Workers Vanguard No. 1072
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7 August 2015
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Book Launch-The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919–1929
Part One
The following is the first part of a presentation, edited for publication, by Prometheus Research Library associate Jacob A. Zumoff, who discussed his book The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929. The talk was delivered at a May 9 book launch in Oakland sponsored by the PRL, a working archive of American and international Marxist history, documentation and related interests. We reviewed the book, an instructive read for everyone from committed socialists to those just beginning to explore revolutionary politics, in WV No. 1067 (1 May).
In November 1917, the Bolsheviks in Russia seized state power amid the devastation of the First World War, announcing that they were proceeding to build socialism. As the American Communist John Reed put it, the Bolshevik Revolution “shook the world” by making a workers state flesh and blood instead of just a goal. In Europe, in Asia and in the Americas, left-wing militants rallied to the Revolution and to the new Third, or Communist, International (the Comintern) that Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders founded in early 1919.
The Bolsheviks envisioned the Comintern as a genuinely revolutionary International able to create Communist parties from those socialist militants who rejected “social chauvinism” (that is, support to imperialist militarism using socialist rhetoric) as well as parliamentary reformism, both of which had caused the social-democratic Second International to collapse at the beginning of WWI. By the summer of 1919, the American Communist movement was born, its enthusiasm matched only by its divisions.
The subject of this talk—and my recent book—is how these early Communists, inspired by the first successful workers revolution in history, sought to forge a party in the U.S. capable of making a revolution in this country. In particular, I analyze what I call the “Americanization” of Communism: how Communists understood and applied the lessons of the international Communist movement to the U.S. Although historians of American Communism are divided on many issues, they share a broad agreement that this process of Americanization was counterposed to what they often refer to as the “interference” of the Communist International. What I argue, on the other hand, is that in the early 1920s the Comintern helped the early Communists come to grips with American society. The Comintern reinforced the early Communist movement politically: for example, by stressing the importance of maintaining the independence of the working class and by emphasizing the importance of the fight against black oppression. By the end of the 1920s, however, reflecting the political degeneration of the Russian Revolution under Joseph Stalin, the Comintern’s interventions became more negative.
There are several points that I want to make in this forum. First is the importance of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the forging of a Communist Party (CP) in the U.S. Thousands of workers and intellectuals who saw themselves as fighting for socialism as they understood it rallied to the banner of the Bolsheviks. These included left-wing Socialists like John Reed, C.E. Ruthenberg and James P. Cannon, as well as many of the numerous semi-autonomous foreign-language federations that had been affiliated to the Socialist Party (SP). There were also many individual militants who had been in the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW. For all of them, the Bolshevik Revolution resonated strongly. As Ruthenberg put it in 1922: “Without the Russian revolution there would have been no Communist movement in the United States.”
Unlike most of the Social Democratic parties in Europe, the official leadership of the U.S. Socialist Party did not openly support its “own” bourgeoisie in WWI, an interimperialist war in which workers had no side. On paper the SP opposed the war, and many of its leaders—of the left, the right and the center—were arrested for antiwar activities.
One of the key things to keep in mind about the American SP is that it was barely a party in the way that many of us would think of such. It was oftentimes more of a loose federation. For instance, most of the Socialist Party’s major newspapers were not even owned by the party but were owned by different groups within the party, and each one often set its own political line. For the better part of a decade, there had been left-wing dissidents within the Socialist Party who were opposed to the gradual, reformist approach of the leadership. And after the Russian Revolution, these leftists looked to the Bolsheviks.
This leads to my second point: these early Communists had very little understanding of what Bolshevism was, what the difference was between, for example, left-wing émigré groups, militant labor unions and left-wing social democracy on the one hand, and a Leninist party on the other. These leftists supported the Bolsheviks because Lenin’s party had made a revolution, but they did not understand why the Bolsheviks had been the only ones capable of making a revolution. And this situation was not unique to the United States. Much of the history of the Comintern under Lenin and Trotsky consisted of trying to teach their followers what Bolshevism consisted of, trying to impart the lessons of Leninism.
Previous Historians of American Communism
I want to talk about the historians of American Communism because my approach goes against most of what has been written by historians—what academics call the “historiography.” The best historian of early American Communism was Theodore Draper. In the 1930s and ’40s, he had been a supporter of the Communist Party, but he broke with the CP at the start of World War II. Although Draper was an anti-Communist by the time he wrote his books, he was an excellent historian. His two books on the CP in the 1920s, The Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960), are based on meticulous research, including both archival research and interviews with all the living Communist leaders willing to talk to him.
Draper’s views are summarized in the conclusion of American Communism and Soviet Russia. He wrote, “Even at the price of virtually committing political suicide, American Communism would continue above all to serve the interests of Soviet Russia.” He went on to argue that the influence of the Comintern cut off the CP from “other forms of American radicalism such as the open, democratic, pre-World War I Socialist party, the farmer-labor movement, or the syndicalist movement, all of which were far more indigenous and independent than the American Communist party.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, after many New Left militants had quit active politics and gone to graduate school, a new generation of historians began to write about the CP. They mainly wrote about the 1930s, when the Communist Party was much larger, and they tended to emphasize what they saw as the “American” aspects of Communism. Nevertheless, they accepted the same basic framework as Draper. For them, the division between “American” and “foreign” in American Communism remained undisputed and they agreed that Soviet and Comintern influence was unquestionably negative. What the New Left historians tended to do was to invert Draper’s schema; they argued that what they saw as the “American” traditions were much more prominent in the CP than Draper had allowed.
What sets my book apart is my emphasis on the way that the International helped the American Communist Party grow roots in America. The Comintern was animated by proletarian internationalism and understood that only international workers revolutions, particularly in the advanced industrial countries, could safeguard the Russian Revolution and lay the basis for international communism.
I should note that I am not the first historian to touch on this theme. Michael Goldfield, particularly in his writings on the black question, and Bryan Palmer, particularly in his recent biography of James P. Cannon, have both written on various aspects of it. And, most importantly, in many ways my approach goes back to Cannon’s Trotskyist appreciation of the origins of American Communism—especially revealed in his correspondence with Draper, which was published in the early 1960s as The First Ten Years of American Communism. I also want to recommend a book of Cannon’s writings that we at the Prometheus Research Library edited and published in 1992, James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism.
The view expressed in my book runs counter to the perspective of much of the left. Thus, in the Summer 2014 issue of International Socialist Review, which is published by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), there is an article on the Comintern (“Zinovievism and the Degeneration of World Communism”) by Joel Geier, one of the ISO’s leaders, in which Geier sneers that “the American party was almost a ward of the Comintern.” More recently, another social democrat, Dan La Botz, complained in a review that my book doesn’t appreciate the domineering role of the Soviet Union in American Communism.
In Lessons of October (1924), Trotsky identified “the essential aspect” of Bolshevism as the “training, tempering, and organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand” when presented with a revolutionary opportunity. Rather than have Communist parties mindlessly imitate the Bolsheviks, the early Comintern fought for them to assimilate the political lessons of the Bolsheviks and apply these to the conditions of each society. In a speech at the Third Comintern Congress in 1921, Lenin stressed that the Comintern’s “fundamental revolutionary principles” were the same everywhere, but “must be adapted to the specific conditions in the various countries.” Only later, under Stalin (in the context of a fight in the American CP), did the Comintern argue that capitalist societies were the same throughout the world and that differences were at most superficial.
This all poses the question: if Draper was such a good historian, despite his ideological biases, why did I go through the trouble of re-tilling the ground he had cultivated so well? The answer is that a lot has changed since the 1950s and ’60s, in particular with the capitalist counterrevolution and the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. The counterrevolution was a disaster for the working class and the oppressed, most immediately in the former Soviet Union and the deformed workers states in Central and East Europe but also internationally.
More narrowly, the counterrevolution affected historians of American Communism in two broad ways. First, it led to the opening of archives in Moscow, including those of the Comintern. Draper’s ability to marshal archival resources still amazes me, but the Comintern files dwarf what he was able to assemble. Second, the counterrevolution led to a view among the bourgeoisie that capitalism was triumphant, and to a retrogression of political consciousness among the left and labor movement. Today, amid a global capitalist depression, the very idea that capitalism can be replaced with a social system based on collective ownership and production for use rather than for profit is seen as obsolete or even impossible by most intellectuals, workers and oppressed people.
Historians of American Communism, in their own way, reflected this widening of archival sources combined with the narrowing of political vision. Some anti-Communist historians seized upon the archives to “prove” once and for all that Communists were pure evil. More seriously, there are historians who got their degrees largely after the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and who imbibed the “death of communism” of the last two decades. They treat Communists as an interesting historical phenomenon, with only academic importance, like, for example, the Shakers. If the revisionists were New Left historians, this school of thought can be referred to as the “No Left” historians, because it is informed by the collapse of any sense of a socialist alternative to capitalism.
The Americanization of U.S. Communism
There are three aspects of the process of Americanization that I want to focus on. The first is the basic question of the need to form a unified, legal Communist Party; the second is the fight against black oppression; the third is the struggle for political independence of the working class.
The pre-Communist left wing in the U.S. was amorphous but had three main components, although oftentimes they overlapped. There were left-wing social-democrats like Ruthenberg; militant syndicalists who had been in or around the IWW, like Cannon, who had also been a member of the SP; and foreign-language groups in the Socialist Party. They were united in their opposition to the Socialist leadership, but not much else. Even before forming a Communist Party, they split over whether they should remain in the SP to fight to win over other dissident Socialists, or leave the party immediately. This was resolved in practice when the leadership of the Socialist Party expelled those remaining at its 1919 convention, but the Communists remained divided into two separate parties, each of which had fundamentally the same political program.
What followed was a years-long process of mitosis, where the different groups formed a variety of competing parties. In my research, I looked at Ruthenberg’s letters to his wife during this period. Ruthenberg was in the leadership of the Communist movement, and at one point he mused: “I am sick and tired of the whole business and only wish I could drop out without leaving people who are depending on me in the lurch.” He didn’t drop out, but many others did quit, probably tens of thousands. Along with the Red Scare repression of the immediate postwar period, this confusion was responsible for the swift decline in the ranks of left-wing socialists. In 1919, there were probably around 60,000 sympathizers of the left wing; five years later, there were about 17,000 Communists.
The Comintern leaders were no less frustrated. Max Bedacht, an American CP representative in Moscow, wrote to his comrades in 1921, complaining about “the little esteem that the general office has for the American business in general.” Eventually, the Comintern, along with American leaders like Ruthenberg and Cannon, were able to get American Communists into one party. In a literal sense, without the Comintern there never would have been a Communist Party in the U.S.
I want to make a point here about unity. The type of unity that the Comintern advocated was communist unity: it was based on the fact that all the Communist groups shared the same political program, with secondary differences over tactics. The Comintern was clear that Communists needed to split from the centrists and reformists in the SP leadership, for example Morris Hillquit, who was specifically denounced in the Comintern’s Twenty-One Conditions for admittance. A Leninist party is formed through splits and fusions.
The eventual organizational unity did not mean that the early CP was a genuinely Bolshevik party. Forging a Bolshevik party in the United States meant more than uniting all the pro-Communist tendencies. It required a political break with the CP’s left social-democratic and syndicalist origins. The most immediate challenge was the more than a dozen foreign-language federations, each of which had its own newspapers, its own buildings, its own functionaries, etc. Ironically, these first pro-Bolshevik groups in the U.S. were, in their organization, non-Bolshevik. In many ways, they were closer to the anti-Bolshevik Bundists in Russia, who had insisted on the exclusive right to carry out work among Jewish workers in the tsarist empire—similar to what is today called “identity politics,” organizing solely on the basis of one’s own ethnic identity, not on political program.
I want to make clear that the foreign-language groups were not appendages to the party. If anything, the English-language party was an appendage to the foreign-language groups. There was a Yiddish-language publication years before there was a Daily Worker. And when there was a Daily Worker, the Yiddish publication still had a higher daily circulation. Then there were the Finns, who made up a huge chunk of the party.
While the dominance of the foreign-language federations kept the CP from Americanizing, the high number of foreign-language workers in the Communist ranks was actually a hallmark of a society like the U.S., which had been formed by waves of immigration. By the 1920s, huge sections of the working class, especially in major Northern cities, were first- or second-generation immigrants. Both the SP and the IWW had their own foreign-language groups. Communist parties in other countries with a largely immigrant-derived working class, such as Argentina and Canada, had similar issues and often had similar foreign-language groups.
Within the Socialist Party, these foreign-language federations essentially had free rein, reflecting the decentralized nature of American social-democracy. Many, but not all, foreign-language groups were on the left of the SP, and they contributed many of the early American Communists. But after affiliating to the CP, many continued to resist control by the American leadership—and when I say the American leadership I essentially mean the English-speaking leadership, many of whom were first- or second-generation immigrants themselves—and wanted to have a monopoly on work among their own particular ethnic or linguistic group. More importantly, on a political level they tended to see themselves as the foreign franchise of the European movement, not part of a movement in the United States. The foreign-language groups did not understand, and in many cases did not want to understand, how the U.S. differed from Europe. They often acted as if they were in tsarist Russia right before the Revolution.
This perspective fed into a broader impatience, one shared by many early Communists in various places who felt that revolution was just around the corner. This is what Lenin polemicized against in his pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920). As one example, when public transportation workers in Brooklyn went on strike, the Communists issued a leaflet telling them to forget higher pay and instead fight for revolution. They weren’t appreciated; I think they were driven off the picket line.
The early Communists believed that the U.S. was entering a period of severe repression, and that Communists had to be illegal as a matter of principle. Now, to be fair, in 1919-21 this was not so hard to believe on a superficial level. Europe was exploding and there was a wave of militant strikes throughout North America. The U.S. bourgeoisie was scared enough to institute widespread repression, the Red Scare, in which militants were swept up, jailed and often deported. But the point is this was a temporary exception, not the rule. The U.S. was not an unstable monarchy or a fascist regime; it was a bourgeois-democratic republic where the ruling class preferred the “rule of law” to naked repression and terror.
The “roaring twenties,” a period that is often associated with unprecedented affluence, posed particular problems for Communists. Rather than destroy the labor movement, such as Mussolini did in Italy, the U.S. bourgeoisie weakened the working class through increased exploitation. This was assisted by the reactionary American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade-union bureaucracy, which preached “partnership” with capital instead of class struggle. Meanwhile, trade-union membership sank dramatically. Much like our own times, this reactionary period and a lack of social struggle threatened to sap the revolutionary juices from many Communists. Rather than deal with this reality, the foreign-language leaders and ultraleft Americans dwelled in a fantasyland of underground conspiracy and imminent revolution.
The Fight for a Legal Party
There were some Communist leaders, such as Cannon and Ruthenberg, who sensed that it was not necessary to be an illegal party. Being illegal hindered the party’s real work. Moreover, American workers rejected a party that either was indifferent to its right to organize legally or too ignorant to know that it had that right. As a former organizer for the IWW, Cannon understood something about state repression, but he also understood the need to fight it, not just accept it as inevitable.
In 1921, the Communists formed a legal party, called the Workers Party. But even then, they did not agree on the relationship between the illegal party and legal party—what the Communists referred to as “Number 1” and “Number 2.” A large section of the membership and leadership thought that only members of the illegal party were real Communists and that the people in the legal party were sellouts. Those who made a fetish out of illegality became known as the “geese,” perhaps because they cackled so much. Cannon and other Americanizers were called the “liquidators” because they wanted a legal party. This fight was not only a tactical issue: it was about understanding American reality and what was necessary to build a party here. The American Communists, if left to their own devices, would have been unable to resolve this fundamental political problem.
Both the geese and the liquidators sent representatives to Moscow for the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922. Cannon later recalled that, when he was in Moscow, Trotsky was sympathetic and told Cannon and Bedacht (another liquidator) to present their argument on “one sheet of paper, no more.” That is probably an important political lesson in itself! After siding with Cannon and the liquidators, the Comintern leadership forcefully intervened into the American party. They made clear that a legal party was a necessity and that the illegal party should be liquidated.
This is only one example of Comintern fights against ultraleftism; there are others. The Comintern struggled to get American Communists to fight for Communist politics within the American Federation of Labor. The AFL bureaucracy, led by Samuel Gompers, was one of the most venal pro-capitalist union leaderships in the industrialized world. But the AFL organized the majority of unionized workers. In this case, the Comintern fought against not just foreign-language groups, but also many American sympathizers of the IWW (for example, John Reed). This fight paved the way to making the Communists a small, but real, factor in many trade unions. It also paved the way for recruiting William Z. Foster, perhaps the best-known militant labor leader in the U.S., who had led the 350,000-strong 1919 steel strike. At bottom, the question was how to forge a Bolshevik party under American conditions. And it took so-called foreigners to appreciate much of what made American society unique and how Communists should approach it.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1073
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4 September 2015
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Book Launch
The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919–1929
Part Two
The following is the second part of a May 9 presentation, edited for publication, by Prometheus Research Library associate Jacob A. Zumoff promoting his book The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929. The first part of Zumoff’s presentation, published in WV No. 1072 (7 August), dealt with the origins of the Communist movement in the U.S. under the impact of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent struggle for a unified, legal Communist Party (CP).
Another important intervention by the Comintern was to push the American Communists to take up the fight against black oppression. One of the distinguishing features of capitalism in the United States is that it rests upon black oppression, going back to the colonial period and the institution of slavery. After the Civil War had abolished slavery, the betrayal of Radical Reconstruction—the brief period when former slaves and their allies gained power in the former slave South—led to the consolidation of black people into a race-color caste at the bottom of American society. Only the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a socialist society can lead to the liberation of black people in the U.S., that is, finishing the tasks of the Civil War.
One of the biggest historical failings of American Social Democracy—its left wing included—was its position on black oppression. There were some prominent Socialists, like Victor Berger of Milwaukee, who were outright racists and actually held that socialism would be segregated. There were others, for example, left-wing Socialist leader Eugene Debs, who were not racists. Debs in fact wrote forcefully against racism, but his approach, what we could call color blindness, was basically that white workers and black workers should get together, unite and fight. Debs said, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.” His conclusion was that, “The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.” While he was anti-racist, this color-blind approach did not appreciate or understand the special role of black oppression in American capitalism.
This color blindness was inherited by the early American Communists. For instance, there was only one black person among the thousands of founding Communists in 1919. So how did the Communists come to pay attention to the question of black oppression? It was the Comintern, and in the first instance it was Lenin, who pushed the issue and forced the American Communists to come to grips with this key aspect of American society.
In contrast to the American Socialists, the Bolsheviks had long emphasized what they saw as “special oppression”—that is to say, oppression that was not just reducible to class exploitation. In his seminal work What Is To Be Done? [1902], Lenin had argued that the revolutionary party must be a “tribune of the people,” fighting against all forms of oppression and linking these fights to the struggle for proletarian power. Lenin called tsarist Russia the “prison house of peoples” and saw that the Bolshevik Party needed to fight against the oppression of the myriad national and ethnic groups by Great Russian chauvinism.
From this revolutionary internationalist perspective, the Comintern essentially forced American Communists to take up what was then called the “Negro question.” To give a concrete example, at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, Lenin made John Reed give a report on this issue. In Reed’s papers at Harvard, I found that Reed wanted to give a report on the trade-union question and wrote to Lenin, asking: is it really important that I give a report on the black question? Lenin wrote back two words: “Absolutely necessary.” So, this intervention by the Comintern, by foreigners as it were, seeded the ground for Communists to begin the work of recruiting radical black workers and intellectuals, something that would flower later on.
The birth of the American Communist movement coincided with one of the worst waves of racist violence in American history, what is known as the “Red Summer,” when there were racist pogroms in several cities. It also coincided with the start of what is now called the “Great Migration” from the Jim Crow South. More than a million black people moved from the rural South, both to urban areas in the South and, more importantly, to cities in the North such as Chicago and New York. There, black people faced the racial oppression inherent in American capitalism, but they also began a process of becoming integrated into the working class, albeit paid less, treated worse, and the last hired and the first fired. In New York and elsewhere, these migrants from the South were joined by black immigrants from British and other European colonies in the Caribbean. This contributed to the development of what was known as the “New Negro” movement, which was in favor of self-defense against racist violence and oppression. This movement was contradictory, encompassing black nationalists, integrationists and people of various other types.
The Bolshevik Revolution had a big impact on many in the ghettoes, from Harlem to the South Side of Chicago and elsewhere. The Bolsheviks’ open hatred of imperialism and colonial oppression, including their demand for the independence of oppressed colonies, attracted many black intellectuals, especially those from the Caribbean. One of the more famous of the “New Negroes” to be attracted to Bolshevism was Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, who had been active around Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers Socialist Federation in London. Another example is the Harlem-based radical black nationalist African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). While such black radicals were attracted to Communism, to Bolshevism, they were not attracted to the early Communist Party in the United States, which had almost nothing to say about black oppression.
The Comintern’s intervention and forceful insistence on the need to fight for black liberation enabled the CP to recruit most of the leadership of the ABB. Recruiting the ABB gave the Communists a real foothold in Harlem and a base to recruit black workers and intellectuals throughout the North. Without Comintern intervention, it is likely that the ABB never would have joined the Communists. As my book explains, in the late 1920s the particular analysis that the CP brought to the question—the so-called Black Belt theory—was flawed, but during the following decade, the Communists became known for being in the forefront of the fight against black oppression.
The Farmer-Labor Question, La Follette and Class Independence
What I want to discuss next is the issue of the Farmer-Labor Party. In the United States, unlike much of Europe, the working class traditionally has supported one or another bourgeois party—either the Democrats or the Republicans. In fact, Samuel Gompers and the rest of the American Federation of Labor bureaucracy opposed organizing a working-class party.
Obviously, as I mentioned, there was the Socialist Party in this period, and Socialists had been elected as mayors in several cities, often focusing on municipal reforms. For example, Victor Berger, the supporter of Jim Crow socialism, was elected in Milwaukee because he promised to fix the sewers there. Thus, this municipal reformism is called sewer socialism. And I believe that he did fix the sewers. But the SP was never seen as a threat to the power of the two bourgeois parties in a national sense.
After World War I, amid a brief upturn in class struggle, some trade-union leaders—especially in Chicago, the industrial center of the country—advocated the formation of a labor party, largely influenced by the British Labour Party. The British Labour Party, like the German Social Democratic Party, was what can be called a bourgeois labor party or a bourgeois workers party—it had a working-class base but a bourgeois program and leadership. Such parties represent in the political arena the division of society between workers and capitalists, albeit in a crude way. In the United States, the formation of a labor party would have represented an advance in the consciousness of the working class.
Focused on their belief that revolution was near, the early Communists were hostile to this labor party movement. Americanizers such as James P. Cannon, as well as the Comintern, fought to get the CP to intervene into this movement in order to polarize it between revolutionaries and reformists. But by the time the American Communists as a whole began to pay attention in 1922, the labor party movement had changed. It had become a farmer-labor party in an attempt to attract agrarian radicals. Thus, it became a two-class party, one that claimed to be based on both the working class and small farmers, that is, a section of the petty bourgeoisie. So, rather than increase class consciousness among workers, this concept weakened it.
A Leninist intervention into the farmer-labor movement would have drawn a clear class line and fought for a working-class party, separate from bourgeois reformers and not subordinate to farmers. Instead, American Communists tried to get rich quick through a series of organizational maneuvers. They formed their own Federated Farmer-Labor Party, splitting with their former allies in the trade-union movement. The new party was based on the same two-class program; the only difference was that the Communists were in control. This move was adventurist—it was based on the idea that there was going to be a massive upsurge in agrarian radicalism. It was also opportunist—it jettisoned sections of the Communist program, sometimes explicitly, for example dropping opposition to Jim Crow segregation. At the same time it was sectarian—it alienated a huge section of the trade-union bureaucracy, not on the basis of politics but on tactics. It backfired—the trade-union bureaucracy, including many bureaucrats who had previously tended to be sympathetic, went on a witchhunt and purged Communists from the unions.
The section of the Communist leadership with the most experience in the trade unions—Cannon and William Z. Foster—thought that this maneuver was folly. And this dispute was the beginning of a long-lasting factional division in the party, with C.E. Ruthenberg on one side and Cannon and Foster on the other. Now, added into the mix was one of the most colorful characters in American Communist history, somebody who went by the name of John Pepper. I won’t be able to give justice to him. He was a native of Hungary and his given name was Jószef Pogány. He played a key role in leading the 1919 Hungarian Revolution to defeat and his second act was helping to organize the disastrous “March Action” in Germany in 1921. By then he had thoroughly alienated his higher-ups in Moscow, who sent him to the United States.
From what I was able to determine, Pepper was sent to America to work with the Hungarian language federation, a medium-sized language federation. One of its largest locals was in Passaic, New Jersey. His actual assignment, I think, was to edit their newspaper. But he was able to pass himself off as an official emissary from the Comintern, got himself elected to the Central Committee and quickly became not only the intellectual leader of the Ruthenberg group, but soon of the party as a whole. Keep in mind that he didn’t speak English when he first came here. The fact that he was able to do all of this speaks to the importance and the esteem that American Communists placed in the Comintern. It also speaks to the theoretical weakness of the early American Communist movement.
Pepper was the most enthusiastic supporter of the farmer-labor perspective. And one of his genuine skills, I suppose, was the ability to make a betrayal of Marxism—tying the proletarian vanguard to the petty-bourgeoisie through a two-class party—seem like the pinnacle of Bolshevism.
With the 1924 presidential elections approaching, the broader farmer-labor movement was soon eclipsed by enthusiasm for longtime Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert La Follette. The same people who, a year earlier, had supported the farmer-labor party were now supporting La Follette. In a broad sense, this wasn’t really a contradiction, since the farmer-labor movement was essentially an attempt to engage in bourgeois pressure politics. There was quite a lot of angst about the fact that there was tremendous corruption and that big business was obviously running the government.
La Follette was an anti-Communist; he did not even want to form a new capitalist party, but sought merely to pressure the two main parties. This should have served as a warning for Communists of the danger of not insisting on the political independence of the working class. Instead, led by Pepper, the Communists were drawn closer into La Follette’s orbit. Pepper hailed what he called the “La Follette revolution,” which, he wrote, would comprise “elements of the great French Revolution, and the Russian Kerensky Revolution.” He expanded: “In its ideology it will have elements of Jeffersonianism, Danish cooperatives, Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism” but he did concede, “The proletariat as a class will not play an independent role in this revolution.” He advocated “support to the La Follette revolution at the same time criticizing and fighting for a Communist mass party.”
Pepper came up with what he called the “theory of two splits.” First, the nascent third-party movement would split the petty bourgeoisie from the big capitalists, and then the Communists would split the proletariat from the petty bourgeoisie. This would have been political suicide for the Communist Party. It would have meant liquidating the party into the reformist swamp, politically undoing the whole 1919 split of the Communists from the reformist betrayers of socialism. In fact, the Socialist Party essentially did liquidate into the La Follette movement and didn’t run a candidate.
In 1924, in Moscow, there was a special American Commission to debate this issue. This commission comprised very important Comintern leaders: Zinoviev, Radek, Lozovsky (who was a key Stalin supporter), Trotsky and Kamenev. This heavy-duty commission was convened because, unknown to most of the American leaders, the La Follette debate intersected a major struggle in the Bolshevik Party. Stalin, then allied with Zinoviev, was seeking to consolidate his power, based on the growing Soviet bureaucracy, within the Russian party after Lenin’s death. As part of this struggle, the Stalin faction resurrected the Menshevik idea that socialists should systematically collaborate with non-working-class forces.
Trotsky, who by this time was in opposition to much of the leadership of the Russian party, opposed the La Follette maneuver as a betrayal. He warned: “For a young and weak Communist Party, lacking in revolutionary temper, to play the role of solicitor and gatherer of ‘progressive’ votes for the Republican Senator La Follette is to head toward the political dissolution of the party in the petty bourgeoisie.”
Although the “triumvirate” of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin was in a position of strength, they still felt compelled to concede to Trotsky. Thus, the Comintern instructed the American party to break with the La Follette movement, to denounce him and to stand its own candidate. The party ran Foster for president in 1924. He did not receive many votes, but he drew a hard class line between the Communists and bourgeois populism.
The Comintern’s intervention confused many American Communists. It came very late in the day and caused the Communists to pivot on a dime, rather clumsily. But it underscores how important the Comintern was at this point in guiding American Communism politically in maintaining the principle of working-class independence. Without the Comintern’s intervention, the party would have become a tail on bourgeois electoral formations (something that has happened quite frequently to sections of the left in subsequent decades).
Stalinist Degeneration
I want to talk now about the Stalinist degeneration of the Comintern and of the Communist movement. By 1924, there had been a political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, as a bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin came to power. After January 1924, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled, and the purposes for which the USSR were ruled had all changed. The ideological expression of this was so-called “socialism in one country,” the idea that it was possible to build socialism (a society of material abundance based on the highest level of productive technology and an international division of labor) in a backward, largely peasant, country surrounded by hostile imperialist powers. Trotsky, right up through his exile in the late 1920s and his assassination in 1940 by a Stalinist agent, waged a battle, as uncompromising as any waged by Lenin, to reforge a communist vanguard and to oppose the Stalinists while at the same time standing for unconditional military defense of the USSR against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution.
The degeneration of the Soviet workers state and the Bolshevik Party was reflected in the Comintern and the rest of the international Communist movement. This was certainly true in the American CP and I describe the process in several chapters in my book. Today, I want to touch on only a few points. First, the significance of the Stalinist degeneration was not immediately clear to most Communists, especially those far away from Russia. Second, the rise of Stalinism within the American CP, while reflecting the intervention of the Comintern, also reflected homegrown political problems. Finally, I want to make the point that Stalinism was fought in the American Communist Party.
What Stalinism represented was not clear in 1924. Many American Communists would not even have recognized Stalin, and the early stages of Stalinization were spearheaded by Zinoviev, not by Stalin. The rise of Stalinization coincided with several problems in the American party. The factionalism that had begun over the farmer-labor party was blossoming into full-fledged warfare, at times threatening the basic unity of the party. Even after Pepper had been sent back to Moscow, Ruthenberg, assisted by his lieutenant Jay Lovestone, maintained one faction; Foster, assisted by Earl Browder and others, had his faction; and Cannon had his own faction.
In the mid to late 1920s, this factionalism had become devoid of any apparent political rationale. At the same time the party was regaining some of its momentum and once again becoming a factor in the broader labor movement. So, to give two examples: in 1926-27, the party led a militant textile workers strike in Passaic, New Jersey, and in 1927 the party’s International Labor Defense (led by Cannon) fought to save anarchist prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti from execution. In the upshot, neither campaign succeeded, but they did demonstrate the militancy and determination of the CP and brought it a wider audience and support among the broader labor movement.
The rise of Stalinization was wrapped up in this situation. Given the factionalism, it became increasingly clear that the American Communist Party could not resolve its problems on its own. Naturally, leading Communists looked to the Comintern—none more so than Cannon, who prided himself on being what he called a Cominternist. I want to defend Cannon here for a moment because many leftists, such as the International Socialist Organization’s Joel Geier, attack Cannon as some kind of bootlicker for the Comintern. Cannon’s problem was not that he looked to the Comintern to help the American Communist Party. In fact, the Comintern had done this in the past. Rather, Cannon did not understand that with the degeneration of the Soviet workers state, the Comintern was no longer the same, that the Comintern leadership was Stalinist, not Leninist.
In the mid and late 1920s, the Comintern did intervene. But it did so not to build a genuine Leninist party, but to create a pliable leadership that would support Stalin. It played each faction off against the others in a cynical game, and each faction courted the Comintern, trying to prove its loyalty. By the end of the decade, the Comintern was essentially picking the party’s leadership. First, the Comintern put control of the party in the hands of Ruthenberg and Lovestone, who became the head of Ruthenberg’s old faction after Ruthenberg died. Then, when Lovestone became too bothersome for even Stalin, the Comintern put the leadership in the hands of Earl Browder, who was in Foster’s faction.
There is also a tendency by many leftists to lay all the blame for the degeneration of the CP at the feet of Moscow—see Dan La Botz’s references to so-called Moscow domination. While Moscow definitely played a key role, not everything came from the Comintern—the pressures of American imperialism contributed to many early Communists giving up on their original goal. For example, the La Follette fiasco, notwithstanding the help from Pepper, was thought up by American Communists. And in fact, in much of the 1930s and 1940s, by which time the Communist Party had become Stalinist, there were many similarities between American social democracy and American Stalinism: both supported President Roosevelt’s New Deal, both alibied the trade-union bureaucrats in the CIO, and, by and large, both became enthusiastic supporters of U.S. imperialism in the Second World War.
Besides creating a compliant leadership, the Stalinized Comintern’s main contribution to this process was the ideology of socialism in one country, which was a betrayal of the Comintern’s original proletarian internationalism. This gave a political cover to the anti-revolutionary impulses of much of the American party’s leadership: if the main goal of the international Communist movement was to protect the Soviet bureaucracy, then revolution in the United States was no longer necessary. By the late 1930s, the CP had essentially become a tool to pressure the Democratic Party.
The final point I want to make about the Stalinist degeneration in the American party is that it was neither inevitable nor uncontested. Much of the leadership of the American party did accept Stalinism. This reflected, as I mentioned, the pressures of the period, the organizational maneuvers of the Comintern and also, to a large degree, Stalin’s false claim to the heritage of Bolshevism. However, just as in Soviet Russia and the Comintern as a whole, Stalinism required a break with Leninism. The one key CP leader who fought this break was Cannon. Precisely because Cannon had looked to the Comintern for Leninist guidance, not just as a source of factional power, he sensed that there was something different about it in the late 1920s than in the earlier period.
In 1928, he was sent as a delegate to the Sixth Comintern Congress. He was not particularly enthusiastic about this assignment, even though his faction seemed to be on the verge of obtaining power in the party. While in Moscow, he managed to read Trotsky’s criticism of the Stalinist degeneration of the Comintern, which was later published as The Third International After Lenin. This critique gave a systematic political explanation for Cannon’s dissatisfaction and won him to support Trotsky’s Left Opposition. Cannon was expelled from the CP for his support to Trotsky and went on to found the Trotskyist Communist League of America. He saw the fight to forge a Trotskyist party as the continuation of his struggle for communism in the United States and internationally.
This history is beyond the scope of my book, which ends in 1929. But it does illuminate the point that I want to end on. As I mentioned, one of Theodore Draper’s strengths as a historian was that he sought out all the early Communists he could find. Many of them were still alive when he was writing in the 1950s, although many had broken with the Communist Party one way or another over the intervening decades. He noted that Cannon’s memories were always the most vivid, and, when he compared what Cannon remembered to the documentary record, they were the most accurate. The reason for this, Draper concluded, was not that Cannon had some kind of superhuman memory, but that he wanted to remember these early years.
That was because in the 1950s Cannon, unlike most of his former comrades, still wanted the same thing he had wanted in the 1920s: to build a revolutionary party capable of leading the American workers to power, part of building socialism internationally. Thus, Cannon understood that the lessons of the first attempt to build such a party in the United States, the CP in the 1920s, were absolutely vital. That is also the main reason motivating my own research: to make available the lessons of the early American Communist movement, not only—and not mainly—to academic historians, but to those who endeavor to build a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist party today.
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Markin comment on founding member James P. Cannon of the early American Communist Party taken from a book review, James P. Cannon and the Early American Communist Party, on the “American Left History” blog:
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early American Communist Party and some of the key personalities, including James Cannon, who formed that party this book is for you.
At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent ‘death of communism’ it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American socialist revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and was in the thick of the battle as a central leader of the Party in this period. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such a militant leader today. His mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.
For those not familiar with this period a helpful introduction by the editors gives an analysis of the important fights which occurred inside the party. That overview highlights some of the now more obscure personalities (a helpful biographical glossary is provided), where they stood on the issues and insights into the significance of the crucial early fights in the party.
These include questions which are still relevant today; a legal vs. an underground party; the proper attitude toward parliamentary politics; support to third- party bourgeois candidates;trade union policy; class-war prisoner defense as well as how to rein in the intense internal struggle of the various factions for organizational control of the party. This makes it somewhat easier for those not well-versed in the intricacies of the political disputes which wracked the early American party to understand how these questions tended to pull it in on itself. In many ways, given the undisputed rise of American imperialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this is a story of the ‘dog days’ of the party. Unfortunately, that rise combined with the international ramifications of the internal disputes in the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International shipwrecked the party as a revolutionary party toward the end of this period.
In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? I would argue that the period under study represented Cannon’s apprenticeship. Although the hothouse politics of the early party clarified some of the issues of revolutionary strategy for him I believe that it was not until he linked up with Trotsky in the late 1920’s that he became the kind of leader who could lead a revolution. Of course, since Cannon never got a serious opportunity to lead revolutionary struggles in America this is mainly reduced to speculation on my part. Later books written by him make the case better. One thing is sure- in his prime he had the instincts to want to lead a revolution.
As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to the two-volume set by Theodore Draper - The Roots of American Communism and Soviet Russia and American Communism- the definitive study on the early history of the American Communist Party. It is also a useful companion to Cannon’s own The First Ten Years of American Communism. I would add that this is something of a labor of love on the part of the editors. This book was published at a time when the demise of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was in full swing and anything related to Communist studies was deeply discounted. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the American Communist Party (and its offshoots) needs to be studied as an ultimately flawed example of a party that failed in its mission to create a radical version of society in America. Now is the time to study this history.
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BOOK REVIEW
NOTEBOOK OF AN AGITATOR- JAMES P. CANNON, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1971
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that was published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, especially after his long collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the 1920’s when he was a leader of the American Communist Party to the red-baiting years after World War II- started with his leadership of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and then later against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.
The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s long time companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.
It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.
I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.
Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this system.
I also suggest a close look at Cannon’s articles in the early 1950’s. Some of them are solely of historical interest around the effects of the red purges on the organized labor movement at the start of the Cold War. Others, however, around health insurance, labor standards, the role of the media and the separation of church and state read as if they were written in 2014 That’s a sorry statement to have to make any way one looks at it.
