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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Year 1923
The Reshaping of the Leadership
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.3, Summer 1955, pp.96-97.
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 19, 1954
Dear Sir:
QUESTION 3B – The re-shaping of the leadership after the legalization of the party
The police raid on the Communist Party Convention at Bridgeman in August, 1922, seemed at the moment to justify the contention of the leftist faction (Goose Caucus) that political conditions made a legal Communist Party impossible and that the underground Communist Party would have to be maintained in all its functions. I was told later, although I did not hear it myself, that Ruthenberg’s first reaction to the police raid on the Convention was a declaration that he had changed his position and would abandon the program to legalize the party at that time.
The raid on the Bridgeman Convention, however, turned out to be merely an episode, probably even an accident, or an attempt of Harding’s Attorney General Daugherty to create a diversion. It contradicted the general sentiment in the country away from the fierce persecution of radicals which had marked the second Wilson administration. The elections in the fall of 1922 showed a trend toward liberalism. This was further confirmed by the circumstance that the Workers Party was permitted to expand its communist propaganda activities without any molestation by the authorities; and the Trade Union Educational League, under the leadership of Foster, developed wide-scale public activities.
These two factors – the expansion of the activities of both the Workers Party and the Trade Union Educational League – strengthened the trend of the party toward Americanization and the legalization of all its activities. The Communist Party itself (the underground “illegal” organization) had nothing to do but “control” this legal work, conducted by other organizations. It had no real functions of its own.
At the same time, the decision of the Comintern shortly after the Bridgeman Convention, in favor of the legalization of the party, rejected the “underground in principle” theory and demolished the leftist faction based on this erroneous theory. The leaders of this lost cause – Katterfeld, Wagenknecht, Minor, Amter, Gitlow, etc. – were badly discredited. Their authority as political leaders was shattered by their demonstrated misjudgment of the political situation in the country and by the Comintern’s rejection of their erroneous theory.
On the other hand, the development and expansion of the legal work of the Workers Party and the TUEL, in which the “liquidators” were most prominent, plus the decision of the Comintern in their favor, raised the prestige of the leaders of the liquidators in the eyes of the party membership.
I don’t think the history of the movement records another instance in which one group scored such a complete and unqualified victory in every respect, while its opponents suffered such an annihilating defeat, as happened in the settlement of this conflict. Normally and logically, this outcome of the long struggle should have led to the consolidation of an expanded authoritative leadership, consisting of those who had played the most prominent parts in the victorious struggle and had worked generally together to bring about the victory. The necessary components of this new leadership combination were the following:
1.The Lovestone-Cannon combination (plus Weinstone and Bittelman), which had played the decisive role in the internal fight to establish the Workers Party and develop it as the principal medium for communist activity and propaganda in the transition period when virtually the whole responsibility fell upon them.
2.Ruthenberg, who had returned from prison in the spring of 1922 and became the national secretary of the Workers Party, with greatly enhanced prominence and prestige, as a result of his prison term, and his vigorous development of the legal communist activity.
3.Foster, who had joined the party in 1921 and had begun to develop the party trade-union activity on a broad scale for the first time.
That’s the way it worked out in practice, by and large and in the long run. But those individuals mentioned, who had come into the decisive positions of national leadership in a genuine process of natural selection, were not destined to cooperate as a united body for very long. An artificial factor upset the equilibrium and played a decisive part in disrupting the new leadership combination before it had a good chance to coalesce.
This artificial factor was John Pepper. He first came to this country in the summer of 1922 and soon began to regulate party affairs with the arbitrary authority of a receiver appointed by the Court to take over a bankrupt concern. His only trouble was that this particular concern was by no means bankrupt, and the receiver’s operations met with challenge and opposition which limited his tenure to a rather short term. Rut while it lasted it was a real merry-go-round which left everybody dizzy.
In other writings I have seen various references to Pepper as a “representative of the Comintern.” Was this really the case? What was Pepper’s real status in the American movement and what, if any, authority did he have as a representative of the Comintern? Strange as it may seem, that was never completely clear. I, at least, never knew for sure; and up till the present no one has ever explained it to me. I don’t think anyone in the American party ever really knew. The officially accredited representative of the Comintern to the American party in the summer and fall of 1922 was the Pole, Valetski. Pepper came along at about the same time.
We were told in Moscow that he had been shipped to America in one of the moves to break up the raging faction fight in the emigré leadership of the defeated Hungarian Communist Party, and that his assignment was to work with the Bureau of the Hungarian Federation of the party in the US.
As far as I know, that’s all the official authorization he ever had. But Pepper, a manipulator deluxe, was never one to be stopped by the formal rules and regulations which act as restraints on ordinary mortals. That man worked fast. He was a European to his finger tips, dripping with the sophistication and facility of continental political journalism. But when it came to getting things done in a hurry and making his way around natural obstacles, he was more American than any hustler or corner-cutter I ever knew or heard about, and that covers a lot of territory.
I was absent from the country, as delegate to the Comintern, during the first six or seven months of Pepper’s activities in the American party. He began his operations first in the Bureau and editorial board of the Hungarian Federation of the party and soon took over the whole works there. I was also told that he acted as some kind of assistant for Valetski, along with Boris Reinstein, without claiming any authority of his own. In these two positions he rapidly familiarized himself with the factional struggle and with all the leading people engaged in it. From that small toe-hold, he moved rapidly into the center of things; got himself elected or co-opted into the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and by the time I arrived back home, along about the first of February in 1923, he seemed to be in full charge of everything, deciding everything, including the positions and the fate of individuals who pleased or displeased him.
He was quick as a flash. His first stunt was to latch on to the Comintern decision and become its most energetic and vociferous interpreter – before the delegates, who had fought for the decision before the Comintern, had a chance to return and make their report. He proceeded to lead the fight for the liquidation of the underground party, and got it all over with in jig time. He became the reporter for the Central Committee before innumerable membership meetings and delegate bodies of the underground party, speaking at first, I was told, in German, with Ruthenberg as translator. (It wasn’t long before he was making speeches in English, talking faster and more furiously in the newly acquired language than any of those who knew no other.)
I never heard that he claimed to be the official representative of the Comintern at those meetings where the bewildered and demoralized leftists were getting the bad news. But I don’t doubt for a minute that he allowed that impression to be given out. It was not concealed that he was “from Moscow,” and that was enough to clothe him with a counterfeit authority.
He was an orator of dazzling facility and effectiveness, and he used his remarkable talents in this field to the maximum. His method and design was to single out the more stubborn, more independent-minded leaders of the leftists for political annihilation, while offering rehabilitation and favor to the weaker capitulators. Katterfeld, for example, sectarian in his thinking, but a sincere communist of firm character and incorruptible integrity who had given a lot to the movement, was virtually destroyed by Pepper. There were other victims of his onslaughts too. The factional fights before that had been rough enough, but the game of “killing” opponents, or people who just seemed to be in the way, really began with Pepper.
Most of the leaders of the liquidators went along with this savage game of Pepper’s as it seemed to clear the field of all opposition to their monopoly of the leadership. But Pepper had other designs in his strategy. The most prominent liquidators were ensconced in the formal positions of leadership - with a string attached. The string was Pepper as an independent personal influence with a fanatical following of his own, and this string could more properly be called a rope.
Pepper rehabilitated all the defeated undergrounders who had capitulated, along with the seceding leftists who had returned to the party, and welded them together into a band of servitors who owed their political existence to him. In a very short time Pepper had an unavowed faction of his own. This gave him a power which all had to recognize.
With his faction of personal followers and dependents as a lever, he operated as an independent force in dealing with the stronger, independent leaders such as Ruthenberg, Foster and Lovestone.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Year 1923
The Pepper Regime
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.3, Summer 1955, pp.97-100.
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 27, 1954
Dear Sir:
QUESTION 3B (continued) – The re-shaping of the leadership after the legalization of the party
If, to borrow the terminology of the economic cycle, the years 1920-21 can be called American communism’s period of depression, and 1922 the beginning of the upturn, then the year 1923 can be described as the year of the boom. This boom was partly real and largely speculative, short-lived and fatally headed for a bust. It was the Pepper era.
The party’s ill-starred adventures of that period are a matter of published record, easily available to the interested student. So also are the policies which inspired the adventures. The fantastic view of American realities, as well as the fantastic theories of what to do about it, are permanently embalmed in the voluminous writings of Pepper published at that time. And let nobody make the mistake of thinking that Pepper’s writings of that time can be passed off as the eccentric contributions of an individual not binding on the party.
Pepper ran the party with an iron hand in those hectic days, and what he wrote was party policy; what he said went. He “politicalized” the party to beat hell, and influenced his opponents almost as much as his supporters. Pepper was the chief fabricator of the policy which led to the resounding fiasco of the “Federated Farmer-Labor Party” – but the others went along.
This newcomer, who established himself as a combination czar and commissar over a somewhat bewildered party while he was still learning the language, in the brief span of a few months, did not confine himself to journalism and the formulation of the party’s external policies. He operated on two fronts. His domination of the internal affairs of the party was no less total, and his policy in this field no less fantastic, than in the field of external policy.
However, Pepper’s internal “regime,” like his external politics, lacked a solid foundation in the realities of the situation, and was likewise destined for explosive disaster. His personal dictatorship – that’s what it was, and it wasn’t a benevolent dictatorship either – was bound to be a short-lived affair. But this nightmarish transition period of 1923, between the time when Pepper took over and “coordinated” everything and everybody (almost) under his bizarre regime, and the emergence of the Foster-Cannon opposition, was a humdinger while it lasted.
This period was another real turning point in the party’s development. And, as far I know, the real story has never been told, precisely because the role of Pepper has been slurred over. That is not true history. Pepper was the central and decisive influence in 1923.
The truth in this case is stranger than fiction. When one stops to consider his handicaps as a newly-arrived foreigner with a false passport, obliged to work under cover and to learn the language as he went along, Pepper’s performance stands out as truly remarkable. In the limited space I can devote to my recollections, I at least feel obliged to give the devil his due. I use this figure of speech advisedly, for I think his work, on the whole, was evil. He was a phony, but by far the most brilliant phony I ever knew. He sparkled like an Arkansas diamond.
Beginning with 1923, party history began to enact itself in a different form, which cannot be adequately understood by a study of the records and documents alone. It was the real beginning of the “crisis of the leadership” which was never solved, and which was destined to culminate, after a long-drawn-out struggle, in a three-way split.
If, from the inception of the left-wing movement until the formation of the Workers Party at the end of 1921 and the legalization of the party a year later, the conflict of issues overshadowed the conflicts of personalities and subordinated them to its uses, the same hardly applies, at least not to the same extent, from 1923 to 1929.
By 1923, the transitory figures in the leadership, who had fared badly in the rough-and-tumble struggles of the earlier years, had been thrust aside or reduced to secondary rank. A definite, limited number of people had emerged and gained universal recognition as the authentic leaders of the movement of that time. There was no single leader among them recognized by the others, and able, by his personal authority, to act as coordinator. The official version, which later assigned this role to Ruthenberg, as the “founder” and “outstanding leader,” is official claptrap. Ruthenberg was one of several.
They were all one-sided products of a primitive movement; they needed each other and complemented each other in various ways; but unfortunately they didn’t fit together in a team very well. There was probably more conflict than cooperation between them. They would have had trouble getting along in any case, and Pepper’s intervention aggravated and complicated the problem.
This was the line-up in the year 1923: Ruthenberg, returned from prison and widely recognized as the outstanding public figure of the party, was firmly established as National Secretary. Foster, with his glittering prestige as the leader of the great steel strike, had come into the party with both feet, beginning as the unquestioned leader of the trade-union work. Both men had turned forty. They were fully formed and at the height of their powers.
Pepper was in the situation; in fact, he was on top of it. He also was about forty, fully matured, and equipped with a rich European experience and political sophistication, plus a European culture – which distinguished him among the American shoemakers. Lovestone, who had graduated from City College into party leadership without any detours, was no longer a boy and was developing his malevolent talents with an amazing precocity. I, myself, had turned thirty and had assimilated a considerable experience in the mass movement as well as in the party. I didn’t know much, but I was not in the least overawed by the others. The relationship between those named people put its stamp on everything that happened in the party in the next six years. This relationship – of mutual dependence and antagonism, of cooperation and conflict – propelled the party forward and pulled it back, held it together and ripped it apart, like an incongruous mechanism working for both good and evil.
There were many others who played important parts – the young party was loaded with eager talents and personalities in those days – but, in my opinion, the central figures I have mentioned were by far the most significant and decisive in the whole story. Three of them – Foster, Lovestone and Pepper – are each worth a book. Each of them was remarkable in his own way, and would unfailingly have made a big stir and commotion in any milieu. I, who had plenty to do with them, and have no favors to thank them for, would be the last to deprecate their exceptional qualities.
Despite all the trouble I had with them, I have always been disposed to look at them objectively. For that reason my impressions and opinions of them, my estimate of their strength and weaknesses, and my theory of their basic motivations, are probably different from those of others. I will undertake to formulate my impressions of these people in the shape of sketches as soon as I clear a few other questions out of the way.
In the new factional alignment and the factional struggle which began in the middle of 1923, and lasted for six solid years, the conflict of personalities in the leadership undoubtedly played a big part. That must be admitted. But it is not the whole story, for the quarrels of the leaders occurred under circumstances not of their making and outside their control. The tendentious accounts which represent party history of that time as a gang fight of unprecedented duration, with personal power and aggrandizement as the motivation common to all, and factional skullduggery as the accepted means to the end, contain perhaps a grain of truth. But no more than that.
The people involved did not operate independently of external conditions in the country. They were prisoners of an objective situation which conditioned and limited everything they did or tried to do. Personalities, it is true, played a big role; but only within this framework.
In 1923 American capitalism, fully recovered from the economic crisis of 1921, was striding into the first stage of the long boom of the Twenties. At that time the leaders of this pioneer movement of American communism – all of them without exception – were revolutionists. Their attempt to build a revolutionary party quickly – and that’s what they were all aiming at – ran up against these unfavorable objective circumstances. The conservative influence of the ascending prosperity on the trade-union movement, and on the great mass of the American workers generally, doomed the party to virtual isolation in any case.
The basic thesis of the Comintern, that the First World War had signalized the beginning of the dissolution and collapse of capitalism as a world system, was the commonly accepted thesis of all the party leaders. But the extent to which capitalism could profit in the new world at the expense of the old, and furiously expand while the other was declining, was not fully comprehended at the time.
Later, when this conjunctural advantage of American capitalism was recognized, it was mistaken for permanence by the majority. This led to the conservatism of the leadership and the tacit abandonment of the revolutionary perspective in this country. This, in turn, set the stage for the conquest of the party by Stalinism, with its pie-in-the-sky theory of “Socialism in one country,” in Russia, that is, not in the United States.
But nothing of that kind was foreseen, or even dreamed of, by anybody in 1923.
* * *
The historian who considers the whole subject important, and wants to do a thorough, objective job, has indeed taken upon himself an enormous task. In addition to the mountainous labor of research, which is apparently already behind you, you have the even more difficult task of selection, of separating the important from the incidental; of distinguishing between the formally stated issues and the clash of personalities, and at the same time, relating them to each other – to say nothing of fixing the place of this tiny, but vital political organism in booming self-confident, capitalist America of the Twenties; and of estimating the significance of the party, and what happened inside it, for the future history of this country.
But that’s your problem. I really sympathize with you, even if you did take it upon yourself without anybody forcing you. Your task is formidable, and in my opinion, important. I have no doubt that many historians to come will probe deeply into the records of the pioneer communist movement in this country, and trace many great events to their genesis in these first faltering attempts to construct the revolutionary party of the future.
Most of what has been written on the subject is false and tendentious. Your own researches will have convinced you of that. You, as the first to undertake the task of the historian seriously, have the opportunity and the responsibility, whatever your own point of view may be, to set a pattern of objectivity and truthfulness. The young party whose early history you are exploring deserves that and can stand it.
In spite of everything, it meant well for the workers, for the country and for the world. It can stand the truth, even when the truth hurts. It deserves and can bear the report of a historian who obeys the prescription of Othello: “Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.”
* * *
I note from your numerous questions about Foster that you are reaching for the heart of the mystery in his case. I knew Foster – close up – precisely in that period when he decided to make the transformation from a trade-union leader to a party politician, and to pay whatever price it might entail in formal subservience to Moscow.
I thought I knew Foster in his bones thirty years ago, and still think so. His later evolution, sickening as it became to those who had known and respected him as a rebel, never surprised me at any stage. The basic decision he made at that time conditioned him for his step-by-step degeneration. He could not have made the decision, however, unless the tendency was inherent in his character.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*******
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Year 1923
Overthrow of the Pepper Regime
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.3, Summer 1955, pp.100-103.
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 28, 1954
Dear Sir:
QUESTION 3B (conclusion) – The overthrow of the Pepper regime
With the formal liquidation of the underground Communist Party, and the transfer of all functions and powers to the National Committee of the Workers Party early in 1923, the old factional alignments fell apart. Outwardly the party was united. The National Committee, in which the former liquidators’ faction heavily predominated, led the party as a united body. There was no formal falling out and break-up of the collaboration between the various elements who had composed the liquidators’ faction as a whole. It was quite evident, however, that a shake-up and reshuffle in the central nucleus of the leadership was taking place, without anything being openly said about it or the reasons for it.
Under the facade of overall unity a new regime was shaping up, with Ruthenberg and Foster as the two outstanding public representatives of the movement and Pepper as the real boss of the party behind the scenes, and Lovestone as his first lieutenant. I agreed with the first part of the new arrangement but didn’t care for the second part, and did not see exactly how I could fit into the new scheme of things. I wasn’t very much worried about it at first, however, as my plans did not call for activity in the Center for the time being. I wanted to see the party and the country before settling down in one spot again.
* * *
I had returned to this country only about the first of February, 1923, after an absence of eight months. A few weeks after my return, I left New York on an extended speaking tour which covered the entire country and kept me on the road for nearly five months. The subject of my public lectures was The Fifth Year of the Russian Revolution. I also spoke at party membership meetings on the Fourth Congress and on the trade-union question.
I was fully absorbed by the tour, revelling in the work which I have always loved most of all and which has always given me the greatest personal satisfaction-the work of propaganda. New York was out of my mind as I traveled the great country, giving out all I had in my speeches, and receiving in return the warm inspiration of new crowds and new acquaintances. Some friendships which began on that tour stuck for good.
I had little or nothing to do with the fateful decisions on party policy which were made and carried out in the first half of the year 1923, and recall them now as an observer rather than as a participant. This is not to say that I opposed the general line of the decisions. I was certainly in favor of the labor-party policy and considered that the practical alliance with the labor progressives, for the promotion of this movement, was correct and most advantageous to us. If I had no part in the decisions made in New York from week to week, I raised no objection to them and did not even suspect that they were driving inexorably to the catastrophic blow-up at the Chicago Convention of the Federated Farmer Labor Party in July.
I did not attend this Convention. I was speaking in the Pacific Northwest at the time; and if I remember correctly, I was in Portland, Oregon, when I read the news reports of the split with Fitzpatrick and the formal launching of the ill-fated Federated Farmer Labor Party. My first reaction, which never changed, was decidedly unfavorable. I could not agree with the optimistic assurances in our press to the effect that a great success had been scored at Chicago. The big “victory” looked like a big mistake to me.
I had been covering the country from one end to the other for months, and I knew very well that we were a small minority, with no more than a toehold in the labor movement; I knew how unrealistic it was to imagine that we could lead a mass labor party by ourselves, without the collaboration of a substantial wing of the trade union bureaucracy. I can’t speak for others, but my own attitude of abstention and watchful waiting in the internal party situation began to change to active opposition to the Pepper regime, specifically and definitely, right after the Chicago Convention, and over that issue.
* * *
What puzzled me, however, was Foster’s support of the adventure. I could understand how the others, who had never had any connection with the labor movement and had no real knowledge of its tendency, could indulge in flights of fancy. But I respected Foster as a realist, and as a man who knew the labor movement through and through. I could not understand how he could deceive himself about the certain consequences of a break with the Fitzpatrick forces, and a decision of the Workers Party to create a labor party all by itself, with a few uninfluential non-party individuals as decorations.
A short time later I stopped at Duluth for a lecture on the last lap of my tour and met Foster, who was there for a trade-union conference and picnic at the same time. We spent the afternoon discussing party affairs under a shade tree in a corner of the picnic grounds. That conversation was the genesis of the Foster-Cannon Opposition. There were no formal commitments, but that’s where the faction began.
Foster opened the conversation by giving me the official party line, and predicting that the trade-union delegates at the Chicago Convention, representing some hundreds of thousands of members, would affiliate their locals to the new party. I told him rather bluntly, right at the start, that I knew better; and that he, who knew the realities of the labor movement better than anybody, couldn’t really deceive himself by such fantasies. He soon admitted that he was troubled by second thoughts and doubts about the prospects. I got the impression that he was glad to find someone to whom he could express his real sentiments and get some encouragement to resist the fatal course of the official policy.
He agreed that, without the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor, the trade-union delegates to the Chicago Convention would not be able to affiliate their locals and central bodies to the new “Farmer-Labor Party,” and in most cases would not even try. I pressed him for an explanation of how he, of all people, could have sanctioned the precipitate break with Fitzpatrick over such a disadvantageous issue; and, if the break couldn’t be avoided, why he agreed to plunge ahead anyway with the launching of the new so-called labor party.
His answer has always stuck in my memory as a bit of wisdom worth repeating, and I have often had occasion to repeat it. He said substantially as follows:
“You know, it’s a funny thing. When people, who all want the same thing, get together in a closed room they tend to see what they want to see and they can talk themselves into almost anything. In the party caucus at the convention so many of our people, carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment, spoke so emphatically about our strength here, there and everywhere, including the Chicago Federation of Labor, that I got carried away myself and was convinced against my will and better judgment.”
Then he added:
“The trouble is, we’ve got the hangover, but the others in New York are still living in a fool’s paradise. Something has to be done to change this course, or we will soon fritter away all the gains of our trade-union workup to now.”
* * *
A short time later I was back in New York, making no secret of my disgruntlement. I wrote a few articles for the weekly Worker at that time (summer of 1923), in which I tried to give a different impression of the present realities in the American labor movement, the weakness of our forces and the tactical inadvisability of a definite split with the “progressives.” I concluded one of the articles by stating that we should work in the direction of “a new rapprochement with the progressives.” These articles were understood by everybody as an indirect criticism of the prevailing party policy, and they encouraged a lot of other people to express themselves along the same lines. I heard many declarations of approval and support for my stand in the party ranks.
At a meeting of the Political Committee shortly afterward, with Foster present, Pepper singled me out for the brass-knuckles treatment. He sought, by a combination of denunciation and ridicule, to put an end to my critical opposition forthwith. I didn’t care for that treatment and said so. (We native American revolutionists had always been strongly individualistic and accustomed to free speech.) Ruthenberg, Lovestone and the others kept quiet during this skirmish. Foster, however, mildly indicated that he was beginning to re-evaluate the Chicago experience and the whole course of policy following from it.
* * *
Foster told me, after the meeting, that he was quite apprehensive about the whole situation, especially about Pepper’s evident intention to bluff things through and make a bad situation worse. He saw the danger of all our trade-union positions crumbling. It was then that he began to relate the new turn of events to his own position in the party. I don’t recall him saying so specifically, but I think it was at that time that Foster made his basic decision to throw his full energy into the party and to fight it out with Pepper for the leadership.
Prior to that time, he had devoted himself exclusively to the work of the Trade Union Educational League and was not publicly an avowed member of the party; he had taken no part in the internal fight for the legalization of the party, although he had let it be known where his sympathies lay; and the people most closely associated with him in the work of the TUEL, Browder in the first place, had taken an active part in the party fight.
Foster’s original design, I think, had been to play the part of the outstanding mass leader, not publicly identified with the party, operating with a wide area of independence and getting the full support of the party on his own terms. He had once remarked to me: “Debs never wasted any time on caucuses. He built up his prestige among the masses. Then, after the party politicians had made their decisions in caucus, they first had to inquire what Debs thought about them before they could carry them out.”
Things weren’t working out that way in our party in 1923. Foster saw that when the showdown came, the party controlled everything; and that if he really wanted to control the trade-union work and keep it within the bounds of realism, he would have to have a big hand in the control of the party itself. I don’t know whether he had already made up his mind, then, to shift the main axis of his activity from the TUEL work to the party; but that’s what it came to in a very short time.
* * *
Before long the new factional alignments began to take shape, and the struggle for “control of the party,” which was to last for six years, with many consequences unforeseen and undreamed of by the original initiators, was under way. I, for my part, was quite definite in my opinion that a real factional struggle was in the offing; and I went to work, seeking points of support in the party, without delay. I considered then, and still consider, that my course was completely consistent with that which I had taken at the National Left Wing Conference in 1919 and had persisted in ever since.
I thought it was not enough to legalize the party and get it out of its self-imposed underground isolation. The party had to be Americanized and “trade-unionized” at the same time, if it was ever to become a factor in the labor movement and in American life generally. The party had to recognize realities, and adjust itself to them. It had to proletarianize itself, not merely in its membership, but in its leadership, too. A party regime dominated by “intellectuals,” who knew nothing of the labor movement and had no roots in American reality, could only lead the party from one adventure to another until there was nothing left of the movement as a bona fide expression of American radicalism. Above all, the party needed an indigenous native leadership capable of surviving and maintaining its continuity in the harsh process of natural selection.
All that meant, in short: the dictatorial regime of Pepper had to be overthrown.
* * *
We began to fight along those lines, without bothering to formulate our program in theses or resolutions. The theses and resolutions came later – plenty of them, too many of them – but all of them put together never counted half so much as the informal program we started with. That was what the long war was really about.
Our first demand was that the party headquarters be moved from New York, which was an island to itself, to Chicago, the proletarian center of the United States. This demand was no mere eccentricity of residential preference. It symbolized the American-proletarian-trade-union orientation and was so understood in the party.
The Pepper Majority soon yielded to our demand to move the party headquarters to Chicago – why I never knew – and by the early fall of 1923 we were on our way. The national center of the party remained in Chicago for four years. Before leaving New York, however, I did all I could to fix some political fences there.
* * *
Disappointment over the Pyrrhic victory at the July Convention of the Federated Farmer Labor Party, and dissatisfaction with the Pepper regime which was extending its dictatorial operations in all directions, was much more extensive than the party majority knew. Their misjudgment of reality in the labor movement had its counterpart in their complacent assumption that all was well for them in the party ranks.
I knew from the beginning, from extensive conversations with innumerable people who were important in the party in various ways, that we would have substantial support if the fight should break out into the open. I must admit that I helped things along in this direction, for I was an indefatigable propagandist against the drift of party policy in general and the dictatorial internal regime in particular.
* * *
The most important success on this front at that time, and the one that I aimed at first, was the alliance with the leaders of the Jewish Federation. The leadership of this section of the party was itself divided into two factions. One was headed by Bittelman, who represented the original communists; the other by Olgin, who represented the considerable forces which had been brought into the party through the merger with the Workers Council group when the Workers Party was constituted in December, 1921. These two factions were at each other’s throats in almost daily combat over control of the Freiheit, the Jewish daily paper.
I sought to enlist the support of both factions for a new party alignment, and succeeded without any difficulty whatever. In my first extensive talk with Bittelman he expressed full agreement with our aims, and thereafter he remained an influential participant in all the future developments of the struggle.
Olgin and his associates were particularly grateful to me for my fight, first to include their group in the fusion which brought about the formation of the Workers Party, and later, for the liquidation of the underground party, to which they had never belonged and whose secret “control” they had deeply resented.
* * *
There was a sound basis for our alliance with the Jewish leaders. It may seem incongruous that a new fight for “Americanization,” with an outspoken proletarian, trade-union, Midwestern orientation, and a native American leadership, should begin with an alliance with the Jewish leaders who were all New Yorkers and intellectuals to boot. But it was not as contradictory in life as it looks in cold print.
The Jewish communists were, by far, more assimilated in American life than the other foreign language groups; they had a more realistic appreciation of the decisive significance of a party leadership which would appear to be a genuine American product. They wanted to be a part of a larger American movement, and not merely the leaders of a futile sect of New Yorkers and foreign-born communists. I think this was their main motivation in allying themselves with us, and it was a politically sound motivation on their part.
In addition, their speedy agreement on the alliance was probably facilitated, subjectively, by some burning grievances of their own against the regime of Pepper. The furious factional dogfight among themselves had been referred to the Political Committee several times. Pepper, seeking new worlds to conquer, came up with a solution for the factional struggle which infuriated both sides. Pepper sought to “take over” the Jewish Federation and the Freiheit by appointing a Political Committee “commissar” over the paper. His assignment was to create a third Pepper faction, incorporating a few capitulators from the other two warring factions, and thrusting the rest aside.
* * *
The unfortunate individual selected for this formidable task, which no realistic party politician would have touched with a ten-foot pole, was Gitlow. His lot was not a happy one. Besides having antagonized the main leaders of both sides by his ill-fated fight against the liquidation of the underground party, Gitlow was not at home in the Yiddish language and had no qualifications as a writer in this field. This latter circumstance was particularly galling to the Freiheit staff. They were first-class literary men and took a justifiable pride in their special qualifications in this respect.
The Bittelman and Olgin factions continued their own struggle for control. But after their alliance with us, they subordinated it to the larger struggle for a change of the party regime.
On the part of Foster and myself there was nothing really incongruous in the alliance either. We didn’t have to make any concessions in regard to our basic aims, because the Jewish leaders fully supported them. On the other hand, our objections to a party leadership dominated by intellectuals did not extend to “anti-intellectualism” and the lunacy of imagining that intellectuals should not be included in the leading staff.
Foster, at that time, was very little acquainted with the various important personalities in the party outside its trade-union section. He left the business of dealing with them, in these preliminary stages of the fight, to me. He was well satisfied with the results; and this assurance of substantial support in the party cadres gave him more courage to take a stronger stand in the Political Committee after we set up shop in Chicago.
* * *
The fight did not break out into the open all at once. As is so often the case in the first stages of a factional struggle, friction and conflict in the Political Committee smoldered for a period of months, flared up and died down over one issue and another; attempts were made to patch things up; compromises were made with retreats on both sides. But every time the dead horse of the “Federated Farmer-Labor Party” was lugged into the room We would have a violent collision. Then, at the next meeting, other business would be dispatched with matter-of-fact objectivity and agreement. I remember Pepper remarking at one meeting: “Isn’t it strange that we always have a peaceful meeting when the ’Federated’ is not on the agenda?”
At the Plenum, held a month or so before the scheduled Convention, the two groups in the Political Committee presented separate resolutions. But after a discussion at the Plenum, which was at times heated, we agreed on a compromise to present a common resolution to the Convention. Precisely what the differences were in the two resolutions, and what we final1y agreed upon for a common resolution, is more than I can remember, and I haven’t the interest to burrow through the old records and verify the point. It didn’t make any real difference anyway.
The real conflict was over control of the party, between two groups who had different ideas about what to do with the party; not merely with respect to one issue or another, at one time or another, but over the whole course, the whole orientation, and the type of leadership that would be required over a long period. Separate resolutions, on some single political issues of the day, could not fully illuminate this basic conflict; nor could unanimous compromise resolutions obliterate it.
* * *
As the 1923 Convention approached, a muffled struggle broke out in the New York and Chicago membership meetings, and it was extended into the district conventions which selected the delegates to the National Convention. In that pre-convention period I saw Pepper give a demonstration of personal power and audacity, under the most adverse circumstances, which always commanded my admiration-even though we were on opposite sides of the party barricades, so to speak.
He was illegally in the country; it was dangerous for him to appear anywhere in public, or even to become personally known and identified by too many people; and he had had only about a year to study the English language. Despite that, at one tense general membership meeting in Chicago, where the fight broke out in real earnest and we were concentrating heavy fire on his regime, he appeared at the meeting, unannounced, to give us a fight. Facing a hostile crowd, which was excited to the brink of a free-for-all, he took the floor to debate with us – in English! – and his speech dominated the debate from his side of the meeting. It was a magnificent performance that failed.
He did the same thing at a closed session of the Convention, after it had been clearly established that the Foster-Cannon Opposition had better than a two-to-one majority. He came to a closed session of the Convention, especially arranged at his request, in a desperate attempt to turn the tide. He spoke powerfully and effectively. I recall Foster remarking to me, with admiration mixed with animosity – Foster really hated Pepper – “This room shakes when that man talks.”
But Pepper’s heroic efforts on this occasion were of no avail. The ranks of a new majority were solidified in the course of the Convention struggle, and a new leadership, giving the predominant majority in the Central Committee to the Foster-Cannon combination, was elected by the Convention.
* * *
That didn’t end the fight, however, and we were not finished with Pepper. The Pepperites did not accept defeat. They seemed to feel that somehow or other they had been cheated out of their rightful control of the party by some kind of a fluke. The majority, on the other hand, were convinced that justice had been done and were resolved that it should not be undone.
The two factions in the leadership, which previously had been held together by informal understandings among key people on both sides, began to harden into solid, definitely organized and disciplined caucuses. These caucuses were gradually extended into the ranks, and eventually included almost every member in every branch, on one side or the other. We were lining up for a six-year war – but we didn’t know it then.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
Monday, December 20, 2010
**From The Partisan Defense Committee- 25th Annual Holiday Appeal- Honor Class-War Prisoner Lynne Stewart
Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
The following is passed on from the PDC concerning the 24th Annual Holiday Appeal and applies this year as well
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Build PDC Holiday Appeal
“The path to freedom leads through a prison. The door swings in and out and through that door passes a steady procession of ‘those fools too stubborn-willed to bend,’ who will not turn aside from the path because prisons obstruct it here and there.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926
Twenty-four years ago, the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—revived a key tradition of the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary: sending monthly stipends to those “stubborn-willed” class-war prisoners condemned to capitalism’s dungeons for standing up against racist capitalist repression. We are again holding Holiday Appeal benefits to raise funds for this unique program, calling particular attention to the fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains on death row in Pennsylvania.
Our forebear, Cannon, also affirmed a basic principle that should be no less applicable today: “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem…. The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement and when that movement claims them for its own, takes up their battle cry and carries on their work.”
The PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties to join us in donating to and building the annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all! We print below brief descriptions of the 16 class-war prisoners who receive monthly stipends from the PDC, many of whom were denied parole over the last year for refusing to express “remorse” for acts they did not commit!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past April, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily threw out Mumia’s efforts to overturn his frame-up conviction based on the racist exclusion of black jurors from his 1982 trial. Ominously, this same court has yet to rule on the prosecution’s petition to reinstate the death penalty. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office states that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will continue to push for Mumia’s execution.
December 9 is the 28th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with the current U.S. president and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted “We can’t prove who shot those agents” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 65-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Outrageously, in August, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and coldbloodedly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 32nd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison. They were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 37 years in jail. This year, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole this year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
The following is passed on from the PDC concerning the 24th Annual Holiday Appeal and applies this year as well
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Build PDC Holiday Appeal
“The path to freedom leads through a prison. The door swings in and out and through that door passes a steady procession of ‘those fools too stubborn-willed to bend,’ who will not turn aside from the path because prisons obstruct it here and there.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926
Twenty-four years ago, the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—revived a key tradition of the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary: sending monthly stipends to those “stubborn-willed” class-war prisoners condemned to capitalism’s dungeons for standing up against racist capitalist repression. We are again holding Holiday Appeal benefits to raise funds for this unique program, calling particular attention to the fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains on death row in Pennsylvania.
Our forebear, Cannon, also affirmed a basic principle that should be no less applicable today: “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem…. The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement and when that movement claims them for its own, takes up their battle cry and carries on their work.”
The PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties to join us in donating to and building the annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all! We print below brief descriptions of the 16 class-war prisoners who receive monthly stipends from the PDC, many of whom were denied parole over the last year for refusing to express “remorse” for acts they did not commit!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past April, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily threw out Mumia’s efforts to overturn his frame-up conviction based on the racist exclusion of black jurors from his 1982 trial. Ominously, this same court has yet to rule on the prosecution’s petition to reinstate the death penalty. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office states that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will continue to push for Mumia’s execution.
December 9 is the 28th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with the current U.S. president and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted “We can’t prove who shot those agents” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 65-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Outrageously, in August, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and coldbloodedly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 32nd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison. They were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 37 years in jail. This year, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole this year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
On “Professional” Protesters- A 50th Anniversary, Of Sorts- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for SANE (or rather its successor, Peace Action)
Markin comment:
As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries my very first public political act occurred in 1960 when I attended a SANE anti-nuclear weapons demonstration on the Boston Common. I was thrilled, if somewhat apprehensive as a fourteen year old (and youngest participant in the demo, as I recall), to be marching in the same cause as Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberal luminaries of the day. I was also somewhat naïve, as to be expected, about how that task, in my mind the task of American unilateral nuclear disarmament, was to take place. The naïve part then was really the failure to know that such a task would take a revolution, would take a life and death struggle against American imperialism, and was not going to take place with Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt, and those other liberal luminaries at my side. But such is political life.
So much for nostalgia. Or at least nostalgia for the old days. The central purpose of this entry is rather to mark my 50 years of “professional” protesting with a few comments, more random musings than anything else. Those quote marks around the word professional are placed there because this is what an old girlfriend back in the days called me. Especially every time I balked at a date because I had some pressing political task to do. But see, here is where she was wrong (as I told her at the time). If by professional she meant that I was getting paid for my profession (which WAS her meaning) then over the last fifty years of political work I have a net loss balance. If I had to subsist on “earnings” from politics I would be on the dole. This same girlfriend (who, by the way, at that time was no mean politico herself) called me, on another occasion, a “chronic” protester. Well, perhaps, but I think that if she had, in either case, just called me a wannabe-Bolshevik I would not have quarreled with that. Although that is my assessment now, more so than then. Needless to say that girlfriend and I did not last long. The last I heard, several years back, she was married to a dentist and a happy grandmother. I hope so.
At that first SANE demonstration, beside the thrill of being there with my liberal heroes at my back (not literally, of course), I had my first “red-baiting” incident. Needless to say I was furious because then although I was rather agnostic on working with communists, known or unknown (mostly the latter as I found out later), I was emphatically not one myself. I was in my family-of-the left phase (although I would not have known then to call it that) where anyone who was for nuclear disarmament, black civil rights in the South, and other good things was my kindred. Funny, how things turn around though. Later in some causes, especially in the later parts of the anti-Vietnam War struggle, when "redness" was a badge of political correctness I was worried when I was not called a Bolshevik. So be it.
I will not bore the reader with a list of various demonstrations, meetings, conferences, sit-ins, and strikes that I have participated in, one way or the other, over the past fifty years. Praise be. Except to say the following and kind of bring things to the present. At that now hallowed SANE demonstration, with its twenty or thirty participants, there were mainly Quakers, pacifists, closet “reds”, and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (to use a phrase of the day to designate oddball political types). Recently, on December 16, 2010, I was down in Washington, D.C. in support of the Veterans For Peace-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House in order to protest his Afghan and Iraq war policies. Among the few hundred demonstrators (and 131 civil disobedience arrestees), beside the veterans, were Quakers, pacifists, and little old ladies in running shoes (progress on the foot apparel front, right?).
But know this, apart from obvious political disagreements with other participants, this action was an appropriate way to end my first fifty years of political activism. And I hope as long as I can I will be that chronic "professional" protester of that long ago girlfriend’s fury. More importantly, mark this date- December 16, 2010-haltingly or not, politically naïve or not, few in number or not-The Resistance Has Begun!
Markin comment:
As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries my very first public political act occurred in 1960 when I attended a SANE anti-nuclear weapons demonstration on the Boston Common. I was thrilled, if somewhat apprehensive as a fourteen year old (and youngest participant in the demo, as I recall), to be marching in the same cause as Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberal luminaries of the day. I was also somewhat naïve, as to be expected, about how that task, in my mind the task of American unilateral nuclear disarmament, was to take place. The naïve part then was really the failure to know that such a task would take a revolution, would take a life and death struggle against American imperialism, and was not going to take place with Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt, and those other liberal luminaries at my side. But such is political life.
So much for nostalgia. Or at least nostalgia for the old days. The central purpose of this entry is rather to mark my 50 years of “professional” protesting with a few comments, more random musings than anything else. Those quote marks around the word professional are placed there because this is what an old girlfriend back in the days called me. Especially every time I balked at a date because I had some pressing political task to do. But see, here is where she was wrong (as I told her at the time). If by professional she meant that I was getting paid for my profession (which WAS her meaning) then over the last fifty years of political work I have a net loss balance. If I had to subsist on “earnings” from politics I would be on the dole. This same girlfriend (who, by the way, at that time was no mean politico herself) called me, on another occasion, a “chronic” protester. Well, perhaps, but I think that if she had, in either case, just called me a wannabe-Bolshevik I would not have quarreled with that. Although that is my assessment now, more so than then. Needless to say that girlfriend and I did not last long. The last I heard, several years back, she was married to a dentist and a happy grandmother. I hope so.
At that first SANE demonstration, beside the thrill of being there with my liberal heroes at my back (not literally, of course), I had my first “red-baiting” incident. Needless to say I was furious because then although I was rather agnostic on working with communists, known or unknown (mostly the latter as I found out later), I was emphatically not one myself. I was in my family-of-the left phase (although I would not have known then to call it that) where anyone who was for nuclear disarmament, black civil rights in the South, and other good things was my kindred. Funny, how things turn around though. Later in some causes, especially in the later parts of the anti-Vietnam War struggle, when "redness" was a badge of political correctness I was worried when I was not called a Bolshevik. So be it.
I will not bore the reader with a list of various demonstrations, meetings, conferences, sit-ins, and strikes that I have participated in, one way or the other, over the past fifty years. Praise be. Except to say the following and kind of bring things to the present. At that now hallowed SANE demonstration, with its twenty or thirty participants, there were mainly Quakers, pacifists, closet “reds”, and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (to use a phrase of the day to designate oddball political types). Recently, on December 16, 2010, I was down in Washington, D.C. in support of the Veterans For Peace-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House in order to protest his Afghan and Iraq war policies. Among the few hundred demonstrators (and 131 civil disobedience arrestees), beside the veterans, were Quakers, pacifists, and little old ladies in running shoes (progress on the foot apparel front, right?).
But know this, apart from obvious political disagreements with other participants, this action was an appropriate way to end my first fifty years of political activism. And I hope as long as I can I will be that chronic "professional" protester of that long ago girlfriend’s fury. More importantly, mark this date- December 16, 2010-haltingly or not, politically naïve or not, few in number or not-The Resistance Has Begun!
Sunday, December 19, 2010
*On The 150th Anniversary of South Carolina’s Secession Jubilee- Send In The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Infantry Regiment- Again
Click on the headline to link to an Associated Press online article about the preparations for "celebration" of the 150th anniversary of secession.
Markin comment:
No question that on most occasions the victors in war, like everything else, get to write the narrative of that victory. The exceptions, however, in some cases prove the rule. In this case the exception is the very, very checkered bourgeois historical interpretation of the American Civil War. In the immediate aftermath of the Union victories the narrative ran something like Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy in the war itself. In the aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, especially it more radical phases in the late 1860’s and early 1870s though, and for an absurdly long time afterward the South, and Southern historians (like those of the U.B. Phillips school), chipped away at that clear-cut victory for union and abolition of slavery. The black-led Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and early 1960s, as a by-product, produced some much needed historical correctives to that distorted Jim Crow narrative.
Know this, however, there always has been, and is, an undertow reaction to their fate in the Civil War by many descendants on the Southern side of that war. From the more recent controversies over the using the Confederate flag as all, or part, of various state flags (South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.) to the place of various generals, like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, in American military history the conflict has never died for them, or for us. For the pro-unionist, pro-abolitionist side there has been a certain laxness in appreciation that for many down there (yes, down there) the Civil War never ended. And for once they are right, it hasn’t. Those social and economic tasks around the race question, around the black question as those of us on the left have termed it, from education to housing to jobs still confront us.
Now comes word that South Carolina, the heart and brains of the Confederacy, has planned a celebration, a jubilee if you will, around the 150th anniversary of the signing of the articles of secession by their forbears in December 1860. Every red-blooded leftist, every ardent slavery abolitionist, every admirer of Captain John Brown of Harpers Ferry should burn with rage over this affront to history and protest this event as the NAACP has called to do.
Except, unlike the NAACP, an organization that has historically seen only the need for some “tweaking” of the American capitalist system to bring justice we cry out- Finish The Civil War!. Come to think of it, in addition to that slogan, we should also call for the heroic Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Infantry Regiment, or its righteous political descendants, to go down to Charleston and straighten these fools out- again. And, like in 1865, do it while singing John Brown’s Body through the streets of Charleston.
Markin comment:
No question that on most occasions the victors in war, like everything else, get to write the narrative of that victory. The exceptions, however, in some cases prove the rule. In this case the exception is the very, very checkered bourgeois historical interpretation of the American Civil War. In the immediate aftermath of the Union victories the narrative ran something like Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy in the war itself. In the aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, especially it more radical phases in the late 1860’s and early 1870s though, and for an absurdly long time afterward the South, and Southern historians (like those of the U.B. Phillips school), chipped away at that clear-cut victory for union and abolition of slavery. The black-led Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and early 1960s, as a by-product, produced some much needed historical correctives to that distorted Jim Crow narrative.
Know this, however, there always has been, and is, an undertow reaction to their fate in the Civil War by many descendants on the Southern side of that war. From the more recent controversies over the using the Confederate flag as all, or part, of various state flags (South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.) to the place of various generals, like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, in American military history the conflict has never died for them, or for us. For the pro-unionist, pro-abolitionist side there has been a certain laxness in appreciation that for many down there (yes, down there) the Civil War never ended. And for once they are right, it hasn’t. Those social and economic tasks around the race question, around the black question as those of us on the left have termed it, from education to housing to jobs still confront us.
Now comes word that South Carolina, the heart and brains of the Confederacy, has planned a celebration, a jubilee if you will, around the 150th anniversary of the signing of the articles of secession by their forbears in December 1860. Every red-blooded leftist, every ardent slavery abolitionist, every admirer of Captain John Brown of Harpers Ferry should burn with rage over this affront to history and protest this event as the NAACP has called to do.
Except, unlike the NAACP, an organization that has historically seen only the need for some “tweaking” of the American capitalist system to bring justice we cry out- Finish The Civil War!. Come to think of it, in addition to that slogan, we should also call for the heroic Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Infantry Regiment, or its righteous political descendants, to go down to Charleston and straighten these fools out- again. And, like in 1865, do it while singing John Brown’s Body through the streets of Charleston.
*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party
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
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
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
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 15, 1954
Dear Sir:
Fraina: (Re. your letter of May 10.)
It is certainly correct to list Fraina as one of the most important personalities in the formative period of American communism. In my History of American Trotskyism, I stated my opinion that he should be recognized as the founder of the movement.
I believe that John Reed and the Liberator did most to popularize the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the broad public of the American left wing. Fraina’s influence was somewhat narrower; his Revolutionary Age was essentially an internal party paper. In that field he did more than anyone to shape the ideology of the young movement of American communism. At the same time he put the stamp of his own romanticism and sectarian rigidity upon it.
The official propaganda of later years, assigning the role of “founder” to Ruthenberg, always offended my sense of historical justice. Ruthenberg was a big man – in his way – and a strong man among the pioneers, but he was by no means the originator, the “founder.”
* * *
I did not know Fraina personally. I first met him only casually at the National Left Wing Conference in New York in June, 1919. I met him a second time when he returned to this country as a member of the “Pan American Agency” of the Comintern with the mission to unify the two parties. This must have been late in 1920 or early in 1921. The other two members of this “Pan American Agency” were Charley Johnson (“Scott”) and Katayama, the old Japanese socialist then living in New York, who later went to Moscow and remained there. I think this was a joint meeting of the negotiating committees of the two parties.
The only memory I have of the meeting is that Fraina spoke there impartially, on behalf of the Comintern, for unity and conciliation. As in all the joint meetings to negotiate “unity” in these days, the discussion must have been somewhat heated. I remember Charley Scott telling me afterward that Fraina had referred to my conduct at the joint meeting as “factional.” This was probably not inaccurate, as I was decidedly hostile to the manifest ambition of the “Federationists” to “control” a united party. Scott’s remark about Fraina’s impression of me remained in my memory and enables me to peg the meeting.
Fraina left soon afterward on a mission for the Comintern in Latin America. Later we heard about his defection and the report that he had failed to account for some Comintern funds.
I recall a statement by Charley Scott in New York (it must have been late in 1921) to the effect that Fraina had misappropriated Comintern funds and that the matter was therefore out of the party’s hands. Scott said: “For that he will have to account to the Comintern,” or words to that effect. Somehow or other I remember that definitely. After that Fraina seemed to drop entirely out of the consciousness of the party leadership.
* * *
I cannot recall anything coming up about Fraina in Moscow in 1922. I have no recollection of any kind of official consideration of his case during my long stay there.
But here I can report an incident which may be of interest in piecing the Fraina story together. During one of my trips to New York (it must have been in 1924 or possibly in 1925) I was handed a letter from Fraina. I cannot remember who handed me the letter, but I am pretty sure it was addressed to me personally. In this letter Fraina stated that he was working and saving all he could from his wages; that he wanted to make arrangements to pay his debt in installments and to work his way back into the party, and asked me to help him. My recollection of this letter is sharp and clear.
On my return to Chicago I took the letter before the Political Committee and it was discussed there. The decision was made that since his affair concerned Comintern funds, it was outside the jurisdiction of the American party; and that Fraina would have to address himself to the Comintern and straighten out his relations there before the party could do anything about it. I conveyed this decision to Fraina through the comrade who had acted as intermediary – again for the life of me I can’t recollect who it was – and that’s the last report I had of Fraina until, years later, he began to write again under the name of Corey.
* * *
I never met him personally in those later days. But strangely enough, we came close to meeting. He appeared to be breaking with the political line of the official Communist Party, while remaining a communist, and there were some indications that he was becoming sympathetic to the Trotskyist position. It was soon after the Hitler victory, when a new party of anti-Stalinist communists was in the air. In a discussion I had with V.F. Calverton, Sidney Hook, and a few others associated with Calverton’s magazine at that time, we discussed the question of a new party. They asked what our attitude would be toward such people as Fraina, with whom they evidently had some contact and association.
I told them that I really didn’t know what to say, because the old financial scandal would put a cloud over Fraina until it was cleared up, in one way or another. Nevertheless, I was very much interested in Fraina, and hoped a way could be found to collaborate with him. When I visited Trotsky in France in the fall of 1934, I took up the question of Fraina and asked his opinion.
Trotsky also was interested and sympathetic and thought that we should by no means reject an overture from Fraina. He finally suggested the following policy: That the new party would be too weak to take upon itself the responsibility of an outstanding personality who had a financial scandal hanging over him. Our defense of him would not be effective enough to do any good, while involvement in the scandal would hurt the party. Fraina should go back to the Communist Party and straighten out his financial entanglements and get an official clearance from them. After that the new party we were forming could accept him as a member without any reservation.
That seemed to me to be the soundest position to take and I agreed to proceed along that line. Upon my return we became deeply involved in the final stage of negotiations with the Muste group, building up to our joint Convention in December. I think I relayed Trotsky’s advice to Fraina through the Calverton group, but I am not absolutely sure of it. At any rate, we never had any direct contact with Fraina; and soon after that he began to move away from the communist movement altogether.
* * *
Fraina was truly a tragic figure. The deportation proceedings brought against him in the last year of his life, after he had fully renounced his youthful communism, added a final stroke of savage irony to a life which was offered to two opposing causes and was rejected by both.
In spite of all, the best part of Fraina – the young part – belongs to us. When one considers how primitive the American left-wing movement had been in matters of theory, and its desolating poverty of literary-political forces, the pioneer work of Fraina in this field stands out by contrast as truly remarkable. I think it no more than just to say that Fraina was the first writer of pioneer American communism. He did more than anybody else to explain and popularize the basic program of the Russian Bolsheviks. American communism, which stems directly from the primitive American left-wing movement, owes its first serious interest in theoretical questions primarily to Fraina.
It is quite useless, however, to demand more from people than they can give. Fraina was too weak to be a leader. He could not stand up against the brutal bulldozing of the Russian Federation leaders who had the power of organizations and finances and wielded their power as a club. Fraina’s capitulation to the Hourwich group, after the National Left Wing Conference in 1919 had decided to continue the legal fight within the SP, certainly did a lot of damage.
The premature split of the SP, and the monstrous absurdity of the split of the communist movement into two parties at the moment of its formal constitution; and then the hasty, ill-considered, and in my opinion, unnecessary plunge into total illegality-were calamitous mistakes, if not crimes, of leadership in which Fraina was more the intimidated accomplice than the author.
Nobody knows how many thousands of American radical socialists – potential communists – were lost and scattered as a result of these insane procedures, imposed upon the movement by the Russian Federation madmen. I have always believed that two people made it possible for this wrecking crew to work such havoc. They could not have done it alone. They needed both Fraina and Ruthenberg, and got them both for different reasons.
In my own mind I have always blamed Ruthenberg more than Fraina. Fraina was weak, and there is not much that can be done about that. Ruthenberg was far stronger, but he was swayed by an overreaching personal ambition. I ascribe more blame to him precisely because of that. The history of American communism would quite possibly have taken a different course, with far greater advantages in the long run, if Fraina in 1919 had been propped up and supported by people who knew what the movement needed and were strong enough to enforce their policy.
Instead of that, Fraina was brutally clubbed down by the strong bosses of the Russian Federation and left without support by Ruthenberg, who then, as always, thought too much of himself, his own position and his own role. Ruthenberg would probably have been greatly surprised if someone had told him, in those critical days, that the most important service he could render to the cause of American communism was to reinforce the position of Fraina; to create conditions for him to do his work as a political writer with a certain amount of latitude.
The sprawling left-wing movement, just emerging from the theoretical wasteland of its pre-history, needed time to study, to learn and to assimilate the great new ideas which had exploded in the Russian Revolution. The self-centered Ruthenberg could not possibly have understood that Fraina’s work of exposition, at that time, was more important than his own, and that he should lend his strength to support it.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
Four Ways of Viewing the Early Communist Party
Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, p.60.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
July 20, 1954
Dear Sir:
I enclose a manuscript (see Fourth International, Fall 1954 – Ed.) which attempts to explain the transformation of the Communist Party in the last half of the Twenties and gives my view of the basic causes. You will note that I have left out all reference to the various incidents and turns of events which you inquired about in your letters dealing with this time. I will answer these questions separately, as well as I can from memory. But the more I thought about this period, the more it became clear to me that the factual story can be meaningful only if it is placed within a framework of interpretation.
As I see it, there are at least four ways to approach a history of the Communist Party in this period, leaving out the official CP version, which isn’t worth mentioning:
1.It can be described as a dark conspiracy of spies and “infiltrators.” (This theme has already been pretty well exploited.)
2.It can be told as a story of the doings and misdoings of more or less interesting people who fought like hell about nothing and finally knocked themselves out.
3.It can be written as an item of curiosa about an odd lot of screwballs who operated in a world of their own, outside the main stream of American life and exerted no influence upon it; something like the books about the various utopian colonies, which from time to time occupy the attention of various professors, Ph.D. thesis writers and others who are interested in things remote from the work-a-day world.
4.Or, one can treat the evolution of the CP in its first decade as a vital part of American history, which was destined to have a strong influence on the course of events in the next two decades.
This last is my point of view. The historian who wants to write a serious work, regardless of his own opinion of communism, will probably have to consider this approach to the subject. Otherwise, why bother with it?
The historical importance of the first ten years of American communism, particularly the latter half of this decade, really comes out when one gets into the New Deal era and attempts to explain the various factors which contributed to Roosevelt’s astounding success in steering American capitalism through the crisis and the Second World War without any substantial opposition on his left.
My own opinion is that Roosevelt was the best political leader crisis-racked American capitalism could possibly have found at the time; and that his best helper – I would go farther and say his indispensable helper – was the Communist Party. The CP did not consist, as the current popular version has it, of the Ware-Chambers groups of spies who infiltrated some Washington offices and filched out a few secret documents. That was a mere detail in a side-show tent.
The CP itself operated during the Roosevelt regime as a first-class force in support of Roosevelt in the broad arena of politics and the labor movement. It played a major role first in promoting the expansion of a new labor movement and then in helping Roosevelt to domesticate it, to blunt its radical-revolutionary edge, and to convert it into his most solid base of support in both domestic and foreign policy.
Furthermore, the Communist Party had to be prepared for this role by the gradual and subtle, but all the more effective and irreversible transformation it went through precisely in the five years preceding the outbreak of the crisis.
Things might very well have happened differently. Let us assume that the CP had developed in the last half of the Twenties as a party of the Leninist type; that it had retained the strongest leaders of that time and they had remained communists and, in the meantime, had learned to work together as a team; that the party had used its monopolistic leadership of the new mass upsurge of labor militancy to impose upon the new union movement a genuine class-struggle policy.
Assume that the CP had contested with Lewis-Hillman-Murray in the struggle for leadership of the new union movement instead of abdicating to them for reasons of foreign policy; that the new union movement under communist influence had launched a radical labor party instead of submerging in the Rooseveltian People’s Front in the Democratic Party; that the CP and the big segment of the labor movement which it influenced had opposed the war instead of becoming its most ardent and most reliable supporters.
All that is just about what a genuine Communist Party would have done. What would American history in the Roosevelt era have looked like in that case? It certainly would have been different. And it is not in the least visionary to imagine that such a different course was possible. The key to the whole situation was the evolution of the CP in the last half of the Twenties.
That, in my opinion, removes the study of early communism from an exercise in speculation about a bizarre cult and places it right where it belongs – in the mainstream of American history.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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