On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- * From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- The Revolutionary Response To Imperialist War

Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives.

BOOK REVIEW

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY IN WORLD WAR II- JAMES P. CANNON'S WRITINGS AND SPEECHES, 1940-43- Pathfinder Press, New York, 1975

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 imperialist war 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, many after his death in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series on this 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 after a long journeymanship working with Trotsky. The period under discussion started with his leadership of the fight against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. He won his spurs in that fight and in his struggle to orient the party toward World War II. 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.


As I write this review we are in the midst of commemorating the 3rd Anniversary of the start of the American invasion of Iraq. As I have argued elsewhere in this space militants must support the call for immediate United States and Allied forces withdrawal from that war-torn country. More drastic action is needed, much more, over the long haul including a change in the form of government but that demand is the minimum basis for action today. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to World War II the Cannon’s writing here will assist you. I draw your attention to three aspects of policy which highlight this book; the historic socialist anti-war policy; the ambiguous Proletarian Military Policy of the Socialist Workers Party; and, revolutionary socialist defense policy against governmental persecution and suppression.

Historically, at least in peace time, most socialist tendencies before World War I had a formal policy against the war policies and military buildup. At the start of World War I most European socialist parties capitulated to their respective imperialist state’s war aims that are rightly understood as a betrayal of that policy. The Russian Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and preciously few other European parties and individuals upheld the Marxist policy against war and militarism. Moreover, one of the most enduring lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 was that the only way to successfully fight against imperialist war aims and stop war is to overthrow the capitalist system of your own country.

As developed during World War I that understanding of socialist policy had two prongs. First, socialists must not vote for or otherwise support the war aims of their own imperialist state. Second, in order to end war and bring in the prospect of a socialist organization of society dedicated to ending war one must actively seek to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. This is the perspective the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon, operated from prior to and during World War II. Thus, they operated within an orthodox Leninist revolutionary perspective. They did this forthrightly and paid the price for it with the imprisonment of its leaders, including Cannon, and virtual suppression of its newspaper. These were severe blows to that small party.

Although the Socialist Workers Party honorably upheld the revolutionary socialist position on imperialist war during this period that party pursued what can only be considered an ambiguous policy that has come down in history as the Proletarian Military Policy. In this perspective the organization was influenced by Trotsky’s theses on permanent war and total militarism. That policy had two parts when it was elaborated just prior to American participation in World War II. One was trade union control of worker military training in case of conscription and the other was control of worker-officer training. The fundamental flaw in this policy is that it contradicts the Marxist understanding of the state which is that in the final analysis the state is an armed body of men (and women) in the service of the ruling class. To call for such controls is either utopian or opportunism and blunted the other orthodox actions that proved the worth of the party. Yes, oppose conscription. Yes, oppose the war budget. Yes, sent your youthful cadre into the army when drafted to influence working class and minority youth. No to this scheme.


As a result of their open and defiant opposition to Roosevelt’s war aims the leadership of the Socialist Workers was indicted before the opening of United States involvement in World War II. Ultimately most of those indicted were convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. This is the price revolutionary must know in their bones they will have to pay for such fundamental opposition. All honor to those courageous individuals. The Socialist Workers Party in response to this governmental persecution created a broad based defense organization to both raise funds and call attention to the plight of their comrades. This was both appropriate and useful. Moreover, the organization properly used the trial as a forum on socialism. This is also a proper response to such persecutions by the government. Cannon has some interesting things his experiences in the legal vs. illegal party debate and the proper tone to take during wartime to protect your legal status when you oppose the government. If you oppose the United States occupation in Iraq read this book. Before we are done you and I may need to use some of the lessons drawn from this source.

************


James P. Cannon
A Statement on the War
December 21, 1941
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Written: 1941
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume III, No. 1, January 1942, pages 3-4.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters
Copyleft: James P. Cannon (www.marx.org) 2005. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 22, 1941

The considerations which determined our attitude toward the war up to the out break of hostilities between the United States and the Axis powers retain their validity in the new situation.

We considered the war upon the part of all the capitalist powers involved—Germany and France, Italy and Great Britain — as an imperialist war.

This characterization of the war was determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist—oppressing other nations or peoples—or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.

Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot; every imperialist power has for a quarter of a century been “attacking” every other imperialist power by economic and political means; the resort to arms is but the culmination of this process, which will continue as long as capitalism endures.

This characterization of the war does not apply to the war of the Soviet Union against German imperialism. We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its “democratic” allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.

The war of China against Japan we likewise characterize as a progressive war. We support China. China is a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke. The reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek, subservient to the “democracies,” has hampered China’s ability to conduct a bold war for independence; but that does not alter for us the essential fact that China is an oppressed nation fighting against an imperialist oppressor. We are proud of the fact that the Fourth Internationalists of China are fighting in the front ranks against Japanese imperialism.

None of the reasons which oblige us to support the Soviet Union and China against their enemies can be said to apply to France or Britain. These imperialist “democracies” entered the war to maintain their lordship over the hundreds of millions of subject peoples in the British and French empires; to defend these “democracies” means to defend their oppression of the masses of Africa and Asia, Above all it means to defend the decaying capitalist social order. We do not defend that, either in Italy and Germany, or in France and Britain—or in the United States.

The Marxist analysis which determined our attitude toward the war up to December 8, 1941 [i.e. up to the Pearl Harbor raid] continues to determine our attitude now. We were internationalists before December 8; we still are. We believe that the most fundamental bond of loyalty of all the workers of the world is the bond of international solidarity of the workers against their exploiters. We cannot assume the slightest responsibility for this war. No imperialist regime can conduct a just war. We cannot support it for one moment.

We are the most irreconcilable enemies of the fascist dictatorships of Germany and Italy and the military dictatorship of Japan. Our co-thinkers of the Fourth International in the Axis nations and the conquered countries are fighting and dying in the struggle to organize the coming revolutions against Hitler and Mussolini.

We are doing all in our power to speed those revolutions. But those ex-socialists, intellectuals and labor leaders, who in the name of “democracy” support the war of United States imperialism against its imperialist foes and rivals, far from aiding the German and Italian anti-fascists, only hamper their work and betray their struggle. The Allied imperialists, as every German worker knows, aim to impose a second and worse Versailles; the fear of that is Hitler’s greatest asset in keeping the masses of Germany in subjection. The fear of the foreign yoke holds back the development of the German revolution against Hitler.

Our program to aid the German masses to overthrow Hitler demands, first of all, that they be guaranteed against a second Versailles. When the people of Germany can feel assured that military defeat will not be followed by the destruction of Germany’s economic power and the imposition of unbearable burdens by the victors, Hitler will be overthrown from within Germany. But such guarantees against a second Versailles cannot be given by Germany’s imperialist foes; nor, if given, would they be accepted by the German people. Wilson’s 14 points are still remembered in Germany, and his promise that the United States was conducting war against the Kaiser and not against the German people. Yet the victors’ peace, and the way in which the victors “organized” the world from 1918 to 1933, constituted war against the German people. The German people will not accept any new promises from those who made that peace and conducted that war.

In the midst of the war against Hitler, it is necessary to extend the hand of fraternity to the German people. This can be done honestly and convincingly only by a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. We advocate the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. Such a government, and only such a government, can conduct a war against Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado in cooperation with the oppressed peoples of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our program against Hitlerism and for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government is today the program of only a small minority. The great majority actively or passively supports the war program of the Roosevelt administration. As a minority we must submit to that majority in action. We do not sabotage the war or obstruct the military forces in any way. The Trotskyists go with their generation into the armed forces. We abide by the decisions of the majority. But we retain our opinions and insist on our right to express them.

Our aim is to convince the majority that our program is the only one which can put an end to war, fascism and economic convulsions. In this process of education the terrible facts speak loudly for our contention. Twice in twenty-five years world wars have wrought destruction. The instigators and leaders of those wars do not offer, and cannot offer, a plausible promise that a third, fourth and fifth world war will not follow if they and their social system remain dominant. Capitalism can offer no prospect but the slaughter of millions and the destruction of civilization. Only socialism can save humanity from this abyss. This is the truth. As the terrible war unfolds, this truth will be recognized by tens of millions who will not hear us now. The war-tortured masses will adopt our program and liberate the people of all countries from war and fascism. In this dark hour we clearly see the socialist future and prepare the way for it. Against the mad chorus of national hatreds we advance once more the old slogan of socialist internationalism: Workers of the World Unite!

New York, December 22, 1941

*Another Song For Our Times- Bob Dylan's "Masters Of War"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Bob Dylan performing "Masters Of War".

Commentary

Several weeks ago (see repost below from February 21, 2009 archive) I wrote an entry concerning one of Bob Dylan's early protest-oriented songs "With God On Our Side" under the influence of the Obama Administration's recent troop escalation in Afghanistan. Needless to say, our call is "Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan". However I am still reeling under the impact of that damn escalation today on the 6th Anniversary of the Iraq invasion so another early Dylan song has been pounding in my brain, "Masters Of War". I think that it speaks very adequately to today's situation. How about you?

Posted February 21, 2009

"I am in high dudgeon today against the latest Obama moves for troops escalation in Afghanistan. I am also writing a review of the Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan, "No Direction Home", from PBS in 2005. This film covers the early protest song-oriented part of Dylan's career, among other things. As part of the documentary there are many film clips of early performances. The one that struck me as apt for today is his rendition of the song "With God On Our Side" together with Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. Powerful stuff. Here is my take on it today.

In the interest of completeness concerning my earlier evaluations of the Dylan songs "Masters Of War" and "With Good On Our Side" on his early albums here are the lyrics to the former song.

Interestingly, except for changing the Cold War theme against the Russians then to the so-called War On Terror now against seemingly every Muslim that any American presidential administration can get it hands on (Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Obama (same and, maybe, Pakistan) these lyrics "speak" to me today. The word they speak is hubris, American hubris, that the rest of the world has had reason to fear, and rightly so. What do they "speak" to you?"

Guest Commentary

Masters Of War-Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

For Bob Dylan - A Song For Our Times- Bob Dylan's "With God On Our Side"

Commentary

I am in high dudgeon today against the latest Obama moves for troops escalation in Afghanistan. I am also writing a review of the Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan, "No Direction Home", from PBS in 2005. This film covers the early protest song-oriented part of Dylan's career, among other things. As part of the documentary there are many film clips of early performances. The one that struck me as apt for today is his rendition of the song "With God On Our Side" together with Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. Powerful stuff. Here is my take on it today.

In the interest of completeness concerning my earlier evaluations of the Dylan songs "Masters Of War" and "With Good On Our Side" on his early albums here are the lyrics to the latter song.

Interestingly, except for changing the Cold War theme against the Russians then to the so-called War On Terror now against seemingly every Muslim that any American presidential administration can get it hands on (Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Obama (same and, maybe, Pakistan) these lyrics "speak" to me today. The word they speak is hubris, American hubris, that the rest of the world has had reason to fear, and rightly so. What do they "speak" to you?

"With God On Our Side"-Bob Dylan-1963

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

The Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns on their hands
And God on their side.

The First World War, boys
It came and it went
The reason for fighting
I never did get
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *From The Archives-The Struggle To Create The Socialist Workers Party in America

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Archive's article by Leon Trotsky, "The Founding Of The Fourth International", that can give some background to the international scope of the uphill struggle for socialism in the period of hard Stalinist domination of the international communist movement.

Guest Commentary

This year marks the 70th Anniversary of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP)founded by James P. Cannon and his cohorts following the Communist left-oppositionist principles laid down by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Although this party long ago gave up the revolutionary ghost those who claim allegiance to the heritage of Leon Trotsky must learn the history of that organization in order to learn from their mistakes (and successes). Here, as my guest commentator, is James P. Cannon in a 1944 article detailing the struggle to build that party. The title of his article could serve as a working one for us today, as well.

March 1944

The Dog Days of the Left Opposition

James P. Cannon

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Source: Fourth International, March 1944. Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription\HTML Markup:Andrew Pollack



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Editor’s Note: We reprint herewith another chapter of "The History of American Trotskyism," by James P. Cannon scheduled for publication this Spring.

Our last lecture brought us up to the first National Conference of the Left Opposition in May 1929. We had survived the difficult first six months of our struggle, kept our forces intact and gained some new recruits. At the first conference we consolidated our forces into a national organization, set up an elected leadership and defined our program more precisely. Our ranks were firm, determined. We were poor in resources and very few in numbers, but we were sure that we had laid hold of the truth and that with the truth we would conquer in the end. We came back to New York to begin the second stage of the struggle for the regeneration of American Communism.

The fate of every political group—whether it is to live and grow or degenerate and die—is decided in its first experiences by the way in which it answers two decisive questions.

The first is the adoption of a correct political program. But that alone does not guarantee victory. The second is that the group decide correctly what shall be the nature of its activities, and what tasks it shall set itself, given the size and capacity of the group, the period of the development of the class struggle, the relation of forces in the political movement, and so on.

If the program of a political group, especially a small political group, is false, nothing can save it in the end. It is just as impossible to bluff in the political movement as in war. The only difference is that in wartime things are brought to such a pitch that every weakness becomes exposed almost immediately, as is shown in one stage after another in the current imperialist war. The law operates just as ruthlessly in the political struggle. Bluffs do not work. At most they deceive people for a time, but the main victims of the deception, in the end, are the bluffers themselves. You must have the goods. That is, you must have a correct program in order to survive and serve the cause of the workers.

An example of the fatal result of a light-minded bluffing attitude toward program is the notorious Lovestone group. Some of you who are new to the revolutionary movement may never have heard of this faction which once played such a prominent role, inasmuch as it has disappeared completely from the scene. But in those days the people who constituted the Lovestone group were the leaders of the American Communist Party. It was they who carried through our expulsion, and when about six months later, they themselves were expelled, they began with far more numerous forces and resources than we did. They made a much more imposing appearance in the first days. But they didn’t have a correct program and didn’t try to develop one. They thought they could cheat history a little bit; that they could cut corners with principle and keep larger forces together by compromises on the program question. And they did for a time. But in the end this group, rich in energies and abilities, and containing some very talented people, was utterly destroyed in the political fight, ignominiously dissolved. Today, most of its leaders, all of them as far as I know, are on the bandwagon of the imperialist war, serving ends absolutely opposite to those which they set out to serve at the beginning of their political work. The program is decisive.

On the other hand, if the group misunderstands the tasks set for it by the conditions of the day, if it does not know how to answer the most important of all questions in politics—that is, the question of what to do next—then the group, no matter what its merits may otherwise be, can wear itself out in misdirected efforts and futile activities and come to grief.

So, as I said in my opening remarks, our fate was determined in those early days by the answer we gave to the question of the program and by the way we analyzed the tasks of the day. Our merit, as a newly created political force in the American labor movement—the merit which assured the progress, stability and further development of our group—consisted in this, that we gave correct answers to both those questions.

The conference didn’t take up every question posed by the political conditions of the time. It took up only the most important questions, that is, those which had to be answered first. And the first of these was the Russian question, the question of the revolution in existence. As I remarked in the previous lecture, ever since 1917 it has been demonstrated over and over again that the Russian question is the touchstone for every political current in the labor movement. Those who take an incorrect position on the Russian question leave the revolutionary path sooner or later.

First Trotskyist Conference

The Russian question has been elucidated innumerable times in articles, pamphlets and books. But at every important turn of events it arises again. As late as 1939 and 1940 we had to fight the Russian question over again with a petty-bourgeois current in our own movement. Those who want to study the Russian question in all its profundity, all its acuteness and all its urgency can find abundant material in the literature of the Fourth International. Therefore I do not need to elucidate it in detail tonight. I simply reduce it to its barest essentials and say that the question confronting us at our first convention was whether we should continue to support the Soviet state, the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the direction of it had fallen into the hands of a conservative, bureaucratic caste. There were people in those days, calling themselves and considering themselves revolutionary, who had broken with the Communist Party, or had been expelled from it, and who wanted to turn their backs entirely on the Soviet Union and what remained of the Russian revolution and start over, with a “clean slate” as an anti-Soviet party. We rejected that program and all those who urged it on us. We could have had many members in those days if we compromised on that issue. We took a firm stand in favor of supporting the Soviet Union; of not overturning it, but of trying to reform it through the instrumentality of the party and the Comintern.

In the course of development it was proved that all those who, whether from impatience, ignorance or subjectivity—whatever the cause might be—prematurely announced the death of the Russian revolution, were in reality announcing their own demise as revolutionists. Each and every one of these groups and tendencies degenerated, fell apart at the very base, withdrew to the side lines, and in many cases went over into the camp of the bourgeoisie. Our political health, our revolutionary vitality, were safeguarded, first of all, by the correct attitude we took toward the Soviet Union despite the crimes that had been committed, including those against us, by the individuals in control of the administration of the Soviet Union.

The trade union question had an extraordinary importance then as always. At that time it was particularly acute. The Communist International, and the Communist parties under its direction and control, after a long experiment with rightwing opportunist politics, had taken a big swing to the left, to ultra-leftism—a characteristic manifestation of the bureaucratic centrism of the faction of Stalin. Having lost the Marxist compass, they were distinguished by a tendency to jump from the extreme right to the left, and vice versa. They had gone through a long experience with right-wing politics in the Soviet Union, conciliating the kulaks and Nepmen, until the Soviet Union, and the bureaucracy with it, came to the brink of disaster. On the international arena, similar policies brought similar results. In reacting to this, and under the relentless criticisms of the Left Opposition, they introduced an ultra-leftist over-correction in all fields. On the trade union question they swung around to the position of leaving the established unions, including the American Federation of Labor, and starting a new made-to-order trade union movement under the control of the Communist Party. The insane policy of building “Red Unions” became the order of the day.

Our first National Conference took a firm stand against that policy, and declared in favor of operating within the existing labor movement, confining independent unionism to the unorganized field. We mercilessly attacked the revived sectarianism contained in this theory of a new “Communist” trade union movement created by artificial means. By that stand, by the correctness of our trade union policy, we assured that when the time arrived for us to have some access to the mass movement we would know the shortest route to it. Later events confirmed the correctness of the trade union policy adopted at our first conference and consistently maintained thereafter.

Faction or Party?

The third big important question we had to answer was whether we should create a new independent party, or still consider ourselves a faction of the existing Communist Party and the Comintern. Here again we were besieged by people who thought they were radicals: ex-members of the Communist Party who had become completely soured and wanted to throw out the baby with the dirty bath water; syndicalists and ultra-leftist elements who, in their antagonism to the Communist Party, were willing to combine with anybody ready to create a party in opposition to it. Moreover, in our own ranks there were a few people who reacted subjectively to the bureaucratic expulsions, the slander and violence and ostracism employed against us. They also wanted to renounce the Communist Party and start a new party. This approach had a superficial attraction. But we resisted, we rejected that idea. People who over-simplified the question used to say to us: “How can you be a faction of a party when you are expelled from it?”

We explained: It is a question of correctly appraising the membership of the Communist Party, and finding the right tactical approach to it. If the Communist Party and its members have degenerated beyond reclamation, and if a more progressive group of workers exists either actually, or potentially by reason of the direction in which such a group is moving and out of which we can create a new and better party-then the argument for a new party is correct. But, we said, we don’t see such a group anywhere. We don’t see any real progressiveness, any militancy, any real political intelligence in all these diverse oppositions, individuals and tendencies. They are nearly all side-line critics and sectarians. The real vanguard of the proletariat consists of those tens of thousands of workers who have been awakened by the Russian revolution. They are still loyal to the Comintern and to the Communist Party. They haven’t attentively followed the process of gradual degeneration. They haven’t unraveled the theoretical questions which are at the bottom of this degeneration. It is impossible even to get a hearing from these people unless you place yourself on the ground of the party, and strive not to destroy but to reform it, demanding readmission to the party with democratic rights.

We solved that problem correctly by declaring ourselves a faction of the party and the Comintern. We named our organization The Communist League of America (Opposition), in order to indicate that we were not a new party but simply an opposition faction to the old one. Experience has richly demonstrated the correctness of this decision. By remaining partisans of the Communist Party and the Communist International, by opposing the bureaucratic leaders at the top, but appraising correctly the rank and file as they were at that time, and seeking contact with them, we continued to gain new recruits from the ranks of the Communist workers. The overwhelming majority of our members in the first five years of our existence came from the CP. Thus we built the foundations of a regenerated Communist movement. As for the anti-Soviet and anti-party people, they never produced anything but confusion.

The Propaganda Task

Out of this decision to form, at that time, a faction and not a new party, flowed another important and troublesome question which was debated and fought out at great length in our movement for five years—from 1928 until 1933. That question was: What concrete task shall we set for this group of 100 people scattered over the broad expanse of this vast country? If we constitute ourselves as an independent party, then we must appeal directly to the working class, turn our backs on the degenerated Communist Party, and embark on a series of efforts and activities in the mass movement. On the other hand, if we are to be not an independent party but a faction, then it follows that we must direct our main efforts, appeals and activities, not to the mass of 40 million American workers, but to the vanguard of the class organized in and around the Communist Party. You can see how these two questions dovetailed. In politics—and not only in politics—once you say “A” you must say “B.” We had to either turn our face towards the Communist Party, or away from the Communist Party in the direction of the undeveloped, unorganized and uneducated masses. You cannot eat your cake and have it too.

The problem was to understand the actual situation, the stage of development at the moment. Of course, you have to find a road to the masses in order to create a party that can lead a revolution. But the road to the masses leads through the vanguard and not over its head. That was not understood by some people. They thought they could by-pass the Communistic workers, jump right into the midst of the mass movement and find there the best candidates for the most advanced, the most theoretically developed group in the world, that is, the Left Opposition which was the vanguard of the vanguard. This conception was erroneous, the product of impatience and the failure to think things out. Instead of that, we set as our main task propaganda, not agitation.

We said: Our first task is to make the principles of the Left Opposition known to the vanguard. Let us not delude ourselves with the idea we can go to the great unschooled mass now. We must first get what is obtainable from this vanguard group, consisting of some tens of thousands of Communist Party members and sympathizers, and crystalize out of them a sufficient cadre either to reform the party, or, if after a serious effort that fails in the end—and only when the failure is conclusively demonstrated—to build a new one with the forces recruited in the endeavor. Only in this way is it possible for us to reconstitute the party in the real sense of the word.

At that time there appeared on the horizon a figure who is also perhaps strange to many of you, but who in those days made an awful lot of noise. Albert Weisbord had been a member of the CP and got himself expelled along about 1929 for criticism, or for one reason or another—it was never quite clear. After his expulsion Weisbord decided to do some studying. It frequently happens, you know, that after people get a bad blow they begin to wonder about the cause of it. Weisbord soon emerged from his studies to announce himself as a Trotskyist; not 50 per cent Trotskyist as we were, but a real genuine 100 per cent Trotskyist whose mission in life was to set us straight.

A Noisy Interloper

His revelation was: The Trotskyists must not be a propaganda circle, but go directly into “mass work.” That conception had to lead him logically to the proposal of forming a new party, but he couldn’t do that very conveniently because he didn’t have any members. He had to apply the tactic of going first to the vanguard—on us. With a few of his personal friends and others he began an energetic campaign of “boring from within” and hammering from without this little group of 25 or 30 people whom we had by that time organized in New York City. While we were proclaiming the necessity of propagandizing the members and sympathizers of the Communist Party as a link to the mass movement, Weisbord, proclaiming a program of mass activity, directed 99 per cent of his mass activity not at the masses, and not even at the Communist Party, but at our little Trotskyist group. He disagreed with us on everything and denounced us as false representatives of Trotskyism. When we said, yes, he said, yes positively. When we said 75, he raised the bid. When we said, “Communist League of America,” he called his group the “Communist League of Struggle” to make it stronger. The heart and core of the fight with Weisbord was this question of the nature of our activities. He was impatient to jump into mass work over the head of the Communist Party. We rejected his program and he denounced us in one thick mimeographed bulletin after another.

Some of you may perhaps have the ambition to become historians of the movement, or at least students of the history of the movement. If so, these informal lectures of mine can serve as guide posts for a further study of the most important questions and turning points. There is no lack of literature. If you dig for it, you will find literally bales of mimeographed bulletins devoted to criticism and denunciation of our movement—and especially of me, for some reason. That sort of thing has happened so often that I long ago learned to accept it as matter of course. Whenever anybody goes crazy in our movement he begins to denounce me at the top of his voice, entirely aside from provocation of any sort on my part. So Weisbord denounced us, particularly me, but we fought it out. We stuck to our course.

There were impatient people in our ranks who thought that Weisbord’s prescription might be worth trying, a way for a poor little group to get rich quick. It is very easy for isolated people, gathered together in a small room, to talk themselves into the most radical proposals unless they retain a sense of proportion, of sanity and realism. Some of our comrades, disappointed at our slow growth, were lured by this idea that we needed only a program of mass work in order to go out and get the masses. This sentiment grew to such an extent that Weisbord created a little faction inside our organization. We were obliged to declare an open meeting for discussion. We admitted Weisbord, who wasn’t a formal member, and gave him the right to the floor. We debated the question hammer and tongs. Eventually we isolated Weisbord. He never enrolled more than 13 members in his group in New York. This little group went through a series of expulsions and splits and eventually disappeared from the scene.

We consumed an enormous amount of time and energy debating and fighting out this question. And not only with Weisbord. In those days we were continually pestered by impatient people in our ranks. The difficulties of the time pressed heavily upon us. Week after week and month after month we appeared to be gaining hardly an inch. Discouragement set in, and with it the demand for some scheme to grow faster, some magic formula. We fought it down, talked it down, and held our group on the right line, kept its face turned to the one possible source of healthy growth: the ranks of the Communist workers who still remained under the influence of the Communist Party.

“Third Period” Policies

The Stalinist “left turn” piled up new difficulties for us. This turn was in part designed by Stalin to cut the ground from under the feet of the Left Opposition; it made the Stalinists appear more radical even than the Left Opposition of Trotsky. They threw the Lovestoneites out of the party as “right wingers,” turned the party leadership over to Foster and Company and proclaimed a left policy. By this maneuver they dealt us a devastating blow. The disgruntled elements in the party, who had been inclined toward us and who had opposed the opportunism of the Lovestone group, became reconciled to the party. They used to say to us: “You see, you were wrong. Stalin is correcting everything. He is taking a radical position all along the line in Russia, America and everywhere else.” In Russia the Stalin bureaucracy declared war on the kulaks. All over the world the ground was being cut from under the feet of the Left Opposition. A whole series of capitulations took place in Russia. Radek and others gave up the fight on the excuse that Stalin had adopted the policy of the Opposition. There were, I would say, perhaps hundreds of Communist Party members, who had been leaning towards us, who gained the same impression and returned to Stalinism in the period of the ultra-left swing.

Those were the real dog days of the Left Opposition. We had gone through the first six months with rather steady progress and formed our national organization at the conference with high hopes. Then recruitment from the party membership suddenly stopped. After the expulsion of the Lovestoneites, a wave of illusion swept through the Communist Party. Reconciliation with Stalinism became the order of the day. We were stymied. And then began the big noise of the first Five Year Plan. The Communist Party members were fired with enthusiasm by the Five Year Plan which the Left Opposition had originated and demanded. The panic in the United States, the “depression,” caused a great wave of disillusionment with capitalism. The Communist Party in that situation appeared to be the most radical and revolutionary force in the country. The party began to grow and swell its ranks and to attract sympathizers in droves.

We, with our criticisms and theoretical explanations, appeared in the eyes of all as a group of impossibilists, hairsplitters, naggers. We were going around trying to make people understand that the theory of socialism in one country is fatal for a revolutionary movement in the end; that we must clear up this question of theory at all costs. Enamored with the first successes of the Five Year Plan, they used to look at us and say, “These people are crazy, they don’t live in this world.” At a time when tens and hundreds of thousands of new elements were beginning to look toward the Soviet Union going forward with the Five Year Plan, while capitalism appeared to be going up the spout; here were these Trotskyists, with their documents under their arms, demanding that you read books, study, discuss, and so on. Nobody wanted to listen to us.

In those dog days of the movement we were shut off from all contact. We had no friends, no sympathizers, no periphery around our movement. We had no chance whatever to participate in the mass movement. Whenever we tried to get into a workers organization we would be expelled as counterrevolutionary Trotskyists. We tried to send delegations to the unemployed meetings. Our credentials would be rejected on the ground that we were enemies of the working class. We were utterly isolated, forced in upon ourselves. Our recruitment dropped to almost nothing. The Communist Party and its vast periphery seemed to be hermetically sealed against us.

Then, as is always the case with new political movements, we began to recruit from sources none too healthy. If you are ever reduced again to a small handful, as well the Marxists may be in the mutations of the class struggle; if things go badly once more and you have to begin over again, then I can tell you in advance some of the headaches you are going to have. Every new movement attracts certain elements which might properly be called the lunatic fringe. Freaks always looking for the most extreme expression of radicalism, misfits, windbags, chronic oppositionists who had been thrown out of half a dozen organizations—such people began to come to us in our isolation, shouting, “Hello, Comrades.” I was always against admitting such people, but the tide was too strong. I waged a bitter fight in the New York branch of the Communist League against admitting a man to membership on the sole ground of his appearance and dress.

The Lunatic Fringe

They asked, “What have you against him?”

I said, “He wears a corduroy suit up and down Greenwich Village, with a trick mustache and long hair. There is something wrong with this guy.”

I wasn’t making a joke, either. I said, people of this type are not going to be suitable for approaching the ordinary American worker. They are going to mark our organization as something freakish, abnormal, exotic; something that has nothing to do with the normal life of the American worker. I was dead right in general, and in this mentioned case in particular. Our corduroy-suit lad, after making all kinds of trouble in the organization, eventually became an Oehlerite.

Many people came to us who had revolted against the Communist Party not for its bad sides but for its good sides; that is, the discipline of the party, the subordination of the individual to the decisions of the party in current work. A lot of dilettantish petty-bourgeois minded people who couldn’t stand any kind of discipline, who had either left the CP or been expelled from it, wanted, or rather thought they wanted to become Trotskyists. Some of them joined the New York branch and brought with them that same prejudice against discipline in our organization. Many of the newcomers made a fetish of democracy. They were repelled so much by the bureaucratism of the Communist Party that they desired an organization without any authority or discipline or centralization whatever.

All the people of this type have one common characteristic: they like to discuss things without limit or end. The New York branch of the Trotskyist movement in those days was just one continuous stew of discussion. I have never seen one of these elements who isn’t articulate. I have looked for one but I have never found him. They can all talk; and not only can, but will; and everlastingly, on every question. They were iconoclasts who would accept nothing as authoritative, nothing as decided in the history of the movement. Everything and everybody had to be proved over again from scratch.

Walled off from the vanguard represented by the Communist movement and without contact with the living mass movement of the workers, we were thrown in upon ourselves and subjected to this invasion. There was no way out of it. We had to go through that long drawn-out period of stewing and discussing. I had to listen, and that is one reason my gray hairs are so numerous. I was never a sectarian or screwball. I never had patience with people who mistake mere garrulousness for the qualities of political leadership. But one could not walk away from this sorely beset group. This little fragile nucleus of the future revolutionary party had to be held together. It had to go through this experience. It had to survive somehow. One had to be patient for the sake of the future; that is why we listened to the windbags. It was not easy. I have thought many times that, if despite my unbelief, there is anything in what they say about the hereafter, I am going to be well rewarded—not for what I have done, but for what I have had to listen to.

Hard Times

That was the hardest time. And then, naturally, the movement slid into its inevitable period of internal difficulties, frictions and conflicts. We had fierce quarrels and squabbles, very often over little things. There were reasons for it. No small isolated movement has ever been able to escape it. A small isolated group thrown in upon itself, with the weight of the whole world pressing down upon it, having no contact with the workers mass movement and getting no sobering corrective from it, is bound in the best case to have a hard time. Our difficulties were increased by the fact that many recruits were not first class material. Many of the people who joined the New York branch weren’t really there by justice. They weren’t the type who, in the long run, could build a revolutionary movement—dilettantes, petty-bourgeois undisciplined elements.

And then, the everlasting poverty of the movement. We were trying to publish a newspaper, we were trying to publish a whole list of pamphlets, without the necessary resources. Every penny we obtained was immediately devoured by the expenses of the newspaper. We didn’t have a nickel to turn around with. Those were the days of real pressure, the hard days of isolation, of poverty, of disheartening internal difficulties. This lasted not for weeks or months, but for years. And under those harsh conditions, which persisted for years, everything weak in any individual was squeezed to the surface; everything petty, selfish and disloyal. I had been acquainted with some of the individuals before in the days when the weather was fairer. Now I came to know them in their blood and bones. And then in those terrible days, I learned also to know Ben Webster and the men of Minneapolis. They always supported me, they never failed me, they held up my hands.

The greatest movement, with its magnificent program of the liberation of all humanity, with the most grandiose historic perspectives, was inundated in those days by a sea of petty troubles, jealousies, clique formations and internal fights. Worst of all, these faction fights weren’t fully comprehensible to the membership because the great political issues which were implicit in them had not yet broken through. However, they were not mere personal quarrels, as they so often appeared to be, but, as is now quite clear to all, the premature rehearsal of the great, definitive struggle of 1939-40 between the proletarian and petty-bourgeois tendencies within our movement.

Those were the hardest days of all in the thirty years that I have been active in the movement—those days from the conference of 1929 in Chicago until 1933, the years of the terrible hermetically sealed isolation, with all the attendant difficulties. Isolation is the natural habitat of the sectarian, but for one who has an instinct for the mass movement it is the most cruel punishment.

The Old Print Shop

Those were the hard days, but in spite of everything we carried out our propaganda tasks, and on the whole we did it very well. At the conference in Chicago we had decided that at all costs we were going to publish the whole message of the Russian Opposition. All the accumulated documents, which had been suppressed, and the current writings of Trotsky were then available to us. We decided that the most revolutionary thing we could do was not to go out to proclaim the revolution in Union Square, not try to put ourselves at the head of tens of thousands of workers who did not yet know us, not to jump over our own heads.

Our task, our revolutionary duty, was to print the word, to carry on propaganda in the narrowest and most concentrated sense, that is, the publication and distribution of theoretical literature. To that end we drained our members for money to buy a second-hand linotype machine and set up our own print shop. Of all the business enterprises that have been contrived in the history of capitalism, I think this was the best, considering the means available. If we weren’t interested in the revolution, I think that we could easily qualify, just on the basis of this enterprise, as very good business experts. We certainly did a lot of corner cutting to keep that business going. We assigned a young comrade, who had just finished linotype school, to operate the machine. He wasn’t a first-class mechanic then; now he is not only a good mechanic but also a party leader and a lecturer on the staff of the New York School of Social Science. In those days the whole weight of the propaganda of the party rested on this single comrade who ran the linotype machine. There was a story about him—I don’t know whether it is true or not—that he didn’t know much about the machine. It was an old broken-down, second-hand job that had been palmed off on us. Every once in a while it would stop working, like a tired mule. Charlie would adjust a few gadgets and, if that didn’t help, take a hammer and give the linotype a crack or two and knock some sense into it. Then it would begin to work properly again and another issue of The Militant would come out.

Later on, we had amateur printers. About half of the New York branch used to work in the print shop at one time or another—painters, bricklayers, garment workers, bookkeepers—all of them served a term as amateur typesetters. With a very inefficient and over-staffed shop we ground out certain results through unpaid labor. That was the whole secret of the Trotskyist printing plant. It wasn’t efficient from any other standpoint, but it was kept going by the secret that all slave masters since Pharaoh have known: If you have slaves you don’t need much money. We didn’t have slaves but we did have ardent and devoted comrades who worked night and day for next to nothing on the mechanical as well as the editorial side of the paper. We were short of funds. All bills were always overdue, with the creditors pressing for immediate payment. No sooner would the paper bill be met than we had to pay rent on the building under threat of eviction. The gas bill then had to be paid in a hurry because without the gas the linotype wouldn’t work. The electric bill had to be paid because the shop could not operate without power and light. All the bills had to be paid whether we had the money or not. The most we could ever hope to do was to cover the rent, the paper cost, installment payments and repairs on the linotype and the gas and light bills. There was seldom anything left over for the “hired help”—not only for the comrades who worked in the shop, but also those in the office, the leaders of our movement.

Great sacrifices were made by the rank and file of our comrades all the time, but they were never greater than the sacrifices made by the leaders. That is why the leaders of the movement always had strong moral authority. The leaders of our party were always in a position to demand sacrifices of the rank and file—because they set the example and everybody knew it.

Somehow or other the paper came out. Pamphlets were printed one after another. Different groups of comrades would each sponsor a new pamphlet by Trotsky, putting up the money to pay for the paper. In that antiquated print shop of ours a whole book was printed on the problems of the Chinese revolution. Every comrade who wants to know the problems of the Orient has to read the book which was published under those adverse conditions—at 84 East 10 Street, New York City.

And in spite of everything—I have cited many of the negative sides and difficulties—in spite of everything, we gained a few inches. We instructed the movement in the great principles of Bolshevism on a plane never known in this country before. We educated a cadre that is destined to play a great role in the American labor movement. We sifted out some of the misfits and recruited some good people one by one; we gained a member here and there; we began to establish new contacts.

We tried to hold public meetings. It was very difficult because in those days nobody wanted to listen to us. I remember the grand efforts we made one time to mobilize the whole organization to distribute leaflets, to have a mass meeting in this very room. We got 59 people, including our own members, and the whole organization was uplifted with enthusiasm. We went around saying to each other: “We had 59 people present at the lecture the other night. We are beginning to grow.”

We received help from outside New York. From Minneapolis, for example. Our comrades who later gained great fame as labor leaders weren’t always famous labor leaders. In those days they were coal heavers, working ten and twelve hours a day in the coal yards, heaving coal, the hardest kind of physical labor. Out of their wages they used to dig up as high as five or ten dollars a week and shoot it in to New York to make sure The Militant came out. Many times we had no money for the paper. We would send a wire to Minneapolis and get back a telegraphic money order for $25 or something like that. Comrades in Chicago and other places did the same things. It was by a combination of all these efforts and all those sacrifices throughout the country that we survived and kept the paper going.

There was an occasional windfall. Once or twice a sympathizer would give us $25. Those were real holidays in our office. We had a “revolving rent fund” which was the last resource of our desperate financial finagling. A comrade with rent to pay, say $30 or $40 due on the fifteenth of the month, would lend it to us on the tenth to pay some pressing bill or other. Then in five days we would get another comrade to lend his rent money to enable us to pay the other comrade back in time to satisfy his landlord. The second comrade would then stall off his landlord while we swung another deal, borrowed somebody else’s rent to repay him. That went on all the time. It gave us some floating capital to cut the corner.

Those were cruel and heavy times. We survived them because we had faith in our program and because we had the help of Comrade Trotsky. Comrade Trotsky began his great work in exile for the third time. His writings and his correspondence inspired us and opened up for us a window on a whole new world of theory and political understanding. This gave us the strength to persevere and to survive, to hold the organization together and to be ready when our opportunity came.

In my next lecture I will show you that we were ready when the opportunity did come. When the first crack in this wall of isolation and stagnation appeared, we were able to leap through it, out of our sectarian circle. We began to play a role in the political and labor movement. The condition for that was to keep our program clear and our courage strong in those days when capitulations were taking place in Russia and discouragement was overcoming the workers everywhere. One defeat after another descended upon the heads of the vanguard of the vanguard. Many began to question. What to do? Is it possible to do anything? Isn’t it better to let things slide a little? Trotsky wrote an article, “Tenacity! Tenacity! Tenacity!” That was his answer to the wave of discouragement that followed the capitulation of Radek and others. Hold on and fight it out that is what the revolutionists must learn, no matter how small their numbers, no matter how isolated they may be. Hold on and fight it out until the break comes, then take advantage of every opportunity. We held out until 1933, and then we began to see daylight. Then the Trotskyists started to get on the political map of this country. In the next lecture I shall tell you about that.

Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment

Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200^th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment 

A link to a 200^th anniversary discussion of Mary Shelley and her “baby” Frankenstein on NPR’s On Point. 

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/02/12/working-in-the-lab-late-one-night

By Lenny Lynch

We all know in the year 2018 that it is impossible to create a human being, maybe any being, out of spare stitched up human parts, and a few jolts of electricity. At least I hope everybody short of say Hannibal Lecter, Lucy Lane or some such holy goof who thought he or she could “do God’s handiwork” on the cheap, out of some “how to manual” knows the ropes enough to have figured that out. You have to go big time MIT scientist and MGH doctor routes running through DNA, RNA, genetic matching and such to do what back in the day only a scary primitive amateur guy working in some foreboding isolated mountain retreat would even dare to contemplate. Back in that 1818 day when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred breeding via Earth Mother feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and French Revolution-saturated  anarcho- philosopher William Godwin and later channeling Romantic era poet husband Percy Shelley who hung around with ill-fated heroic Lord Byron and that crowd ) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein former idea, the stitch and sew part, seemed pretty far out on the surface and would go on to sell scads of books to titillate and disturb the sleep of fevered.  

I like the Modern Prometheus part of her title better since like I said science was pretty primitive on that count, not much better that the Greeks creation from earth’s laden clay process, about the way our brother was put together in a slapdash manner but provided an impetus to further discovery. Today where through genetic engineering we have a better understanding of science and medicine who knows what the possibilities are for good or evil. Although at times we need to treat science, maybe medicine too, like a thing from which we have to run. (Example, a very current example, running the rack on discovering everything there is to know about the atom and then have such a discovery threatening a hostage world with nuclear weapons once the night-takers latched on to the military possibilities. At that point running away from the results of the creation like cowardly Victor Frankenstein doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing.)      

Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy thoughts about human beings, about sentient and sapient beings, about where women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button create life without human intervention which has already accrued to us today in marginal cases and probably would have shocked her 19^th sensibilities. A better result if humankind can make itself out of odd spare parts, a little DNA splicing here and there, that also puts a big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks once he or she becomes a sullen bystander to human endeavor. Not a bad thing not a bad thing at all. But the most beautiful part of her story is the possibility, once again, that we may get back to the Garden to retrofit that Paradise Lost that the blind revolutionary 17^th poet John Milton lost his eyesight over trying to in verse form how we lost our human grace. Yeah, tell us that we might be able to get back to the Garden. Nice choice Ms. Shelley. 

We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern Prometheus, has gotten a bad rap. Prometheus remember him from subtle Greek mythology and how he was able to create his brethren out of clay. Nice trick. Better, the brother did not leave humankind hanging by offering the gift of fire to move human progress at a faster clip. To keep the race from cold and hunger. Took a beating from psychopath Zeus for his lese majeste by having to roll that rock for eternity. Mister Frankenstein really has been misunderstood especially since the rise of the cinema starting from that first libelous presentation in 1931 which turned him from that misunderstood and challenged youth who was orphaned by a unfit “father” into a scary monster who made kids afraid on nighttime shadows on bedroom walls. There are a million ways that piece of bad celluloid got it wrong but if you will he remember actually learned English, despite being “born” out in the wilds of 19^th century Germany, so movie audiences could understand what he was saying. Does that sound like a monster to you? I thought not.

The bad ass in the whole caper is this dolt Victor Frankenstein, the human so-called scientist who built a thing from which he had to run like some silly schoolgirl. If the guy had the sense that God, yes God, gave geese he would not have abandoned his brethren, his avenging angel. Wouldn’t have started a string of murders for which he not his so-called “monster” was morally responsible for. Instead the dink just let the bodies stack up like a cord of wood as he let his “creation” get out of control.

On this site my fellow writer Danny Moriarty has recently taken it upon himself to smash what he has called the unearned reputation of one Lanny Lamont, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes the so-called deductive logic detective who also let innocent bodies pile up before he got a bright thought in his dope-addled head about how to stop the carnage. That Danny’s take, Danny not his real name by the way but an alias he had been forced to use to protect himself and his family who have been threatened by a bunch of hooligans who are cultist devotees and aficionados of this Lanny Lamont known as the Baker Street Irregulars.

I don’t know enough about the merits of Danny’s crusade to decide whether he too is also an avenging angel, a blessed brethren in the fight for human progress against the night-takers, against the “alternate fact” crowd. But I do know that the idea behind what he is trying to do is solid. In his case the bare knuckle blowing up of an undeserved legend. This bicentennial year of the existence our beautiful Mister Frankenstein, the Old Testament avenging angel, I am proud to defend his honor against all the abuse he has taken for far too long. That may be a tough road but so be it.         

Mary Shelley started something for us to think about on letting things get out of hand though and now we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle. 

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- The Czar Of All The Russias- No Rehab From The International Working Class

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of Trotsky's "History Of The Russian Revolution". Anyone who wants to rehabilitate old Czar Nicolas read Chapter Four, The Tzar and Tzarina" first.

Commentary

On October 2, 2008 the Russian Supreme Court did a legal "rehab" job on the last Czar of all the Russias, Nicolas II, absolving him and the "little family" of any crimes during his reign. Hears me out on this though-, one can do all the "rehab" jobs in the world concerning the crimes of the last Czar but we remember events a little differently including the events of Bloody Sunday massacre of peacefully protesting workers and their families in January 1905 that started the 1905 revolution, the massacre of the Lena Gold Mine workers in 1912 for demanding better working conditions and the destruction of Russia's youth in the massacre of World War I. Leon Trotsky mentioned in his monumental three volume History Of The Russian Revolution, in another context (the struggle against the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviets), that some forces have to face the dustbin of history. That is the Czar's fate as it was for Charles I in the English Revolution and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. No court can change that fate. Below, for a different point of view but one that reflects the position of our class opponents and their continuing fear of the events of 1917 is a Boston Globe editorial.


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The Czar of All The Dissidents? The Boston Globe, October 6, 2008

ANYONE who rejects linear theories of history in favor of cycles had to feel vindicated last week after Russia's Supreme Court rehabilitated Czar Nicholas II and his family, declaring that they were victims of "groundless" political repression when they were murdered, at Lenin's behest, in 1918.

During the Soviet interregnum, schoolchildren were taught that the last czar of all the Russias was a criminal culpable for all of Russia's ills and injustices. The notion that he and the other Romanovs executed along with him could one day be officially deemed victims of the Bolshevik terror - well, for 90 years the kindest thing to be said about such a notion was that it was delusional.

At present, however, all the old villains and bugaboos of the Bolsheviks' political mythology are being celebrated as eternal verities of Mother Russia. Pure, undiluted patriotism is back. The Russian Orthodox Church is respected once again; political leaders pay tribute to the institution and its clerics. And czarist imperial history is held up not as a folly of the past, but as an inspiration for the future. Witness Russia's recent military excursion into Georgia and the Kremlin's warnings about Ukraine.

The most astonishing aspect of the Romanovs' rehabilitation is the implicit logic of the court's ruling. If the last czar was an innocent victim of an act of political repression, then Lenin - that ultimate hero of the Soviet Union - was nothing but a murderous thug. Yet Lenin still reposes in his mausoleum in Red Square.

The day he is banished from that sainted spot will be the day that history has come full circle.