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
Origin of the Policy on the Labor Party
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, pp.56-58.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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May 18, 1954
Dear Sir:
This replies to your inquiry of May 15 on the origins of the labor party policy.
I think this whole question of the party’s activity in farmer-labor party politics in the first half of the Twenties ought to be separated into two parts. First, the original policy and how it came to be adopted by the party; second, the perversions of this policy in the experiments, more correctly the fantastic adventures in this field, under the tutelage of Pepper. Here I will confine myself entirely to the first part of the subject – the origins of the labor party policy – reserving the second part for a separate report.
There is not much documentation on this question and I find that my memory is not so sharp as to details as it is on the fight over legalization. That is probably because the real fight was over legalization. The labor party policy, the development of the trade-union work, and the whole process of Americanizing the movement, were subsumed under that overall issue of legalizing the party. Insofar as they took a position on the related questions, the factions divided along the same lines.
With considerable effort I have to reconstruct my memory of the evolution of the labor party question in the American movement. I may err on some details or miss some. My general recollection however is quite clear and is not far wrong. The approach to the question zigzagged along a number of high points in about this order:
(1) To start with, the left wing of American socialism had been traditionally rigid and doctrinaire on all questions – revolution versus reform, direct action versus parliamentary action, new unions versus the old craft unions, etc. The publication of Lenin’s pamphlet on left communism marked the beginning of their comprehension that realistic tactics could flexibly combine activities in these fields without departing from basic revolutionary principle. We needed the Russians to teach us that.
(2) The first approach of the left wing to the question of the labor party was inflexibly sectarian and hostile. I recall an editorial by Fraina in the Revolutionary Age or in the Communist in 1919 or early 1920 against “laborism,” i.e., the policy and practice of the British Labor Party and the advocates of a similar party in this country, who were fairly numerous and vocal at that time. In that period Fraina, who was the most authoritative and influential spokesman of the left wing, was an ultra-leftist. He seemed to be allied with this tendency in the Comintern, which was centered around the Dutch communists and some German leftists. This tendency, as you know, was vigorously combatted and defeated by Lenin and Trotsky at the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921). (Incidentally, you will find Trotsky’s two volumes on The First Five Years of the Communist International, published by Pioneer Publishers, informative reading on this period. It impinges on America at least to this extent: that Trotsky polemicized against Pepper (Pogany), who had been in Germany with a Comintern delegation, and at that time was himself an ultra-leftist.)
This article or editorial by Fraina expressed the general attitude of the party, which was ultra-leftist all along the line in those days. Perhaps I recall this particular article or editorial because I was a quite pronounced “right winger” in the early Communist Party, and I thought that people who were advocating a labor party were a hell of a long way out in front of the labor movement as I knew it in the Midwest. However, I must say that it never occurred to me at that time that we could be a part of the larger movement for a labor party and remain communists. Engels’ perspicacious letters on this very theme were unknown to us in those days.
(3) The theoretical justification for such a complicated tactic – conditional support of a reformist labor party by revolutionists – came originally from Lenin. I think it is indisputable that Lenin’s proposal to the British communists that they should “urge the electors to vote for the labor candidate against the bourgeois candidate,” in his pamphlet on Left-Wing Communism, and his later recommendation that the British Communist Party should seek affiliation to the British Labor Party, gave the first encouragement to the sponsors of a similar policy in this country, and marks the real origin of the policy.
I don’t think this contradicts the statement you quote, from the Foster-Cannon document of November 26, 1924 – which was probably written by me and which I had long since forgotten – that the Comintern’s approval of a labor party policy in 1922 was obtained “mainly on the strength of the information supplied by our delegates, that there was in existence a strong mass movement towards a farmer-labor party.”
Lenin’s intervention in England provided the original justification for revolutionists to support a labor party based on the unions. Our contention in Moscow in 1922 was simply that a realistic basis existed for the adaptation of this policy to America. There was considerable sentiment in the country for a farmer-labor party at that time. The Chicago Federation of Labor was for it. The Farmer-Labor Party had had a presidential candidate in 1920, who polled about half a million votes.
It seemed to us – after we had assimilated Lenin’s advice to the British – that this issue would make an excellent basis for a bloc with the more progressive wing of the trade-union movement, and open up new possibilities for the legitimization of the communists as a part of the American labor movement, the expansion of its contacts, etc. But 1 don’t think we would have argued the point if we had not been previously encouraged by Lenin’s explanation that revolutionists could critically support a reformist labor party, and even belong to it, without becoming reformists.
(4) I do not recall that the question of a labor party was concretely posed in the factional struggle between the liquidators and the undergrounders-in-principle. The real issue which divided the party into right and left wings, was the legalization of the movement. On all subsidiary questions – labor party, realistic trade-union program, predominance of native leadership, Americanization in general – the right wing naturally tended to be for and the left wing against.
As far as I can recall, all the liquidators readily accepted the labor party policy. After the leftists had been completely defeated on the central question of party legalization, any resistance they might have had to the labor party policy collapsed. I do not recall any specific factional struggle over the labor party by itself.
(5) Furthermore, it was the Comintern that picked up our information and our advocacy of a labor party policy at the time of the Fourth Congress, and formulated it most clearly and decisively. I am quite certain in my recollection that the Comintern letter to the Communist Party of the US, announcing its decision in favor of the legalization of the movement, referred also to the labor party policy. The letter stated that the formation of a labor party in the US, based on the trade unions, would be “an event of world historical importance.”
If you will check this letter, which it seems to me was printed either in the Worker or the Communist early in 1923, I think you will find the definitive answer to the question of the origin of the labor party policy.
(6) Pepper certainly had no part in initiating the policy in Moscow “before and during the Fourth Congress.” He was in America at that time. In answer to your-question: “Or did he pick up that ball and run with it after. he came to the US?” – I would simply say, Yes, but fast; in fact he ran away with it.
(7) Valetski, the Comintern representative to the American party in 1922, was one of the leaders of the Polish Communist Party. I met him when he returned to Moscow after the Bridgeman Convention, and heard him speak in the American Commission several times. He did not fully support the liquidators and I had a number of clashes with him. His position after he returned to Moscow would indicate quite clearly that he had not been sent to America with a predetermined decision of the Comintern to support legalization. Rather the contrary.
The change of position and the eventual decision was made in Moscow as a result of our fight there and not on the recommendation of Valetski. He began to shift his position in the course of the debates, but he didn’t go all the way. He tried to get us to agree to a compromise to blunt the edge of the decision, but we refused. I recall Zinoviev saying privately to us, when we complained to him about Valetski’s position: “He is changing. but he is not fully on our line yet.”
Valetski was obviously a learned and quite able man. I think he had originally been a professor, but he apparently had a long record in the Polish movement. They had had all kinds of faction fights in the Polish party. His experience would have qualified him to be sent as representative of the Comintern to a young and comparatively inexperienced party torn to pieces by factional struggle.
Factionalism and faction fights are frequently derided by side-line critics as aberrations of one kind or another, a disease peculiar to the radical movement. But I never knew a political leader of any consequence who had not gone through the school of factional struggles. To be sure, I have also known factional fighters – quite a few of them – who were no good for anything else: who became so consumed by factionalism that they forgot what they started out to fight for. But that’s part of the overhead, I guess.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
P.S. I had never heard that Lenin raised the labor party question with Fraina in Moscow already in 1920. That is very interesting. I think it also supplies corroboration to my own conception, set forth above, that Lenin was the real originator of this policy. He must have turned over in his mausoleum, however, when he saw what was later done with his idea. – JPC
******
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
Fraina – The Founder
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, pp.58-60.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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June 15, 1954
Dear Sir:
Fraina: (Re. your letter of May 10.)
It is certainly correct to list Fraina as one of the most important personalities in the formative period of American communism. In my History of American Trotskyism, I stated my opinion that he should be recognized as the founder of the movement.
I believe that John Reed and the Liberator did most to popularize the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the broad public of the American left wing. Fraina’s influence was somewhat narrower; his Revolutionary Age was essentially an internal party paper. In that field he did more than anyone to shape the ideology of the young movement of American communism. At the same time he put the stamp of his own romanticism and sectarian rigidity upon it.
The official propaganda of later years, assigning the role of “founder” to Ruthenberg, always offended my sense of historical justice. Ruthenberg was a big man – in his way – and a strong man among the pioneers, but he was by no means the originator, the “founder.”
* * *
I did not know Fraina personally. I first met him only casually at the National Left Wing Conference in New York in June, 1919. I met him a second time when he returned to this country as a member of the “Pan American Agency” of the Comintern with the mission to unify the two parties. This must have been late in 1920 or early in 1921. The other two members of this “Pan American Agency” were Charley Johnson (“Scott”) and Katayama, the old Japanese socialist then living in New York, who later went to Moscow and remained there. I think this was a joint meeting of the negotiating committees of the two parties.
The only memory I have of the meeting is that Fraina spoke there impartially, on behalf of the Comintern, for unity and conciliation. As in all the joint meetings to negotiate “unity” in these days, the discussion must have been somewhat heated. I remember Charley Scott telling me afterward that Fraina had referred to my conduct at the joint meeting as “factional.” This was probably not inaccurate, as I was decidedly hostile to the manifest ambition of the “Federationists” to “control” a united party. Scott’s remark about Fraina’s impression of me remained in my memory and enables me to peg the meeting.
Fraina left soon afterward on a mission for the Comintern in Latin America. Later we heard about his defection and the report that he had failed to account for some Comintern funds.
I recall a statement by Charley Scott in New York (it must have been late in 1921) to the effect that Fraina had misappropriated Comintern funds and that the matter was therefore out of the party’s hands. Scott said: “For that he will have to account to the Comintern,” or words to that effect. Somehow or other I remember that definitely. After that Fraina seemed to drop entirely out of the consciousness of the party leadership.
* * *
I cannot recall anything coming up about Fraina in Moscow in 1922. I have no recollection of any kind of official consideration of his case during my long stay there.
But here I can report an incident which may be of interest in piecing the Fraina story together. During one of my trips to New York (it must have been in 1924 or possibly in 1925) I was handed a letter from Fraina. I cannot remember who handed me the letter, but I am pretty sure it was addressed to me personally. In this letter Fraina stated that he was working and saving all he could from his wages; that he wanted to make arrangements to pay his debt in installments and to work his way back into the party, and asked me to help him. My recollection of this letter is sharp and clear.
On my return to Chicago I took the letter before the Political Committee and it was discussed there. The decision was made that since his affair concerned Comintern funds, it was outside the jurisdiction of the American party; and that Fraina would have to address himself to the Comintern and straighten out his relations there before the party could do anything about it. I conveyed this decision to Fraina through the comrade who had acted as intermediary – again for the life of me I can’t recollect who it was – and that’s the last report I had of Fraina until, years later, he began to write again under the name of Corey.
* * *
I never met him personally in those later days. But strangely enough, we came close to meeting. He appeared to be breaking with the political line of the official Communist Party, while remaining a communist, and there were some indications that he was becoming sympathetic to the Trotskyist position. It was soon after the Hitler victory, when a new party of anti-Stalinist communists was in the air. In a discussion I had with V.F. Calverton, Sidney Hook, and a few others associated with Calverton’s magazine at that time, we discussed the question of a new party. They asked what our attitude would be toward such people as Fraina, with whom they evidently had some contact and association.
I told them that I really didn’t know what to say, because the old financial scandal would put a cloud over Fraina until it was cleared up, in one way or another. Nevertheless, I was very much interested in Fraina, and hoped a way could be found to collaborate with him. When I visited Trotsky in France in the fall of 1934, I took up the question of Fraina and asked his opinion.
Trotsky also was interested and sympathetic and thought that we should by no means reject an overture from Fraina. He finally suggested the following policy: That the new party would be too weak to take upon itself the responsibility of an outstanding personality who had a financial scandal hanging over him. Our defense of him would not be effective enough to do any good, while involvement in the scandal would hurt the party. Fraina should go back to the Communist Party and straighten out his financial entanglements and get an official clearance from them. After that the new party we were forming could accept him as a member without any reservation.
That seemed to me to be the soundest position to take and I agreed to proceed along that line. Upon my return we became deeply involved in the final stage of negotiations with the Muste group, building up to our joint Convention in December. I think I relayed Trotsky’s advice to Fraina through the Calverton group, but I am not absolutely sure of it. At any rate, we never had any direct contact with Fraina; and soon after that he began to move away from the communist movement altogether.
* * *
Fraina was truly a tragic figure. The deportation proceedings brought against him in the last year of his life, after he had fully renounced his youthful communism, added a final stroke of savage irony to a life which was offered to two opposing causes and was rejected by both.
In spite of all, the best part of Fraina – the young part – belongs to us. When one considers how primitive the American left-wing movement had been in matters of theory, and its desolating poverty of literary-political forces, the pioneer work of Fraina in this field stands out by contrast as truly remarkable. I think it no more than just to say that Fraina was the first writer of pioneer American communism. He did more than anybody else to explain and popularize the basic program of the Russian Bolsheviks. American communism, which stems directly from the primitive American left-wing movement, owes its first serious interest in theoretical questions primarily to Fraina.
It is quite useless, however, to demand more from people than they can give. Fraina was too weak to be a leader. He could not stand up against the brutal bulldozing of the Russian Federation leaders who had the power of organizations and finances and wielded their power as a club. Fraina’s capitulation to the Hourwich group, after the National Left Wing Conference in 1919 had decided to continue the legal fight within the SP, certainly did a lot of damage.
The premature split of the SP, and the monstrous absurdity of the split of the communist movement into two parties at the moment of its formal constitution; and then the hasty, ill-considered, and in my opinion, unnecessary plunge into total illegality-were calamitous mistakes, if not crimes, of leadership in which Fraina was more the intimidated accomplice than the author.
Nobody knows how many thousands of American radical socialists – potential communists – were lost and scattered as a result of these insane procedures, imposed upon the movement by the Russian Federation madmen. I have always believed that two people made it possible for this wrecking crew to work such havoc. They could not have done it alone. They needed both Fraina and Ruthenberg, and got them both for different reasons.
In my own mind I have always blamed Ruthenberg more than Fraina. Fraina was weak, and there is not much that can be done about that. Ruthenberg was far stronger, but he was swayed by an overreaching personal ambition. I ascribe more blame to him precisely because of that. The history of American communism would quite possibly have taken a different course, with far greater advantages in the long run, if Fraina in 1919 had been propped up and supported by people who knew what the movement needed and were strong enough to enforce their policy.
Instead of that, Fraina was brutally clubbed down by the strong bosses of the Russian Federation and left without support by Ruthenberg, who then, as always, thought too much of himself, his own position and his own role. Ruthenberg would probably have been greatly surprised if someone had told him, in those critical days, that the most important service he could render to the cause of American communism was to reinforce the position of Fraina; to create conditions for him to do his work as a political writer with a certain amount of latitude.
The sprawling left-wing movement, just emerging from the theoretical wasteland of its pre-history, needed time to study, to learn and to assimilate the great new ideas which had exploded in the Russian Revolution. The self-centered Ruthenberg could not possibly have understood that Fraina’s work of exposition, at that time, was more important than his own, and that he should lend his strength to support it.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
Four Ways of Viewing the Early Communist Party
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, p.60.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
July 20, 1954
Dear Sir:
I enclose a manuscript (see Fourth International, Fall 1954 – Ed.) which attempts to explain the transformation of the Communist Party in the last half of the Twenties and gives my view of the basic causes. You will note that I have left out all reference to the various incidents and turns of events which you inquired about in your letters dealing with this time. I will answer these questions separately, as well as I can from memory. But the more I thought about this period, the more it became clear to me that the factual story can be meaningful only if it is placed within a framework of interpretation.
As I see it, there are at least four ways to approach a history of the Communist Party in this period, leaving out the official CP version, which isn’t worth mentioning:
1.It can be described as a dark conspiracy of spies and “infiltrators.” (This theme has already been pretty well exploited.)
2.It can be told as a story of the doings and misdoings of more or less interesting people who fought like hell about nothing and finally knocked themselves out.
3.It can be written as an item of curiosa about an odd lot of screwballs who operated in a world of their own, outside the main stream of American life and exerted no influence upon it; something like the books about the various utopian colonies, which from time to time occupy the attention of various professors, Ph.D. thesis writers and others who are interested in things remote from the work-a-day world.
4.Or, one can treat the evolution of the CP in its first decade as a vital part of American history, which was destined to have a strong influence on the course of events in the next two decades.
This last is my point of view. The historian who wants to write a serious work, regardless of his own opinion of communism, will probably have to consider this approach to the subject. Otherwise, why bother with it?
The historical importance of the first ten years of American communism, particularly the latter half of this decade, really comes out when one gets into the New Deal era and attempts to explain the various factors which contributed to Roosevelt’s astounding success in steering American capitalism through the crisis and the Second World War without any substantial opposition on his left.
My own opinion is that Roosevelt was the best political leader crisis-racked American capitalism could possibly have found at the time; and that his best helper – I would go farther and say his indispensable helper – was the Communist Party. The CP did not consist, as the current popular version has it, of the Ware-Chambers groups of spies who infiltrated some Washington offices and filched out a few secret documents. That was a mere detail in a side-show tent.
The CP itself operated during the Roosevelt regime as a first-class force in support of Roosevelt in the broad arena of politics and the labor movement. It played a major role first in promoting the expansion of a new labor movement and then in helping Roosevelt to domesticate it, to blunt its radical-revolutionary edge, and to convert it into his most solid base of support in both domestic and foreign policy.
Furthermore, the Communist Party had to be prepared for this role by the gradual and subtle, but all the more effective and irreversible transformation it went through precisely in the five years preceding the outbreak of the crisis.
Things might very well have happened differently. Let us assume that the CP had developed in the last half of the Twenties as a party of the Leninist type; that it had retained the strongest leaders of that time and they had remained communists and, in the meantime, had learned to work together as a team; that the party had used its monopolistic leadership of the new mass upsurge of labor militancy to impose upon the new union movement a genuine class-struggle policy.
Assume that the CP had contested with Lewis-Hillman-Murray in the struggle for leadership of the new union movement instead of abdicating to them for reasons of foreign policy; that the new union movement under communist influence had launched a radical labor party instead of submerging in the Rooseveltian People’s Front in the Democratic Party; that the CP and the big segment of the labor movement which it influenced had opposed the war instead of becoming its most ardent and most reliable supporters.
All that is just about what a genuine Communist Party would have done. What would American history in the Roosevelt era have looked like in that case? It certainly would have been different. And it is not in the least visionary to imagine that such a different course was possible. The key to the whole situation was the evolution of the CP in the last half of the Twenties.
That, in my opinion, removes the study of early communism from an exercise in speculation about a bizarre cult and places it right where it belongs – in the mainstream of American history.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
*From "YouTube"- December 16, 2010-Veterans for Peace Take Demand to White House Fence -The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*Once Again-From "YouTube"- December 16, 2010-The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*From "Daily Kos" Blogger Bohica- The Veteran-Led Civil Disobedience Action At The White House On December 16, 2010
Click on the headline to link to a Daily Kos blog with links to the veteran-led action at the White House.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)-From The Pen Of James P.Cannon- Factional Struggle And Party Leadership- The 1953 Cochran-Clarke Fight
Markin comment:
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
************
Fourth International
November-December, 1953
Factional Struggle And Party Leadership
James P. Cannon
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.14 No.6, November-December 1953, pp.115-122.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription\HTML Markup: Andrew Pollack.
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(Speech by James P. Cannon at the Open Plenum of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, November 1953, New York, N.Y.)
* * *
We all recognize, comrades, that we have come to the end of the long faction fight in the party. Nothing remains now but to sum up the results.
This has been a long faction fight, and it was not brought to a definitive conclusion until it was fully ripe. The Cochranite minority were given a whole year to carry on underground factional work and organization in the party. A whole year. Then we finally dragged them out into the open, and we had intensified discussion for five months, with more Internal Bulletins published even than in the great fight of 1939-40. Then we had the May Plenum and the truce, which the Cochranites signed but did not keep.
Then five more months of struggle during which the Cochranites developed their positions to their logical conclusion and showed themselves in action as an anti-party, anti-Trotskyist tendency. They organized a campaign of sabotage of party activities and party funds, culminating in the organized boycott of our 25th Anniversary meeting. Then we came to this November Plenum where the Cochranite leaders were indicted for treachery and suspended from the party. And that’s the end of the faction fight in the SWP.
In the face of the record nobody can justly say that we were impatient; that anything was done hastily; that there wasn’t a “free and ample discussion; that there were not abundant proofs of disloyalty before discipline was invoked. And above all, nobody can say that the leadership hesitated to bring down the ax when the time came for it. That was their duty. The rights of a minority in our democratic party have never included, and will never include, the right to be disloyal. The SWP has no place and no room for strike-breakers.
* * *
Unifications and Splits
Trotsky once remarked that unifications and splits are alike methods of building the revolutionary party. That’s a profoundly true remark, as experience has shown. The party which led the Russian Revolution to victory was the product of the split with the Mensheviks in 1903, several unifications and splits along the road, and the final unification with Trotsky in 1917. The combination of the splits and the unifications made possible the party of victory in the Russian Revolution.
We have seen, in our own experience, the same principle working out. We began with a split from the Stalinists. Unification with the Musteites in 1934 and later with the left-wing of the Socialist Party were great milestones in the building of our organization. But these unifications were of no more importance, and stand rather on an equal plane, with the split of the leftist sectarians in 1935 and of the revisionist Burnhamites in 1940, and with the split of the new revisionists today. All these actions have been part of the process of building the revolutionary party.
This law enunciated by Trotsky, that both unifications and splits are alike methods of building the party, is true however, only on the condition that both the unification and the split in each case is properly motivated. If they are not properly prepared and properly motivated they can have a disrupting and disorganizing effect. I can give you examples of that.
The unification of the Left Opposition under Nin in Spain with the opportunist Maurin group, out of which was formed the POUM, was one of the decisive factors in the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. The dilution of the program of Trotskyism for the sake of unification with an opportunist group robbed the Spanish proletariat of that clear program and resolute leadership which could have made the difference in the Spanish Revolution in 1936.
Conversely, the splits in the French Trotskyist organization before World War II, several of them, none of which were properly motivated – contributed to the demoralization of the party. It has been our good fortune that we have made no false unifications and no false splits. Never have we had a split in which the party did not bound forward the day after, precisely because the split was properly prepared and properly motivated.
The party was not ready for a split when our Plenum convened last May. The minority at that time had by no means extended their revisionist conceptions into action in such a manner as to convince every single member of the party that they were alien to us. For that reason we made big concessions to avoid a split. By the same reasoning, because everything was clear and everything was ripe in November, we made the split here – without the slightest hesitation. And if, in the reminiscences of the fight, you give the party leadership credit for their patience and forbearance in the long struggle, don’t forget to add that they deserve just as much credit for the decisive, resolute action taken at this Plenum to bring things to a conclusion.
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The Split of 1940
I think it would be useful for us to make a comparison of this split, which we consider to be progressive and a contribution to the development of the revolutionary party in America, with the split of 1940. There are points of similarity and of difference. They are similar insofar as the basic issue in each case was revisionism. But the revisionism of 1940 was by no means as deep and definitive as the revisionism that we have split with today. Burnham, it is true, had abandoned the program of Marxism but he did it openly only in the last stages of the fight, when he took off the mask. And Shachtman did not go along fully with him. Shachtman, up to the point of the split, did not openly revise our program on the Soviet Union, which was the central issue in dispute.
He left the question open and even stated in one of his last documents that if the imperialists would attack the Soviet Union he would come out for defense. As for the third leader, Abern, he did not yield anything theoretically to revisionism at all. He still considered himself an orthodox Trotskyist, and thought the whole fight was over the organization question. He was greatly mistaken, but the definitive struggle between orthodox Trotskyism and revisionism was by no means as clear-cut and deep in 1940 as it is this time. That was shown by the fact that when Burnham; carried his revisionism to its logical conclusion and abandoned the movement altogether a couple of months later, Shachtman and Abern drew back.
The two splits, this one and that of 1940, are similar in that they were both unavoidable. The differences in each case had matured to the point where we could no longer talk the same language or live in the same party. When the Shachtmanites gave us their plain ultimatum and demanded that they be allowed to have their own paper, their own magazine, their own public expression, they were only expressing their deepest conviction that they had to talk a different language from ours; that they could not conscientiously circulate what we wrote in our press along orthodox lines. And since we could not tolerate that, the split was unavoidable.
* * *
The present split is different from 1940 in that it is more definitive. There is not a single member of this Plenum who contemplates any later relations in the same party with the strike-breakers of the Pablo-Cochran gang. Any doubt on this score is excluded. It is an absolute certainty that from yesterday morning at eleven o’clock, when they left the hall, – not with a bang but a giggle – that they left for good. The most that can be contemplated is that individual members who have been caught in the under-currents may drift back to the party one by one, and of course they will be received. But as far as the main core of the minority faction is concerned, they have broken forever with us. The day they were suspended from the party, and released from further obligations to it, was probably the happiest day of their lives.
The Shachtmanites, on the other hand, continued to protest for a long time that they would like to have unity. And even six-seven years after the split, in 1946 and 1947, we actually conducted unity negotiations with the Shachtmanites. At one time in early 1947 we had a unification agreement with them, illustrating the point I make that the split of 1940 was by no means as definitive and final as is the split today. We are finished and done with Pablo and Pabloism forever, not only here but on the international field. And nobody is going to take up any of our time with any negotiations about compromise or any nonsense of that sort. We are at war with this new revisionism, which came to full flower in the reaction to the events after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union, in East Germany, and in the French general strike.
Differences in the Splits
There are differences between the two splits in other respects, very important ones, and more favorable for the party. First, as to the size of the split. In 1940 the Shachtmanites had not less than 40% of the party and a majority of the youth organization. If you count the youth, who were not voting members of the party, it was almost a 50-50 split. This group takes out a bare 20%. That is one difference.
A second difference is that in 1940 the split was a split of the leading cadre right down the middle. Not just a sloughing off of some people that you can easily get along without. For years in the central leadership of the party, the central political nucleus had been Burnham, Shachtman and Cannon. They took two out of the three. They had a majority of the Political Committee of the party as it was constituted up to the outbreak of the fight in September 1939. We had to reorganize the Political Committee at the Plenum in October 1939 in order to establish the majority rule in the PC.
Shachtman and Burnham were by no means mere ornaments in the Political Committee. They were the editors of the magazine and of the paper, and they did practically all the literary work. There was a division of labor between them and me, whereby I took care of the organizational and trade union direction, administration and finances – and all the rest of the chores that intellectuals don’t like to bother with as a rule, – and they did the writing, most of it. And when they were on the right line they wrote very well, as you know.
So in 1940 there was a real split, not only in the political leadership but in the working cadre as well. At the time of the split there was a lot of apprehension on the part of some of our comrades. What in the devil would we do without these first class intellectual forces, efficient writers, etc.? And there was great jubilation on their part, and a profound conviction that we would never be able to get along because they took all the writers.
Why, practically all the comrades who are now leading the party and doing all the work of the leading cadre – very few of them were even members of the National Committee at that time. Those who were members, were only getting their first experience and had not yet gained recognition as writers, orators and politicians. Comrade Dobbs, for example, coming out of the mass movement, had been only a couple of months in New York. A number of other comrades, who were members or alternates of the National Committee, had not yet considered themselves or been considered as actual members of the leading political cadre of the party. In 1940 the split of the cadre went right down the middle.
* * *
And then there was a third feature of the 1940 split. The petty-bourgeois opposition went out of the party with the majority of the youth who, as Comrade Dobbs said, have more bounce to the ounce. They were confident that with their dynamism, with their ability to jump and run, with their conception of a “campaign party,” and with their writers – they would soon show that they could build a party faster, bigger, better – and in every other California way – than we could. We didn’t agree with them, but that’s what they started with.
And don’t forget, they started almost the next week with a new party. They called it the “Workers Party” and they came out with a new weekly paper and with a magazine which they stole from us. For a considerable period they thought they were serious rivals of ours in the struggle for the allegiance of the workers’ vanguard in this country. That is what we were up against in 1940. We had to take a new cadre of previously inexperienced comrades and push them into places of responsibility in the Political Committee and the press, and begin their training for leadership in the fire of struggle.
The Party Rolls Along
The 1953 split is quite different in various respects. First, I mentioned size. It is much smaller. Second, the cadre is not split down the middle this time, as might appear to some people when they see these names – Cochran, Clarke, Bartell, Frankel, and so on. They are talented people; they were part of the cadre; but not an indispensable part. We have had five months of experience of the “cold split” since the May Plenum to test that out. During that entire period the Cochranites have done no constructive party work whatever. Inspired by the Great God Pablo, they have devoted their efforts exclusively to factionalism, obstruction of party work and sabotage of party finances. And what has been the result? We have found in the five months since the May Plenum that these people are in no way indispensable to the literary work of the party, to the political work of the party, to the organizational work of the party, or to the financial support of the party.
The party has been rolling along without them and despite them for five months. The split of the cadre turned out to be a splinter. We tested it out for five months in a cold split before we finally confronted it in a hot split, and we know. There will be absolutely no disruption in the leadership, no scurrying around to find who is going to fill the places vacated by these former Trotskyists turned revisionists. The places are already filled, filled to overflowing, so to speak. Everything is going OK. That’s the experience of the drawn-out cold split since May.
* * *
Third, nobody can imagine these people even daring to contemplate the idea of launching a new party and an agitational paper First of all, they don’t believe in their own capacity to build a party. Second, they don’t believe in the capacity of anybody to build a party. And in the third place, they don’t believe in a revolutionary vanguard party. So they are not going to confront us with a rival party, claiming to be the Trotskyist vanguard and the nucleus of the future mass party of the revolution.
They are, in their own maximum optimistic plans, aiming at a small propaganda circle which will publish a little magazine, in which they will observe and analyze and explain things for the benefit of the “sophisticated political elements,” i.e. the Stalinists and “progressive” labor skates. Sideline critics, observers, analysts and abstainers – that is the kind of an opposition they will present to us. No rival party.
They will not be an obstacle to us in our struggle as a party in election campaigns – because they don’t believe in election campaigns. In the first period after we split with the Shachtmanites they used to run their own candidates against us in New York and other places; and in general they tried to compete with us, their party against our party. That will not be the case with the Cochranites. If we want to have any debates with these people, I think we will have to hunt them up wherever they may be hiding. And in some places that is going to be a difficult proposition, especially in Detroit and San Francisco.
* * *
A Test of Leadership
A factional struggle is a test of leadership. Factional struggle is a part of the process of building the revolutionary party of the masses; not the whole of the struggle, but a part of it.
Some comrades, especially mass workers, who want to be all the time busy with their constructive work, who are upset and irritated by arguments, squabbles and faction fights, have to learn that they can’t have peace in the party unless they fight for it. Factional struggle is one way of getting peace.
The party, as you know, enjoyed internal peace and solidarity over that entire period from 1940 to 1951; eleven years, barring that little skirmish with Goldman and Morrow, which did not amount to much – eleven years of peace and normal internal life. This “long peace” carried the party through the war, the trial and the imprisonment of the 18, the post-war boom and the first period of the witch-hunt. That internal peace and solidarity didn’t fall from the sky. It was not “given” to us. We fought for it and secured it by the factional battle with the petty-bourgeois opposition in the eight months from September 1939 to April 1940.
Every serious factional struggle, properly directed by a conscious leadership, develops in progressive stages; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and at every stage of the struggle the leadership is put to a test. Without a conscious leadership, factionalism can devour and destroy a party. Headless factionalism, sometimes even the smallest squabble, can tear a party to pieces. We have seen this happen more than once. Everything depends on the leaders, on their consciousness. They must know how and when to begin the faction fight; how to conduct it; and how and when to finish it.
* * *
The first two stages of the struggle against the revisionist-liquidators in the SWP – the beginning and the middle – are already behind us. Now comes the end. We will have plenty of time to reflect on the experiences of the first two stages later. I think it would be ill-advised and worse than a waste of time, at this stage of final action in finishing the fight, to begin reminiscing and examining how many mistakes were made, and who made this and that mistake, and so on.
The essential thing is that the leading cadre of the party as a whole saw the problem in time, took hold of the situation and brought it out in the open, for five months of free discussion. Then, at the May Plenum we offered the minority a truce in order to give them a chance to reconsider their course or to establish the issues more clearly in objective discussion. Then, when the Cochranites broke the truce, we went through five months of the “cold split,” and finally brought it to an end at the Plenum.
All that was done successfully, without disrupting or demoralizing the party. That is the essential thing. We can leave for later the reminiscences or examinations or analyses of whether a little mistake was made here and there by this one or that one. That does not count now. The third point is what counts now -how to finish the faction fight. And here again it is a question of leadership.
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The Question of the Party
Leadership is the one unsolved problem of the working class of the entire world. The only barrier between the working class of the world and socialism is the unsolved problem of leadership. That is what is meant by “the question of the party.” That is what the Transition Program means when it states that the crisis of the labor movement is the crisis of leadership. That means, that until the working class solves the problem of creating the revolutionary party, the conscious expression of the historic process which can lead the masses in struggle, the issue remains undecided. It is the most important of all questions – the question of the party.
And if our break with Pabloism, as we see it now clearly; if it boils down to one point and is concentrated in one point, that is it – it is the question of the party. That seems clear to us now, as we have seen the development of Pabloism in action. The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part – the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party.
Pabloism aims not only to overthrow Trotskyism; it aims to overthrow that part of Trotskyism which Trotsky learned from Lenin. Lenin’s greatest contribution to his whole epoch was his idea and his determined struggle to build a vanguard party capable of leading the workers in revolution. And he did not confine his theory to the time of his own activity. He went all the way back to 1871, and said that the decisive factor in the defeat of the first proletarian revolution, the Paris Commune, was the absence of a party of the revolutionary Marxist vanguard, capable of giving the mass movement a conscious program and a resolute leadership. It was Trotsky’s acceptance of this part of Lenin in 1917, that made Trotsky a Leninist.
That is written into the Transition Program, that Leninist concept of the decisive role of the revolutionary party. And that is what the Pabloites are throwing overboard in favor of the conception that the ideas will somehow filter into the treacherous bureaucracy, the Stalinists or reformists, and in some way or another, “In the Day of the Comet,” the socialist revolution will be realized and carried through to conclusion without a revolutionary Marxist, that is, a Leninist-Trotskyist party. That is the essence of Pabloism. Pabloism is the substitution of a cult and a revelation for a party and a program.
The Leading Cadre
The problem of the party has another aspect. The problem of the party is the problem of the leadership of the party. I believe, that just as truly as the problem of the party is the problem the working class has to solve before the struggle against capitalism can be definitively successful – the problem of the party is the problem of the leadership of the party.
You cannot build a revolutionary party without the program. We all know that. In time the program will create the party. But herein is precisely the role of conscious leaders – to save time. Time is “of the essence” in this epoch when years count for centuries. It is certainly difficult to build a party without leadership, without cadres. As a matter of fact it can’t be done.
Look over the world, look over all the experiences of the last quarter of a century, in one country after another, where the writings and teachings of Trotsky were available, where the program was known, and what do you see? Where they lacked the leaders to build the party, where they lacked cadres, the party did not amount to much. On the other hand, those parties which threw up leaders capable of working together as a cadre remained firm and solid and consciously prepared their future.
The leading cadre plays the same, decisive role in relation to the party that the party plays in relation to the class. Those who try to break up the historically created cadres of the Trotskyist parties, as the Pabloites are doing in one country after another, are in reality aiming to break up the parties and to liquidate the Trotskyist movement. Take note: I said “trying” and “aiming,” I didn’t say “succeeding.” They will not succeed. The Trotskyist parties will liquidate the liquidators, and the SWP has the high historic privilege of setting the example.
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Given the program, the construction of leading cadres is the key to the construction of revolutionary parties; and the former requires an even higher degree of consciousness and a more deliberate design than the latter. Of course, every party in every generation since the Communist Manifesto has had a leadership of a sort. But there has been very little consciousness about its selection, and for that reason, among others, the real problem remained unsolved. The experiences of the past in this respect are rich in lessons on the theme of what not to do.
The present generation of the revolutionary vanguard, which has the benefit of Lenin and Trotsky, has the supreme duty now to examine the tragic mistakes of the past in this respect in order to avoid them and to replace haphazard methods by a conscious theory and a deliberate design in the construction of leading cadres.
Kinds of Leadership
First, and perhaps worst, of the kinds of party leadership which we have seen and known, even in the Fourth International, is the unplanned leadership of talented individual stars, pulling in opposite directions, squandering their energies in personal rivalries, quarrelling over trifles, and incapable of organizing a sensible division of labor. That has been the tragic experience of many sections of the Fourth International, in particular of the French section. I don’t know how things are in France today, but I do know that the French section of the Fourth International will never become a real party until it learns to discipline its individual star performers and make them work together.
A second kind of leadership is the leadership of a clique. In every leadership clique there is a certain coordination, a certain organization and division of labor, and it sometimes looks good – while it lasts. But a clique is bound together by personal associations – what Trotsky, who hated cliques, called “chumminess” – and has in it, by that very fact, a fatal flaw – that it can be broken up by personal quarrels. That is the inevitable fate of every political clique.
There is no such thing, and can be no such thing as a permanent clique, no matter what good friends and chums may be drawn together in a tight, exclusive circle and say to themselves: “Now we have everything in our hands and we are going to run things fine.” The great winds and waves of the class struggle keep beating upon this little clique. Issues arise. Personal difficulties and frictions develop. And then come personal quarrels and squabbles, meaningless faction fights and senseless splits, and the clique ends in disaster. The party cannot be led by a clique. Not for very long, anyway.
* * *
There is a third method of leadership which I will confess to you frankly I noticed only after I passed my sixtieth birthday. That is the leadership of a cult. I will admit that I lived sixty years in this world before I stumbled over the fact that there are such things as political cults. I began rubbing my eyes when I saw the Johnsonites operating in our party. I saw a cult bound to a single person, a sort of Messiah. And I thought, “I’ll be damned. You’re never too old to learn something new.”
A cult requires unthinking fools for the rank and file. But that is not all. In order for a cult to exist, it is not enough for a leader to have personal followers – every leader has personal influence more or less – but a cult leader has to :be a cultist himself. He has to be a megalomaniac who gets revelations outside the realm of reality. A megalomaniacal cult leader is liable to jump in any direction at any time, and all the cultists automatically follow, as sheep follow the bellwether, even into the slaughter house.
That is what happened with the Johnsonites. The cult followed Johnson, not simply for his theory of the Soviet Union – other people have that theory; a lot of people in the world have that theory about “state capitalism.” The Johnsonites were personal cultist followers of Johnson as a Messiah; and when he finally gave the signal for them to jump out of this party for reasons known only to himself, but allegedly because of some personal grievance he imagined, of which they had no knowledge and which they had just heard about, they all left the party at the same hour, Eastern Standard Time. That is a cult. The Pabloite cult, like any other, is capable of jumping in any direction at any time, whenever the leader gets a revelation. You cannot trust the party of the workers’ vanguard to a cult or a cultist leader.
There is a fourth method of leadership which has been very common. I have seen much of it in my time – that is the leadership of a permanent faction. Here is something that we have to be on our guard about, because we have just gone through a very severe faction fight, and in the course of the fight we have become tightly bound together. It is absolutely necessary for the leadership to see clearly what a temporary faction is, what its legitimate purposes are, what its limits are, and the danger of the faction hardening into permanence.
Hardening of Factious
There is no greater abomination in the workers’ political movement than a permanent faction. There is nothing that can demoralize the internal life of a party more efficiently than a permanent faction. You may say, that is contradicted by the experience of Lenin. Didn’t he organize a faction in 1903, the Bolshevik faction, and didn’t that remain a hard and fast faction all the way up to the revolution? Not entirely. The faction of Lenin, which split with the Mensheviks in 1903, and subsequently had negotiations with them and at various times united with them in a single party, but nevertheless remained a faction, was a faction only in its outward form.
In the essence of the matter, the nucleus of the Bolshevik Party of the October Revolution was the Lenin Bolshevik faction. It was a party. And the proof of the fact that it was a party and not an exclusive faction of Lenin was that within the Bolshevik faction there were different tendencies. There were left-wing and right-wing Bolsheviks. At times some of them openly polemicized with Lenin. The Bolsheviks even had splits and re-unifications among themselves. Lenin did not consider the Bolshevik faction something he was going to keep with him all his life as a closed corporation.
In the decisive days of 1917 when he brought out his April Theses, he showed that his conception was really that of a party by uniting with Trotsky, which made all the difference in the world. It was a party action. And a few months later, when Zinoviev and Kamenev, the very closest collaborators of Lenin, went wrong on the insurrection, he combined with Trotsky to smash them. Lenin’s faction was in reality a party.
* * *
We have seen factions which grew out of a separate struggle, crystallized and hardened, and held together after the issues which brought them into being no longer existed. That was in the old Communist Party.
Its leading cadre, as a whole, was a fusion of people with different backgrounds. There were the New Yorkers, and some others, who came out of the Socialist Party, whose experience had been in the field of parliamentary socialism, election campaigns, etc. – a purely “political” grouping. Ruthenberg, Lovestone, etc., represented this background. There was another tendency in the party represented by the “Westerners” – those who had a syndicalist background, a background of work in the trade union movement, in strikes, in the “direct action” of the class struggle. Foster, Bill Dunne, Swabeck, myself, etc., represented this origin.
We naturally formed different tendencies – each partly right and partly wrong – and from the beginning were always in skirmishes with each other. Eventually these tendencies hardened into factions. Then later, – after several years of experience, we learned from each other and the real differences narrowed down. But the faction formations remained. Time after time, the two factions would agree on what was to be done; agree on every resolution for the convention; and still the factions would continue to exist.
Degeneration of Factionalism
In such circumstances the factions degenerated into gangs struggling for power, and the degeneration of the Communist Party was greatly facilitated by that. The Comintern should have helped us to unify the cadre, but instead it fed the flames of factionalism in order to fish in the troubled waters to create its own Stalinist faction. Those were bitter times. I began to rebel against that sterile kind of struggle and I made several attempts – years before we were thrown out of the party for Trotskyism – I made several attempts to break up the politically senseless faction formations. A number of us broke away from the Foster gang and formed a separate grouping and united with a group that Weinstone had split off from the Lovestoneites, with the same revolt against this purposeless gang factionalism. We formed a “middle grouping” with the slogan: “Dissolve the factions.”
We carried on a fight for a couple of years to dissolve the factions into the party. But by that time both the Lovestoneites and the Fosterites had become so hardened in the gang and clique spirit that it was impossible to do it. That contributed to the degeneration of the Communist Party, because permanent factions become cliques and they exclude everybody else. If a permanent faction happens to get control of the leadership of the party and runs the party as a faction, it is bound to exclude others from any real place in the leadership. By that very fact it drives the others into the organization of counter-cliques and counter-factions, and there is no longer a single cadre in the leadership of the party. We saw that happen in the CP. We have to learn something from that experience.
* * *
In our party, basing ourselves on our experiences and our studies, we have had a conception of the leadership not as a number of uncoordinated individual stars; not as a clique; not – in God’s name – as a cult; and not as a permanent faction. Our conception of the leadership is that of a leading cadre.
It is a conscious design, patiently worked at for years and years. A leading cadre, in our conception, has the following basic characteristics: It consists of people who are, first of all, united on the program; not on every single question that arises in daily work but united on the basic program of Trotskyism. That is the beginning.
The second feature is that the leading cadre is an inclusive and not an exclusive selection. It does not have a fixed membership, but deliberately keeps the door open all the time for the inclusion of new people, for the assimilation and development of others, so that the leading cadre is flexibly broadening in numbers and in influence all the time.
Our cadre has another feature. It constructs the National Committee as a widely democratic representation of the party. I do not know how the leadership is constructed in other parties, but our party here is not led exclusively by the central political working group in New York. The leadership, we have always emphasized, is not the Secretariat. It is not the Political Committee. It is not the Editorial Board. It is the Plenum. The Plenum includes the Secretariat, the Political Committee and the Editorial Board, plus the leading comrades from all the districts of the party.
Leadership Really Representative
These district representatives, as you know, are not handpicked in New York and promoted by special maneuvers. We all know how to do that sort of thing and deliberately refrain from doing it. The central leaders never interfere with the deliberations of the nominating commission at party conventions. The district representatives are freely selected by the delegates from their districts and confirmed by the nominating commission. They really represent their branches or locals, and when they sit in the Plenum you have a really democratic representation of the entire party. That is one reason why our Plenums have such a commanding authority in the party.
When the Plenum meets, we can say that we are the leadership because we really are. It is a small convention every time we have a meeting of the Plenum of the National Committee. That is part of our deliberate program of constructing a representative leadership which is democratically controlled.
* * *
A third feature of our conception of the cadre, which we work on consciously and deliberately all the time, is to cultivate among all the leading people the ability to work together; not to be individual stars; not to be wiseacres who make problems of themselves – but people who fit into a machine; work with others; recognize the merits and respect the opinions of others; recognize that there is no such thing as an unimportant person, that anybody who stands for the program and is sent into the National Committee by his branch or local has got something to give. The task of the central leaders of the party is to open the door for him, find out what he can do, and help him to train himself to do better in the future.
The ability to work together is an essential feature of our conception of the leading cadre, and the next feature is that of a division of labor. It is not necessary for one or two wise guys to know everything and do everything. It is much better, much firmer, much surer if you have a broad selection of people, each one of whom contributes something to the decisions and does a specially selective work for which he is qualified, and coordinates his work with others.
I must say, I take great satisfaction in the way the leading cadre of our party has evolved and developed in the period since the open fight with the Pablo-Cochran revisionists began. I think they have given the world movement a model demonstration of a strong group of people, of varied talents and experiences, learning how to coordinate their efforts, divide the labor between them, and work collectively so that the strength of each one becomes the strength of all. We end up with a powerful machine, which combines the merits of all its individual members into a multiplied power.
* * *
And you not only combine the merits and get good out of them. You can sometimes also get good and positive results from a combination of faults. That also takes place in a properly organized and coordinated cadre. That thought was expressed to me in a letter from Trotsky. What I am telling you here is not exclusively what I have seen and experienced and thought up an my own head. It is not only the experience, but also a great deal of personal instruction from Trotsky. He formed the habit of writing to me very often after he found out that I was willing to listen and did not take offense at friendly criticism.
Trotsky’s Advice
He kept advising me all the time about the problems of leadership. As far back as 1935 and 1936, in the fight with the Musteites and the Oehlerites, he gave us such advice. He always referred to Lenin, how Lenin had put his cadre together. He said, Lenin would take one man who had an impulse for action, smelled opportunities and had a tendency to run ahead of himself, and balance him off against a man who was a little more cautious – and the compromise between the two got a balanced decision, which redounded to the benefit of the party.
He told me, for example, in one letter where he was advising me to be very careful and not to make an exclusive slate for the Committee, and not to eliminate people who have some faults which I especially don’t like, such as hesitation, conciliationism and indecisiveness in general; he said, you know Lenin used to say about Kamenev, that he was a constitutional vacillator; he always tended at the moment of decision to “soften up,” to vacillate and conciliate. Kamenev, as a matter of fact, belonged to the faction of Bolshevik conciliators in the period after 1907 to 1917, with a tendency toward conciliation with the Mensheviks, but he remained in the Bolshevik Party.
And Lenin used to say – as Trotsky explained it to me – we need Kamenev in the Central Committee because his tendency to waver and conciliate is the reflection of a certain tendency of that kind in the party ranks that we want to keep our finger on. When Kamenev speaks we know that there is a certain sentiment within the party of the same kind that we have to take into consideration. And while we do not accept Kamenev’s wavering and conciliationism, we go slow and take it into account because when we move we want to take the whole party with us. If he raises too many objections, we stop awhile and devote a little more time to education in the party ranks to make sure that our ranks will be solid.
* * *
Our strength is in our combination, both of our faults and of our virtues. That, taken on the whole, is what I call the cadre concept of leadership. This cadre, for the last year almost, has been constituted as a faction – that is, the great majority of the cadre. We have engaged in a faction struggle. But what was that cadre organized into a faction for? It was not the whole cadre; it was the majority, but not all. It didn’t include the comrades from Buffalo and Youngstown – there were some differences there at first but they have been virtually eliminated in the course of the struggle; the decisions of this Plenum are all unanimous.
But at the start, the majority of the cadre constituted itself into a faction, meeting by itself, making its own decisions, and so on.
However, this faction was not formed for the purpose of having a faction. It was not formed as a permanent combination of good fellows who are going to stick together from now to doomsday and not let anybody else join. It is not a gang, nor a clan, nor a clique. It is just simply a politico-military organization formed for a certain purpose. But what was the purpose? The purpose was to defeat and isolate the revisionist faction of Pablo-Cochran. That aim has been achieved.
Dissolution of Majority Faction
That being the case, what is the duty of this faction now? Are we going to hold together for old time’s sake, form a sort of “Grand Army of the Republic” – the only ones allowed to wear ribbons, demand special privileges and honors? No. The duty of this faction now is to say: “The task is finished, the faction is no longer needed, and the faction must be dissolved into the party.” The leadership of the party belongs henceforth to the cadre as a whole, assembled at this Plenum. All problems, all questions for discussion, should be taken directly into the party branches.
I would like to start off this new stage of party life by announcing here, in the name of the majority faction of the National Committee, its unanimous decision: The majority faction that was formed for the purposes of the struggle, having accomplished its task, thereby dissolves itself into the party.
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
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Fourth International
November-December, 1953
Factional Struggle And Party Leadership
James P. Cannon
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.14 No.6, November-December 1953, pp.115-122.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription\HTML Markup: Andrew Pollack.
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(Speech by James P. Cannon at the Open Plenum of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, November 1953, New York, N.Y.)
* * *
We all recognize, comrades, that we have come to the end of the long faction fight in the party. Nothing remains now but to sum up the results.
This has been a long faction fight, and it was not brought to a definitive conclusion until it was fully ripe. The Cochranite minority were given a whole year to carry on underground factional work and organization in the party. A whole year. Then we finally dragged them out into the open, and we had intensified discussion for five months, with more Internal Bulletins published even than in the great fight of 1939-40. Then we had the May Plenum and the truce, which the Cochranites signed but did not keep.
Then five more months of struggle during which the Cochranites developed their positions to their logical conclusion and showed themselves in action as an anti-party, anti-Trotskyist tendency. They organized a campaign of sabotage of party activities and party funds, culminating in the organized boycott of our 25th Anniversary meeting. Then we came to this November Plenum where the Cochranite leaders were indicted for treachery and suspended from the party. And that’s the end of the faction fight in the SWP.
In the face of the record nobody can justly say that we were impatient; that anything was done hastily; that there wasn’t a “free and ample discussion; that there were not abundant proofs of disloyalty before discipline was invoked. And above all, nobody can say that the leadership hesitated to bring down the ax when the time came for it. That was their duty. The rights of a minority in our democratic party have never included, and will never include, the right to be disloyal. The SWP has no place and no room for strike-breakers.
* * *
Unifications and Splits
Trotsky once remarked that unifications and splits are alike methods of building the revolutionary party. That’s a profoundly true remark, as experience has shown. The party which led the Russian Revolution to victory was the product of the split with the Mensheviks in 1903, several unifications and splits along the road, and the final unification with Trotsky in 1917. The combination of the splits and the unifications made possible the party of victory in the Russian Revolution.
We have seen, in our own experience, the same principle working out. We began with a split from the Stalinists. Unification with the Musteites in 1934 and later with the left-wing of the Socialist Party were great milestones in the building of our organization. But these unifications were of no more importance, and stand rather on an equal plane, with the split of the leftist sectarians in 1935 and of the revisionist Burnhamites in 1940, and with the split of the new revisionists today. All these actions have been part of the process of building the revolutionary party.
This law enunciated by Trotsky, that both unifications and splits are alike methods of building the party, is true however, only on the condition that both the unification and the split in each case is properly motivated. If they are not properly prepared and properly motivated they can have a disrupting and disorganizing effect. I can give you examples of that.
The unification of the Left Opposition under Nin in Spain with the opportunist Maurin group, out of which was formed the POUM, was one of the decisive factors in the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. The dilution of the program of Trotskyism for the sake of unification with an opportunist group robbed the Spanish proletariat of that clear program and resolute leadership which could have made the difference in the Spanish Revolution in 1936.
Conversely, the splits in the French Trotskyist organization before World War II, several of them, none of which were properly motivated – contributed to the demoralization of the party. It has been our good fortune that we have made no false unifications and no false splits. Never have we had a split in which the party did not bound forward the day after, precisely because the split was properly prepared and properly motivated.
The party was not ready for a split when our Plenum convened last May. The minority at that time had by no means extended their revisionist conceptions into action in such a manner as to convince every single member of the party that they were alien to us. For that reason we made big concessions to avoid a split. By the same reasoning, because everything was clear and everything was ripe in November, we made the split here – without the slightest hesitation. And if, in the reminiscences of the fight, you give the party leadership credit for their patience and forbearance in the long struggle, don’t forget to add that they deserve just as much credit for the decisive, resolute action taken at this Plenum to bring things to a conclusion.
* * *
The Split of 1940
I think it would be useful for us to make a comparison of this split, which we consider to be progressive and a contribution to the development of the revolutionary party in America, with the split of 1940. There are points of similarity and of difference. They are similar insofar as the basic issue in each case was revisionism. But the revisionism of 1940 was by no means as deep and definitive as the revisionism that we have split with today. Burnham, it is true, had abandoned the program of Marxism but he did it openly only in the last stages of the fight, when he took off the mask. And Shachtman did not go along fully with him. Shachtman, up to the point of the split, did not openly revise our program on the Soviet Union, which was the central issue in dispute.
He left the question open and even stated in one of his last documents that if the imperialists would attack the Soviet Union he would come out for defense. As for the third leader, Abern, he did not yield anything theoretically to revisionism at all. He still considered himself an orthodox Trotskyist, and thought the whole fight was over the organization question. He was greatly mistaken, but the definitive struggle between orthodox Trotskyism and revisionism was by no means as clear-cut and deep in 1940 as it is this time. That was shown by the fact that when Burnham; carried his revisionism to its logical conclusion and abandoned the movement altogether a couple of months later, Shachtman and Abern drew back.
The two splits, this one and that of 1940, are similar in that they were both unavoidable. The differences in each case had matured to the point where we could no longer talk the same language or live in the same party. When the Shachtmanites gave us their plain ultimatum and demanded that they be allowed to have their own paper, their own magazine, their own public expression, they were only expressing their deepest conviction that they had to talk a different language from ours; that they could not conscientiously circulate what we wrote in our press along orthodox lines. And since we could not tolerate that, the split was unavoidable.
* * *
The present split is different from 1940 in that it is more definitive. There is not a single member of this Plenum who contemplates any later relations in the same party with the strike-breakers of the Pablo-Cochran gang. Any doubt on this score is excluded. It is an absolute certainty that from yesterday morning at eleven o’clock, when they left the hall, – not with a bang but a giggle – that they left for good. The most that can be contemplated is that individual members who have been caught in the under-currents may drift back to the party one by one, and of course they will be received. But as far as the main core of the minority faction is concerned, they have broken forever with us. The day they were suspended from the party, and released from further obligations to it, was probably the happiest day of their lives.
The Shachtmanites, on the other hand, continued to protest for a long time that they would like to have unity. And even six-seven years after the split, in 1946 and 1947, we actually conducted unity negotiations with the Shachtmanites. At one time in early 1947 we had a unification agreement with them, illustrating the point I make that the split of 1940 was by no means as definitive and final as is the split today. We are finished and done with Pablo and Pabloism forever, not only here but on the international field. And nobody is going to take up any of our time with any negotiations about compromise or any nonsense of that sort. We are at war with this new revisionism, which came to full flower in the reaction to the events after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union, in East Germany, and in the French general strike.
Differences in the Splits
There are differences between the two splits in other respects, very important ones, and more favorable for the party. First, as to the size of the split. In 1940 the Shachtmanites had not less than 40% of the party and a majority of the youth organization. If you count the youth, who were not voting members of the party, it was almost a 50-50 split. This group takes out a bare 20%. That is one difference.
A second difference is that in 1940 the split was a split of the leading cadre right down the middle. Not just a sloughing off of some people that you can easily get along without. For years in the central leadership of the party, the central political nucleus had been Burnham, Shachtman and Cannon. They took two out of the three. They had a majority of the Political Committee of the party as it was constituted up to the outbreak of the fight in September 1939. We had to reorganize the Political Committee at the Plenum in October 1939 in order to establish the majority rule in the PC.
Shachtman and Burnham were by no means mere ornaments in the Political Committee. They were the editors of the magazine and of the paper, and they did practically all the literary work. There was a division of labor between them and me, whereby I took care of the organizational and trade union direction, administration and finances – and all the rest of the chores that intellectuals don’t like to bother with as a rule, – and they did the writing, most of it. And when they were on the right line they wrote very well, as you know.
So in 1940 there was a real split, not only in the political leadership but in the working cadre as well. At the time of the split there was a lot of apprehension on the part of some of our comrades. What in the devil would we do without these first class intellectual forces, efficient writers, etc.? And there was great jubilation on their part, and a profound conviction that we would never be able to get along because they took all the writers.
Why, practically all the comrades who are now leading the party and doing all the work of the leading cadre – very few of them were even members of the National Committee at that time. Those who were members, were only getting their first experience and had not yet gained recognition as writers, orators and politicians. Comrade Dobbs, for example, coming out of the mass movement, had been only a couple of months in New York. A number of other comrades, who were members or alternates of the National Committee, had not yet considered themselves or been considered as actual members of the leading political cadre of the party. In 1940 the split of the cadre went right down the middle.
* * *
And then there was a third feature of the 1940 split. The petty-bourgeois opposition went out of the party with the majority of the youth who, as Comrade Dobbs said, have more bounce to the ounce. They were confident that with their dynamism, with their ability to jump and run, with their conception of a “campaign party,” and with their writers – they would soon show that they could build a party faster, bigger, better – and in every other California way – than we could. We didn’t agree with them, but that’s what they started with.
And don’t forget, they started almost the next week with a new party. They called it the “Workers Party” and they came out with a new weekly paper and with a magazine which they stole from us. For a considerable period they thought they were serious rivals of ours in the struggle for the allegiance of the workers’ vanguard in this country. That is what we were up against in 1940. We had to take a new cadre of previously inexperienced comrades and push them into places of responsibility in the Political Committee and the press, and begin their training for leadership in the fire of struggle.
The Party Rolls Along
The 1953 split is quite different in various respects. First, I mentioned size. It is much smaller. Second, the cadre is not split down the middle this time, as might appear to some people when they see these names – Cochran, Clarke, Bartell, Frankel, and so on. They are talented people; they were part of the cadre; but not an indispensable part. We have had five months of experience of the “cold split” since the May Plenum to test that out. During that entire period the Cochranites have done no constructive party work whatever. Inspired by the Great God Pablo, they have devoted their efforts exclusively to factionalism, obstruction of party work and sabotage of party finances. And what has been the result? We have found in the five months since the May Plenum that these people are in no way indispensable to the literary work of the party, to the political work of the party, to the organizational work of the party, or to the financial support of the party.
The party has been rolling along without them and despite them for five months. The split of the cadre turned out to be a splinter. We tested it out for five months in a cold split before we finally confronted it in a hot split, and we know. There will be absolutely no disruption in the leadership, no scurrying around to find who is going to fill the places vacated by these former Trotskyists turned revisionists. The places are already filled, filled to overflowing, so to speak. Everything is going OK. That’s the experience of the drawn-out cold split since May.
* * *
Third, nobody can imagine these people even daring to contemplate the idea of launching a new party and an agitational paper First of all, they don’t believe in their own capacity to build a party. Second, they don’t believe in the capacity of anybody to build a party. And in the third place, they don’t believe in a revolutionary vanguard party. So they are not going to confront us with a rival party, claiming to be the Trotskyist vanguard and the nucleus of the future mass party of the revolution.
They are, in their own maximum optimistic plans, aiming at a small propaganda circle which will publish a little magazine, in which they will observe and analyze and explain things for the benefit of the “sophisticated political elements,” i.e. the Stalinists and “progressive” labor skates. Sideline critics, observers, analysts and abstainers – that is the kind of an opposition they will present to us. No rival party.
They will not be an obstacle to us in our struggle as a party in election campaigns – because they don’t believe in election campaigns. In the first period after we split with the Shachtmanites they used to run their own candidates against us in New York and other places; and in general they tried to compete with us, their party against our party. That will not be the case with the Cochranites. If we want to have any debates with these people, I think we will have to hunt them up wherever they may be hiding. And in some places that is going to be a difficult proposition, especially in Detroit and San Francisco.
* * *
A Test of Leadership
A factional struggle is a test of leadership. Factional struggle is a part of the process of building the revolutionary party of the masses; not the whole of the struggle, but a part of it.
Some comrades, especially mass workers, who want to be all the time busy with their constructive work, who are upset and irritated by arguments, squabbles and faction fights, have to learn that they can’t have peace in the party unless they fight for it. Factional struggle is one way of getting peace.
The party, as you know, enjoyed internal peace and solidarity over that entire period from 1940 to 1951; eleven years, barring that little skirmish with Goldman and Morrow, which did not amount to much – eleven years of peace and normal internal life. This “long peace” carried the party through the war, the trial and the imprisonment of the 18, the post-war boom and the first period of the witch-hunt. That internal peace and solidarity didn’t fall from the sky. It was not “given” to us. We fought for it and secured it by the factional battle with the petty-bourgeois opposition in the eight months from September 1939 to April 1940.
Every serious factional struggle, properly directed by a conscious leadership, develops in progressive stages; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and at every stage of the struggle the leadership is put to a test. Without a conscious leadership, factionalism can devour and destroy a party. Headless factionalism, sometimes even the smallest squabble, can tear a party to pieces. We have seen this happen more than once. Everything depends on the leaders, on their consciousness. They must know how and when to begin the faction fight; how to conduct it; and how and when to finish it.
* * *
The first two stages of the struggle against the revisionist-liquidators in the SWP – the beginning and the middle – are already behind us. Now comes the end. We will have plenty of time to reflect on the experiences of the first two stages later. I think it would be ill-advised and worse than a waste of time, at this stage of final action in finishing the fight, to begin reminiscing and examining how many mistakes were made, and who made this and that mistake, and so on.
The essential thing is that the leading cadre of the party as a whole saw the problem in time, took hold of the situation and brought it out in the open, for five months of free discussion. Then, at the May Plenum we offered the minority a truce in order to give them a chance to reconsider their course or to establish the issues more clearly in objective discussion. Then, when the Cochranites broke the truce, we went through five months of the “cold split,” and finally brought it to an end at the Plenum.
All that was done successfully, without disrupting or demoralizing the party. That is the essential thing. We can leave for later the reminiscences or examinations or analyses of whether a little mistake was made here and there by this one or that one. That does not count now. The third point is what counts now -how to finish the faction fight. And here again it is a question of leadership.
* * *
The Question of the Party
Leadership is the one unsolved problem of the working class of the entire world. The only barrier between the working class of the world and socialism is the unsolved problem of leadership. That is what is meant by “the question of the party.” That is what the Transition Program means when it states that the crisis of the labor movement is the crisis of leadership. That means, that until the working class solves the problem of creating the revolutionary party, the conscious expression of the historic process which can lead the masses in struggle, the issue remains undecided. It is the most important of all questions – the question of the party.
And if our break with Pabloism, as we see it now clearly; if it boils down to one point and is concentrated in one point, that is it – it is the question of the party. That seems clear to us now, as we have seen the development of Pabloism in action. The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part – the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party.
Pabloism aims not only to overthrow Trotskyism; it aims to overthrow that part of Trotskyism which Trotsky learned from Lenin. Lenin’s greatest contribution to his whole epoch was his idea and his determined struggle to build a vanguard party capable of leading the workers in revolution. And he did not confine his theory to the time of his own activity. He went all the way back to 1871, and said that the decisive factor in the defeat of the first proletarian revolution, the Paris Commune, was the absence of a party of the revolutionary Marxist vanguard, capable of giving the mass movement a conscious program and a resolute leadership. It was Trotsky’s acceptance of this part of Lenin in 1917, that made Trotsky a Leninist.
That is written into the Transition Program, that Leninist concept of the decisive role of the revolutionary party. And that is what the Pabloites are throwing overboard in favor of the conception that the ideas will somehow filter into the treacherous bureaucracy, the Stalinists or reformists, and in some way or another, “In the Day of the Comet,” the socialist revolution will be realized and carried through to conclusion without a revolutionary Marxist, that is, a Leninist-Trotskyist party. That is the essence of Pabloism. Pabloism is the substitution of a cult and a revelation for a party and a program.
The Leading Cadre
The problem of the party has another aspect. The problem of the party is the problem of the leadership of the party. I believe, that just as truly as the problem of the party is the problem the working class has to solve before the struggle against capitalism can be definitively successful – the problem of the party is the problem of the leadership of the party.
You cannot build a revolutionary party without the program. We all know that. In time the program will create the party. But herein is precisely the role of conscious leaders – to save time. Time is “of the essence” in this epoch when years count for centuries. It is certainly difficult to build a party without leadership, without cadres. As a matter of fact it can’t be done.
Look over the world, look over all the experiences of the last quarter of a century, in one country after another, where the writings and teachings of Trotsky were available, where the program was known, and what do you see? Where they lacked the leaders to build the party, where they lacked cadres, the party did not amount to much. On the other hand, those parties which threw up leaders capable of working together as a cadre remained firm and solid and consciously prepared their future.
The leading cadre plays the same, decisive role in relation to the party that the party plays in relation to the class. Those who try to break up the historically created cadres of the Trotskyist parties, as the Pabloites are doing in one country after another, are in reality aiming to break up the parties and to liquidate the Trotskyist movement. Take note: I said “trying” and “aiming,” I didn’t say “succeeding.” They will not succeed. The Trotskyist parties will liquidate the liquidators, and the SWP has the high historic privilege of setting the example.
* * *
Given the program, the construction of leading cadres is the key to the construction of revolutionary parties; and the former requires an even higher degree of consciousness and a more deliberate design than the latter. Of course, every party in every generation since the Communist Manifesto has had a leadership of a sort. But there has been very little consciousness about its selection, and for that reason, among others, the real problem remained unsolved. The experiences of the past in this respect are rich in lessons on the theme of what not to do.
The present generation of the revolutionary vanguard, which has the benefit of Lenin and Trotsky, has the supreme duty now to examine the tragic mistakes of the past in this respect in order to avoid them and to replace haphazard methods by a conscious theory and a deliberate design in the construction of leading cadres.
Kinds of Leadership
First, and perhaps worst, of the kinds of party leadership which we have seen and known, even in the Fourth International, is the unplanned leadership of talented individual stars, pulling in opposite directions, squandering their energies in personal rivalries, quarrelling over trifles, and incapable of organizing a sensible division of labor. That has been the tragic experience of many sections of the Fourth International, in particular of the French section. I don’t know how things are in France today, but I do know that the French section of the Fourth International will never become a real party until it learns to discipline its individual star performers and make them work together.
A second kind of leadership is the leadership of a clique. In every leadership clique there is a certain coordination, a certain organization and division of labor, and it sometimes looks good – while it lasts. But a clique is bound together by personal associations – what Trotsky, who hated cliques, called “chumminess” – and has in it, by that very fact, a fatal flaw – that it can be broken up by personal quarrels. That is the inevitable fate of every political clique.
There is no such thing, and can be no such thing as a permanent clique, no matter what good friends and chums may be drawn together in a tight, exclusive circle and say to themselves: “Now we have everything in our hands and we are going to run things fine.” The great winds and waves of the class struggle keep beating upon this little clique. Issues arise. Personal difficulties and frictions develop. And then come personal quarrels and squabbles, meaningless faction fights and senseless splits, and the clique ends in disaster. The party cannot be led by a clique. Not for very long, anyway.
* * *
There is a third method of leadership which I will confess to you frankly I noticed only after I passed my sixtieth birthday. That is the leadership of a cult. I will admit that I lived sixty years in this world before I stumbled over the fact that there are such things as political cults. I began rubbing my eyes when I saw the Johnsonites operating in our party. I saw a cult bound to a single person, a sort of Messiah. And I thought, “I’ll be damned. You’re never too old to learn something new.”
A cult requires unthinking fools for the rank and file. But that is not all. In order for a cult to exist, it is not enough for a leader to have personal followers – every leader has personal influence more or less – but a cult leader has to :be a cultist himself. He has to be a megalomaniac who gets revelations outside the realm of reality. A megalomaniacal cult leader is liable to jump in any direction at any time, and all the cultists automatically follow, as sheep follow the bellwether, even into the slaughter house.
That is what happened with the Johnsonites. The cult followed Johnson, not simply for his theory of the Soviet Union – other people have that theory; a lot of people in the world have that theory about “state capitalism.” The Johnsonites were personal cultist followers of Johnson as a Messiah; and when he finally gave the signal for them to jump out of this party for reasons known only to himself, but allegedly because of some personal grievance he imagined, of which they had no knowledge and which they had just heard about, they all left the party at the same hour, Eastern Standard Time. That is a cult. The Pabloite cult, like any other, is capable of jumping in any direction at any time, whenever the leader gets a revelation. You cannot trust the party of the workers’ vanguard to a cult or a cultist leader.
There is a fourth method of leadership which has been very common. I have seen much of it in my time – that is the leadership of a permanent faction. Here is something that we have to be on our guard about, because we have just gone through a very severe faction fight, and in the course of the fight we have become tightly bound together. It is absolutely necessary for the leadership to see clearly what a temporary faction is, what its legitimate purposes are, what its limits are, and the danger of the faction hardening into permanence.
Hardening of Factious
There is no greater abomination in the workers’ political movement than a permanent faction. There is nothing that can demoralize the internal life of a party more efficiently than a permanent faction. You may say, that is contradicted by the experience of Lenin. Didn’t he organize a faction in 1903, the Bolshevik faction, and didn’t that remain a hard and fast faction all the way up to the revolution? Not entirely. The faction of Lenin, which split with the Mensheviks in 1903, and subsequently had negotiations with them and at various times united with them in a single party, but nevertheless remained a faction, was a faction only in its outward form.
In the essence of the matter, the nucleus of the Bolshevik Party of the October Revolution was the Lenin Bolshevik faction. It was a party. And the proof of the fact that it was a party and not an exclusive faction of Lenin was that within the Bolshevik faction there were different tendencies. There were left-wing and right-wing Bolsheviks. At times some of them openly polemicized with Lenin. The Bolsheviks even had splits and re-unifications among themselves. Lenin did not consider the Bolshevik faction something he was going to keep with him all his life as a closed corporation.
In the decisive days of 1917 when he brought out his April Theses, he showed that his conception was really that of a party by uniting with Trotsky, which made all the difference in the world. It was a party action. And a few months later, when Zinoviev and Kamenev, the very closest collaborators of Lenin, went wrong on the insurrection, he combined with Trotsky to smash them. Lenin’s faction was in reality a party.
* * *
We have seen factions which grew out of a separate struggle, crystallized and hardened, and held together after the issues which brought them into being no longer existed. That was in the old Communist Party.
Its leading cadre, as a whole, was a fusion of people with different backgrounds. There were the New Yorkers, and some others, who came out of the Socialist Party, whose experience had been in the field of parliamentary socialism, election campaigns, etc. – a purely “political” grouping. Ruthenberg, Lovestone, etc., represented this background. There was another tendency in the party represented by the “Westerners” – those who had a syndicalist background, a background of work in the trade union movement, in strikes, in the “direct action” of the class struggle. Foster, Bill Dunne, Swabeck, myself, etc., represented this origin.
We naturally formed different tendencies – each partly right and partly wrong – and from the beginning were always in skirmishes with each other. Eventually these tendencies hardened into factions. Then later, – after several years of experience, we learned from each other and the real differences narrowed down. But the faction formations remained. Time after time, the two factions would agree on what was to be done; agree on every resolution for the convention; and still the factions would continue to exist.
Degeneration of Factionalism
In such circumstances the factions degenerated into gangs struggling for power, and the degeneration of the Communist Party was greatly facilitated by that. The Comintern should have helped us to unify the cadre, but instead it fed the flames of factionalism in order to fish in the troubled waters to create its own Stalinist faction. Those were bitter times. I began to rebel against that sterile kind of struggle and I made several attempts – years before we were thrown out of the party for Trotskyism – I made several attempts to break up the politically senseless faction formations. A number of us broke away from the Foster gang and formed a separate grouping and united with a group that Weinstone had split off from the Lovestoneites, with the same revolt against this purposeless gang factionalism. We formed a “middle grouping” with the slogan: “Dissolve the factions.”
We carried on a fight for a couple of years to dissolve the factions into the party. But by that time both the Lovestoneites and the Fosterites had become so hardened in the gang and clique spirit that it was impossible to do it. That contributed to the degeneration of the Communist Party, because permanent factions become cliques and they exclude everybody else. If a permanent faction happens to get control of the leadership of the party and runs the party as a faction, it is bound to exclude others from any real place in the leadership. By that very fact it drives the others into the organization of counter-cliques and counter-factions, and there is no longer a single cadre in the leadership of the party. We saw that happen in the CP. We have to learn something from that experience.
* * *
In our party, basing ourselves on our experiences and our studies, we have had a conception of the leadership not as a number of uncoordinated individual stars; not as a clique; not – in God’s name – as a cult; and not as a permanent faction. Our conception of the leadership is that of a leading cadre.
It is a conscious design, patiently worked at for years and years. A leading cadre, in our conception, has the following basic characteristics: It consists of people who are, first of all, united on the program; not on every single question that arises in daily work but united on the basic program of Trotskyism. That is the beginning.
The second feature is that the leading cadre is an inclusive and not an exclusive selection. It does not have a fixed membership, but deliberately keeps the door open all the time for the inclusion of new people, for the assimilation and development of others, so that the leading cadre is flexibly broadening in numbers and in influence all the time.
Our cadre has another feature. It constructs the National Committee as a widely democratic representation of the party. I do not know how the leadership is constructed in other parties, but our party here is not led exclusively by the central political working group in New York. The leadership, we have always emphasized, is not the Secretariat. It is not the Political Committee. It is not the Editorial Board. It is the Plenum. The Plenum includes the Secretariat, the Political Committee and the Editorial Board, plus the leading comrades from all the districts of the party.
Leadership Really Representative
These district representatives, as you know, are not handpicked in New York and promoted by special maneuvers. We all know how to do that sort of thing and deliberately refrain from doing it. The central leaders never interfere with the deliberations of the nominating commission at party conventions. The district representatives are freely selected by the delegates from their districts and confirmed by the nominating commission. They really represent their branches or locals, and when they sit in the Plenum you have a really democratic representation of the entire party. That is one reason why our Plenums have such a commanding authority in the party.
When the Plenum meets, we can say that we are the leadership because we really are. It is a small convention every time we have a meeting of the Plenum of the National Committee. That is part of our deliberate program of constructing a representative leadership which is democratically controlled.
* * *
A third feature of our conception of the cadre, which we work on consciously and deliberately all the time, is to cultivate among all the leading people the ability to work together; not to be individual stars; not to be wiseacres who make problems of themselves – but people who fit into a machine; work with others; recognize the merits and respect the opinions of others; recognize that there is no such thing as an unimportant person, that anybody who stands for the program and is sent into the National Committee by his branch or local has got something to give. The task of the central leaders of the party is to open the door for him, find out what he can do, and help him to train himself to do better in the future.
The ability to work together is an essential feature of our conception of the leading cadre, and the next feature is that of a division of labor. It is not necessary for one or two wise guys to know everything and do everything. It is much better, much firmer, much surer if you have a broad selection of people, each one of whom contributes something to the decisions and does a specially selective work for which he is qualified, and coordinates his work with others.
I must say, I take great satisfaction in the way the leading cadre of our party has evolved and developed in the period since the open fight with the Pablo-Cochran revisionists began. I think they have given the world movement a model demonstration of a strong group of people, of varied talents and experiences, learning how to coordinate their efforts, divide the labor between them, and work collectively so that the strength of each one becomes the strength of all. We end up with a powerful machine, which combines the merits of all its individual members into a multiplied power.
* * *
And you not only combine the merits and get good out of them. You can sometimes also get good and positive results from a combination of faults. That also takes place in a properly organized and coordinated cadre. That thought was expressed to me in a letter from Trotsky. What I am telling you here is not exclusively what I have seen and experienced and thought up an my own head. It is not only the experience, but also a great deal of personal instruction from Trotsky. He formed the habit of writing to me very often after he found out that I was willing to listen and did not take offense at friendly criticism.
Trotsky’s Advice
He kept advising me all the time about the problems of leadership. As far back as 1935 and 1936, in the fight with the Musteites and the Oehlerites, he gave us such advice. He always referred to Lenin, how Lenin had put his cadre together. He said, Lenin would take one man who had an impulse for action, smelled opportunities and had a tendency to run ahead of himself, and balance him off against a man who was a little more cautious – and the compromise between the two got a balanced decision, which redounded to the benefit of the party.
He told me, for example, in one letter where he was advising me to be very careful and not to make an exclusive slate for the Committee, and not to eliminate people who have some faults which I especially don’t like, such as hesitation, conciliationism and indecisiveness in general; he said, you know Lenin used to say about Kamenev, that he was a constitutional vacillator; he always tended at the moment of decision to “soften up,” to vacillate and conciliate. Kamenev, as a matter of fact, belonged to the faction of Bolshevik conciliators in the period after 1907 to 1917, with a tendency toward conciliation with the Mensheviks, but he remained in the Bolshevik Party.
And Lenin used to say – as Trotsky explained it to me – we need Kamenev in the Central Committee because his tendency to waver and conciliate is the reflection of a certain tendency of that kind in the party ranks that we want to keep our finger on. When Kamenev speaks we know that there is a certain sentiment within the party of the same kind that we have to take into consideration. And while we do not accept Kamenev’s wavering and conciliationism, we go slow and take it into account because when we move we want to take the whole party with us. If he raises too many objections, we stop awhile and devote a little more time to education in the party ranks to make sure that our ranks will be solid.
* * *
Our strength is in our combination, both of our faults and of our virtues. That, taken on the whole, is what I call the cadre concept of leadership. This cadre, for the last year almost, has been constituted as a faction – that is, the great majority of the cadre. We have engaged in a faction struggle. But what was that cadre organized into a faction for? It was not the whole cadre; it was the majority, but not all. It didn’t include the comrades from Buffalo and Youngstown – there were some differences there at first but they have been virtually eliminated in the course of the struggle; the decisions of this Plenum are all unanimous.
But at the start, the majority of the cadre constituted itself into a faction, meeting by itself, making its own decisions, and so on.
However, this faction was not formed for the purpose of having a faction. It was not formed as a permanent combination of good fellows who are going to stick together from now to doomsday and not let anybody else join. It is not a gang, nor a clan, nor a clique. It is just simply a politico-military organization formed for a certain purpose. But what was the purpose? The purpose was to defeat and isolate the revisionist faction of Pablo-Cochran. That aim has been achieved.
Dissolution of Majority Faction
That being the case, what is the duty of this faction now? Are we going to hold together for old time’s sake, form a sort of “Grand Army of the Republic” – the only ones allowed to wear ribbons, demand special privileges and honors? No. The duty of this faction now is to say: “The task is finished, the faction is no longer needed, and the faction must be dissolved into the party.” The leadership of the party belongs henceforth to the cadre as a whole, assembled at this Plenum. All problems, all questions for discussion, should be taken directly into the party branches.
I would like to start off this new stage of party life by announcing here, in the name of the majority faction of the National Committee, its unanimous decision: The majority faction that was formed for the purposes of the struggle, having accomplished its task, thereby dissolves itself into the party.
*From "YouTube"- December 16, 2010-Veterans for Peace Take Demand to White House Fence -The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
* From The "Stop These Wars" Website- December 16, 2010-The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to the Stop These Wars Website for many reports and videos of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*Once Again-From The Blogosphere- December 16, 2010-The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to a Libertarian blog entry film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*From The December 16th Veteran-Led March On The White House -The Resistance Begins
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the veteran-led march on the White House December 16, 2010.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
From "The Washington Post"-Daniel Ellsberg's Defense Of "Wikileaks" And Pvt Bradley Manning
Click on the headline to link to a Washington Post online article about Pentagon Papers (1971) whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on current whistleblowers Wikileaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning.
Markin comment:
This one is easy- Hands Off Wikileaks ! and Free Bradley Manning.
Markin comment:
This one is easy- Hands Off Wikileaks ! and Free Bradley Manning.
*The Winter Palace, 1917 (Oops!)-The White House, December 16, 2010- The Winter Soldier Resistance-Down With Imperialist War!
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House. For pictures of the Winter Palace in Russia in November 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution you are on your own. Markin comment:
Old Truth: Old white-haired men, well-groomed, well-sated, mainly white-skinned, a few women also white-haired, and also mainly white-skinned now thrown in, their arthritic hands on the throttles on state power send young, virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class men, many brown and black- skinned (and also now young virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class women, many brown and black-skinned) to fight their imperial wars. Their American behemoth, monstrous imperial wars. A current “white” black front man, a conscious and willing front man does not alter that truth. That configuration, that infernal configuration, of who orders and who fights remains in place and no amount of “spin” can alter it.
“Spin”: our vital national security interests demand it: if we don’t stop them there (fill in the blank there) they’ll be at our doorstep next; they need a good dose of democracy, democracy America-style, to cure their ills; we had to burn that village to the ground to save it; the only good “commie” (fill in the blank for the current “axis of evil” enemy) is a dead “commie”; we need to keep our oil (fill in the blank for your favored resource) supplies secure; if we don’t support (fill in the blank) then the next guy will be even worst; we are winning the war by not losing; we can see the light at the end of the tunnel; oh, that, that was strictly “collateral damage” that doesn’t count; we seek no wider war but I will next week sent (fill in the blank) troops just to be on the safe side; America love it, or leave it; my country, right or wrong; and, on and on and on.
New Truth: White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders, many Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of the past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly. All, I say all, showing the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
Old Truth: Old white-haired men, well-groomed, well-sated, mainly white-skinned, a few women also white-haired, and also mainly white-skinned now thrown in, their arthritic hands on the throttles on state power send young, virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class men, many brown and black- skinned (and also now young virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class women, many brown and black-skinned) to fight their imperial wars. Their American behemoth, monstrous imperial wars. A current “white” black front man, a conscious and willing front man does not alter that truth. That configuration, that infernal configuration, of who orders and who fights remains in place and no amount of “spin” can alter it.
“Spin”: our vital national security interests demand it: if we don’t stop them there (fill in the blank there) they’ll be at our doorstep next; they need a good dose of democracy, democracy America-style, to cure their ills; we had to burn that village to the ground to save it; the only good “commie” (fill in the blank for the current “axis of evil” enemy) is a dead “commie”; we need to keep our oil (fill in the blank for your favored resource) supplies secure; if we don’t support (fill in the blank) then the next guy will be even worst; we are winning the war by not losing; we can see the light at the end of the tunnel; oh, that, that was strictly “collateral damage” that doesn’t count; we seek no wider war but I will next week sent (fill in the blank) troops just to be on the safe side; America love it, or leave it; my country, right or wrong; and, on and on and on.
New Truth: White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders, many Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of the past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly. All, I say all, showing the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
*Another Look-From "YouTube"- December 16, 2010-The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*Yet Again-From "YouTube"- December 16, 2010-The Resistance Begins- The Winter Soldiers Lead The Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action at the White House in opposition to Obama's wars.
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
Markin comment:
This is another easy one-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan And Iraq! Not One Penny, Not One Person For These Imperial Wars!
*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party-James P. Cannon-The “American Question” at the Fourth (Communist International) Congress
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.
*********
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
The “American Question” at the Fourth Congress
Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Winter 1955, pp.15-18.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 10, 1954
Dear Sir:
I arrived in Moscow on June 1, 1922 as the official delegate of the American Communist Party to the Plenum of the ECCI and to the pending Fourth Congress of the Comintern. I remained there until the following January. Besides attending to my duties in the ECCI and in the Congress, I had a good chance to look around and form some impressions of the country in the fifth year of the revolution.
After my return to the US, I covered the country on a five-month tour, speaking on The Fifth Year of the Russian Revolution. This lecture was published in pamphlet form at the time and has since been reprinted by Pioneer Publishers, together with another lecture, under the title The Russian Revolution.
I was seated as the American representative on the ECCI and was also made a member of its presidium, the smaller working body, which met frequently and handled all current political work of the Comintern in the same manner as the smaller political bureau of the national committee of a national organization.
This was my first view of the functioning of the Comintern, and my first chance to see the great political leaders at work in discussion and decision on questions of the world movement. I was well satisfied to sit quietly, to listen and try to learn. I really think I learned a lot in this priceless experience.
The problems of the various national parties, one after another, came up for review in the sessions of the presidium. The big questions of the time, as I recall, were the continuing crisis in the French party and the application of the tactics of the united front generally. All the important parties had permanent delegates in Moscow. They presented periodic reports on new developments in their respective Countries and joined in the discussion.
The decisive lead was taken by the Russian delegation assigned to permanent work in the Comintern. These were Zinoviev as chairman, Radek and Bukharin. As a member of the presidium, I saw these leaders at work and heard them speak on an average of about once a week during the entire period of my stay in Moscow. There was no question whatever of the leading role played by the Russian representatives. This was taken as a matter of course and was never questioned. But the reasons for it were entirely just and natural. They were the veterans who were schooled in the doctrine and knew the world movement, especially the European section of it, from study and first-hand experience in their years of exile. In addition, they had the commanding moral authority which accrues by right to the leaders of a victorious revolution. The delegates of the other parties, like myself, were mainly apprentices of a younger generation. I think all of us, or nearly all, felt that we were privileged to attend an incomparable school, and we tried to profit by the opportunity.
* * *
I also worked in the Executive Body of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern). There I became well acquainted with the leading figures in the trade-union work of different countries. I particularly remember Losovsky, Nin and Brandler. The Profintern Committee enjoyed a wide autonomy at that time in all the practical affairs of the international trade-union movement. Questions involving political policy, however, were coordinated with the presidium of the Comintern and eventually decided there.
* * *
In pursuit of my special objective – to gain Comintern support for our policy in the US – I talked personally to Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin and Kuusinen (the secretary of the ECCI). Bittelman came along to Moscow in the summer of 1922 on a special mission – to report on the Jewish movement in the US, I think. Bittelman and I worked closely together in Moscow. We cooperated in preparing written reports on the situation in the US and attended the conversations with the various leaders together.
I noted that all the leaders, as though by a prior decision on their part, remained noncommittal in all these discussions of American policy at that time. They were extremely friendly and patient. They gave us freely of their time, which must indeed have been strictly limited, and asked numerous pointed questions which showed an intense interest in the question. None of them, however, expressed any opinion. The net result of the first round of conversations, which extended over a considerable period of time, was an informal decision to wait for the arrival of the delegates from the other faction, who would be coming to the World Congress, and to defer any decision until that time.
Nothing was said directly to indicate a definite position; but I did get the impression at that time that the Russian leaders were inclined to regard me as a “liquidator” of the type they had confronted in the Russian party in the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905 revolution. These Russian “liquidators” had wanted to abandon the illegal party organization and to adapt Social Democratic activity to Czarist legality. The Bolsheviks had been traditionally opposed to such capitulatory liquidationism; and I felt that the reserved attitude of the Russian leaders in 1922 was at least partly conditioned by the memory of that old battle.
I noticed that one of the technical functionaries in the Comintern apparatus, a woman comrade who spoke English, told me that she had been assigned to help me study the experiences of the old Bolshevik struggle against the liquidators. She took me to a library and translated for me a number of Lenin’s polemical articles of that time. I agreed with the articles, but I thought there was a difference between Czarist Russia and Harding’s America. I had the uneasy feeling, throughout the summer of 1922, that I wasn’t making a bit of headway in my effort to gain support for our policy.
Possibly the reserve of the Russian leaders was due to the fact that previously the ECCI had sent a representative to America – Valetski, a Pole – and that they awaited his report.
* * *
Those were the good days of the Communist International, when its moral authority was the highest and the wisdom of its advice to the young parties from the various countries was recognized and appreciated by all. We knew nothing of any conflict or rivalry among the Russian leaders. We thought of the Russian leadership as a unit, with Lenin and Trotsky standing above and somewhat apart from all the rest.
Trotsky led the debate on the French question at the June Plenum of the ECCI of that year, and also at the Fourth Congress which followed some months later. Trotsky also appeared a few times at the meetings of the presidium, but only for a special purpose each time. I saw and heard Lenin only once, when he spoke for an hour at the Fourth Congress. We knew, of course, that he was ill; but there was confident optimism on every side that he would recover. As I said, all the daily work of the presidium of the ECCI was led by the special Russia delegation assigned to that function – Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin. I can’t recall that I either saw or heard of Stalin that time.
* * *
Meantime, at home the factional fight between the liquidators and the leftists was raging. Additional delegates to the Fourth Congress began to arrive from America. It was a big delegation, nearly a score all told, and all tendencies were represented. Max Bedacht and Arne Swabeck came for the liquidators; L.E. Katterfeld, Rose Pastor Stokes and others for the undergrounders. There was a youth delegation headed by Martin Abern. A number came as trade-union delegates; I remember Jack Johnstone, Rose Wortis and others. The youth and trade-union delegates both supported the liquidators. There was also a Negro delegate whose name has escaped me, who seemed to support the leftist faction. Trachtenberg represented the Workers Council group, which had not joined the CP. The seceding group of leftists (United Toilers) had two delegates who had been invited to come and present their appeal.
In addition, a number of individuals had come to Moscow on their own account. Among them were Max Eastman; the Negro poet, Claude McKay; and Albert Rhys Williams. In Claude McKay’s autobiographical book, A Long Way from Home, he devotes a section to his Russian visit and the Congress. Zinoviev and the other Russian leaders made a great fuss over him. They included him in group pictures with them and other Congress leaders for propaganda purposes in the colonial world. In Chapter 16 of his book, McKay speaks about the Congress and the American Commission, which he attended. You might find this interesting, as the independent impression of an artist.
After the full delegation had arrived and the Fourth Congress began to drag out its month-long course, the preliminary fight over the American question began in earnest. The first skirmishes took place in the special department of the Comintern for English speaking countries. Rakosi, the recently deposed Stalinist boss of Hungary, was in charge of this department. He spoke English fluently and I got to know him quite well. He was one of the younger members of the Hungarian leadership who had made their way to Moscow after the defeat of the Hungarian revolution.
Rakosi impressed me then as a rather rigid formalist and sectarian and he did not conceal his suspicion of us as “liquidators.” We didn’t mind that so much because we didn’t take him too seriously. But the possibility that he might be reflecting the point of view of the official leaders made us rather uncomfortable. I must say that this was the general impression at that time, and it was reflected in the attitude of other technical functionaries in the Comintern apparatus.
They began to give me a bad time. On the eve of the Congress they shifted me from my privileged room in the Hotel Lux to a roughly improvised dormitory for overflow delegates. I really didn’t mind that very much, being an old hobo, but political significance was attached to it, and my friends joked about my banishment from the Lux. This is what I meant when I referred in my “History” to my status during that period as a sort of “pariah.” These “apparachniks” were real weather vanes. I never liked this breed, then or ever.
* * *
Toward the end of the Congress we final1y secured an interview with Trotsky. That changed everything overnight. We don’t deserve a bit of credit for this decisive interview because, as far as I can remember, we never even thought of asking for it. The interview was arranged by Max Eastman on his own initiative.
Trotsky, the most businesslike of men, set the interview for a definite time. His fearsome insistence on punctuality, in contrast to the typical Russian nonchalance in matters of time, was a legend, and nobody dared to keep him waiting. Eastman only had about one hour to arrange it, and came within an inch of failing to round us up. He got hold of us at the last minute, as we were blithely returning from a visit to the Russian steam baths – my first and only experience with this formidable institution – and hustled us to Trotsky’s office by auto just in the nick of time to keep the appointment.
Those who attended the interview, as I recall, were Max Bedacht, Max Eastman and myself. If any other American delegates were present, I don’t remember them. Trotsky, bristling with businesslike precision, wasted no time on formalities. He asked us right away to state our case, and reminded us that we had only one hour. I was struck by the difference between his manner and method and Zinoviev’s. The latter had impressed me as informal and easygoing, even somewhat lackadaisical. He always seemed to have plenty of time, and could always be counted on to open a meeting two or three hours late. In spite of that he obviously did an enormous amount of work. It was just a difference in his way of working.
The greatness of Lenin and Trotsky was the greatness of genius. Zinoviev receded before them, but on a lesser scale he was a great man too. I had a soft spot for Zinoviev, and my affectionate regard for him never changed. I still hope, someday, to write something in justice to his memory.
The main exposition at the interview with Trotsky was made by me, supplemented by some remarks from Bedacht. My thesis, as I recall, had four points:
1.The lack of class consciousness of the American workers, and as a result, the elementary tasks of propaganda imposed on the Communist Party.
2.The actual political climate in the country which made possible and necessitated a legal party.
3.Our proposal to support the formation of a labor party based on the trade unions.
4.The necessity of Americanizing the party, of breaking the control of the foreign-language federations and assuring an indigenous national leadership.
Trotsky asked only a few questions about the actual political situation in the country, with respect to the laws, etc. He expressed astonishment, and even some amusement, over the theory that underground organization is a question of principle. He said the attempt of the foreign-language groups to “control” the American party was unrealistic and untenable. If they persisted, he said facetiously, the Russian party would invite them to return to Russia. (It might be remarked, parenthetically, that the return to Russia of Hourwich, Staklitzky, Ashkenudzie and other strong and fanatical leaders of the Russian Federation, did contribute to the eventual solution of the problem of party “control.”)
I don’t recall what, if anything, Trotsky said about the labor party question.
At the end of the discussion, which probably didn’t last more than an hour as he had specified, Trotsky stated unambiguously that he would support us, and that he was sure Lenin and the other Russian leaders would do the same. He said that if Lenin didn’t agree, he would try to arrange for us to see him directly. He said he would report the interview to the Russian Central Committee and that the American Commission would soon hear their opinion. At the end of the discussion he asked us to write our position concisely, on “one sheet of paper – no more,” and send it to him for transmission to the Russian leadership.
It struck me at the moment, as a formidable task, after a solid year of unlimited debate, to be asked to say everything we had to say on one sheet of paper. Nevertheless, with the help of Eastman we did it that very day and sent it in. I would give a good deal today for the original of that document “on one sheet of paper.”
* * *
That interview with Trotsky was the great turning point in the long struggle for the legalization of the American communist movement, which should never have accepted an illegal status in the first place. Soon afterward, the formal sessions of the American Commission of the Fourth Congress were started. The Russians showed their decided interest in the question by sending a full delegation – Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin – to the Commission.
Nothing was hurried. There was a full and fair debate, in a calm and friendly atmosphere. Nobody got excited but the Americans. Katterfeld and I were given about an hour each to expound the conflicting positions of the contending factions. Rose Pastor Stokes, Bedacht and others were called upon to supplement the remarks of the main reporters on both sides. A representative of the seceding underground leftist group was also given the floor.
Then the big guns began to boom. First Zinoviev, then Radek and then Bukharin. The noncommittal attitude they had previously shown in our personal conversations with them, which had caused us such apprehension, was cast aside. They showed a familiarity with the question which indicated that they had discussed it thoroughly among themselves. They all spoke emphatically and unconditionally in support of the position of the liquidators.
Their speeches were truly brilliant expositions of the whole question of legal and illegal organization, richly illustrated from the experience of the Russian movement. They especially demonstrated that the central thesis of the underground leftists, namely, that the party had to retain its underground organization as a matter of principle, was false. It was, they explained, purely a practical question of facts and possibilities in a given political atmosphere.
They especially castigated the tendency to transplant mechanically the Russian experiences under the Czar, where all forms of political opposition were legally proscribed, to America which still retained its bourgeois democratic system intact and where the Workers Party was already conducting a satisfactory communist propaganda without legal interference. Illegal underground work, said Zinoviev, is a cruel necessity in certain conditions; but one must not make a fetish of it, and resort to costly and cumbersome underground activities, when legal possibilities are open. He told an amusing story of an old Bolshevik underground worker who insisted on carrying her old false passport even after the Bolsheviks had taken over the state power.
The result of the discussion in the American Commission was the unanimous decision: (1) to legalize the party; (2) to recommend that the party advocate and work for the construction of a labor party based on the trade unions; and (3) to appeal to the seceding leftists to return to the party, assuring them a welcome and rightful place in its ranks.
* * *
That was one time when a great problem of American communism, which it had not been able to solve by itself, was settled conclusively and definitely by the Comintern for the good of the movement.
All subsequent experience demonstrated the absolute correctness of this decision. It is appalling to think what would have been the fate of the American communist movement without the help of the Comintern in this instance. The two factions were so evenly matched in strength, and the leftists were so fanatically convinced that they were defending a sacred principle, that a definitive victory for the liquidators within a united movement could not be contemplated.
The main energies of the American communists would have been consumed in the internal struggle, at the expense of public propaganda and the recruitment of new forces. The prospect was one of unending factional struggles and disintegrating splits until the movement exhausted itself, while the great country rolled along and paid no attention to it. The intervention of Trotsky, and then of the Russian party and the Comintern, saved us from that.
This decision showed the Comintern at its best, in its best days, as the wise leader and coordinator of the world movement.
Its role in this crucial struggle of the infant movement of American communism was completely realistic, in accord with the national political conditions and necessities of that time. Moreover, the Russian leaders, to whom American communism owed this great debt, showed themselves to be completely objective, fair and friendly to all, but very definite and positive on important political questions.
I always remembered their friendly help in this affair with the deepest gratitude. Perhaps that was one reason why I could never reconcile myself to the campaign against them and their eventual expulsion a few years later. I could never believe that they had become “enemies of the revolution,” and I believe it even less today, 32 years afterward.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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.
*********
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
The “American Question” at the Fourth Congress
Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Winter 1955, pp.15-18.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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May 10, 1954
Dear Sir:
I arrived in Moscow on June 1, 1922 as the official delegate of the American Communist Party to the Plenum of the ECCI and to the pending Fourth Congress of the Comintern. I remained there until the following January. Besides attending to my duties in the ECCI and in the Congress, I had a good chance to look around and form some impressions of the country in the fifth year of the revolution.
After my return to the US, I covered the country on a five-month tour, speaking on The Fifth Year of the Russian Revolution. This lecture was published in pamphlet form at the time and has since been reprinted by Pioneer Publishers, together with another lecture, under the title The Russian Revolution.
I was seated as the American representative on the ECCI and was also made a member of its presidium, the smaller working body, which met frequently and handled all current political work of the Comintern in the same manner as the smaller political bureau of the national committee of a national organization.
This was my first view of the functioning of the Comintern, and my first chance to see the great political leaders at work in discussion and decision on questions of the world movement. I was well satisfied to sit quietly, to listen and try to learn. I really think I learned a lot in this priceless experience.
The problems of the various national parties, one after another, came up for review in the sessions of the presidium. The big questions of the time, as I recall, were the continuing crisis in the French party and the application of the tactics of the united front generally. All the important parties had permanent delegates in Moscow. They presented periodic reports on new developments in their respective Countries and joined in the discussion.
The decisive lead was taken by the Russian delegation assigned to permanent work in the Comintern. These were Zinoviev as chairman, Radek and Bukharin. As a member of the presidium, I saw these leaders at work and heard them speak on an average of about once a week during the entire period of my stay in Moscow. There was no question whatever of the leading role played by the Russian representatives. This was taken as a matter of course and was never questioned. But the reasons for it were entirely just and natural. They were the veterans who were schooled in the doctrine and knew the world movement, especially the European section of it, from study and first-hand experience in their years of exile. In addition, they had the commanding moral authority which accrues by right to the leaders of a victorious revolution. The delegates of the other parties, like myself, were mainly apprentices of a younger generation. I think all of us, or nearly all, felt that we were privileged to attend an incomparable school, and we tried to profit by the opportunity.
* * *
I also worked in the Executive Body of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern). There I became well acquainted with the leading figures in the trade-union work of different countries. I particularly remember Losovsky, Nin and Brandler. The Profintern Committee enjoyed a wide autonomy at that time in all the practical affairs of the international trade-union movement. Questions involving political policy, however, were coordinated with the presidium of the Comintern and eventually decided there.
* * *
In pursuit of my special objective – to gain Comintern support for our policy in the US – I talked personally to Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin and Kuusinen (the secretary of the ECCI). Bittelman came along to Moscow in the summer of 1922 on a special mission – to report on the Jewish movement in the US, I think. Bittelman and I worked closely together in Moscow. We cooperated in preparing written reports on the situation in the US and attended the conversations with the various leaders together.
I noted that all the leaders, as though by a prior decision on their part, remained noncommittal in all these discussions of American policy at that time. They were extremely friendly and patient. They gave us freely of their time, which must indeed have been strictly limited, and asked numerous pointed questions which showed an intense interest in the question. None of them, however, expressed any opinion. The net result of the first round of conversations, which extended over a considerable period of time, was an informal decision to wait for the arrival of the delegates from the other faction, who would be coming to the World Congress, and to defer any decision until that time.
Nothing was said directly to indicate a definite position; but I did get the impression at that time that the Russian leaders were inclined to regard me as a “liquidator” of the type they had confronted in the Russian party in the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905 revolution. These Russian “liquidators” had wanted to abandon the illegal party organization and to adapt Social Democratic activity to Czarist legality. The Bolsheviks had been traditionally opposed to such capitulatory liquidationism; and I felt that the reserved attitude of the Russian leaders in 1922 was at least partly conditioned by the memory of that old battle.
I noticed that one of the technical functionaries in the Comintern apparatus, a woman comrade who spoke English, told me that she had been assigned to help me study the experiences of the old Bolshevik struggle against the liquidators. She took me to a library and translated for me a number of Lenin’s polemical articles of that time. I agreed with the articles, but I thought there was a difference between Czarist Russia and Harding’s America. I had the uneasy feeling, throughout the summer of 1922, that I wasn’t making a bit of headway in my effort to gain support for our policy.
Possibly the reserve of the Russian leaders was due to the fact that previously the ECCI had sent a representative to America – Valetski, a Pole – and that they awaited his report.
* * *
Those were the good days of the Communist International, when its moral authority was the highest and the wisdom of its advice to the young parties from the various countries was recognized and appreciated by all. We knew nothing of any conflict or rivalry among the Russian leaders. We thought of the Russian leadership as a unit, with Lenin and Trotsky standing above and somewhat apart from all the rest.
Trotsky led the debate on the French question at the June Plenum of the ECCI of that year, and also at the Fourth Congress which followed some months later. Trotsky also appeared a few times at the meetings of the presidium, but only for a special purpose each time. I saw and heard Lenin only once, when he spoke for an hour at the Fourth Congress. We knew, of course, that he was ill; but there was confident optimism on every side that he would recover. As I said, all the daily work of the presidium of the ECCI was led by the special Russia delegation assigned to that function – Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin. I can’t recall that I either saw or heard of Stalin that time.
* * *
Meantime, at home the factional fight between the liquidators and the leftists was raging. Additional delegates to the Fourth Congress began to arrive from America. It was a big delegation, nearly a score all told, and all tendencies were represented. Max Bedacht and Arne Swabeck came for the liquidators; L.E. Katterfeld, Rose Pastor Stokes and others for the undergrounders. There was a youth delegation headed by Martin Abern. A number came as trade-union delegates; I remember Jack Johnstone, Rose Wortis and others. The youth and trade-union delegates both supported the liquidators. There was also a Negro delegate whose name has escaped me, who seemed to support the leftist faction. Trachtenberg represented the Workers Council group, which had not joined the CP. The seceding group of leftists (United Toilers) had two delegates who had been invited to come and present their appeal.
In addition, a number of individuals had come to Moscow on their own account. Among them were Max Eastman; the Negro poet, Claude McKay; and Albert Rhys Williams. In Claude McKay’s autobiographical book, A Long Way from Home, he devotes a section to his Russian visit and the Congress. Zinoviev and the other Russian leaders made a great fuss over him. They included him in group pictures with them and other Congress leaders for propaganda purposes in the colonial world. In Chapter 16 of his book, McKay speaks about the Congress and the American Commission, which he attended. You might find this interesting, as the independent impression of an artist.
After the full delegation had arrived and the Fourth Congress began to drag out its month-long course, the preliminary fight over the American question began in earnest. The first skirmishes took place in the special department of the Comintern for English speaking countries. Rakosi, the recently deposed Stalinist boss of Hungary, was in charge of this department. He spoke English fluently and I got to know him quite well. He was one of the younger members of the Hungarian leadership who had made their way to Moscow after the defeat of the Hungarian revolution.
Rakosi impressed me then as a rather rigid formalist and sectarian and he did not conceal his suspicion of us as “liquidators.” We didn’t mind that so much because we didn’t take him too seriously. But the possibility that he might be reflecting the point of view of the official leaders made us rather uncomfortable. I must say that this was the general impression at that time, and it was reflected in the attitude of other technical functionaries in the Comintern apparatus.
They began to give me a bad time. On the eve of the Congress they shifted me from my privileged room in the Hotel Lux to a roughly improvised dormitory for overflow delegates. I really didn’t mind that very much, being an old hobo, but political significance was attached to it, and my friends joked about my banishment from the Lux. This is what I meant when I referred in my “History” to my status during that period as a sort of “pariah.” These “apparachniks” were real weather vanes. I never liked this breed, then or ever.
* * *
Toward the end of the Congress we final1y secured an interview with Trotsky. That changed everything overnight. We don’t deserve a bit of credit for this decisive interview because, as far as I can remember, we never even thought of asking for it. The interview was arranged by Max Eastman on his own initiative.
Trotsky, the most businesslike of men, set the interview for a definite time. His fearsome insistence on punctuality, in contrast to the typical Russian nonchalance in matters of time, was a legend, and nobody dared to keep him waiting. Eastman only had about one hour to arrange it, and came within an inch of failing to round us up. He got hold of us at the last minute, as we were blithely returning from a visit to the Russian steam baths – my first and only experience with this formidable institution – and hustled us to Trotsky’s office by auto just in the nick of time to keep the appointment.
Those who attended the interview, as I recall, were Max Bedacht, Max Eastman and myself. If any other American delegates were present, I don’t remember them. Trotsky, bristling with businesslike precision, wasted no time on formalities. He asked us right away to state our case, and reminded us that we had only one hour. I was struck by the difference between his manner and method and Zinoviev’s. The latter had impressed me as informal and easygoing, even somewhat lackadaisical. He always seemed to have plenty of time, and could always be counted on to open a meeting two or three hours late. In spite of that he obviously did an enormous amount of work. It was just a difference in his way of working.
The greatness of Lenin and Trotsky was the greatness of genius. Zinoviev receded before them, but on a lesser scale he was a great man too. I had a soft spot for Zinoviev, and my affectionate regard for him never changed. I still hope, someday, to write something in justice to his memory.
The main exposition at the interview with Trotsky was made by me, supplemented by some remarks from Bedacht. My thesis, as I recall, had four points:
1.The lack of class consciousness of the American workers, and as a result, the elementary tasks of propaganda imposed on the Communist Party.
2.The actual political climate in the country which made possible and necessitated a legal party.
3.Our proposal to support the formation of a labor party based on the trade unions.
4.The necessity of Americanizing the party, of breaking the control of the foreign-language federations and assuring an indigenous national leadership.
Trotsky asked only a few questions about the actual political situation in the country, with respect to the laws, etc. He expressed astonishment, and even some amusement, over the theory that underground organization is a question of principle. He said the attempt of the foreign-language groups to “control” the American party was unrealistic and untenable. If they persisted, he said facetiously, the Russian party would invite them to return to Russia. (It might be remarked, parenthetically, that the return to Russia of Hourwich, Staklitzky, Ashkenudzie and other strong and fanatical leaders of the Russian Federation, did contribute to the eventual solution of the problem of party “control.”)
I don’t recall what, if anything, Trotsky said about the labor party question.
At the end of the discussion, which probably didn’t last more than an hour as he had specified, Trotsky stated unambiguously that he would support us, and that he was sure Lenin and the other Russian leaders would do the same. He said that if Lenin didn’t agree, he would try to arrange for us to see him directly. He said he would report the interview to the Russian Central Committee and that the American Commission would soon hear their opinion. At the end of the discussion he asked us to write our position concisely, on “one sheet of paper – no more,” and send it to him for transmission to the Russian leadership.
It struck me at the moment, as a formidable task, after a solid year of unlimited debate, to be asked to say everything we had to say on one sheet of paper. Nevertheless, with the help of Eastman we did it that very day and sent it in. I would give a good deal today for the original of that document “on one sheet of paper.”
* * *
That interview with Trotsky was the great turning point in the long struggle for the legalization of the American communist movement, which should never have accepted an illegal status in the first place. Soon afterward, the formal sessions of the American Commission of the Fourth Congress were started. The Russians showed their decided interest in the question by sending a full delegation – Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin – to the Commission.
Nothing was hurried. There was a full and fair debate, in a calm and friendly atmosphere. Nobody got excited but the Americans. Katterfeld and I were given about an hour each to expound the conflicting positions of the contending factions. Rose Pastor Stokes, Bedacht and others were called upon to supplement the remarks of the main reporters on both sides. A representative of the seceding underground leftist group was also given the floor.
Then the big guns began to boom. First Zinoviev, then Radek and then Bukharin. The noncommittal attitude they had previously shown in our personal conversations with them, which had caused us such apprehension, was cast aside. They showed a familiarity with the question which indicated that they had discussed it thoroughly among themselves. They all spoke emphatically and unconditionally in support of the position of the liquidators.
Their speeches were truly brilliant expositions of the whole question of legal and illegal organization, richly illustrated from the experience of the Russian movement. They especially demonstrated that the central thesis of the underground leftists, namely, that the party had to retain its underground organization as a matter of principle, was false. It was, they explained, purely a practical question of facts and possibilities in a given political atmosphere.
They especially castigated the tendency to transplant mechanically the Russian experiences under the Czar, where all forms of political opposition were legally proscribed, to America which still retained its bourgeois democratic system intact and where the Workers Party was already conducting a satisfactory communist propaganda without legal interference. Illegal underground work, said Zinoviev, is a cruel necessity in certain conditions; but one must not make a fetish of it, and resort to costly and cumbersome underground activities, when legal possibilities are open. He told an amusing story of an old Bolshevik underground worker who insisted on carrying her old false passport even after the Bolsheviks had taken over the state power.
The result of the discussion in the American Commission was the unanimous decision: (1) to legalize the party; (2) to recommend that the party advocate and work for the construction of a labor party based on the trade unions; and (3) to appeal to the seceding leftists to return to the party, assuring them a welcome and rightful place in its ranks.
* * *
That was one time when a great problem of American communism, which it had not been able to solve by itself, was settled conclusively and definitely by the Comintern for the good of the movement.
All subsequent experience demonstrated the absolute correctness of this decision. It is appalling to think what would have been the fate of the American communist movement without the help of the Comintern in this instance. The two factions were so evenly matched in strength, and the leftists were so fanatically convinced that they were defending a sacred principle, that a definitive victory for the liquidators within a united movement could not be contemplated.
The main energies of the American communists would have been consumed in the internal struggle, at the expense of public propaganda and the recruitment of new forces. The prospect was one of unending factional struggles and disintegrating splits until the movement exhausted itself, while the great country rolled along and paid no attention to it. The intervention of Trotsky, and then of the Russian party and the Comintern, saved us from that.
This decision showed the Comintern at its best, in its best days, as the wise leader and coordinator of the world movement.
Its role in this crucial struggle of the infant movement of American communism was completely realistic, in accord with the national political conditions and necessities of that time. Moreover, the Russian leaders, to whom American communism owed this great debt, showed themselves to be completely objective, fair and friendly to all, but very definite and positive on important political questions.
I always remembered their friendly help in this affair with the deepest gratitude. Perhaps that was one reason why I could never reconcile myself to the campaign against them and their eventual expulsion a few years later. I could never believe that they had become “enemies of the revolution,” and I believe it even less today, 32 years afterward.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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