was impossible for him. So the whole stew blew up violently and then receded and continued to simmer and sizzle in the same pot. We, the “Cannonites,” stood aside and let the Fosterites fight it out among themselves. From a personal standpoint I felt a certain sympathy for the slaves in hysterical rebellion. But from a political standpoint I couldn’t see any sense whatever in encouraging a split with a view to realignment in the form of a bloc between our faction and the Fosterites, minus Foster.

Foster’s name and prestige, and his dogged persistence and outstanding ability as a mass worker, were always the bigger half of the assets of the Foster group, and remained so even after he had been defeated and isolated within the group. This was shown quite conclusively a short time later. When Stalin wanted to convey a message – with more than a hint of future support – to the American opposition, he sent for Foster and gave it to him personally.

It is quite possible that Browder and Johnstone could have had illusions of going on without Foster as if nothing had happened, for they were notorious for their political unrealism and ineptitude. But I could not imagine Bittelman entertaining such illusions. He had always been pretty realistic in his estimate of the forces in the party and of his own impediments. He knew that he had to be allied with others who had what he lacked, and he relied on combinations in which he could playa strategic part. The original Foster-Bittelman-Cannon combination was made to order for him to play a role in the party that he never could have played by himself. His importance declined when one-third of the combination broke off. And he cannot have failed to understand that it would decline still more if he came to an open break with Foster. I had known Bittelman as a man of reserve, who kept his personal feelings under control far better than most – a quality which I admired; and to this day I can’t understand what drove him to such violence in the attack on Foster as to risk the danger of an irreparable split. That he had any idea of fighting for the leadership of the party in his own name is in my opinion the one hypothesis that has to be excluded.

* * *
There is one small postscript to my recollections of this family fight among the Fosterites, which was soon swallowed up in my preoccupation with the immeasurably larger subject of Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program, and all that it implied for my own future course.

After the meeting, in a personal conversation with Bill Dunne and me, Foster complained of the treatment he had received and intimated – without saying so directly – that he would like to have better personal relations with us for collaboration in the future. But my own mind was already turning to far bigger things than the old factions and faction squabbles in the American party, and I couldn’t get up any interest in them any more.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon

*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party -Before The Sixth Communist International Congress (1928)

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

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Before the Sixth Congress

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Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.18 No.1, Winter 1957, pp.24-25, 34-35.
Original bound volumes of 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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January 27, 1956

Dear Sir:

The period from the victory of the Lovestone faction in 1927 until the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1928 has been overshadowed in my mind by the new struggle I started after the Congress. Many of the details of the earlier 1928 period are blurred in my memory. I was away from the party center nearly all the time between the February and May Plenums of the party. I went on a big national tour for the International Labor Defense right after the February 1928 Plenum and returned to New York only shortly before the May Plenum. On the tour I tried to put the factional squabbles out of mind and didn’t keep track of internal party developments very closely. Your questions show a much greater familiarity with the events of that time.

* * *
We were aware in 1928 that the Comintern was making a left turn and that this was producing a more favorable climate for the Opposition in the American party. Just how much this influenced me at the time is hard to say now in retrospect. We were all predominantly concerned with the American struggle. I didn’t begin to get a real international orientation until after the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.

It is clear now that all Stalin’s moves were strongly influenced by Trotsky. Stalin’s method was to smash the Opposition organizationally and then to expropriate its ideas and apply them in his own way. It was Trotsky who first saw the coming of the new period of capitalist stabilization after the big post-war revolutionary upsurge had subsided. This was shown already in his polemics against the leftists in 1921. Somewhat later the official policy of the Comintern caught up with the new reality and overdid the emphasis on the new capitalist “stabilization.” This was the period of the Comintern’s swing to the right – 1924-1928 – which helped the Lovestoneites so much in the American party.

Just about the time the Comintern was going overboard on this theme, Trotsky saw the contradictions in the new stabilization and the opening up of new revolutionary perspectives. His fight against the official policy on the Anglo-Russian Committee and the British General Strike reflected his thinking in that time. So also did his book Whither England? and his speech of February 15, 1926, on Europe and America (republished in Fourth International in the April and May issues, 1943).

Simultaneously with the expulsion of the Left Opposition, in December 1927, Stalin began to appropriate a large part of Trotsky’s program on the international field as well as in Russia. This is what brought him into the conflict with Bukharin.

* * *
As I have said before, this was all a mystery to me at the time. Then we only noted the indications of a left turn. It began at a time when Lovestone and Wolfe were divesting themselves of the leftist baggage they had inherited from Ruthenberg to give free play to their own political instincts, which were always decidedly conservative. The “left turn” of the Comintern caught them off guard.

The formal record could give the impression that the factional conflict in the American party in the year 1928 centered mainly around the trade-union question, with Foster and Lovestone lining up on one side and Bittelman-Cannon on the other. The documentary material may support this view, but it is not really correct. The main feature of Foster-Cannon-Bittelman relations at that time was their agreement on irreconcilable opposition to the Lovestone regime in the party and its conservative perspectives in general. The trade-union question was only one of the items in the struggle.

And even though Foster, at the May 1928 Plenum, was closer to the Lovestoneites on this one point, he was definitely with us on an overall factional basis in the fight against the Lovestone regime. It was Foster who first approached me when I returned to New York, shortly before the May Plenum, with a proposal that we get together for a more aggressive fight against the Lovestoneites. Pepper, it appeared, had returned to this country in the spring of 1928 with a special mission to promote “unity” of the Lovestone-Foster groups. The Lovestoneites were trying hard, at the instigation of Pepper, to win over or neutralize Foster, but he was not receptive.

At the May Plenum the Lovestoneites centered their attacks on me and Bittelman and made a big play for “unity” with Foster. I remember ridiculing their sudden discovery of Foster’s virtues by asking if they meant to kill him with kindness, and quoting the Latin adage: “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” The aptness of the remark was pretty well understood in the whole assembly, and Foster joined in the general laughter. The Lovestoneites wanted to make a captive of Foster, but their maneuver was fruitless. Foster was dead set against their control of the party and rejected all their overtures.

* * *
Foster’s approach to the trade-union question was not the same as that of Lovestone and Wolfe. The position of the latter on that, as on other national questions, was determined by their basically conservative view of American perspectives. They were sure that American capitalism was entering its “Victorian” period, and they seemed to be downright happy about it. These people simply did not believe any more in the perspective of revolution in this booming country.

Foster’s trade-union position was differently motivated. He was the prisoner of his own fetish of “boring from within” the AFL, which had dominated his thinking since his break with the IWW in 1911. His whole career seemed to be bound up with that specific tactic, and he was tied to it by the possibly unconscious need of self-justification.

I had never fully agreed with Foster on the trade-union question. I had started out in the IWW and I never disavowed my work in that field. I had come to recognize the error in the IWW attempt to build brand-new revolutionary unions all up and down the line. But in my own thinking I never went to the extreme AFL-ism that Foster did.

At the 1920 Convention of the United Communist Party, where an anti-AFL position was adopted, I had spoken for a more flexible policy of working within the existing AFL unions and of supporting independent unions in fields neglected by the AFL.

The Convention report of the speech of “Dawson” refers to me. (The Communist, official organ of the United Communist Party, Vol.I, No.1, June 12, 1920, page 4.)

In the exigencies of the faction fight that began in 1923 there was no special occasion, and it was not appropriate, for this difference of emphasis to show itself openly in the party. But as early as the December, 1925 Plenum, both Dunne and I differed with the Fosterites on the Passaic campaign. Dunne’s support of Losovsky at the Fourth Congress of the RILU was the natural expression of our real sentiment about the necessity of building independent unions in fields neglected or sabotaged by the AFL. That could be considered a real difference between us and Foster; but we considered it then as a difference of emphasis, and it was overshadowed all the time, even at the May 1928 Plenum, by our general agreement in opposition to the Lovestone regime and its conservative outlook in general.

* * *
Bittelman’s role in these new developments was a special one. Bittelman was never a “Fosterite” any more than I was. He was first, last and all the time a Moscow man, and the line from Moscow was law for him. He had the advantage of reading Russian and that put him one jump ahead of the others whenever new winds began to blow in Moscow. Moreover, inside the party Bittelman always had his own personal sub-faction in the Jewish Federation. It was always necessary to deal with him not merely as an individual but as the representative of a factional following.

The final decision made by the party – after our expulsion in October 1928 – to go all out for a policy of independent unionism, and to transform the TUEL into a new trade-union center under the name of the Trade Union Unity League, was swallowed by Foster, but it must have been a bitter pill for him. It constituted, in effect, a repudiation of his whole course since his break with the IWW.

When Zack was expelled from the CP and came over to us for a while, in the fall of 1934, he told me that he had been to see Foster shortly before that. He found him very ill, helpless and discouraged. Zack said that Foster had enjoined him not to take any steps that would give Browder the pretext to expel him from the party. In connection with that, he told Zack that he had never believed in the program of the TUUL but felt that he had to go along with it to prevent his own expulsion.

* * *
I doubt that Foster’s failure to attend the Fourth Congress of the Profintern in the winter of 1928 had any special significance. He was deeply preoccupied with the miners’ campaign at that time and was in the field constantly. I don’t recall any special discussion between me and Dunne before his departure for this Profintern Congress. My memory about the whole thing is rather hazy – perhaps because I was on tour all that time. I think there is no doubt, however, that the initiative for the sharp turn came from Losovsky and not from us. But it was very easy for us to go along with it, because it was becoming more and more obvious to us that the organization of the unorganized required more emphasis on independent unions in certain fields.

My trade-union article in the July 1928 Communist was published at my own insistence. I felt rather strongly about the question and wanted to make my position clear. It was considered somewhat “irregular” already then to have conflicting views appear in the press. The Lovestoneites objected, but they probably thought it was better to print it than to have a fuss with me on that kind of an issue at that particular time. I do not recall any discussion with Foster about it. To be sure, the Lovestoneites thought they were playing a clever game by putting Foster forward to defend the official policy. But Foster was playing his own game in coming to the defense of his fetish.

* * *
The difference between me and Foster on the trade-union question at the May Plenum did not seriously disturb relations in the bloc of the two factions. It remained, as before, a touch-me-not alliance of convenience. I recall that we had a joint social gathering of the two groups shortly before our departure for Moscow for the Sixth Congress. The general understanding was that we were going to make common cause there.

I do not recall the division among the Fosterites becoming manifest at the May Plenum. They kept it bottled up in the family for a while. The furious internal fight of the Fosterites, in which Foster was isolated, was revealed to us only when the fight broke out into the open at a joint meeting of the delegates of the two opposition groups in Moscow.

Our group, which was strongly represented at the Congress – Dunne, Cannon, Hathaway, Gomez and several others attending the Lenin School in Moscow – did not intervene on the side of Bittelman-Browder-Johnstone. We kept hands off and let the Fosterites fight it out among themselves.

* * *
Lovestone’s reaction to the Losovsky line in 1928 was not determined primarily by any fanatical conviction about trade-union policy. The trade-union question was not his main interest – not by a long shot. Lovestone was far more concerned to justify the policy of the majority of the party in the past, and thus to protect its prestige, than about any line he would have to take in the future. His main concern was to keep control of the party.

For that he was willing to adapt himself to almost any kind of a new directive from Moscow. I feel quite sure he had the illusion that Losovsky himself was out on a limb and that, with the support of Bukharin, he could get around him in Moscow. Losovsky was the one who forced the fight and left Lovestone no alternative but to fight back.

* * *
It is difficult to describe my feeling and expectations in this period before the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, without coloring the recollections by what I learned and did afterward – after I read Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program during the Congress. The new signs from Moscow in the early months of 1928 were undoubtedly more favorable for the Opposition, but I think the Fosterites took more courage from it than I did. We had had so many disappointments in Moscow that I couldn’t get up any real enthusiasm about better luck the next time.

Also, as I have explained in my History of American Trotskyism, I was deeply oppressed by the developments in the Russian party and the expulsion of the Opposition. But with the limited understanding of the disputed questions I had at that time, I didn’t know what I could do about it, and had no definite idea of trying to do anything. In that mood I really did not want to go to the Congress at all, and would not have gone if my factional associates had not insisted on it.

I did not communicate my inner thoughts and doubts to them at that time, since I had no definite proposals to make. Their mood, contrary to mine, was rather optimistic about the prospects of support for our factional struggle in Moscow. That, I suppose, is why they wouldn’t hear of my withdrawal from the Congress delegation.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon