Click on the healdine to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Paris Commune.
March 18, 2012 marked the 141st Anniversary of the establishment of the heroic Paris Commune. As militants honor the Communards we should also draw the lessons of the Commune for today’s struggles. Below is a commentary on some of those lessons. There are others.
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one can learn something new even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. Nevertheless, one can still learn lessons from those experiences and measure the mistakes of the Communards against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we also have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions in the post-World War II period.
Notwithstanding the mistake made by the Communards and the contradictory nature of the later revolutions cited above, and as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses, militants today proudly honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the socialist revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe and faint-hearted elements in the European labor movement. As he noted, the Commune truly was the first workers government. Thus, it is one of the revolutionary peaks or the international labor movement.
Many working class tendencies, Anarchist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Left Social Democratic, Communist and Left Communist justifiably pay homage to the defenders of the Paris Commune and claim its traditions. Why does an organization of short duration and subject to savage reprisals still command our attention? The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite for action, their capacity to sacrifice themselves in the name of a future, more just, organization of society. Every working class tendency can honor those qualities, even those parliamentary-based organizations which are far removed from any active need to do more than pay homage to the memory of the fallen Communards.
Nevertheless, to truly honor the Communards it is necessary to understand that along with its positive qualities at the same time the Commune shows us the many times frustrating incapacity of the masses to act in their objective interests, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their almost always fatal desire to halt after the first successes. Obviously, only a revolutionary party sure of itself and of its program can provide that kind of leadership in order fight against these negative trends. At that stage in the development of the European working class where political class consciousness was limited to the vanguard, capitalism was still capable of progressive expansion and other urban classes were at least verbally espousing socialist solutions it may have been improbable that such a mass organization could have been formed. Nevertheless such an organization was objectively necessary to seize and, more importantly, to hold power.
The Commune thus, in embryo, presents the first post-1848 Revolution instance of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. That is, the necessity of a revolutionary party to order to lead the working class to victory. Placing the problems facing the Commune in this context made me realize that this crisis of revolutionary leadership really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. I had formerly placed its start at the collapse of the Socialist International at the beginning of World War I when most European socialist parties took a defensist position toward their own governments by voting for war credits. Unfortunately, this leadership question is still to be resolved.
It is a truism in politics, including revolutionary politics, that timing is important and many times decisive. As many commentators have noted, seizure of power by the Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4, 1870 rather than March 18, 1871 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at the head of the workers of the whole country in their struggle. At the very least it would have allowed time for the workers of other cities and the peasantry in the smaller towns and villages to organize their forces for action in defense of Paris and to create their own communes. Unfortunately the Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders forged by previous struggles who could or would reach out to the rest of France.
Furthermore, a revolutionary workers' party, while entirely capable of using parliamentary methods is not, and should not, be a machine for parliamentary wrangling. In a revolution to rely solely on such activity amounts to parliamentary cretinism. One can think of the role of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in the Provisional Government and the Soviets after the February Revolution in Russia in 1917. In Paris the Central Committee of the National Guard, the embodiment of organizational power and in effect the prototype for a Workers’ Council or Soviet, had more than its share of such wrangling and confusionist politics. The most militant elements within it needed to form a revolutionary party to break this impasse.
In contrast, a revolutionary party is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the road forward, all its stages, and knows how to act in the situation, that the proletariat avoids making the same historical mistakes, overcomes its hesitations, and acts decisively to seize power. Unfortunately, history shows no other way to defeat the class enemy. Needless to say those same qualities are necessary to retain power against the inevitable counter-revolutionary onslaught. The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Like other revolutionary opportunities six months delay proved fatal. Capitalist society cruelly exacted its revenge. That is the great lesson of the Commune.
Contingent history is always problematic. Nevertheless in the interest of fully drawing the lessons of the Commune let me highlight some actions which were entirely possible at the time but were not carried out. Later revolutionaries, particularly the Bolsheviks, did incorporate these lessons into their strategies. Again this presupposes the existence of a revolutionary party capable of learning these lessons.
First, let us note that if the working class had political power on March 18, 1871 it was not because it had been deliberately seized, but because its enemies had left Paris. This is very different political and psychological position from a position of the earlier French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the later Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The proletariat took power by default due to the bankruptcy of the then current bourgeois leadership headed by Thiers and a lack of confidence of the masses in it. Thus, this turn of events required an offensive strategy as an elementary act of self-defense. This did not happen.
Was such a strategy possible? The government fled Paris in order to concentrate its forces elsewhere. Unfortunately, it was allowed to do so with impunity. Furthermore, as can be noted in other revolutions this first success of the revolutionary forces was a new source of passivity. The enemy had fled to Versailles. At that moment the government apparatus could have been crushed almost without the spilling of blood. In Paris, all the ministers could have been taken prisoner. If necessary, and as later events showed it proved necessary, they could have been used as hostages against future reprisals. Nobody would have defended them. It was however not done.
The Commune also had the complete possibility of winning even the peasant regiments, for the latter had lost all confidence and all respect for the power and the command. Yet it undertook nothing towards this end. The fault here is not in the relationships of the peasant and the working classes, but in the revolutionary strategy. The Bolsheviks went out of their way to court the demoralized peasant regiments stationed in Petrograd and elsewhere. The key to win those elements then was the land question and an end to the war. While the animating issues might be posed differently the Commune had those same possibilities to win the declassed peasant elements.
Moreover, after the defeats at the hands of the Germans the thread which tied the officers and the demoralized soldiers was pretty thin. The fleeing soldiers were hostile to the officers and thus the army was not reliable. Had there been a revolutionary party in Paris, it would have incorporated into the retreating armies some agitators. The party would have instructed those agitators to increase the discontent of the soldiers against the officers in order to free the soldiers from their officers and bring them back to Paris to unite with the people. This could easily have been realized, according to the admissions of Thiers' supporters themselves.
Nobody in the Central Committee of the National Guard even thought of it.
The Central Committee of the National Guard drew its authority from democratic elections. At the moment when the Central Committee needed to develop to the maximum its initiative in the offensive, deprived of the leadership of a proletarian party, it lost its head, hastened to transmit its powers to the representatives of the Commune which required a broader democratic basis. And, as Marx noted, it was a great mistake in that period to play with elections. But once the elections had been held and the Commune brought together, it was necessary to concentrate everything in the Commune at a single blow and to have it create an organ possessing real power to reorganize the National Guard. This was not the case. By the side of the elected Commune there remained the Central Committee; the elected character of the latter gave it a political authority thanks to which it was able to compete with the Commune. But at the same time that deprived it of the energy and the firmness necessary in the purely military questions which, after the organization of the Commune, justified its existence.
Without question the Central Committee of the National Guard needed to be led. It was indispensable to have an organization incarnating the political experience of the proletariat from previous battles and always present-not only in the Central Committee, but in the working class districts of Paris. By means of a Council of Deputies or other such broad-based formation-here they naturally centered on the organs of the National Guard-the party could have been in continual contact with the masses, known their state of mind; its leading center, most probably a central committee, could each day put forward a slogan which, through the medium of the party's militants, would have penetrated into the masses, uniting their thought and their will. If an offensive was to have a chance of success it needed such guidance.
Moreover, the real revolutionary task consisted of assuring the proletariat the power all over the country. Paris as a capital city naturally had to serve as its base. To attain this goal, it was necessary to defeat Versailles without the loss of time and to send agitators, organizers, and armed forces throughout France. It was necessary to enter into contact with sympathizers, to strengthen the hesitators and to shatter the opposition of the adversary. Instead of this offensive policy which was the only thing that could save the situation, the leaders of Paris attempted to seclude themselves in an individual commune. Their fatal policy amounted to not attacking others if the others do not attack them. The Communards stubbed their toes on this outdated premise.
Naturally, nobody can reasonably argue that a revolutionary party can create the revolution at will. It does not choose the moment for seizing power as it likes, but it intervenes actively in the events, penetrates at every moment the state of mind of the revolutionary masses and evaluates the power of resistance of the enemy, and thus determines the most favorable moment for decisive action. This is the ABC’s of revolutionary strategy. This is the most difficult side of its task. The more deeply a revolutionary party penetrates into all aspects of the proletarian struggle, the more unified it is by the unity of goal and discipline, the speedier and better will it arrive at resolving its task. To state the necessity of such conditions answers the question regarding the ultimate bloody fate of the Commune.
The comparison of March 18, 1871 in Paris with November 7, 1917 in Petrograd is very instructive from this point of view. In Paris, there is an absolute lack of initiative for action on the part of the leading revolutionary circles. The proletariat, armed earlier by the bourgeois government, is in reality the sole power in Paris, has all the material means of power-cannon and rifles-at its disposal, but it is not aware of it. This is the classic ‘dual power’ situation. The bourgeoisie makes an attempt to retake the weapons. The attempt fails. The government flees in panic from Paris to Versailles. The field is clear. The "leaders" are, however, in the wake of events, they record them when the latter are already accomplished, and they do everything in their power to blunt the revolutionary edge.
In contrast, in the lead up to the Russian October Revolution after the attempted counter-revolution of General Kornilov on Petrograd in August a purely military organ, the Revolutionary War Committee was created standing at the head of the Petrograd garrison. Commissioned by the Soviet it is in reality a legal organ of armed insurrection. At the same time commissars were designated in all the military units, in the military schools, arsenals, etc. The clandestine military organization accomplished specific technical tasks and furnished the Revolutionary War Committee with fully trustworthy militants for important military tasks. The essential work concerning the preparation and the realization and the armed insurrection took place openly under the cover of defense. Again, the Communards had those same possibilities, perhaps more so, as the internal enemy was rather less significant than in Petrograd. Learn these lessons. LONG LIVE THE MEMORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE!!
Friday, June 08, 2012
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- On The Paris Commune Of 1871 FromThe Pen Of Leon Trotsky
Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky Internet Archives online copy of his work on the Paris Commune
THe Paris Commune, Leon Trotsky
The substance of this review was originally used to comment on Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he emphasized the lack of revolutionary leadership as one of the decisive factors in the defeat of the Commune. All revolutionary Marxists, following Marx’s lead, have studied the lessons of the Commune from various angles and have essentially drawn the same lessons as he did. Therefore the essential points are covered by Trotsky.
Additionally, here you get the Marx’s masterful contemporary analysis of the events and his adamant defense of the Communards before the international working class. I might add one note which Lenin and others incorporated into their strategies. One of the few, if only substantial revisions that Marx made in his seminal document the Communist Manifesto was to revamp his understanding of the state after the takeover by the working class. In 1848 he assumed that the working class would take over the capitalist state as is. Reflecting on the Paris Commune experience he dramatically changed that factor and held that the working class would have to smash the old state machinery and develop its own institutions. This is in line with previous revolutionary history, especially the experience of the French Revolution.
All militants pay homage to the memory of the Commune. For a historical narrative of the events surrounding the rise and fall of the Commune look elsewhere. However, if you want to draw the lessons of the Commune this book offers a superior strategic study. Not surprisingly Trotsky, the organizer of the Russian October Revolution in 1917 and creator of the Red Army, uses the strength and weaknesses of the Commune against the experiences of the October Revolution to educate the militants of his day. Today some of those lessons are still valid for the international labor movement in the seemingly one-sided class struggle being waged against it.
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. Nevertheless, one can still learn lessons and measure them against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we also have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. Trotsky’s analysis follows this path.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of later experiences cited above, and as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses, Trotsky honored the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world socialist revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe and the faint-hearted elements in the European labor movement. It is truly one of the revolutionary peaks.
The Commune nevertheless also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was to be later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. Moreover, after Lenin’s death this question preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life. Trotsky’s placing the problems facing the Commune in this context made me realize that this crisis really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, that question is still to be resolved.
Many working class tendencies, Anarchist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Left Social Democratic and Communist justifiably pay homage to the defenders of the Paris Commune and claim its traditions. Why does an organization of short duration and subject to savage reprisals still command our attention? The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite for action, their capacity to sacrifice themselves in the name of a future, more just, organization of society. Every working class tendency can honor those qualities, particularly when far removed from any active need to do more than pay homage to the memory of the fallen Communards.
Nevertheless, as Trotsky notes, to truly honor the Communards it is necessary to understand that at the same time the Commune shows us the many times frustrating incapacity of the masses to act in their objective interests, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their almost always fatal desire to halt after the first successes. Obviously, only a revolutionary party can provide that kind of leadership in order fight against these negative traits. At that stage in the development of the European working class where political class consciousness was limited to the vanguard, capitalism was still capable of progressive expansion and other urban classes were at least verbally espousing socialist solutions it is improbable that such an organization could have been formed. Nevertheless such an organization was objectively necessary.
It is a truism in politics, including revolutionary politics, that timing is important and many times decisive. As Trotsky noted seizure of power by the Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4, 1870 rather than March 18, 1871 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at the head of the workers of the whole country in their struggle. At the very least, it would have allowed time for the workers of other cities and the peasantry in the smaller towns and villages to galvanize their forces for action in defense of Paris and to create their own communes. Unfortunately the Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders forged by previous struggles that could or would reach out to the rest of France.
Moreover, a revolutionary workers' party, while entirely capable of using parliamentary methods is not, and should not, be a machine for parliamentary wrangling. In a revolution such activity at times amounts to parliamentary cretinism. The Central Committee of the National Guard, the embodiment of organizational power, had more than its share of such wrangling and confusionist politics. In contrast, a revolutionary party is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the road forward, all its stages, and knows how to act in the situation, that the proletariat avoids making the same historical mistakes, overcomes its hesitations, and acts decisively to seize power. Needless to say those same qualities are necessary to retain power against the inevitable counter-revolutionary onslaught. The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Like other revolutionary opportunities six months delay proved fatal. Capitalism cruelly exacted its revenge. That is a great lesson of the Commune, for others read this book.
THe Paris Commune, Leon Trotsky
The substance of this review was originally used to comment on Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he emphasized the lack of revolutionary leadership as one of the decisive factors in the defeat of the Commune. All revolutionary Marxists, following Marx’s lead, have studied the lessons of the Commune from various angles and have essentially drawn the same lessons as he did. Therefore the essential points are covered by Trotsky.
Additionally, here you get the Marx’s masterful contemporary analysis of the events and his adamant defense of the Communards before the international working class. I might add one note which Lenin and others incorporated into their strategies. One of the few, if only substantial revisions that Marx made in his seminal document the Communist Manifesto was to revamp his understanding of the state after the takeover by the working class. In 1848 he assumed that the working class would take over the capitalist state as is. Reflecting on the Paris Commune experience he dramatically changed that factor and held that the working class would have to smash the old state machinery and develop its own institutions. This is in line with previous revolutionary history, especially the experience of the French Revolution.
All militants pay homage to the memory of the Commune. For a historical narrative of the events surrounding the rise and fall of the Commune look elsewhere. However, if you want to draw the lessons of the Commune this book offers a superior strategic study. Not surprisingly Trotsky, the organizer of the Russian October Revolution in 1917 and creator of the Red Army, uses the strength and weaknesses of the Commune against the experiences of the October Revolution to educate the militants of his day. Today some of those lessons are still valid for the international labor movement in the seemingly one-sided class struggle being waged against it.
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. Nevertheless, one can still learn lessons and measure them against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we also have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. Trotsky’s analysis follows this path.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of later experiences cited above, and as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses, Trotsky honored the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world socialist revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe and the faint-hearted elements in the European labor movement. It is truly one of the revolutionary peaks.
The Commune nevertheless also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was to be later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. Moreover, after Lenin’s death this question preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life. Trotsky’s placing the problems facing the Commune in this context made me realize that this crisis really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, that question is still to be resolved.
Many working class tendencies, Anarchist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Left Social Democratic and Communist justifiably pay homage to the defenders of the Paris Commune and claim its traditions. Why does an organization of short duration and subject to savage reprisals still command our attention? The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite for action, their capacity to sacrifice themselves in the name of a future, more just, organization of society. Every working class tendency can honor those qualities, particularly when far removed from any active need to do more than pay homage to the memory of the fallen Communards.
Nevertheless, as Trotsky notes, to truly honor the Communards it is necessary to understand that at the same time the Commune shows us the many times frustrating incapacity of the masses to act in their objective interests, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their almost always fatal desire to halt after the first successes. Obviously, only a revolutionary party can provide that kind of leadership in order fight against these negative traits. At that stage in the development of the European working class where political class consciousness was limited to the vanguard, capitalism was still capable of progressive expansion and other urban classes were at least verbally espousing socialist solutions it is improbable that such an organization could have been formed. Nevertheless such an organization was objectively necessary.
It is a truism in politics, including revolutionary politics, that timing is important and many times decisive. As Trotsky noted seizure of power by the Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4, 1870 rather than March 18, 1871 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at the head of the workers of the whole country in their struggle. At the very least, it would have allowed time for the workers of other cities and the peasantry in the smaller towns and villages to galvanize their forces for action in defense of Paris and to create their own communes. Unfortunately the Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders forged by previous struggles that could or would reach out to the rest of France.
Moreover, a revolutionary workers' party, while entirely capable of using parliamentary methods is not, and should not, be a machine for parliamentary wrangling. In a revolution such activity at times amounts to parliamentary cretinism. The Central Committee of the National Guard, the embodiment of organizational power, had more than its share of such wrangling and confusionist politics. In contrast, a revolutionary party is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the road forward, all its stages, and knows how to act in the situation, that the proletariat avoids making the same historical mistakes, overcomes its hesitations, and acts decisively to seize power. Needless to say those same qualities are necessary to retain power against the inevitable counter-revolutionary onslaught. The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Like other revolutionary opportunities six months delay proved fatal. Capitalism cruelly exacted its revenge. That is a great lesson of the Commune, for others read this book.
***The Queen Of Parlor Detection- Agatha Christie’s “Then There Were None”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Then There Were None.
DVD Review
Then There Were None, starring Barry Fitzgerald, directed by Rene Clair, 1945
No question that I like my detective stories to feature hard-boiled, world- wary, world-weary tough guy detectives ready to take a slug or two for some windmill cause, or, better, for some wayward dame, for some two-timing femme fatale who gets her comeuppance (or not) as he keeps that shoulder to the wheel seeking to eke some rough justice out of this wicked old world. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe come easily, and readily, to mind. As do such films as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man.
Of course before Hammett and Chandler toughened up the crime-fighting world with their hard-edged windmill seekers of rough justice such heavy lifting was done in parlors, and drawing rooms. Figured out by gallants, professional or not. And the queen of parlor detection was Agatha Christie who spent a life’s career creating such works, such works as the film adaptation of her work under review, Then There Were None.” (And a later film version under the title Ten Little Indians)
Now Ms. Christie never recoiled from piling the corpses high (although usually not in the parlor, or drawing room) and she does not fail us here. Here ten people of various class backgrounds and professions are invited to a seaside English manor house (of course, Ms. Christie was, ah, English and manor houses have lots of rooms to stuff corpses and big parlors too) by a Mr. Owen for some nefarious purpose. What joins the ten together is that all bear various amounts of responsibility for the deaths (murders?) of one or more persons. And while the law was not able to bring them to even rough justice it is soon apparent, as the bodies pile up, that Mr. Owen is seeking to be his own avenger. Except of course one cannot go around committing mass murder by the numbers (literally with a ten, nine..., countdown right on the dinner room table to keep a scorecard tabulation) especially since the villain of the piece (one of the ten) perhaps did not peruse the records as carefully as he/she should have and not everybody is guilty of murder, or anything.
Maybe there are fewer corpses (although sometimes not by much) but give me that windmill-tilting, take a punch for the good of the cause, hard-boiled detective, especially those twisting in the wind over some two-timing frail every time. Agatha, your time has passed.
DVD Review
Then There Were None, starring Barry Fitzgerald, directed by Rene Clair, 1945
No question that I like my detective stories to feature hard-boiled, world- wary, world-weary tough guy detectives ready to take a slug or two for some windmill cause, or, better, for some wayward dame, for some two-timing femme fatale who gets her comeuppance (or not) as he keeps that shoulder to the wheel seeking to eke some rough justice out of this wicked old world. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe come easily, and readily, to mind. As do such films as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man.
Of course before Hammett and Chandler toughened up the crime-fighting world with their hard-edged windmill seekers of rough justice such heavy lifting was done in parlors, and drawing rooms. Figured out by gallants, professional or not. And the queen of parlor detection was Agatha Christie who spent a life’s career creating such works, such works as the film adaptation of her work under review, Then There Were None.” (And a later film version under the title Ten Little Indians)
Now Ms. Christie never recoiled from piling the corpses high (although usually not in the parlor, or drawing room) and she does not fail us here. Here ten people of various class backgrounds and professions are invited to a seaside English manor house (of course, Ms. Christie was, ah, English and manor houses have lots of rooms to stuff corpses and big parlors too) by a Mr. Owen for some nefarious purpose. What joins the ten together is that all bear various amounts of responsibility for the deaths (murders?) of one or more persons. And while the law was not able to bring them to even rough justice it is soon apparent, as the bodies pile up, that Mr. Owen is seeking to be his own avenger. Except of course one cannot go around committing mass murder by the numbers (literally with a ten, nine..., countdown right on the dinner room table to keep a scorecard tabulation) especially since the villain of the piece (one of the ten) perhaps did not peruse the records as carefully as he/she should have and not everybody is guilty of murder, or anything.
Maybe there are fewer corpses (although sometimes not by much) but give me that windmill-tilting, take a punch for the good of the cause, hard-boiled detective, especially those twisting in the wind over some two-timing frail every time. Agatha, your time has passed.
The Night Of The Living Dead- “Edmond O’Brian’s Crime Noir –D.O.A.
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry from the crime noir classic D.O.A.
DVD Review
D.O.A., starring Edmund O’Brian, directed by Rudolph Mate, Cardinal Pictures, 1950
Hey, over the couple of years that I have been periodically reviewing crime noirs I’ve seen it all. Bad gees getting away with murder, almost. Good gees getting the wrong end of the deal and just barely getting a little justice in this wicked old world before the scales turn, slightly. I’ve seen tough guy detectives take every beating imaginable before they, at the last second, grab the brass ring. I’ve seen more two-timing twisted sister femme fatale dames pile the corpses high and some skirt crazy guys grinning saying they were just misunderstood, almost. Ya, I’ve seen it all, brother. Well, not quite all, as the film under review, D.O.A., starring rugged looks 1950s actor Edmond O’Brian makes fatally clear. I‘ve never done a review a where the dead guy is still walking. That is usually saved for a genre, horror films, that don’t interest me, almost.
Let me back up (as is done in the film to explain that last point, otherwise this would be an exceedingly short review of an exceedingly short film). Average notary (for our purposes) Frank (played by the aforementioned Mr. O’Brian) needs a holiday bad. Bad from his closing in honey ready to make her kill (marriage and white picket fence cottages for two, okay). So naturally being a California desert guy and wanting to go wild he heads for be-bop 1950s San Francisco (just as the beat geist begins its climb up those seven hills, or whatever number there are). But Frank picked a wrong day, a wrong weekend, wrong month, hell, and a wrong millennium to “break out.”
Seems a regular work-a-day notary (accountant too) can know just a little too much. So in the language of the genre, he has to take “the fall.” And he does, as a nefarious guy who has something to hide slips him the mickey. But what a mickey, a totally fatal, no cure, done, dead, if still walking dose done while, well, while he is preoccupied picking up one of those high-flying “beat” hanger-on women that were filling up the town just then. So that is why our boy Frank is a dead man walking. And the rest of the film, the fast-paced film, by the way, with great black and white shots (especially of a be-bop jazz group blowing that high white note to kingdom come in the fog-bound ‘Frisco night- shades of some Jack Kerouac dream song, or maybe Allen Ginsberg, a young Allen Ginsberg), is spent frantically unfolding how Frank got himself killed. And some remorse over not treating his honey back in the desert so good.
A great film but I still have this lingering question. Since he knew (including getting a second medical opinion on the question) he was doomed in a day or two, a week at the most, why was not reveling in wine, women and song, especially that high-flying frail from the bistro, instead of almost getting himself “killed” (early) trying to find the truth? And you will be scratching your head also after you see this one. And you should.
DVD Review
D.O.A., starring Edmund O’Brian, directed by Rudolph Mate, Cardinal Pictures, 1950
Hey, over the couple of years that I have been periodically reviewing crime noirs I’ve seen it all. Bad gees getting away with murder, almost. Good gees getting the wrong end of the deal and just barely getting a little justice in this wicked old world before the scales turn, slightly. I’ve seen tough guy detectives take every beating imaginable before they, at the last second, grab the brass ring. I’ve seen more two-timing twisted sister femme fatale dames pile the corpses high and some skirt crazy guys grinning saying they were just misunderstood, almost. Ya, I’ve seen it all, brother. Well, not quite all, as the film under review, D.O.A., starring rugged looks 1950s actor Edmond O’Brian makes fatally clear. I‘ve never done a review a where the dead guy is still walking. That is usually saved for a genre, horror films, that don’t interest me, almost.
Let me back up (as is done in the film to explain that last point, otherwise this would be an exceedingly short review of an exceedingly short film). Average notary (for our purposes) Frank (played by the aforementioned Mr. O’Brian) needs a holiday bad. Bad from his closing in honey ready to make her kill (marriage and white picket fence cottages for two, okay). So naturally being a California desert guy and wanting to go wild he heads for be-bop 1950s San Francisco (just as the beat geist begins its climb up those seven hills, or whatever number there are). But Frank picked a wrong day, a wrong weekend, wrong month, hell, and a wrong millennium to “break out.”
Seems a regular work-a-day notary (accountant too) can know just a little too much. So in the language of the genre, he has to take “the fall.” And he does, as a nefarious guy who has something to hide slips him the mickey. But what a mickey, a totally fatal, no cure, done, dead, if still walking dose done while, well, while he is preoccupied picking up one of those high-flying “beat” hanger-on women that were filling up the town just then. So that is why our boy Frank is a dead man walking. And the rest of the film, the fast-paced film, by the way, with great black and white shots (especially of a be-bop jazz group blowing that high white note to kingdom come in the fog-bound ‘Frisco night- shades of some Jack Kerouac dream song, or maybe Allen Ginsberg, a young Allen Ginsberg), is spent frantically unfolding how Frank got himself killed. And some remorse over not treating his honey back in the desert so good.
A great film but I still have this lingering question. Since he knew (including getting a second medical opinion on the question) he was doomed in a day or two, a week at the most, why was not reveling in wine, women and song, especially that high-flying frail from the bistro, instead of almost getting himself “killed” (early) trying to find the truth? And you will be scratching your head also after you see this one. And you should.
Vamos a redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para salvar privado Bradley Manning-Que todas las Plaza de la Ciudad A Bradley Manning Plaza De Boston a nosotros Berkeley- Notas sobre la audiencia de la moción Bradley Manning, 6 de junio
Markin comentario:
El caso de Bradley Manning privado se encamina hacia un juicio otoño. Aquellos de nosotros que apoyan su causa, debemos redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para asegurar su libertad. Para los últimos meses ha habido una vigilia semanal en el área metropolitana de Boston frente a la Plaza de Davis Redline MBTA parada (rebautizada Plaza de Bradley Manning para la duración de la vigilia) en Somerville de 1:00-14:00 los viernes. Esta vigilia tiene, por decir lo menos, ha sido muy poca asistencia. Tenemos que construir con más seguidores presentes. Por favor, únase a nosotros cuando pueda. O mejor aún si usted no puede unirse a nosotros iniciar una vigilia de apoyo Bradley Manning la semana en algún lugar en su ciudad ya sea en el área de Boston o Berkeley. Y por favor, firmen la petición para su liberación. He puesto enlaces a la red de Manning y Manning sitio web de la plaza de abajo.
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning Plaza de página web
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
Los siguientes son comentarios que se han centrado en los últimos tiempos para conseguir apoyo para la causa Bradley Manning.
Veteranos por la Paz se yergue en la solidaridad y la defensa de los soldado Bradley Manning.
Nosotros, los del movimiento anti-guerra no pudieron hacer mucho para afectar el gobierno de Bush-Obama Irak calendario guerra, pero podemos salvar uno de los héroes de esa guerra, Bradley Manning.
Estoy en solidaridad con las supuestas acciones de soldado Bradley Manning en sacar a la luz, sólo un poco de luz, algunos de los nefastos hechos relacionados con la guerra de este gobierno, el gobierno de Bush y Obama. Si lo hiciera tales actos no son delito. Ningún crimen en absoluto en mis ojos o en los ojos de la gran mayoría de la gente que conoce del caso y de su importancia como un acto individual de resistencia a las injustas y bárbaras encabezadas por Estados Unidos las guerras en Irak y Afganistán. Duermo un poco de sombra más fácil en estos días a sabiendas de que Manning podría haber expuesto lo que todos sabían, o debían haber sabido, la guerra de Irak y de las justificaciones de la guerra afgana se basaba en un castillo de naipes. El imperialismo estadounidense pistolero castillo de naipes, pero las tarjetas, sin embargo.
Estoy de pie en solidaridad con el soldado Bradley Manning, porque estoy indignado por el trato dado a Manning, presumiblemente un hombre inocente, por un gobierno que afirma a sí misma como un "faro" del mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning se había celebrado en la solidaridad en Quantico y otras localidades de más de 500 días, y ha sido detenido sin juicio durante mucho más tiempo, ya que el gobierno y sus fuerzas armadas tratan de pegar un caso juntos. Los militares y sus secuaces en el Departamento de Justicia, se han vuelto más tortuosa, aunque no más inteligente desde que era un soldado en la mira más de cuarenta años.
Estas son razones más que suficientes para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning y lo será hasta el día en que es liberado por sus carceleros. Y voy a seguir para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning orgullosos hasta ese gran día.
La retirada inmediata e incondicional de todas las tropas estadounidenses / Allied y mercenarios de Afganistán! Manos Fuera de Irán! Guías gratuitas de Bradley Manning ahora!
***********
Notas sobre la audiencia de la moción Bradley Manning, 6 de junio
Encuentro en Fort Meade puerta principal para respaldar Bradley Manning durante la audiencia, 06/06/12
Día 1 de una moción de 3 días escuchando en Fort Meade, MD, por el candidato a Premio Nobel de la Paz PFC Bradley Manning. La defensa, finalmente recibe algunas evaluaciones de los daños y litiga los demás, como la fiscalía admite una discrepancia descubrimiento. Mañana, los funcionarios del Departamento de Estado va a declarar.
Por Nathan Fuller. 06 de junio 2012.
Esta audiencia propuesta de PFC Bradley Manning se ejecutará a partir de junio 6-8, en Fort Meade, Maryland. A principios de esta semana, he publicado una vista previa de las mociones de la defensa para esta audiencia .
A medida que se tienen para cada una de las audiencias de movimiento últimos varios en Fort Meade, el juez militar, la defensa y la fiscalía se reunieron para una conferencia privada a partir de 9-10am antes de que la sala se abrió para el público. Cuando comenzó la sesión abierta, el juez Denise Lind introdujo por primera vez PFC más reciente de Manning abogado defensor, el Mayor de Hurley. A continuación, le leyeron sus derechos a elegir su propio abogado, ya que tiene en cada audiencia.
Documentos del Departamento de Estado que se dio la vuelta, los funcionarios a declarar
El primer movimiento del día fue la petición de la fiscalía de la corte que reconsidere su decisión sobre la evaluación del Departamento de Estado de los posibles daños causados por las emisiones de WikiLeaks. El juez Lind ya dictaminó que el gobierno debe presentar la evaluación para su revisión en la cámara, y la fiscalía quiere que se reconsidere, porque es simplemente un 'proyecto', no un informe completo. Lind estableció que la evaluación era lo suficientemente importante a la culpa y el castigo potencial para una revisión en la cámara (una proyección privada para que el juez para determinar la relevancia de la información clasificada), por lo que el gobierno le dio la vuelta después de 23 de mayo.
Luego pasamos a través de alguna de las otras agencias de la que la defensa solicita informes de impacto. Lind falló a continuación que el gobierno debe proporcionar las evaluaciones de la Agencia de Inteligencia de Defensa (DIA) y el Grupo de Tareas WikiLeaks (WTF), pero estos son para ex parte de revisión, es decir, hecho por un único partido. Debido a la desclasificación de estos documentos, el juez se corrijan, sustituir, o un resumen de estos informes, en lugar de revisarlos en la cámara. Un sustituto redactada, dijo, "un equilibrio adecuado entre los derechos de los intereses de seguridad acusados y nacional." La defensa pidió revisar las evaluaciones de inmediato, porque tenía un experto cualificado en la mano, pero el gobierno en lugar de los mantendrá en la sede de la DIA.
Siguiente Lind preguntó el fiscal, si los documentos de la CIA de descubrimiento de contenido Brady material - la información pertinente a la culpabilidad o la condena de la defensa. No está seguro, el gobierno solicitó un breve receso. A su regreso, Fein, principal de la fiscalía Ashden dijo que la CIA había producido documentos sin clasificar, sin Brady material. Lind dijo que el tribunal había realizado un examen en la cámara para la información clasificada y encontrado el sustituto insuficiente. Ella aún se revisan los archivos de la CIA para el material pertinente. Lind se le preguntó si había algún nuevas revelaciones desde las audiencias de los últimos. Desde entonces, la CIA produjo nuevos archivos, el que el juez y redactado.
Pasamos a la segunda moción para obligar a la defensa de descubrimiento , que incluye una solicitud de funcionarios del Departamento de Estado a declarar en relación con las evaluaciones del impacto de ese organismo. Mañana (y, posiblemente, viernes), por lo menos un funcionario del Departamento de Estado dará testimonio.
Sustitución de las conferencias telefónicas
Una organización privada, telefónica conferencia de 802 se celebró para aclarar la logística de los testigos antes de la audiencia de hoy - esto indujo a la moción de la defensa para grabar y transcribir las conferencias telefónicas, quejándose de que el gobierno los usa como una oportunidad para volver a litigar las resoluciones anteriores y en contradicción a continuación 802 declaraciones en la corte. El gobierno argumentó que no hay prohibición de debatir las cuestiones sustantivas en las conferencias privadas, siempre y cuando ambas partes están de acuerdo y que la grabación y la transcripción que el juez falló a favor de la acusación, sino que ofrece una solución de compromiso "impedir procesos ágiles.": En lugar de privado 802 conferencias , que podría haber un solo día en la audiencia entre las audiencias ya programadas para sortear problemas menores de logística y de otro tipo en audiencia pública.
Seleccione la imagen de arriba para las fotos de Fort Meade, 06/06/12 (Flickr)
La debida diligencia Fiscalía descuidada
Continuando segunda moción de la defensa para obligar descubrimiento, Coombs presentó su extensa argumentación de denunciar el fracaso del gobierno para llevar a cabo las peticiones de la defensa con la "diligencia debida" y en el momento oportuno, recordando a los dos años de Brady temas que sostuvo en la última sesión . La fiscalía, dijo, en primer lugar se refirió a "evaluaciones de los daños alegados," y luego dijo que no podía proporcionar "una evaluación incompleta del daño", y más tarde dijo que era "consciente" de la existencia de algunas evaluaciones de los daños. Entonces, reveló, una nota de la sede del Departamento del Ejército (HQDA) aterrizó accidentalmente sobre el escritorio del comandante Kempke - abogado Bradley antes de Mayor Hurley. El memorándum, de 29 de julio de 2011, mostró que la fiscalía solicitó Brady material de más de un año después de Bradley fue detenido y varios meses más tarde aún, nada se había hecho.
Además explica ritmo aletargado del gobierno, Coombs dijo que sólo recientemente ha sido informado de la declaración de impacto del FBI, que había estado solicitando desde hace casi dos años. También fue recientemente hizo al tanto de la existencia de una evaluación de impacto ONCIX (y que sigue siendo "incompleto). El gobierno, afirmó Coombs, fue inconsistente en sus declaraciones sobre la existencia de estas evaluaciones vitales 'y la terminación.
Más tarde, las notas muestran que el 23 de febrero, 20.012, el gobierno dijo que había encontrado ningún Brady material de estos informes de daños, y sin embargo, han continuado la búsqueda de este material en los últimos meses. Están de nuevo en busca de una nueva y correcta Brady comprensión, pero Coombs se queja de que esto ha tomado demasiado tiempo.
28 de 63 evaluaciones de presentar ningún daño hasta el momento
Coombs, anunció que ha recibido información de 28 de las 63 agencias que solicitaron la evaluación de daños de. Él dice que estos son por lo general sólo una o dos páginas cada uno, ya sea afirmando ningún daño ha sido causado en aquellas agencias o remitirlo a otra agencia donde el daño pudo haber ocurrido.
Coombs dijo republicano Darrell Issa, presidente del Comité de la Cámara de Supervisión, revisó el Departamento de Justicia y el Departamento de Defensa de Bradley Manning información relacionada con el año pasado. Coombs ha solicitado esta información, pero la fiscalía afirma que su solicitud no era lo suficientemente específica. Coombs dijo que no podía haber sido más claro que quería informes de Issa con respecto a las supuestas acciones de Bradley Manning y el Fiscal General Eric Holder acciones ha tomado en respuesta. Corto de decir que los archivos que quiere son "en un archivo de color rojo en el tercer cajón de Issa, en virtud de la Biblia", dijo Coombs, no podía ser más específico. Se propone al Tribunal de Justicia el enjuiciamiento demora de dos a tres semanas para cumplir plenamente con sus solicitudes de descubrimiento, detallando cuando el gobierno hizo sus peticiones y cuántas páginas revisadas. El juez observó que esto podría complicar el calendario, pero Coombs, dijo que sólo esta parte de la programación necesaria para ser suspendido temporalmente y que el resto podría continuar. Paramos para el almuerzo, que incluyó una interacción inusual .
Semántica Brady desacuerdos
Por la tarde, continuó con su argumento de Coombs descubrimiento, haciendo hincapié en que sólo unos pocos meses antes del juicio, el gobierno había proporcionado todavía sólo 12 páginas de Brady material. Los informes de la DIA, del Departamento de Estado, ONCIX, la CIA y otras permanecen no producido o producido incompleta. Estas 28 agencias que se han convertido en la evaluación de los daños dio meramente una instantánea de finales de 2010 y principios de 2011 - no está claro si se dio seguimiento a sus comentarios. Coombs contó una conferencia de 802 para determinar la terminología apropiada para su Brady solicitud, que el gobierno dijo que era demasiado estrecho después de haber incluido el término "documentos de trabajo", pero era demasiado amplia sin ella. El gobierno, Coombs dice, "parece que está ocultando algo."
A continuación, Mayor Fein Ashden entregado la respuesta del gobierno, reiterando su afirmación de que la fiscalía se estaba convirtiendo en toda Brady material, y que la defensa continuaron usando la lengua excesivamente amplia en sus peticiones. El intento de voltear el argumento de Coombs, Fein dijo que la acusación había anticipado el alcance de los delitos imputados y envió una nota de la búsqueda de los documentos pertinentes al principio. Esta búsqueda, sin embargo, no es la defensa de Brady solicitud.
Recapitulación de las evaluaciones de las agencias actuales de los
Para determinar el estado actual de los diversos organismos en cuestión, Lind corrió a través de cada uno con preguntas básicas acerca de la autoridad de la fiscalía de búsqueda y los resultados - ¿Es una "entidad estrechamente alineados"? Es bajo la autoridad militar? ¿Qué documentos se ha producido?
FBI : alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, ha producido parte de una investigación conjunta sobre Wikileaks. Fein dice que toda la investigación no se produjo porque una parte sólo se ocupaba de PFC Manning y el resto fue clasificado y no es relevante para el caso. Coombs, sin embargo, mostró lo que el FBI había revelado fue severamente redactado, de tal manera que vastos sectores (30 páginas o más consecutivos) se desmayó por completo.
DSS (Defensa del Servicio de Seguridad): alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, ha producido 79 páginas de un expediente de investigación.
Del Departamento de Estado: alineados, en parte bajo la autoridad, los documentos ya han surgido en la audiencia de hoy.
Departamento de Justicia : alineada, no bajo la autoridad militar, no tenía ninguna evaluación de los daños, pero tiene testimonio ante el jurado y los archivos de la fiscalía. Todos los demás archivos del Departamento de Justicia están contenidas en el informe del FBI, ya que llevó a cabo una investigación conjunta.
CIA: alineada, no bajo la autoridad militar, el gobierno sigue buscando a Brady y ha producido otros expedientes de investigación.
ODNI (Oficina del Director de Inteligencia Nacional): alineados, que forma parte de los militares, el padre de varias organizaciones (por ejemplo, ONCIX), siempre a partir de información dirigida memorando mencionado y no la evaluación de daños.
ONCIX (Oficina del Ejecutivo Nacional de Contrainteligencia): alineados (por fallo de la corte), puede producir evaluaciones de daños.
Surgió un desacuerdo sobre la evaluación de los daños ONCIX. El juez Lind pidió la fiscalía por lo que no reconoció la evaluación continua de ONCIX anteriormente. El gobierno argumentó que ONCIX tenía un "proyecto" de un informe de impacto, pero esto todavía no era un "interino" de evaluación o de una versión "final" y por lo tanto no era la adecuada. La defensa quiere que la evaluación, independientemente de su estado, diciendo que va a recibir la información actualizada sobre la terminación, pero quiere trabajar con lo previsto hasta ahora.
DIA : alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, la fiscalía dice que la defensa todavía no ha cumplido las peticiones específicas suficientes para esta agencia, pero que no hay archivos de investigación se encontraron y que los otros existían en relación con WikiLeaks que pueden estar relacionados con la sentencia, pero no el fondo de la culpa. Cualquier daño, afirmó Coombs, la sentencia o no, se puede detectar.
Fein dijo: "Esta solicitud es un esfuerzo amplio para frenar la persecución", que recibió la risa audible en los bancos, probablemente debido a Bradley ha estado en prisión durante 745 días .
DISA : alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, en el proceso de revisión de menos de 60 documentos, en su mayoría de la información administrativa o de fondo. Fein dijo de nuevo la petición de la defensa fue demasiado amplia, diciendo que quieren "cualquier documento ..." Lind terminó su frase: "... si es relevante para la defensa." Se le veía frustrado, pero él estuvo de acuerdo. Después de mucha discusión circular sobre requisitos de descubrimiento, esta fue la primera vez la fiscalía reconoció que no había producido todos los documentos que habían marcado para el descubrimiento.
Coombs respondió: "El cielo no está cayendo para el gobierno. No les estamos enviando una expedición de pesca. Si lo fuéramos, nos gustaría pedir a muchos más de estos pocos organismos. "
La identificación de Brady materiales
Por último, Lind presentó la defensa moción para solicitar al Gobierno a identificar todos los Brady de material en los documentos de su descubrimiento. Lind preguntó el capitán Tooman, quien argumentó la moción, "En todos los 400.000 documentos?"
Tooman respondió: "Si fueran debidamente diligente, que me lo han hecho." En el futuro, sin embargo, se solicita el enjuiciamiento de relieve la Brady material, puesto que ya lo ha marcado de forma separada para producir a la corte.
Tooman argumentó, como previamente el lunes, que el tamaño de la información sobre el descubrimiento, la separación geográfica de la defensa, y el alcance limitado de los recursos de los abogados defensores hicieron ver el Brady material juntos como un equipo legal muy difícil. Fein puso de pie para contrarrestar, diciendo destacar que este material estaría haciendo el trabajo de la defensa. Dijo que cada abogado obtiene un seguro para la información clasificada, por lo que debe ser capaz de transportar el material con facilidad. Si necesitan más abogados, dijo Fein, la defensa podría pagar más abogados.
Tooman también argumentó que el gobierno dio a las cantidades enormes de defensa de los documentos sin ningún índice de búsqueda o útiles, sólo números Bates como referencias. El gobierno dijo que era la forma en que procesa los documentos y la creación de un índice o la prestación de su índice interno para la defensa estaría haciendo su trabajo para la defensa. El juez se pronunciará sobre la petición de la defensa posterior.
Por último, el juez Lind pidió tanto a la defensa y la acusación particular, dan una motivación más para saber cómo las evaluaciones de los daños que afectan a sus argumentos. En casi las 6:00 PM, que en receso para el día.
El caso de Bradley Manning privado se encamina hacia un juicio otoño. Aquellos de nosotros que apoyan su causa, debemos redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para asegurar su libertad. Para los últimos meses ha habido una vigilia semanal en el área metropolitana de Boston frente a la Plaza de Davis Redline MBTA parada (rebautizada Plaza de Bradley Manning para la duración de la vigilia) en Somerville de 1:00-14:00 los viernes. Esta vigilia tiene, por decir lo menos, ha sido muy poca asistencia. Tenemos que construir con más seguidores presentes. Por favor, únase a nosotros cuando pueda. O mejor aún si usted no puede unirse a nosotros iniciar una vigilia de apoyo Bradley Manning la semana en algún lugar en su ciudad ya sea en el área de Boston o Berkeley. Y por favor, firmen la petición para su liberación. He puesto enlaces a la red de Manning y Manning sitio web de la plaza de abajo.
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning Plaza de página web
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
Los siguientes son comentarios que se han centrado en los últimos tiempos para conseguir apoyo para la causa Bradley Manning.
Veteranos por la Paz se yergue en la solidaridad y la defensa de los soldado Bradley Manning.
Nosotros, los del movimiento anti-guerra no pudieron hacer mucho para afectar el gobierno de Bush-Obama Irak calendario guerra, pero podemos salvar uno de los héroes de esa guerra, Bradley Manning.
Estoy en solidaridad con las supuestas acciones de soldado Bradley Manning en sacar a la luz, sólo un poco de luz, algunos de los nefastos hechos relacionados con la guerra de este gobierno, el gobierno de Bush y Obama. Si lo hiciera tales actos no son delito. Ningún crimen en absoluto en mis ojos o en los ojos de la gran mayoría de la gente que conoce del caso y de su importancia como un acto individual de resistencia a las injustas y bárbaras encabezadas por Estados Unidos las guerras en Irak y Afganistán. Duermo un poco de sombra más fácil en estos días a sabiendas de que Manning podría haber expuesto lo que todos sabían, o debían haber sabido, la guerra de Irak y de las justificaciones de la guerra afgana se basaba en un castillo de naipes. El imperialismo estadounidense pistolero castillo de naipes, pero las tarjetas, sin embargo.
Estoy de pie en solidaridad con el soldado Bradley Manning, porque estoy indignado por el trato dado a Manning, presumiblemente un hombre inocente, por un gobierno que afirma a sí misma como un "faro" del mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning se había celebrado en la solidaridad en Quantico y otras localidades de más de 500 días, y ha sido detenido sin juicio durante mucho más tiempo, ya que el gobierno y sus fuerzas armadas tratan de pegar un caso juntos. Los militares y sus secuaces en el Departamento de Justicia, se han vuelto más tortuosa, aunque no más inteligente desde que era un soldado en la mira más de cuarenta años.
Estas son razones más que suficientes para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning y lo será hasta el día en que es liberado por sus carceleros. Y voy a seguir para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning orgullosos hasta ese gran día.
La retirada inmediata e incondicional de todas las tropas estadounidenses / Allied y mercenarios de Afganistán! Manos Fuera de Irán! Guías gratuitas de Bradley Manning ahora!
***********
Notas sobre la audiencia de la moción Bradley Manning, 6 de junio
Encuentro en Fort Meade puerta principal para respaldar Bradley Manning durante la audiencia, 06/06/12
Día 1 de una moción de 3 días escuchando en Fort Meade, MD, por el candidato a Premio Nobel de la Paz PFC Bradley Manning. La defensa, finalmente recibe algunas evaluaciones de los daños y litiga los demás, como la fiscalía admite una discrepancia descubrimiento. Mañana, los funcionarios del Departamento de Estado va a declarar.
Por Nathan Fuller. 06 de junio 2012.
Esta audiencia propuesta de PFC Bradley Manning se ejecutará a partir de junio 6-8, en Fort Meade, Maryland. A principios de esta semana, he publicado una vista previa de las mociones de la defensa para esta audiencia .
A medida que se tienen para cada una de las audiencias de movimiento últimos varios en Fort Meade, el juez militar, la defensa y la fiscalía se reunieron para una conferencia privada a partir de 9-10am antes de que la sala se abrió para el público. Cuando comenzó la sesión abierta, el juez Denise Lind introdujo por primera vez PFC más reciente de Manning abogado defensor, el Mayor de Hurley. A continuación, le leyeron sus derechos a elegir su propio abogado, ya que tiene en cada audiencia.
Documentos del Departamento de Estado que se dio la vuelta, los funcionarios a declarar
El primer movimiento del día fue la petición de la fiscalía de la corte que reconsidere su decisión sobre la evaluación del Departamento de Estado de los posibles daños causados por las emisiones de WikiLeaks. El juez Lind ya dictaminó que el gobierno debe presentar la evaluación para su revisión en la cámara, y la fiscalía quiere que se reconsidere, porque es simplemente un 'proyecto', no un informe completo. Lind estableció que la evaluación era lo suficientemente importante a la culpa y el castigo potencial para una revisión en la cámara (una proyección privada para que el juez para determinar la relevancia de la información clasificada), por lo que el gobierno le dio la vuelta después de 23 de mayo.
Luego pasamos a través de alguna de las otras agencias de la que la defensa solicita informes de impacto. Lind falló a continuación que el gobierno debe proporcionar las evaluaciones de la Agencia de Inteligencia de Defensa (DIA) y el Grupo de Tareas WikiLeaks (WTF), pero estos son para ex parte de revisión, es decir, hecho por un único partido. Debido a la desclasificación de estos documentos, el juez se corrijan, sustituir, o un resumen de estos informes, en lugar de revisarlos en la cámara. Un sustituto redactada, dijo, "un equilibrio adecuado entre los derechos de los intereses de seguridad acusados y nacional." La defensa pidió revisar las evaluaciones de inmediato, porque tenía un experto cualificado en la mano, pero el gobierno en lugar de los mantendrá en la sede de la DIA.
Siguiente Lind preguntó el fiscal, si los documentos de la CIA de descubrimiento de contenido Brady material - la información pertinente a la culpabilidad o la condena de la defensa. No está seguro, el gobierno solicitó un breve receso. A su regreso, Fein, principal de la fiscalía Ashden dijo que la CIA había producido documentos sin clasificar, sin Brady material. Lind dijo que el tribunal había realizado un examen en la cámara para la información clasificada y encontrado el sustituto insuficiente. Ella aún se revisan los archivos de la CIA para el material pertinente. Lind se le preguntó si había algún nuevas revelaciones desde las audiencias de los últimos. Desde entonces, la CIA produjo nuevos archivos, el que el juez y redactado.
Pasamos a la segunda moción para obligar a la defensa de descubrimiento , que incluye una solicitud de funcionarios del Departamento de Estado a declarar en relación con las evaluaciones del impacto de ese organismo. Mañana (y, posiblemente, viernes), por lo menos un funcionario del Departamento de Estado dará testimonio.
Sustitución de las conferencias telefónicas
Una organización privada, telefónica conferencia de 802 se celebró para aclarar la logística de los testigos antes de la audiencia de hoy - esto indujo a la moción de la defensa para grabar y transcribir las conferencias telefónicas, quejándose de que el gobierno los usa como una oportunidad para volver a litigar las resoluciones anteriores y en contradicción a continuación 802 declaraciones en la corte. El gobierno argumentó que no hay prohibición de debatir las cuestiones sustantivas en las conferencias privadas, siempre y cuando ambas partes están de acuerdo y que la grabación y la transcripción que el juez falló a favor de la acusación, sino que ofrece una solución de compromiso "impedir procesos ágiles.": En lugar de privado 802 conferencias , que podría haber un solo día en la audiencia entre las audiencias ya programadas para sortear problemas menores de logística y de otro tipo en audiencia pública.
Seleccione la imagen de arriba para las fotos de Fort Meade, 06/06/12 (Flickr)
La debida diligencia Fiscalía descuidada
Continuando segunda moción de la defensa para obligar descubrimiento, Coombs presentó su extensa argumentación de denunciar el fracaso del gobierno para llevar a cabo las peticiones de la defensa con la "diligencia debida" y en el momento oportuno, recordando a los dos años de Brady temas que sostuvo en la última sesión . La fiscalía, dijo, en primer lugar se refirió a "evaluaciones de los daños alegados," y luego dijo que no podía proporcionar "una evaluación incompleta del daño", y más tarde dijo que era "consciente" de la existencia de algunas evaluaciones de los daños. Entonces, reveló, una nota de la sede del Departamento del Ejército (HQDA) aterrizó accidentalmente sobre el escritorio del comandante Kempke - abogado Bradley antes de Mayor Hurley. El memorándum, de 29 de julio de 2011, mostró que la fiscalía solicitó Brady material de más de un año después de Bradley fue detenido y varios meses más tarde aún, nada se había hecho.
Además explica ritmo aletargado del gobierno, Coombs dijo que sólo recientemente ha sido informado de la declaración de impacto del FBI, que había estado solicitando desde hace casi dos años. También fue recientemente hizo al tanto de la existencia de una evaluación de impacto ONCIX (y que sigue siendo "incompleto). El gobierno, afirmó Coombs, fue inconsistente en sus declaraciones sobre la existencia de estas evaluaciones vitales 'y la terminación.
Más tarde, las notas muestran que el 23 de febrero, 20.012, el gobierno dijo que había encontrado ningún Brady material de estos informes de daños, y sin embargo, han continuado la búsqueda de este material en los últimos meses. Están de nuevo en busca de una nueva y correcta Brady comprensión, pero Coombs se queja de que esto ha tomado demasiado tiempo.
28 de 63 evaluaciones de presentar ningún daño hasta el momento
Coombs, anunció que ha recibido información de 28 de las 63 agencias que solicitaron la evaluación de daños de. Él dice que estos son por lo general sólo una o dos páginas cada uno, ya sea afirmando ningún daño ha sido causado en aquellas agencias o remitirlo a otra agencia donde el daño pudo haber ocurrido.
Coombs dijo republicano Darrell Issa, presidente del Comité de la Cámara de Supervisión, revisó el Departamento de Justicia y el Departamento de Defensa de Bradley Manning información relacionada con el año pasado. Coombs ha solicitado esta información, pero la fiscalía afirma que su solicitud no era lo suficientemente específica. Coombs dijo que no podía haber sido más claro que quería informes de Issa con respecto a las supuestas acciones de Bradley Manning y el Fiscal General Eric Holder acciones ha tomado en respuesta. Corto de decir que los archivos que quiere son "en un archivo de color rojo en el tercer cajón de Issa, en virtud de la Biblia", dijo Coombs, no podía ser más específico. Se propone al Tribunal de Justicia el enjuiciamiento demora de dos a tres semanas para cumplir plenamente con sus solicitudes de descubrimiento, detallando cuando el gobierno hizo sus peticiones y cuántas páginas revisadas. El juez observó que esto podría complicar el calendario, pero Coombs, dijo que sólo esta parte de la programación necesaria para ser suspendido temporalmente y que el resto podría continuar. Paramos para el almuerzo, que incluyó una interacción inusual .
Semántica Brady desacuerdos
Por la tarde, continuó con su argumento de Coombs descubrimiento, haciendo hincapié en que sólo unos pocos meses antes del juicio, el gobierno había proporcionado todavía sólo 12 páginas de Brady material. Los informes de la DIA, del Departamento de Estado, ONCIX, la CIA y otras permanecen no producido o producido incompleta. Estas 28 agencias que se han convertido en la evaluación de los daños dio meramente una instantánea de finales de 2010 y principios de 2011 - no está claro si se dio seguimiento a sus comentarios. Coombs contó una conferencia de 802 para determinar la terminología apropiada para su Brady solicitud, que el gobierno dijo que era demasiado estrecho después de haber incluido el término "documentos de trabajo", pero era demasiado amplia sin ella. El gobierno, Coombs dice, "parece que está ocultando algo."
A continuación, Mayor Fein Ashden entregado la respuesta del gobierno, reiterando su afirmación de que la fiscalía se estaba convirtiendo en toda Brady material, y que la defensa continuaron usando la lengua excesivamente amplia en sus peticiones. El intento de voltear el argumento de Coombs, Fein dijo que la acusación había anticipado el alcance de los delitos imputados y envió una nota de la búsqueda de los documentos pertinentes al principio. Esta búsqueda, sin embargo, no es la defensa de Brady solicitud.
Recapitulación de las evaluaciones de las agencias actuales de los
Para determinar el estado actual de los diversos organismos en cuestión, Lind corrió a través de cada uno con preguntas básicas acerca de la autoridad de la fiscalía de búsqueda y los resultados - ¿Es una "entidad estrechamente alineados"? Es bajo la autoridad militar? ¿Qué documentos se ha producido?
FBI : alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, ha producido parte de una investigación conjunta sobre Wikileaks. Fein dice que toda la investigación no se produjo porque una parte sólo se ocupaba de PFC Manning y el resto fue clasificado y no es relevante para el caso. Coombs, sin embargo, mostró lo que el FBI había revelado fue severamente redactado, de tal manera que vastos sectores (30 páginas o más consecutivos) se desmayó por completo.
DSS (Defensa del Servicio de Seguridad): alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, ha producido 79 páginas de un expediente de investigación.
Del Departamento de Estado: alineados, en parte bajo la autoridad, los documentos ya han surgido en la audiencia de hoy.
Departamento de Justicia : alineada, no bajo la autoridad militar, no tenía ninguna evaluación de los daños, pero tiene testimonio ante el jurado y los archivos de la fiscalía. Todos los demás archivos del Departamento de Justicia están contenidas en el informe del FBI, ya que llevó a cabo una investigación conjunta.
CIA: alineada, no bajo la autoridad militar, el gobierno sigue buscando a Brady y ha producido otros expedientes de investigación.
ODNI (Oficina del Director de Inteligencia Nacional): alineados, que forma parte de los militares, el padre de varias organizaciones (por ejemplo, ONCIX), siempre a partir de información dirigida memorando mencionado y no la evaluación de daños.
ONCIX (Oficina del Ejecutivo Nacional de Contrainteligencia): alineados (por fallo de la corte), puede producir evaluaciones de daños.
Surgió un desacuerdo sobre la evaluación de los daños ONCIX. El juez Lind pidió la fiscalía por lo que no reconoció la evaluación continua de ONCIX anteriormente. El gobierno argumentó que ONCIX tenía un "proyecto" de un informe de impacto, pero esto todavía no era un "interino" de evaluación o de una versión "final" y por lo tanto no era la adecuada. La defensa quiere que la evaluación, independientemente de su estado, diciendo que va a recibir la información actualizada sobre la terminación, pero quiere trabajar con lo previsto hasta ahora.
DIA : alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, la fiscalía dice que la defensa todavía no ha cumplido las peticiones específicas suficientes para esta agencia, pero que no hay archivos de investigación se encontraron y que los otros existían en relación con WikiLeaks que pueden estar relacionados con la sentencia, pero no el fondo de la culpa. Cualquier daño, afirmó Coombs, la sentencia o no, se puede detectar.
Fein dijo: "Esta solicitud es un esfuerzo amplio para frenar la persecución", que recibió la risa audible en los bancos, probablemente debido a Bradley ha estado en prisión durante 745 días .
DISA : alineados, bajo la autoridad militar, en el proceso de revisión de menos de 60 documentos, en su mayoría de la información administrativa o de fondo. Fein dijo de nuevo la petición de la defensa fue demasiado amplia, diciendo que quieren "cualquier documento ..." Lind terminó su frase: "... si es relevante para la defensa." Se le veía frustrado, pero él estuvo de acuerdo. Después de mucha discusión circular sobre requisitos de descubrimiento, esta fue la primera vez la fiscalía reconoció que no había producido todos los documentos que habían marcado para el descubrimiento.
Coombs respondió: "El cielo no está cayendo para el gobierno. No les estamos enviando una expedición de pesca. Si lo fuéramos, nos gustaría pedir a muchos más de estos pocos organismos. "
La identificación de Brady materiales
Por último, Lind presentó la defensa moción para solicitar al Gobierno a identificar todos los Brady de material en los documentos de su descubrimiento. Lind preguntó el capitán Tooman, quien argumentó la moción, "En todos los 400.000 documentos?"
Tooman respondió: "Si fueran debidamente diligente, que me lo han hecho." En el futuro, sin embargo, se solicita el enjuiciamiento de relieve la Brady material, puesto que ya lo ha marcado de forma separada para producir a la corte.
Tooman argumentó, como previamente el lunes, que el tamaño de la información sobre el descubrimiento, la separación geográfica de la defensa, y el alcance limitado de los recursos de los abogados defensores hicieron ver el Brady material juntos como un equipo legal muy difícil. Fein puso de pie para contrarrestar, diciendo destacar que este material estaría haciendo el trabajo de la defensa. Dijo que cada abogado obtiene un seguro para la información clasificada, por lo que debe ser capaz de transportar el material con facilidad. Si necesitan más abogados, dijo Fein, la defensa podría pagar más abogados.
Tooman también argumentó que el gobierno dio a las cantidades enormes de defensa de los documentos sin ningún índice de búsqueda o útiles, sólo números Bates como referencias. El gobierno dijo que era la forma en que procesa los documentos y la creación de un índice o la prestación de su índice interno para la defensa estaría haciendo su trabajo para la defensa. El juez se pronunciará sobre la petición de la defensa posterior.
Por último, el juez Lind pidió tanto a la defensa y la acusación particular, dan una motivación más para saber cómo las evaluaciones de los daños que afectan a sus argumentos. En casi las 6:00 PM, que en receso para el día.
Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Save Private Bradley Manning-Make Every Town Square A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley-Join Those In Front Of Fort Meade, Maryland On June 6th To Support Private Manning’s Court Appearance-Notes From The June 6th Hearing
Click on the headline to link to a the Private Bradley Manning Support Network website page.
Markin comment:
The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward a fall trial. Those of us who support his cause should redouble our efforts to secure his freedom. For the past several months there has been a weekly vigil in Greater Boston across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the vigil’s duration) in Somerville from 1:00-2:00 PM on Fridays. This vigil has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you can’t join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly vigil in some location in your town whether it is in the Boston area or Berkeley. And please sign the petition for his release. I have placed links to the Manning Network and Manning Square website below.
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Manning Square website
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
The following are remarks that I have been focusing on of late to build support for Bradley Manning’s cause.
Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Bradley Manning.
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
I stand in solidarity with the alleged actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious war-related doings of this government, under Bush and Obama. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning may have exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justifications rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
I am standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
These are more than sufficient reasons to stand in solidarity with Private Manning and will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Private Manning until that great day.
Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran! Free Bradley Manning Now!
************
"God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...
I want people to see the truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
—online chat attributed to Army RFC Bradley Manning
Accused Wikileaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning,
a 23-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, is accused of sharing a video of the killing of civilians— including two Reuters journalists—by a US helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq with the Wikileaks website.
He is also charged with blowing the whistle on the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and revealing US diplomatic cables. In short, he's been charged with telling us the truth.
The video and documents have illuminated the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and brines play in international diplomacy.
Half of every edition of The New York Times has cited one or more of these documents during the past year. The leaks have caused Amnesty International to hail Wikileaks for catalyzing the democratic middle eastern revolutions and changing journalism forever.
What happens now is up to YOU!
Never before in U.S. history has someone been charged with "Aiding the enemy through indirect means" by making information public.
A massive; popular outpouring of support for Bradley Manning is needed to save his life.
We are at a turning point in our nation's history. Will we as a public demand greater transparency and accountability from pur elected leaders? Will we be governed by fear and secrecy? Will we accept endless war fought with our tax dollars? Or, will we demand the right to know the truth—the real foundation of democracy.
Here are some actions you should take now to support Bradley:
» Visitwww.standwithbrad.org to sign the petition. Then join our photo petition at iam.bradleymanning.org
» Join our facebook page, savebradley,
to receive campaign updates, and follow SaveBradley on twitter
» Visitwww.bradleymanning.org and
download our Organizer Toolkit to learn howyou can educate community members, gain media attention, and donate toward Bradley's defense.
The People Have the Right to Know...
Visit wvwv.braclleymaiiniiig.org to learn howyou can take action!
************
What did WikiLeaks reveal?
.
"In no case shall information be classified... in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency... or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security."
—Executive Order 13526, Sec. 7.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations
"Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is this awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."
—Robert Gates, Unites States Secretary of Defense
PFC Bradley Manning is a US Army intelligence specialist who is accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, an organization that he allegedly understood would release portions of the information to news organizations and ultimately to the public.
Was the information that PFC Manning is accused of leaking classified for our protection and national security, as government officials contend? Or do the revelations provide the American public with information that we should have had access to in the first place? Just
what are these revelations? Below are some key facts that PFC Manning is accused of making public.
There is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq.
The "Iraq War Logs" published by WikiLeaks revealed that thousands of reports of prisoner abuse and torture had been filed against the Iraqi Security Forces. Medical evidence detailed how prisoners had been whipped with heavy cables across the feet, hung from ceiling hooks, suffered holes being bored into their legs with electric drills, urinated upon, and sexually assaulted. These logs also revealed the existence of "Frago 242,"an order implemented in 2004 not to investigate allegations of abuse against the. Iraqi government This order is a direct violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States in 1994. The Convention prohibits the Armed Forces from transferring a detainee to other countries "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." According to the State Department's own reports, the U.S. government was already aware that the Iraqi Security Forces engaged in torture (1).
U.S. officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan.
U.S. defense contractors were brought under much tighter supervision after leaked diplomatic cables revealed that they had been complicit in child trafficking activities. DynCorp — a powerful defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from U.S. tax dollars — threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring boys purchased from child traffickers for entertainment. DynCorp had already faced human trafficking charges before this incident took place. According to the cables, Afghan Interior minister HanifAtmar urged the assistant US ambassadorto"quash"the story.These revelations have been a driving factor behind recent calls for the removal of all U.S. defense contractors from Afghanistan (2).
Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives.
The Guantanamo Files describe how detainees were arrested based on what the New York Times referred to as highly subjective evidence. For example, some poor farmers were captured after they were found wearing a common watch or a jacket that was the same as those also worn by Al Queda operatives. How quickly innocent prisoners were released was heavily dependent on their country of origin. Because the evidence collected against Guantanamo prisoners is not permissible in U.S. courts, the U.S. State Department has offered millions of dollars to other countries to take and try our prisoners. According to a U.S. diplomatic cable written on April 17, 2009, the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners requested that the National Court indict six former U.S. officials for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture against five Spanish prisoners. However,"Senator Mel Martinez... met Acting FM [Foreign Minister] AngelLossada... on April 15. Martinez... -underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship"(3).
There is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was false. Between 2004 and 2009, the U.S. government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants. This means that for every Iraqi death that is classified as a combatant, two innocent men, women or children are also killed (4),
FOOTNOTES:
(1)Alex Spillius, "Wikileaks: Iraq War Logs show US ignored torture allega-
tions,"Telegraph, October 22,2010. http://www.telegrapti.co.uk/news/
woridnews/middleeast/iraq/8082223/WiMleab-lraq-War-Logs-show-US-
ignored-torture-allegations.html.
(2)foreign contractors hired Afghan 'dancing boys; WikiLeaks cable
reveals'guanJian.co.uk, December 2,2010, http://www.guardian.co.tik/
world/2010/dec/02/foreign-contractors-hired-dancing-boys
(3) Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser.The Guatanamo Files: Judging Detainees'Risk, Often With Rawed Evidence'New York Times, April 24,2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/2S/world/guantanamo-files-flawed-evidence-for-assessing-risk.html;'US embassy cables: Don't pursue Guantanamo criminal case, says Spanish attorney general'guardian.co.uk, December 1,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202776.
(4) Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previously Unlisted Civilian Deaths,' guard-ian.co.uk, October 22,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/won'd/2010/ oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq
Markin comment:
The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward a fall trial. Those of us who support his cause should redouble our efforts to secure his freedom. For the past several months there has been a weekly vigil in Greater Boston across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the vigil’s duration) in Somerville from 1:00-2:00 PM on Fridays. This vigil has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you can’t join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly vigil in some location in your town whether it is in the Boston area or Berkeley. And please sign the petition for his release. I have placed links to the Manning Network and Manning Square website below.
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Manning Square website
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
The following are remarks that I have been focusing on of late to build support for Bradley Manning’s cause.
Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private Bradley Manning.
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
I stand in solidarity with the alleged actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious war-related doings of this government, under Bush and Obama. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning may have exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justifications rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
I am standing in solidarity with Private Bradley Manning because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
These are more than sufficient reasons to stand in solidarity with Private Manning and will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Private Manning until that great day.
Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran! Free Bradley Manning Now!
************
"God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms...
I want people to see the truth... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
—online chat attributed to Army RFC Bradley Manning
Accused Wikileaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning,
a 23-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, is accused of sharing a video of the killing of civilians— including two Reuters journalists—by a US helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq with the Wikileaks website.
He is also charged with blowing the whistle on the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and revealing US diplomatic cables. In short, he's been charged with telling us the truth.
The video and documents have illuminated the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and brines play in international diplomacy.
Half of every edition of The New York Times has cited one or more of these documents during the past year. The leaks have caused Amnesty International to hail Wikileaks for catalyzing the democratic middle eastern revolutions and changing journalism forever.
What happens now is up to YOU!
Never before in U.S. history has someone been charged with "Aiding the enemy through indirect means" by making information public.
A massive; popular outpouring of support for Bradley Manning is needed to save his life.
We are at a turning point in our nation's history. Will we as a public demand greater transparency and accountability from pur elected leaders? Will we be governed by fear and secrecy? Will we accept endless war fought with our tax dollars? Or, will we demand the right to know the truth—the real foundation of democracy.
Here are some actions you should take now to support Bradley:
» Visitwww.standwithbrad.org to sign the petition. Then join our photo petition at iam.bradleymanning.org
» Join our facebook page, savebradley,
to receive campaign updates, and follow SaveBradley on twitter
» Visitwww.bradleymanning.org and
download our Organizer Toolkit to learn howyou can educate community members, gain media attention, and donate toward Bradley's defense.
The People Have the Right to Know...
Visit wvwv.braclleymaiiniiig.org to learn howyou can take action!
************
What did WikiLeaks reveal?
.
"In no case shall information be classified... in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency... or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security."
—Executive Order 13526, Sec. 7.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations
"Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is this awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."
—Robert Gates, Unites States Secretary of Defense
PFC Bradley Manning is a US Army intelligence specialist who is accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, an organization that he allegedly understood would release portions of the information to news organizations and ultimately to the public.
Was the information that PFC Manning is accused of leaking classified for our protection and national security, as government officials contend? Or do the revelations provide the American public with information that we should have had access to in the first place? Just
what are these revelations? Below are some key facts that PFC Manning is accused of making public.
There is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq.
The "Iraq War Logs" published by WikiLeaks revealed that thousands of reports of prisoner abuse and torture had been filed against the Iraqi Security Forces. Medical evidence detailed how prisoners had been whipped with heavy cables across the feet, hung from ceiling hooks, suffered holes being bored into their legs with electric drills, urinated upon, and sexually assaulted. These logs also revealed the existence of "Frago 242,"an order implemented in 2004 not to investigate allegations of abuse against the. Iraqi government This order is a direct violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States in 1994. The Convention prohibits the Armed Forces from transferring a detainee to other countries "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." According to the State Department's own reports, the U.S. government was already aware that the Iraqi Security Forces engaged in torture (1).
U.S. officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan.
U.S. defense contractors were brought under much tighter supervision after leaked diplomatic cables revealed that they had been complicit in child trafficking activities. DynCorp — a powerful defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from U.S. tax dollars — threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring boys purchased from child traffickers for entertainment. DynCorp had already faced human trafficking charges before this incident took place. According to the cables, Afghan Interior minister HanifAtmar urged the assistant US ambassadorto"quash"the story.These revelations have been a driving factor behind recent calls for the removal of all U.S. defense contractors from Afghanistan (2).
Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives.
The Guantanamo Files describe how detainees were arrested based on what the New York Times referred to as highly subjective evidence. For example, some poor farmers were captured after they were found wearing a common watch or a jacket that was the same as those also worn by Al Queda operatives. How quickly innocent prisoners were released was heavily dependent on their country of origin. Because the evidence collected against Guantanamo prisoners is not permissible in U.S. courts, the U.S. State Department has offered millions of dollars to other countries to take and try our prisoners. According to a U.S. diplomatic cable written on April 17, 2009, the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners requested that the National Court indict six former U.S. officials for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture against five Spanish prisoners. However,"Senator Mel Martinez... met Acting FM [Foreign Minister] AngelLossada... on April 15. Martinez... -underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship"(3).
There is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was false. Between 2004 and 2009, the U.S. government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants. This means that for every Iraqi death that is classified as a combatant, two innocent men, women or children are also killed (4),
FOOTNOTES:
(1)Alex Spillius, "Wikileaks: Iraq War Logs show US ignored torture allega-
tions,"Telegraph, October 22,2010. http://www.telegrapti.co.uk/news/
woridnews/middleeast/iraq/8082223/WiMleab-lraq-War-Logs-show-US-
ignored-torture-allegations.html.
(2)foreign contractors hired Afghan 'dancing boys; WikiLeaks cable
reveals'guanJian.co.uk, December 2,2010, http://www.guardian.co.tik/
world/2010/dec/02/foreign-contractors-hired-dancing-boys
(3) Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser.The Guatanamo Files: Judging Detainees'Risk, Often With Rawed Evidence'New York Times, April 24,2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/2S/world/guantanamo-files-flawed-evidence-for-assessing-risk.html;'US embassy cables: Don't pursue Guantanamo criminal case, says Spanish attorney general'guardian.co.uk, December 1,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202776.
(4) Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previously Unlisted Civilian Deaths,' guard-ian.co.uk, October 22,2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/won'd/2010/ oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq
From Occupy Quincy (Ma)- Bank Of America Saturday Weekly Stand-Out Beginning May 19, 2012-Join Us-Banks Got Bailed Out We Got Sold Out
Protest Big Bank Thieves!
Join us outside Bank of America
Every Saturday
11:00pm
Starting every Saturday from May 19th, Occupy Quincy will be protesting outside Bank of America from 11 to 12 noon.
That's 1400 Hancock St., Quincy Center. Bring yourself, your spirit and your signs. See you there!
The Bank of America makes billions in profits and pays no taxes. Even worse - they get a rebate from our corrupt system of governance. All while gouging Americans and stealing their homes.
We will stand out at Bank of America continuously to remind the citizenry just how corrupt the system is. We stand out because our economy is in decline for the bottom 99%. We stand out because the problems that got us here have not been corrected.
Banks are still unregulated and fraud is still rampant. Corporate profits are booming for the malefactors of great wealth who drove us into this mess. Yet, there are no indictments and no one goes to jail. If corporations are people why are they not incarcerated like the rest of us?
The problem with “too big too fail” are the words “too big.” We need to down-size these corporations in order to better share the wealth. Why does a billionaire need another billion?
They have stolen our jobs, our homes, and our pensions.
With their wars, they steal our children.
They are destroying our environment for profit.
The rich get richer, the middle-class gets drastically reduced, and the poor get the street or jail.
The 1% got bailed out while the 99% get left out.
We must stand up and speak out to address the injustice and corruption and make our government work for the people - not the corporations.
Join us outside Bank of America
Every Saturday
11:00pm
Starting every Saturday from May 19th, Occupy Quincy will be protesting outside Bank of America from 11 to 12 noon.
That's 1400 Hancock St., Quincy Center. Bring yourself, your spirit and your signs. See you there!
The Bank of America makes billions in profits and pays no taxes. Even worse - they get a rebate from our corrupt system of governance. All while gouging Americans and stealing their homes.
We will stand out at Bank of America continuously to remind the citizenry just how corrupt the system is. We stand out because our economy is in decline for the bottom 99%. We stand out because the problems that got us here have not been corrected.
Banks are still unregulated and fraud is still rampant. Corporate profits are booming for the malefactors of great wealth who drove us into this mess. Yet, there are no indictments and no one goes to jail. If corporations are people why are they not incarcerated like the rest of us?
The problem with “too big too fail” are the words “too big.” We need to down-size these corporations in order to better share the wealth. Why does a billionaire need another billion?
They have stolen our jobs, our homes, and our pensions.
With their wars, they steal our children.
They are destroying our environment for profit.
The rich get richer, the middle-class gets drastically reduced, and the poor get the street or jail.
The 1% got bailed out while the 99% get left out.
We must stand up and speak out to address the injustice and corruption and make our government work for the people - not the corporations.
From The Socialist Alternative Press-Wisconsin Recall: Democrats Paved the Way for Walker’s Victory — A party of the working class is needed to defend workers in Wisconsin and beyond
Wisconsin Recall: Democrats Paved the Way for Walker’s Victory — A party of the working class is needed to defend workers in Wisconsin and beyond
Jun 7, 2012
By George Martin Fell Brown and Richard Payton
A little over a year ago, the working people of Wisconsin made history when they took to the streets in protest against the union-busting agenda of the right-wing governor Scott Walker. The mass popular uprising that shook the state in February and March of 2011 gave way to a massive recall campaign in which Walker became the third governor in U.S. history to face a recall. On Tuesday, June 5, a footnote was added to the pages of history when Walker became the first governor to survive a recall election, defeating his opponent Tom Barrett 54 percent to 46 percent, a wider margin than his initial election victory in 2010.
Many activists around the state are understandably disheartened by the fact that what began last year as a powerful mass movement involving rallies of tens of thousands, occupations and sick-outs, has in the end led to Walker remaining in office. The right will undoubtedly take the election results as a mandate for further attacks on working people. The blame for this lies with the leadership of the unions and the politicians of the Democratic Party, who diverted a mass movement of the working class into an electoral battle between the two parties of big business. To prevent future defeats, it is vital that workers learn the lessons of the Wisconsin recall and break from the two-party system.
The popular energy present last spring, both in Madison and all over the state, carried the potential for real, progressive change. Many of the protesters involved were experiencing their first taste of direct political activity, and countless Wisconsinites threw themselves into the grassroots, on-the-ground work of the recall campaign. At the time, the recall, which would not have been even a possibility without the protests of February and March, was presented by the union leadership and state Democratic politicians as the only way forward for the movement. These activists’ enthusiasm and zeal is evidenced by the nearly one million signatures supporting the recall of the governor gathered around the state in just a few months.
Democrats Offer No Alternative
Walker’s attacks on workers, students, women, the poor and the elderly are terrible, of course, and he deserves to be removed from office for them. However, the Democratic party and its candidate, Tom Barrett, failed to provide any real alternative. As mayor of Milwaukee, Barrett himself made use of Walker’s infamous anti-labor Act 10 to extract concessions from municipal workers under his control. On the campaign trail Barrett put forward virtually no argument in the face of Walker’s austerity program, instead stating that he wouldn’t increases taxes on big business and the rich. In this he essentially turned his back on the mass movement that made his re-match against Walker possible in the first place. To top it all off, while Walker was receiving countless unimaginably large donations from various right-wing foundations and tycoons around the country, the Democratic National Committee refused to put any resources whatsoever into the recall effort and the everyday Wisconsinites working towards it – Wisconsinites who were already left out in the cold once by draconian attacks on labor rights and social services.
Some commentators defended Barrett’s right-wing politics as necessary to win over moderate “swing voters.” For instance, former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz endorsed Barrett, arguing: “A candidate beholden to big unions is no more appealing to independent voters than one who answers to the Koch brothers.” (“How to Win a Recall Election,” The Isthmus, April 12, 2012). But Barrett’s embrace of austerity and “shared sacrifice” served to legitimize Walker’s agenda. Accepting that public sector workers needed to pay for the crisis only reinforced the right-wing propaganda that unions are only interested in taking their members’ money and funding Democrats. This played a key role in allowing Walker to win the election even after the winter protests.
In the heat of the February and March protests, the workers of Wisconsin held the possibility of imminent victory in their hands. Tens of thousands of people converged on Madison to march and rally, but weeks of protests had shown that Walker was not going to back down just in the face of demonstrations. The idea of strike action was widely discussed within the movement. A one-day public-sector general strike, combined with a solid occupation of the Capitol, mass demonstrations, direct action and student walkouts could have been an inspiring launch pad for a serious strategy to defeat Walker. However, even when faced with the dismantling of public sector unions in Wisconsin, the state-level union leadership continually shied away from strike action, diverting the movement into the “safe” channel of the recall.
Socialist Alternative warned at the time that the recall strategy was not as “safe” as the union leaders made it out to be. We said:
“It will not be enough to stop Walker and his corporate offensive. A recall will take months, a year or more (nor is there any guarantee of victory). But that won’t stop the immediate impact of this disastrous bill as public sector unions now face the danger of being dismantled in the coming weeks.” (“Will the Recall be Enough?—We Need to Build a Mass Movement that Can Defeat Walker”)
Unfortunately, our warning was proven correct.
While the unions devoted countless resources to the Democratic Party, union membership has declined in the face of Walker’s legislation. Since the passage of Act 10, statewide membership in the American Federation of Teachers has declined from 17,000 to 11,000 and statewide membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has declined from 62,818 to 28,745. This crisis would still exist even if Barrett had won. Now, more than ever, the labor movement needs to rebuild its membership and stop the attacks coming from Democrats and Republicans alike. It’s up to the rank and file to organize on the shop floor in every workplace to challenge their own leadership as well as the right-wing politicians.
Break from the parties of big business
Ultimately, for labor to succeed it needs to break from the two-party system. While the Democratic and Republican Parties may not be exact clones, they both represent the interests of big business and can’t be relied on as allies of working people. During the recall election, Socialist Alternative called for the labor movement and activist groups to run independent, pro-worker candidates. If all the effort that unions and activists put behind Barrett had gone to a candidate who genuinely represented the interests of workers, the outcome could have been different. A candidate who unequivocally defended the interests of all working people, public and private sector, union and non-union, would have been able to win over “swing voters” far more easily than Barrett’s slogan of “Scott Walker is too extreme for Wisconsin.” Even if Walker still won the recall election, this political independence would have put the unions in a much better position to resist his attacks.
What we need is a new political party that refuses to take corporate money, is democratically controlled by its members, and fights determinedly for the interests of the working-class majority on the issues of jobs, wages, benefits, health care, social programs, housing, war, discrimination, and the environment. In the past, workers have created parties like this in countries around the world. There are now two corporate parties in the U.S. Why shouldn’t we, as working people, have one of our own?
Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative
Jun 7, 2012
By George Martin Fell Brown and Richard Payton
A little over a year ago, the working people of Wisconsin made history when they took to the streets in protest against the union-busting agenda of the right-wing governor Scott Walker. The mass popular uprising that shook the state in February and March of 2011 gave way to a massive recall campaign in which Walker became the third governor in U.S. history to face a recall. On Tuesday, June 5, a footnote was added to the pages of history when Walker became the first governor to survive a recall election, defeating his opponent Tom Barrett 54 percent to 46 percent, a wider margin than his initial election victory in 2010.
Many activists around the state are understandably disheartened by the fact that what began last year as a powerful mass movement involving rallies of tens of thousands, occupations and sick-outs, has in the end led to Walker remaining in office. The right will undoubtedly take the election results as a mandate for further attacks on working people. The blame for this lies with the leadership of the unions and the politicians of the Democratic Party, who diverted a mass movement of the working class into an electoral battle between the two parties of big business. To prevent future defeats, it is vital that workers learn the lessons of the Wisconsin recall and break from the two-party system.
The popular energy present last spring, both in Madison and all over the state, carried the potential for real, progressive change. Many of the protesters involved were experiencing their first taste of direct political activity, and countless Wisconsinites threw themselves into the grassroots, on-the-ground work of the recall campaign. At the time, the recall, which would not have been even a possibility without the protests of February and March, was presented by the union leadership and state Democratic politicians as the only way forward for the movement. These activists’ enthusiasm and zeal is evidenced by the nearly one million signatures supporting the recall of the governor gathered around the state in just a few months.
Democrats Offer No Alternative
Walker’s attacks on workers, students, women, the poor and the elderly are terrible, of course, and he deserves to be removed from office for them. However, the Democratic party and its candidate, Tom Barrett, failed to provide any real alternative. As mayor of Milwaukee, Barrett himself made use of Walker’s infamous anti-labor Act 10 to extract concessions from municipal workers under his control. On the campaign trail Barrett put forward virtually no argument in the face of Walker’s austerity program, instead stating that he wouldn’t increases taxes on big business and the rich. In this he essentially turned his back on the mass movement that made his re-match against Walker possible in the first place. To top it all off, while Walker was receiving countless unimaginably large donations from various right-wing foundations and tycoons around the country, the Democratic National Committee refused to put any resources whatsoever into the recall effort and the everyday Wisconsinites working towards it – Wisconsinites who were already left out in the cold once by draconian attacks on labor rights and social services.
Some commentators defended Barrett’s right-wing politics as necessary to win over moderate “swing voters.” For instance, former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz endorsed Barrett, arguing: “A candidate beholden to big unions is no more appealing to independent voters than one who answers to the Koch brothers.” (“How to Win a Recall Election,” The Isthmus, April 12, 2012). But Barrett’s embrace of austerity and “shared sacrifice” served to legitimize Walker’s agenda. Accepting that public sector workers needed to pay for the crisis only reinforced the right-wing propaganda that unions are only interested in taking their members’ money and funding Democrats. This played a key role in allowing Walker to win the election even after the winter protests.
In the heat of the February and March protests, the workers of Wisconsin held the possibility of imminent victory in their hands. Tens of thousands of people converged on Madison to march and rally, but weeks of protests had shown that Walker was not going to back down just in the face of demonstrations. The idea of strike action was widely discussed within the movement. A one-day public-sector general strike, combined with a solid occupation of the Capitol, mass demonstrations, direct action and student walkouts could have been an inspiring launch pad for a serious strategy to defeat Walker. However, even when faced with the dismantling of public sector unions in Wisconsin, the state-level union leadership continually shied away from strike action, diverting the movement into the “safe” channel of the recall.
Socialist Alternative warned at the time that the recall strategy was not as “safe” as the union leaders made it out to be. We said:
“It will not be enough to stop Walker and his corporate offensive. A recall will take months, a year or more (nor is there any guarantee of victory). But that won’t stop the immediate impact of this disastrous bill as public sector unions now face the danger of being dismantled in the coming weeks.” (“Will the Recall be Enough?—We Need to Build a Mass Movement that Can Defeat Walker”)
Unfortunately, our warning was proven correct.
While the unions devoted countless resources to the Democratic Party, union membership has declined in the face of Walker’s legislation. Since the passage of Act 10, statewide membership in the American Federation of Teachers has declined from 17,000 to 11,000 and statewide membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has declined from 62,818 to 28,745. This crisis would still exist even if Barrett had won. Now, more than ever, the labor movement needs to rebuild its membership and stop the attacks coming from Democrats and Republicans alike. It’s up to the rank and file to organize on the shop floor in every workplace to challenge their own leadership as well as the right-wing politicians.
Break from the parties of big business
Ultimately, for labor to succeed it needs to break from the two-party system. While the Democratic and Republican Parties may not be exact clones, they both represent the interests of big business and can’t be relied on as allies of working people. During the recall election, Socialist Alternative called for the labor movement and activist groups to run independent, pro-worker candidates. If all the effort that unions and activists put behind Barrett had gone to a candidate who genuinely represented the interests of workers, the outcome could have been different. A candidate who unequivocally defended the interests of all working people, public and private sector, union and non-union, would have been able to win over “swing voters” far more easily than Barrett’s slogan of “Scott Walker is too extreme for Wisconsin.” Even if Walker still won the recall election, this political independence would have put the unions in a much better position to resist his attacks.
What we need is a new political party that refuses to take corporate money, is democratically controlled by its members, and fights determinedly for the interests of the working-class majority on the issues of jobs, wages, benefits, health care, social programs, housing, war, discrimination, and the environment. In the past, workers have created parties like this in countries around the world. There are now two corporate parties in the U.S. Why shouldn’t we, as working people, have one of our own?
Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative
Make The 1% Pay- Rally In Boston June 16th At Dewey Square
Click on the headline to link to a Facebook event page for the rally and march in Boston against austerity and the 1%.
Markin comment:
Some marches and rallies can be passed up. Others are maybe. But this one is one to attend. Fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. All out!
Markin comment:
Some marches and rallies can be passed up. Others are maybe. But this one is one to attend. Fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. All out!
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928
Click on the headline to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives.
James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928
© Spartacist Publishing Company, 1992. ISBN 0-9633828-1-0; Published by Spartacist Publishing Company, Box 1377 G.P.O. New York, NY 10116.
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand someof 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 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 dispute 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 1930’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 here 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.
James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928
© Spartacist Publishing Company, 1992. ISBN 0-9633828-1-0; Published by Spartacist Publishing Company, Box 1377 G.P.O. New York, NY 10116.
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand someof 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 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 dispute 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 1930’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 here 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.
Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Originsof the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928-A Biography of James P. Cannon-A Review
Spartacist English edition No. 60
Autumn 2007
A Review
Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Originsof the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928
A Biography of James P. Cannon
The publication of a major biography of James P. Cannon, a founding American Communist and the foremost leader of American Trotskyism for its first 40-plus years, is a significant event for Marxist revolutionaries. Cannon was the finest communist leader yet produced in the United States. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)—which has its origins in the Revolutionary Tendency, a faction expelled from Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1963-64—claims Cannon as a central revolutionary forebear. At his death in 1974, Cannon was the National Chairman emeritus of the SWP, which had de facto abandoned the Trotskyist program more than ten years earlier. But in his prime Cannon had the evident capacity to lead the proletarian revolution in America to victory.
James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 by Bryan Palmer, a well-known social historian who is currently a professor at Canada’s Trent University, is quite good—far better than one would expect from a sympathetic, but nonetheless academic, source. The Prometheus Research Library, library and archive of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S., section of the ICL, was among the many institutions and individuals that provided Palmer with assistance in preparing this volume, as he notes in the book’s “Acknowledgements.”
Palmer’s 542-page volume, which covers Cannon’s early years through his 1928 expulsion from the Communist Party, is a substantial addition to the existing published material on Cannon’s political evolution and his leadership role in the first decade of American Communism, when it attracted the best American working-class fighters and before it was homogenized into a rigid, non-revolutionary Stalinist dogmatism. The Communist Party had been formed with the intent of following the model of Russia’s Bolsheviks, who led the world’s first successful workers revolution, the October Revolution of 1917. Those who flocked to the Bolshevik cause in the U.S. included Cannon, a former member of the Socialist Party (SP) and the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The study of this period of Cannon’s history as a communist is critical for revolutionaries not only in the U.S. but internationally. As Cannon noted:
“Out of the Communist Party in the United States came the nucleus of the Fourth International in this country. Therefore, we should say that the early period of the Communist movement in this country belongs to us; that we are tied to it by indissoluble bonds; that there is an uninterrupted continuity from the early days of the Communist movement, its brave struggles against persecution, its sacrifices, mistakes, faction fights and degeneration to the eventual resurgence of the movement under the banner of Trotskyism.”
—Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)
And Cannon stayed the course, becoming a leader of the Fourth International when it was founded in 1938. For various historical reasons, the American Trotskyists became a mainstay of the Fourth International. They had the advantage of operating in conditions of relative stability, unlike a number of other Opposition groups, which were crushed by state repression before or during World War II. Moreover, Cannon, unlike other prominent figures in Trotsky’s International Left Opposition (ILO), brought with him a factional following that had worked together for years in the Communist Party.
Palmer’s solidly researched volume helps round out the picture drawn in the late Theodore Draper’s essential two-volume history of the early American Communist movement, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960). One of the many ex-Communists who became anti-Communists, Draper nonetheless maintained a feel for the concerns and struggles of Communist cadre. He was aided in his research by Cannon, many of whose substantial letters to Draper were subsequently selected for publication as The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962). These letters fleshed out Cannon’s earlier recollections of the period in the first chapters of The History of American Trotskyism.
Palmer reports that Draper consciously downplayed Cannon’s contributions to his second volume. Nonetheless, Draper paid tribute to Cannon, writing a preface to First Ten Years. Explaining why Cannon’s memory of events in the 1920s was significantly better than that of his contemporaries, Draper concluded, “Unlike other communist leaders of his generation, Jim Cannon wanted to remember. This portion of his life still lives for him because he has not killed it within himself.”
Palmer’s biography supplements Cannon’s own published speeches and writings from the period under study, including those compiled in Notebook of an Agitator (1958) and the more internally oriented party material published in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism, Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 (1992). The latter volume was published by the Prometheus Research Library, which acquired a substantial collection of Cannon material from the 1920s in preparing the book.
The PRL introduction to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism noted that the archives of the Communist International (CI) in Moscow were likely to contain additional documents by Cannon from the 1920s. Shortly after the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92, PRL researchers were given access to the archives and were able to make copies of previously unavailable papers by and about Cannon from the archives of the Comintern, the American party, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU)—also known as the Profintern—and the International Red Aid. Palmer received permission from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) to use the PRL’s copies of their material in researching his book. Palmer’s frequent references to Communist Party Political Committee minutes contrast favorably to the biographies of William Z. Foster by Edward P. Johanningsmeier (Forging American Communism, the Life of William Z. Foster [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]) and James R. Barrett (William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999]). Johanningsmeier and Barrett write as if the factional battles of the period were incidental to the party’s trade-union work, with which they are overwhelmingly concerned.
Palmer was also able to use the James P. Cannon Papers, which were deposited by the SWP at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, as well as substantial documentary material on early American Communism from other libraries. Palmer collected an impressive amount of material documenting Cannon’s little-known early years and his activities in the IWW. His portrayal of Cannon’s leadership of the International Labor Defense, including the years-long campaign in defense of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti until their execution in 1927, is second to none. Palmer paints a picture of James P. Cannon that is not fundamentally new, but it is significantly enhanced.
An “Age of Innocence”?
We take exception, however, to Palmer’s conclusion that Cannon represented the “revolutionary Left in its age of innocence up to 1928,” free of the “worldly-wise knowledges that have calloused the politics of our time, undermining belief in the possibility of thoroughgoing transformation, dismissing the broad capacity of working-class people to effect material change, containing the expansiveness of radicalism in various liberal accommodations to ‘the art of the possible’.” Palmer attributes this supposed loss of innocence to the corrupting and corrosive effects of Stalinism.
Corruption and rejection of revolutionary purpose in the American workers movement preceded the Russian Revolution and its Stalinist degeneration; the Communist movement was founded in rebellion against the reformist Socialists and trade-union bureaucrats who insisted on the politics of the “possible.” The rise of American imperialism and its huge superprofits had led to the development of a labor aristocracy that gave rise to a particularly venal trade-union bureaucracy at the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). American Marxist Daniel De Leon popularized the description of the AFL tops as “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,” a term later picked up by Lenin. Revulsion at the open racism and reformist municipal “sewer socialism” of Victor Berger and his ilk in the heterogeneous Socialist Party propelled Cannon out of its ranks and into the IWW in 1911, on the road that would eventually lead him to communism.
The idea of Cannon as an innocent stands in contrast to the description written by West Indian poet Claude McKay of Cannon’s demeanor in fighting for the liquidation of the underground Communist Party in favor of the legal Workers Party at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. McKay wrote that Cannon “had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in a radical way” (A Long Way From Home [New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969]).
Cannon was an authentic American communist leader. As noted in the PRL introduction to Early Years of American Communism, “If Cannon, feeling at a dead end in the internal factional wars, was able to make the leap in 1928 to Trotsky’s programmatic and international understanding of Stalinism, it was in large part because he had tried, in the preceding period, to chart a path for the party based on revolutionary communism.” Only with the help of Trotsky’s seminal 1928 Critique of the draft program of the Comintern (subsequently published in The Third International After Lenin) did Cannon extricate himself from the Stalinizing party to continue the struggle that he had taken up early in his youth—the fight to lead the American working people to socialist revolution. The Third International After Lenin was the de facto founding document of the International Left Opposition. Cannon’s recruitment to the ILO—along with a good part of the faction he had led—was a tremendous validation of Trotsky’s struggle against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
Draper vs. New Left Historians
Palmer astutely realized that a biography of Cannon, who had largely been ignored by historians since Draper wrote his two volumes, would be a way to cut through the schism that has dominated the academic study of American Communism. This debate pits anti-Communist historians like Draper and, more actively, Draper’s epigones such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, against New Left-derived historians like Maurice Isserman. (Klehr is the author of a major study of the CP in the 1930s, The Heyday of American Communism [New York: Basic Books, 1984], while Isserman’s major work in the New Left mode is Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War [Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982].) Klehr, Haynes and their ilk, in whose hands Draper’s thorough research has degenerated into shallow anti-Communist muckraking, paint a picture of American Communism as little more than a Soviet espionage network that slavishly followed the foreign policy dictates of the Kremlin from its inception. In contrast, the New Left historians, many of whom were influenced by parents or other mentors who were activists in the Stalinized CP after 1928, argue that the political line coming from Moscow played at most a secondary role in what was mainly an indigenous movement of the American left.
Palmer’s Introduction, based on an earlier article by him (“Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism,” American Communist History, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2003), motivates his biography of Cannon as a way to transcend the sterility of that academic debate by injecting the question of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, i.e., of Stalinism. The breadth and depth with which Palmer surveys the existing works on American Communist history—both secondary histories and firsthand memoirs—is very impressive, as is the sheer weight of documentary material he marshals. More casual readers will find the 155 pages of footnotes more than they can handle, but Palmer’s detailed list of sources and comments on them will be an important resource for historians of American Communism for some time to come.
Palmer writes from the point of view of one who is sympathetic not to some kind of ersatz academic “Marxism,” but to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution itself. Such sympathy has been nonexistent among academic historians of American Communism, as Palmer himself noted in an earlier reply to his critics:
“Almost nobody in academic circles in the year 2003 is willing to stand the ground of the original Bolshevik tradition. The study of US Communism is no exception to this. Recognition of the colossal and overwhelmingly positive accomplishments of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is side-stepped…. The immense resources and programmatic guidance of this Bolshevism, willingly given to the cause of the only force which could sustain the gains of October, the world revolution and its armies of proletarian internationalism, are quibbled about, as if the early Communist International’s motivation was nothing more than ‘domination’ and ‘foreign control’.”
—Palmer, “Communist History: Seeing It Whole. A Reply to Critics,” American Communist History, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2003
It is unfortunate, then, that Palmer situates Cannon as a leader of something called the “revolutionary Left,” presenting communism as part of a continuum of “Left” organizations. Even prefaced by the word “revolutionary,” “Left” has only an amorphous, relative political meaning (Left vs. Right), with no class content. In current as well as historical usage, “Left” includes not only working-class political formations, but bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties as well. It is thus a notion that encompasses reformist class collaboration—the working class is seen simply as a constituent part of all “progressive” forces.
The formation of the Socialist Party in 1901 represented a more widespread recognition that the working class needed its own political party as distinct from the bourgeois parties; it was formed through a merger of the Social Democratic Party—which included a split led by Eugene Debs from the bourgeois Populists—with Morris Hillquit’s split from Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party. The formation of the American Communist movement represented a giant step forward from the SP because it recognized the need for a clear political break not just with the bourgeois parties but also with reformist currents within the working class. Cannon wrote:
“The launching of the Communist Party in 1919 represented, not simply a break with the old Socialist Party, but even more important a break with the whole conception of a common party of revolutionists and opportunists. That signified a new beginning for American socialism, far more important historically than everything that had happened before, including the organization of the Socialist Party in 1901. There can be no return to the outlived and discredited experiment of the past.”
—Cannon, “Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Movement of His Time,” reprinted in The First Ten Years of American Communism
Palmer’s use of “revolutionary Left” reflects a failure to make a qualitative distinction between communism and the radical-populist, social-democratic, anarchist and syndicalist movements that were often intertwined in the left internationally before the Bolshevik Revolution. Palmer’s dissolution of communism—the program of the revolutionary international working class for the overthrow of capitalism—into the amorphous “Left” is a bow in the direction of the pervasive retrogression of political consciousness that followed the destruction of the world’s first workers state in 1991-92. This retrogression is evident not only in academic circles but, especially, in the ostensibly Marxist movement itself. A prime example is Alan Wald’s review of Palmer’s book (“The Story of James P. Cannon, A Revolutionary Life,” Against the Current, July/August 2007), which questions the applicability in the 21st century of the program stemming from the Russian Revolution.
The Significance of the Russian Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution, in the words of a 1939 “Speech on the Russian Question” by Cannon, “took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality” (Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party [1943]). It vindicated the Marxist understanding, reasserted in Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917), that the bourgeois state could not be reformed to serve the interests of the workers but had to be smashed and replaced by a workers state, the dictatorship of the proletariat. It demonstrated, as Cannon makes clear above, that the proletariat needed a disciplined vanguard party based on a clear revolutionary program if it was to conquer state power. Cannon and the other co-founders of the American Communist movement, many of whom had long histories in the American Socialist and syndicalist movements, made a political leap—at least in intent—when they decided that the experience of the October Revolution was decisive. This involved not simply recognizing that the revolution in Russia had won, but grasping that working-class revolutionaries had to apply the lessons of that victory to the American terrain.
This was easier said than done, and the misunderstandings that ran through the early American Communist movement—the insistence on an “underground” party, the advocacy of “revolutionary” unions counterposed to the reformist-led trade unions, the refusal to run candidates for bourgeois parliamentary office—were enormous. These misconceptions were not limited to the American party. In his seminal work written for the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, addressing ultraleft tendencies in Holland, Britain, Germany and elsewhere, Lenin stressed the singular experience that led to the crystallization of a Bolshevik vanguard party in tsarist Russia:
“Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?…
“For about half a century—approximately from the forties to the nineties of the last century—progressive thought in Russia, oppressed by a most brutal and reactionary tsarism, sought eagerly for a correct revolutionary theory, and followed with the utmost diligence and thoroughness each and every ‘last word’ in this sphere in Europe and America. Russia achieved Marxism—the only correct revolutionary theory—through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment, verification, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.
“On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate ‘last word’ of American and European political experience.”
—V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920)
During the latter half of the 19th century, two generations of Russian intellectuals underwent intense political ferment in search of means to throw off the stultifying tsarist yoke. Out of this ferment the most able gravitated to revolutionary Marxism. These intellectuals, in turn, led the nascent proletariat of the tsarist empire in the same direction. The 1903 split in the Russian Social Democracy between Lenin’s “hard” Bolsheviks and the “soft” Mensheviks, originally over the narrow question of how to define party membership, anticipated the subsequent definitive split carried through by Lenin between Bolshevism and Menshevik labor reformism in 1912. The key importance of a political and organizational break from reformism was only generalized by Lenin in 1914, when—after the ignominious collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism in the face of World War I—he called for a Third International. The new International was founded in early 1919, 18 months after the Bolshevik victory in Russia.
The necessity of a break with reformism was not the only lesson the Bolsheviks had to impart. The revolutionary Russian Social Democrats (the Bolsheviks adopted the title “Communist” only in 1918) had had to find a way to mobilize the peasantry—the vast majority of the tsarist empire—behind the proletariat. This was key to the Russian victory. They also had to come up with a revolutionary proletarian approach to the national question—only some 50 percent of the population of the tsarist empire was ethnic Russian. If the Bolsheviks had not successfully grappled with these issues, it would have shipwrecked the Russian Revolution. The Polish Communist Party, for example, was sterilized in the postwar period by its failure to develop a revolutionary approach to the peasantry, and paid a price for its earlier inability to deal with the Polish national question.
Lenin speaks of the quick succession of political conditions in Russia that compelled the Bolsheviks to develop a variety of tactics. There were other places in East Europe where conditions of material backwardness and severe repression meant that Marxist-inclined workers were not offered the luxury of parliamentary reformism. Many of the Social Democratic parties of the Balkans also had merit (e.g., Dimitar Blagoev’s Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party and the Serbian Social Democrats, which were the only other parties in belligerent countries besides the Bolsheviks to vote against war credits from the beginning of World War I). In contrast, the relative bourgeois-democratic stability that had prevailed before the war in the English-speaking world worked against the possibility of revolutionaries transcending the divisions among radical populism, anarcho-syndicalism and parliamentary socialism as the Bolsheviks did.
Palmer understands that the overwhelming authority the Bolsheviks enjoyed in the early Communist International stemmed from the fact that they had much to teach, but he gives short shrift to the substance of those lessons. He does not, for example, include any discussion of the collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism as the war began. This is where Palmer’s use of “revolutionary Left” does more to obscure than to illuminate the political evolution of those who came to found American Communism, feeding into his insistence that the 1920s was an “age of innocence.”
The Corruption Didn’t All Come from Moscow
Palmer sympathizes not simply with the October Revolution, but with Trotsky’s fight against the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. This degeneration grew out of the utter devastation to which an already economically backward Russia had been subjected as a result of World War I and the bloody Civil War that erupted a few months after the Bolsheviks took power. The proletariat that had made the revolution was decimated, with the better elements being drawn into the Red Army and party and state administration. Conditions of great material scarcity produced strong objective pressures toward bureaucratism, which had an impact on both the party and state. These were compounded by the isolation of the young workers state, felt especially after the defeat of a revolutionary opportunity in Germany in 1923. Amid the profound demoralization that swept through the Soviet proletariat, a growing bureaucratic caste seized political power from the working class, ostentatiously rigging the delegate elections to the January 1924 Thirteenth Conference of the Soviet party and thus stifling the voice of the Bolshevik Opposition led by Trotsky. While an account of this process is outside the scope of his book, Palmer correctly points to the adoption of the dogma of “socialism in one country,” first promulgated by Stalin in late 1924, as key to the CI’s abandonment of its revolutionary purpose.
The degeneration of the Russian Revolution was a process that began in 1924 but did not end there. Palmer correctly distinguishes the revolutionary program and principles that characterized the decisions of the Communist International in 1919-22 from the zigzags of the degenerating CI in 1924-28, first under Zinoviev and then Bukharin. As Palmer wrote in his earlier essay in American Communist History, “The Comintern was invested with a powerful and justified authority, but it was not, before 1923, regarded as some ‘sacrosanct deity’” (“Communist History: Seeing It Whole. A Reply to Critics”).
Palmer understands that the ouster of Bukharin in 1929 and Stalin’s domestic turn to forced collectivization of the peasantry—in the face of an imminent counterrevolutionary threat by the kulaks (the wealthier peasants), who had grown emboldened by Stalin/Bukharin’s conciliationist policies—dictated the sterile, sectarian adventurism of the Comintern’s 1928-34 “Third Period.” During the Third Period, all parties (not just the American) abandoned reformist-led trade unions in favor of building “revolutionary” ones. A useful documentary record of the CI’s degeneration can be found in the two volumes by Helmut Gruber, a history professor (now emeritus) at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York: International Communism in the Era of Lenin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967) and Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974).
The adoption of the popular-front policy at the CI’s Seventh World Congress in 1935, which mandated that the Communist parties seek out class-collaborationist alliances with putatively “democratic” and “anti-fascist” wings of the bourgeoisie, signaled the final descent of the Communist International into reformism, though there was a brief period of left rhetoric during the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939-41. In 1943, Stalin ignominiously and formally interred the CI as a hindrance to continuing his World War II alliance with the “democratic” imperialists. Most Communist parties retained their allegiance to Moscow into the 1970s, making them not very desirable governmental partners as far as the imperialist bourgeoisies were concerned. But the participation of the Communist parties in France and Italy in popular-front governments in the immediate postwar period played a critical role in staving off proletarian revolutions in those countries.
An understanding of this process of programmatic degeneration and its link to the fights going on in the Russian party is the beginning of wisdom for any serious study of Communist history. If Palmer’s account of this process in the 1920s has a flaw, it is in its overemphasis on the process of Bolshevization and what he calls “Zinoviev’s appetite for bureaucratic centralism” rather than on the political drift away from a revolutionary program.
Palmer insists that it was the “bureaucratization and triumphant Stalinization of the Comintern” which “lowered a final curtain on the innocence of the revolutionary Left in 1928.” He ignores the very real objective pressures in the United States that were also pushing the party away from a revolutionary purpose. In fact, no party of the Comintern degenerated simply under the influence of Moscow. There was a co-degeneration as the 1920s went on. Though the particulars were very different in the Soviet Union, the same underlying objective pressure affected the cadre of the Western Communist parties—the recession of the post-WWI revolutionary wave and the stabilization of the capitalist world after the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923. It was the relative lack of revolutionary opportunities that underlay both the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the corruption of the Comintern’s national parties, as Cannon recognized:
“The party was influenced from two sides—nationally and internationally—and this time adversely in each case. Its decline and degeneration in this period, no less than its earlier rise, must be accounted for primarily, not by national or international factors alone, but by the two together. These combined influences, at this time working for conservatism, bore down with crushing weight on the still infant Communist Party of the United States.
“It was difficult to be a working revolutionist in America in those days, to sustain the agitation that brought no response, to repeat the slogans which found no echo. The party leaders were not crudely corrupted by personal benefits of the general prosperity; but they were affected indirectly by the sea of indifference around them….
“The party became receptive to the ideas of Stalinism, which were saturated with conservatism, because the party cadres themselves were unconsciously yielding to their own conservative environment.”
—Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism
Cannon’s Formative Years
Cannon wrote little about his youth and upbringing in Rosedale, Kansas (now a part of Kansas City), but Palmer uncovered what he could about Cannon’s working-class Irish immigrant parents and family. His mother, Ann, who died when Cannon was 14, was his father’s second wife. Palmer has managed to unravel Jim Cannon’s relations to his five siblings and half-siblings, formerly quite murky. Cannon’s father, John, was only intermittently employed, but the young Jim sometimes went with him to work in the building trades. Cannon’s right thumb was smashed in an accident at his father’s work site, resulting in the amputation of the top of the digit. This minor disfigurement was seldom mentioned by Cannon.
Cannon’s father later left the working class to open an insurance office and real estate business. Palmer insists that in later life Cannon embellished his father’s proletarian credentials. Regardless, Cannon was won to socialist politics by his father, and his upbringing was typical of the Irish immigrant proletariat—Jim left school at 13 to work first at a packing house, then on the railroads and subsequently in the printing trades. He hung out in pool halls and bars with other young Irish workingmen. Palmer uses Cannon’s unpublished semi-autobiographical fiction—written in the 1950s—to throw light on his early youth and social attitudes. Given the paucity of other sources, this is probably merited. But one can imagine the very private Cannon squirming at some of Palmer’s suppositions.
What was unusual in Cannon’s youth was the fact that at age 17, when he was already supporting himself and living on his own, he decided to go back to high school. Cannon had been sympathetic to socialism since participating in the 1906-07 defense campaign for Western Federation of Miners leaders William “Big Bill” Haywood and Charles Moyer, falsely accused of murder. But Cannon joined the Socialist Party only in 1908, shortly after enrolling in high school. Cannon found it difficult to support himself and attend school; he attended for only three years and did not graduate. Palmer acquired the yearbooks of Rosedale High for the relevant years, gleaning details about Cannon’s high school career and obtaining a picture of the young man as part of the Rosedale Society of Debate in 1910.
Cannon made a serious study of oratory in high school, developing himself as a powerful public speaker. Leaving high school, Cannon joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911, cultivating his speaking ability as a soapbox agitator on the streets of Kansas City, and subsequently as an itinerant Wobbly (as IWW members were known). Later, in the Communist Party, Cannon was much in demand as a speaker. Cannon could explain complicated political concepts in easily understandable language, as the material in Notebook of an Agitator amply demonstrates. He excelled as a communist propagandist.
A young teacher, Lista Makimson, was the mentor of the debate society. She and Cannon developed a romantic relationship while he was still in school; they married in 1913. Palmer debunks the myth that Lista was greatly Cannon’s senior—they were separated by only seven years. Cannon’s relationship with an older woman, as well as his membership in the IWW, where agitation for non-conformist ideas overlapped with labor radicalism, contradicts Palmer’s assertion that Cannon “seemed to embody an odd fusion of traditionalist, Victorian notions of gender relations and sexuality and a bohemian, avant-garde disdain for material acquisitions and the trappings of money.”
Cannon certainly had a disdain for material acquisitions. He was also a private man, especially about sexual matters, as were many of his day and age. But he traveled in bohemian circles, and Palmer himself recounts Cannon’s enthusiastic remembrances of a speech on “free love” by anarchist Emma Goldman. Jim and Lista married only because it looked as though he was going to spend six months in jail for his labor activities; they subsequently had two children. Cannon left Lista in 1923 for fellow Communist Rose Karsner, who became his lifelong companion. He and Rose only married at the end of their lives, when they thought it necessary in order to get full Social Security benefits. This is hardly evidence of “Victorian notions of gender relations.”
Palmer’s complaint that Cannon practiced a “conventional monogamy” and “never really engaged with the potentially transformative gender politics of a militantly feminist approach to the personal realm” says more about the postmodern conceits of academic milieus than it does about Cannon. Ted Morgan’s A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999) is more of an extended gossip column than a serious attempt to examine the life of this unprincipled adventurer who latched on to the Communist movement in his youth only to become a CIA operative later in life. But Lovestone’s private affairs, unearthed by Morgan, show that eschewal of “conventional monogamy” is hardly a ticket to “transformative gender politics,” whatever they may be.
Cannon was elected Kansas City delegate to the Seventh National Convention of the IWW in 1912. Here he caught the eye of legendary Wobbly leader Vincent St. John, who subsequently sent him on the road as an itinerant organizer. Palmer writes, “More than any other single individual, St. John put Cannon on the track of being a professional revolutionary.” Palmer has discovered much that is new here, and his book excels in the account of Cannon’s life as a Wobbly. Cannon went to Newcastle, Pennsylvania, where he helped produce the IWW paper Solidarity. From there, in early 1913, St. John sent Cannon to Akron, where a strike for union organization had erupted among the rubber workers, both native-born and immigrant. According to Palmer, “Cannon became one of the central IWW figures writing for the rebel press, appealing for funds, and taking the struggle of Akron’s workers beyond the boundaries of Ohio.” With the defeat of the Akron strike, Cannon was active in a manufacturing strike in Peoria (where he and Lista married). Palmer reports that by the end of the summer of 1913 “Cannon was one of only sixteen Wobbly agitators who were recognized by the General Executive Board of the IWW as having ‘voluntary credentials’ as itinerant organizers.” From Peoria, Cannon moved on to organizing a strike by immigrant iron-ore dock workers in Duluth. Here Cannon was pretty much in charge of the IWW’s efforts, working with the famous Frank Little.
Palmer writes that Lista’s marriage to Cannon precluded her working any longer at Rosedale High. Cannon was thus forced to return to Kansas City in the fall of 1913. He worked on a local syndicalist paper, The Toiler, and helped to lead a major free speech fight, though because of his domestic responsibilities he kept himself off the front lines in order to avoid arrest. He became, as Palmer puts it, “a member of what some Wobblies rather condescendingly referred to as ‘the homeguard’.” Palmer says that Cannon grew increasingly disillusioned as the Wobblies concentrated more on organizing rural workers than the industrial proletariat; he was even more disillusioned at the lack of a coordinated defense campaign to counter the state raids and arrests that broke upon the Wobblies after the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Palmer concludes that Cannon’s “homeguard years as a disillusioned Wobbly, then, were among the worst of Cannon’s life, whereas his year as a hobo rebel, immersed in the rough-and-tumble class struggles of his time, was a period of his fondest memories and most prideful accomplishments.”
The Founding of American Communism
It was the October Revolution that propelled Cannon back on the road to being a professional revolutionary. Seeing the “anti-political” IWW crushed by the action of the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party committed to political activity led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the Socialist Party in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. Palmer adds only a few new details to the account of Cannon’s role in the founding of the American Communist movement, divided at first into two parties—the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party—both dominated by ultraleftism.
One of the few native-born American radicals who joined the largely immigrant Communist movement, and one of the very few with real experience in workers struggles, Cannon was among the first to assimilate the lessons of Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism. From the outset, Cannon opposed the American Communists’ “dual unionist” insistence on the formation of revolutionary unions, and he quickly rose to prominence in the fight against those who believed the party should be underground in principle. He was appointed editor of the Cleveland-based Toiler, which subsequently became the Daily Worker. Cannon was the chairman of the above-ground Workers Party when it was founded in December 1921. (The party changed its name to Workers [Communist] Party in 1925 and to Communist Party in 1929.)
Ironically, the Comintern’s campaign against the ultraleftism that infected the young Communist parties led to the reversal of a correct position that had been adopted by sections of the American Communist movement: opposition to running candidates for executive office. The program adopted by the United Communist Party (UCP) at its founding in May 1920, reasserting a position in the September 1919 manifesto of the Communist Party of America, declared:
“The United Communist Party participates in election campaigns and parliamentary action only for the purpose of revolutionary propaganda. Nominations for public office and participation in elections are limited to legislative bodies, such as the national congress, state legislatures and city councils.”
—UCP Program, reprinted in Revolutionary Radicalism, Lusk Commission Report to
New York State Senate, submitted 24 April 1920
This position indicated a healthy, and correct, revulsion with the arch-reformist practice of the Socialist Party, whose ranks included 56 mayors and 22 police officials in 1912. The UCP program, however, wrongly declared that Communist representatives elected to legislative bodies “will not introduce nor support reform measures.”
As we point out elsewhere in this issue (see “Down With Executive Offices!”, page 20), in combatting the ultraleftists at the Second Congress, the distinction between executive and legislative positions was lost. In the wake of the contradictory Second Congress theses on parliamentarism, the plank against running for executive office—evidently a position pushed in particular by C.E. Ruthenberg—became a subject of debate in the American party. The following year, in the lead-up to the December 1921 founding of the Workers Party, the Communists in New York City ran Ben Gitlow for mayor. Cannon had a big hand in advocating and orchestrating this campaign. A Comintern document written for the August 1922 underground party convention declared, “The communists must participate as revolutionists in all general election campaigns, municipal, state and congressional, as well as presidential” (“Next Tasks of the Communist Party in America,” printed in Reds in America [New York City: Beckwith Press, 1924]).
Five months after the Workers Party was founded, Cannon left for Moscow to serve as American representative to the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI). Cannon’s seven-month stay in Soviet Russia was a critical experience in deepening his understanding of Bolshevism and the importance of the Communist International. It also provided him with a yardstick by which to later measure the degeneration of the Comintern. In a 1955 letter to Draper quoted by Palmer, Cannon recalled:
“I never was worth a damn on a mission to Moscow after my first trip in 1922. Then everything was open and aboveboard. A clear-cut political issue was presented by both sides in open debate and it was settled straightforwardly, on a political basis, without discrimination or favoritism to the factions involved, and without undisclosed reasons, arising from internal Russian questions, motivating the decision and determining the attitude toward the leaders of the contending factions. That was the Lenin-Trotsky Comintern, and I did all right there. But after 1924 everything was different.”
—Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism
Palmer adds new and sometimes fascinating detail in his account of Cannon’s Moscow activities. Cannon’s November 1922 speech to the American Commission (see “We Want the Comintern to Give Us Assistance,” page 44) was but the culmination of a long and trying battle against those who insisted on maintaining an illegal Communist Party parallel to the legal Workers Party. The victory by the so-called “Liquidators” in Moscow laid the basis for the American Communists to finally really engage in the American class struggle.
The Comintern and the Black Question
The American Communist movement—like that in most other industrial countries—had been formed on the crest of the wave of labor radicalism that swept much of the globe at the end of World War I. Trade-union membership doubled in the U.S. between 1916 and 1920, and the end of the war saw a massive strike wave involving large numbers of unskilled immigrant workers for the first time. The war years had seen an 80 percent fall in immigration and a mass influx of blacks from the American South to the North, beginning the transformation of the black population from rural sharecroppers into an integral part of the industrial working class. The mass migration of black people had interacted with the pre-existing division between the largely Protestant, native-born white workers and the overwhelmingly Catholic workers from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe, leading over the next two decades to the displacement of religious and ethnic hostilities by anti-black racism as the central divide in the proletariat.
The significance of the black question was little understood by revolutionaries in the U.S. It was the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky that brought to the American workers movement the crucial understanding that the struggle for black emancipation is a central, strategic question for the American workers revolution. In his essay “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” Cannon writes:
“The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism....
“The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the over-all program—and to start doing something about it....
“Everything new and progressive on the Negro question came from Moscow, after the revolution of 1917, and as a result of the revolution—not only for the American communists who responded directly, but for all others concerned with the question.”
—Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism
By 1917, almost one-quarter of the 45,000 workers who labored in the Chicago stockyards were black. Black workers were a significant section of the workforce in steel as well, making up some 12-14 percent of the workers at the key Homestead mill. Yet most AFL unions refused to admit black workers or else organized them in separate Jim Crow locals. The first major efforts to bring unskilled laborers into the AFL—in the Chicago stockyards and in the steel industry nationally—were led at the end of the war years by William Z. Foster, a longtime syndicalist activist. Foster had broken with the IWW in 1911, opposing its strategy of building revolutionary unions in favor of “boring from within” (i.e., working to undermine the AFL bureaucracy from within the craft unions). But Foster also bowed to the reactionary Gompers bureaucracy on the question of support to the imperialist world war, going so far as to sell war bonds.
The stockyard organizing drive, concentrated at first among the Slavic immigrant workers, made some initial headway in organizing black workers—some 4,000-5,000 were union members by 1919. An integrated union march through Chicago’s South Side in July 1919 gave promise of success; but the brutal race riots that swept the city three weeks later destroyed the interracial organizing efforts. A disastrous strike against a wage cut in 1921, in which black workers largely scabbed, wiped out the gains that had been won in the earlier struggles. The organizing drive among steel workers led to 250,000 workers, almost half the total workforce in steel, walking off the job in September 1919. Within ten days, 14 workers had been killed. Troops were brought in to occupy Gary, Indiana. While the strike was initially solid among the unskilled immigrant workers, few black workers joined and many native-born skilled workers scabbed. The strike had collapsed in the Midwest by November and was broken nationally by the middle of December, though it was not officially called off until the following month.
The 1919 defeats, the result of state repression and racist reaction, occurred as the American Communists were first breaking from the Socialist Party. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. government began a wave of repression aimed at the Communists. Beginning in November 1919 and lasting over four months, the “Palmer Raids” (named for then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) involved raids of Communist offices, closing of newspapers and mass arrests of Communists, anarchists and other leftist workers (over 6,000 in the first week of January 1920 alone). Foreign-born Communists and other radicals were deported en masse. Many leading Communists were jailed on “criminal syndicalism” charges. The repression quickly abated, though many leading Communists remained under indictment well into the decade. But the Palmer Raids gave credence to the ultraleftists’ undergroundism, leading to the prolonged debate on whether or not the fledgling Communist movement could function openly.
The Early TUEL
By the time the Workers Party was founded in December 1921, it was clear that American Communists could publicly propagate their views. The American bourgeoisie was largely satisfied that the smashing of the organizing drives and the repression in 1919-20 had had the desired effect. Republican Warren G. Harding was elected president in November 1920 on a program of returning the country to “normalcy.” A national strike by railway shop workers in 1922 was the last gasp of postwar labor militancy. The strike centrally involved 256,000 machinists (members of the International Association of Machinists [IAM] and maintenance workers); Workers Party supporters played a role in helping to lead it. The strike was defeated by the scabbing by some of the AFL craft brotherhoods, and by a sweeping government injunction, issued at the request of U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty, that basically forbade the striking unions to take any action to further the strike (known as the Daugherty injunction). This set the tone for repeated use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against the unions in the ’20s. The union-busting offensive combined with a resurgence of racist terror (the Ku Klux Klan had several million members in the 1920s) and anti-immigrant legislation to make the 1920s a decade of racist, juridical and anti-labor reaction.
The American Communists paid a high price for this period of reaction—higher than they did for the intense repression of 1919-20—which led to great pressures toward abandoning the revolutionary purpose on which the Communist movement had been founded. Objective conditions in the 1920s dictated that the Communist Party would encompass only a small minority of the working class. The American Communists, including Cannon, were themselves slow to recognize this, and the twists and turns dictated by the Stalinizing Comintern in the latter half of the ’20s didn’t help.
It looked at first as if the Workers Party was destined for great success in the labor movement. Having been recruited by former fellow syndicalist Earl Browder to be part of a labor delegation to the Soviet Union in 1921, William Z. Foster was won to Bolshevism by all he saw and experienced in his three-and-a-half months there. After attending the founding conference of the Profintern in Moscow, Foster returned to Chicago in the late summer and joined the Communist Party, at the time still an underground organization.
Under the influence of Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, the American Communists had abandoned their dual-unionist perspective; their policy now dovetailed with Foster’s long-held strategy, though not without some differences over his rigid opposition to any trade-union organizing outside the AFL framework. The Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), which Foster had founded in late 1920, was placed at the service of the Workers Party and functioned as its trade-union arm from early 1922. Foster’s own party membership was to remain a secret until 1923, and the TUEL was headquartered in Chicago, separate from the party headquarters in New York. Foster retained the close ties he had cultivated with John Fitzpatrick’s Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), under whose aegis he had begun his organizing campaigns. An ardent Irish nationalist and trade-union “progressive,” Fitzpatrick had for a while been advocating the formation of a labor party. He was a thorn in the side of the AFL bureaucracy under Samuel Gompers. The TUEL received substantial protection from Gompers’ virulent anti-Communism because of Foster’s work for the CFL.
Organized around the journal Labor Herald, the TUEL had no dues or membership structure so as to avoid any charge of dual unionism (its public income came from literature sales and donations, and it also received Comintern subsidies). It fought “to develop trade unions from their present antiquated and stagnant condition into modern, powerful labor organizations capable of waging successful warfare against Capital” (William Z. Foster, “The Principles and Program of the Trade Union Educational League,” Labor Herald, March 1922). Advocating the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers republic, the TUEL sought the affiliation of American trade unions to the Red International of Labor Unions. The TUEL program did not mention the Jim Crow restrictions that kept blacks out of the AFL craft unions; nor did it oppose the draconian restrictions the government had just imposed on immigration. This failure to confront the anti-black and anti-immigrant prejudices common in the working class was a real weakness. The fight against anti-black racism was a question that the American Communists, under prodding from the Comintern, were only beginning to address.
The TUEL saw as its immediate task an aggressive campaign for the amalgamation of AFL craft unions into unions organized on an industry-wide basis, raising the slogan, “amalgamation or annihilation.” Beginning with a motion for amalgamation in the CFL in March 1922, the TUEL managed in the succeeding 18 months to get amalgamation motions passed in 16 international unions, 17 state federations, many city labor councils and thousands of union locals.
Grappling with the Labor Party Question
As they came up from the underground, the American Communists began to grapple with the issue of whether or not to call for a labor party. In a chapter appropriately titled “Pepper Spray,” Palmer details the ways in which the Workers Party under the tutelage of a Hungarian-born Communist named Jószef Pogány (known in the U.S. as John Pepper) made a mess of it.
In “Left-Wing” Communism Lenin advocated that the British Communists affiliate to the British Labour Party (BLP) and give it critical support in the coming elections. Though its program and leadership were reformist, the BLP was based on affiliated trade unions; it had been formed as an expressly working-class party. Lenin termed it a “bourgeois workers party.” In order to maintain their hold on the working class in the face of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar radicalization, the BLP tops were talking left and had in 1918 adopted a provision in the party constitution (Clause Four) calling for wholesale nationalization of industry. Lenin advocated that the Communists vote for the BLP—while retaining their complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity—to help prove to the masses that once elected to government the BLP tops would in fact betray the interests of the working class. This exposure would facilitate the Communists winning the working-class base of the Labour Party.
Lenin had brought up in his discussions with American delegates at both the Second and Third CI Congresses the question of whether or not an equivalent party to the BLP could be formed in the United States. The Workers Party finally adopted the call for a labor party in May 1922. In his November 1922 speech Cannon endorses the idea of a labor party “something after the nature of the English Labour Party.”
The formation of a labor party can be a big step forward on the road to a mass communist party, but it can also easily become a giant obstacle. The problem with the slogan is objective; as Trotsky later explained, everything depends on the context in which it is raised:
“One can say that under the American conditions a labor party in the British sense would be a ‘progressive step,’ and by recognizing this and stating so, we ourselves, even though indirectly, help to establish such a party. But that is precisely the reason I will never assume the responsibility to affirm abstractly and dogmatically that the creation of a labor party would be a ‘progressive step’ even in the United States, because I do not know under what circumstances, under what guidance, and for what purpose that party would be created. It seems to me more probable that especially in America, which does not possess any important traditions of independent political action by the working class (like Chartism in England, for example) and where the trade-union bureaucracy is more reactionary and corrupted than it was at the height of the British empire, the creation of a labor party could be provoked only by mighty revolutionary pressure from the working masses and by the growing threat of communism. It is absolutely clear that under these conditions the labor party would signify not a progressive step but a hindrance to the progressive evolution of the working class.”
—Trotsky, “The Labor Party Question in the United States,” 19 May 1932
Elements in the trade-union bureaucracy in the United States had begun to raise the idea of a labor party during the post-WWI strike wave. John Fitzpatrick had run for mayor of Chicago in 1919 on a Labor Party ticket, garnering 56,000 votes. Fitzpatrick sought to unite into a national party the local labor parties that had sprung up in several cities, including Seattle and Minneapolis. But by the time the American Communists, having emerged from the underground, began to pay attention to these efforts, Fitzpatrick’s party was no longer an unambiguous attempt to create a working-class party organizationally independent of the bourgeoisie. At a convention in 1920, the Labor Party had merged forces with the bourgeois Committee of 48, the remnants of the “Progressive” movement that had dominated both bourgeois parties earlier in the century but was distinctly on the outs in President Harding’s America.
The Progressives wanted to run the old Republican warhorse Robert La Follette for president. Fitzpatrick would not go along with support to such an openly bourgeois candidate. But his divergence from a proletarian orientation was indicated by his party’s change of name to Farmer-Labor Party (FLP). The FLP ran its own candidate for president, Parley Parker Christensen, who received a quarter of a million votes. His vote was not centered in urban working-class centers: it was overwhelmingly in the Western agrarian states where American family farmers were facing ruin and where the bourgeois populist tradition remained strong.
The American Communists could not at first agree on what attitude to take toward Fitzpatrick’s FLP. This was a source of dispute right up to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. The ECCI advised the American Communists to enter the labor party movement:
“The idea now prevailing of the establishment of a labor party in America has enormous political importance. The basis of our activity must be the Left Wing of the Trade Union Movement. All attention and energy must be devoted to our activity among the masses of the Left Wing in the Trade Union movement. If we succeed in building a large Labor Party—at first only with a moderate political program—it will be an event of historical importance, not only for the American Labor movement, but for the Labor movement of the whole world.”
—“To the Communist Party of America from the Executive Committee of the Communist International,” undated but written shortly after the Fourth CI Congress, reprinted in Spartacist No. 40, Summer 1987
This CI decision was based on reports at the Fourth Congress that there was a growing movement for an “independent labor party” in the left wing of the trade-union movement in the United States (see “We Want the Comintern to Give Us Assistance,” page 44). The FLP per se was not mentioned in the CI decision.
The American Communists began to campaign for a labor party even before the ink was dry on the ECCI letter. They did so while in an implicit bloc with Fitzpatrick’s CFL and without explicitly criticizing Fitzpatrick’s Farmer-Labor orientation. The Labor Herald declared:
“The pioneer work in this movement, as in many other things, came from the Chicago Federation of Labor. This organization was the initiator of the Farmer-Labor Party, the first attempt to give expression to the trade unions on the political field.”
—National Committee of the Trade Union Educational League, “A Political Party for Labor,” Labor Herald, December 1922
The article did not mention Fitzpatrick’s merger with the bourgeois Committee of 48, nor the fact that the FLP’s support was overwhelmingly from small capitalist farmers. It insisted, “In order to mobilize all the potential strength of the Labor Party, it is necessary that it make provision for including the exploited small-farming class along with the industrial workers. But the actual workers, being the only class whose interests give them a clear-cut line of action at all times, must dominate the party…. It must be a Labor Party in fact as well as name.” In the absence of any concrete criticism of Fitzpatrick’s FLP, this insistence on a “labor” party was meaningless.
The only principled basis for participation in a labor party movement at this time would have been an attempt to polarize and split the FLP by insisting on a break with the bourgeois Progressives and an unambiguously working-class orientation. The Workers Party had embarked on an opportunist and class-collaborationist course.
The party agreed to participate in a national conference called by Fitzpatrick’s FLP for July 3 to found a party of workers and farmers. In this case, the Workers Party’s own opportunist impulse to cash in on Fitzpatrick’s popularity dovetailed with the emphasis on a “workers and peasants” united front, then coming from Zinoviev’s Comintern. A Peasant International was formed in the autumn of 1923; the CI would soon begin pushing for the establishment of two-class worker and peasant parties. John Pepper had arrived in the U.S. with an ECCI delegation in 1922 and appointed himself permanent CI representative. Pepper made it his business to keep up on the shifts in policy as the CI degenerated and he soon made himself indispensable to the New York WP leadership around C.E. Ruthenberg. Pepper, whom Palmer aptly terms “a living articulation of the nascent degeneration of the Russian Revolution,” was in the forefront of the U.S. party’s wholesale adoption of farmer-laborism.
In joining in with Fitzpatrick’s call for a farmer-labor party, the American Communists were submerging the crucial call for political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie into the “progressive” petty-bourgeois radical morass they had set out to combat. Two-class parties, supposedly uniting the working class with the peasantry or small farmers, are inevitably and invariably bourgeois parties, as Trotsky exhaustively demonstrates in The Third International After Lenin. Trotsky derisively wrote of the American variant:
“According to Pepper’s conception, a party of a few thousand members, consisting chiefly of immigrants, had to fuse with the farmers through the medium of a bourgeois party and by thus founding a ‘two-class’ party, insure the socialist revolution in the face of the passivity or neutrality of the proletariat corrupted by super-profits.”
—Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin
Pepper, a consummate opportunist maneuverer, indicated no knowledge of the history of bourgeois agrarian Populism in the United States. He had grandiose illusions and thought that if the Workers Party could capture the farmer-labor movement, the party would catapult itself into national influence. Under his direction, the Communists rode roughshod over the concerns of Fitzpatrick, packing the July 3 Farmer-Labor convention with Communist delegates and provoking a walkout by the vengeful CFL leader. The Federated Farmer-Labor Party (FFLP) that was created on July 3 consisted largely of the Communists and no one else.
The effect of the split with Fitzpatrick was exactly the opposite of what Pepper intended. The Workers Party lost the protection of its bloc partners in the AFL. Gompers, with the full backing of Fitzpatrick, launched a witchhunt that drove TUEL supporters out of labor councils and unions around the country. By 1925, the TUEL had been driven virtually underground in the shrinking AFL craft unions. Though forced by Pepper’s idiocies, the break with Fitzpatrick was very likely, given the string of labor defeats and the political climate in the U.S. at the time. Gompers had cut the subsidy to the Chicago Federation of Labor to force it to sever ties with the Workers Party. But a sliding apart based on clear political differences would have been far less damaging than an acrimonious split over organizational grievances.
The debacle of the July 3 convention led Foster and Cannon to make a pact to fight for leadership of the party against Pepper and his American supporters. Foster and Cannon were horrified at the growing isolation of the TUEL in the AFL. But they fully imbibed the opportunist adaptation to farmer-laborism and the unprincipled call for a “two-class party” that had led to the July 3 debacle. Thus they helped lead the Workers Party into deepening its unprincipled course, taking the FFLP far down the road to support for Republican Senator La Follette in the 1924 presidential elections.
Palmer’s account downplays the political problems with the Workers Party’s uncritical adoption of farmer-laborism. He blames the problem on Pepper and Moscow, not the opportunist impulse in the American party itself. Far from being the sole source of opportunism, it was the Comintern—where Trotsky had vehemently opposed the support to La Follette—that pulled the American party back from supporting La Follette. Trotsky wrote:
“For a young and weak Communist Party, lacking in revolutionary temper, to play the role of solicitor and gatherer of ‘progressive voters’ for the Republican Senator La Follette is to head toward the political dissolution of the party in the petty bourgeoisie.”
—Trotsky, Introduction (1924), The First Five Years of the Communist International
Palmer wrongly writes that the sudden pullback from support to La Follette was like the Fitzpatrick split “all over again.” He insists that “the mechanical reversal of communist policy spoke to the ways in which the WP was now subject to a Communist International bureaucratism that had no sensitivity to international realities and little flexibility in its local renegotiation of programmatic error.” There is no room for “flexibility” on the elemental question of drawing the class line in electoral activity. If the Workers Party had persisted in support to a bourgeois candidate, its cadre would have been finished as a revolutionary force.
The conflation of bourgeois third parties with genuine labor parties has been a source of opportunism before and since. Cannon earnestly sought to assimilate the lessons and turn the party around, as Palmer lays out. But the Comintern under Zinoviev only confused the party more by insisting that it maintain the fictitious Federated Farmer-Labor Party front group. Cannon and the American Trotskyists originally drew the wrong lessons from the American Communist experience in the 1920s, dropping the labor party slogan from their arsenal entirely until Trotsky insisted that they adopt it again in the midst of the labor upsurge that built the mass industrial unions in 1938. This will hopefully be a topic in Palmer’s second volume.
Issues in the Factional Wars
Cannon and Foster’s successful fight to win a majority of delegates to the Workers Party’s Third Convention in December 1923, and hence a majority on the incoming Central Executive Committee (CEC, the leading body between party conferences), is well laid out by Palmer. They drew into their faction Ludwig Lore’s supporters in the German federation and the needle trades, and most importantly, the Finnish-language federation, the largest single voting bloc. Cannon was key to establishing and cementing this alliance.
The factional struggle took on the ferocity it did in part because of the role played by Jay Lovestone, an indefatigable Ruthenberg factional operative who learned quickly in the Pepper school. The split between Foster-Cannon and Ruthenberg-Lovestone reflected in part a national bifurcation between the TUEL, based in industrial Chicago, and the central party leadership based in New York. In his It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Charles Shipman gives a sense of the social and political tensions in the party at the time. Shipman (known at that time as Manuel Gomez) was a member of the Workers Party in Chicago in 1923-24, later joining the Cannon faction and becoming head of the party’s All-American Anti-Imperialist League.
Ruthenberg viewed the Foster-Cannon bloc as a collection of trade-union opportunists. There was an element of truth in this view. As Cannon himself later wrote, he was “not very sensitive” to the risk of opportunist errors at the time. Though there were certainly differences of approach and nuance between the groups, there were no fundamental programmatic disagreements. After their December 1923 victory, Cannon and Foster managed to get the party headquarters moved to Chicago. But they insisted that Ruthenberg remain party secretary. Cannon was assistant secretary and Foster party chairman. They succeeded in having Pepper recalled to Moscow. However, lines hardened, leading to the factional wars that dominated the party until Lovestone’s expulsion in 1929.
Pepper continued to play a role as a Ruthenberg operative in Moscow. The Cannon-Foster faction’s majority in the party leadership was overthrown by Comintern fiat at the party’s Fourth Convention in 1925. Cannon and Foster parted ways in reaction to the Comintern edict, with Cannon leading those faction members who refused to organize a revolt against the Comintern decision. After 1925, Cannon maintained his own separate faction. Palmer writes particularly well about the Foster-Cannon split and its aftermath.
Palmer uses material from the Comintern archives to shed new light on issues under dispute in the Workers Party. For example, he reports that the formation of the United Council of Working Class Women/Wives and similar local women’s organizations led by party activists was a source of controversy in 1924. Palmer asserts that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction tended to support these auxiliary party women’s organizations while Cannon did not. Cannon expressed concern that “the theory of operating under another name is somewhat a survival of the days when our Party was obliged to work illegally” (Cannon Letter to Jeanette Pearl, 22 September 1924). Cannon wrote that “political work among the women must be conducted directly by the Party, in the name of the Party…and not under some other organization—real or camouflage.” However, he also wrote that he had “hesitated a long while over the question,” adding, “Women’s work is very complicated, and I am far from being able to qualify as an ‘expert’ on the question. However, its importance is self-evident.”
Palmer incorrectly takes Cannon to task for insisting that work among women be directly under the political control of the party leadership, seeing this as evidence of a “blind spot” on the need for special work among women. The Workers Party had created an internal Women’s Commission/Bureau in 1922, as mandated by the Third CI Congress resolution on methods and forms of work among women. The task was to make this a real body overseeing real party work. But, as Palmer notes, this body “was largely a figurehead organization.” In fact, the Workers Party appears to have produced very little propaganda about women’s oppression, and to have carried out very little work on the woman question per se, reflecting a tendency to bend to the backward attitudes in the working class. This was true no matter which faction was in power. Neither side pushed women to take leadership roles. Only a few women—largely intellectuals like Juliet Stuart Poyntz and Rose Pastor Stokes—served on the Central Executive Committee. Women were, however, a large part of the party’s base in the heavily Jewish needle trades, where Rose Wortis helped lead the work. The garment workers’ leaders were originally part of the Foster-Cannon group, though they switched to Ruthenberg-Lovestone after 1925.
The trade-union work, and in particular the TUEL, was always a source of controversy in the party’s factional wars. The only AFL unions in which the party retained a base after the early 1920s were in the needle trades and in coal mining. Both of these industries were in decline and their workers suffered job and wage cuts throughout the decade, making them particularly volatile. As Ian Angus details in his excellent history of the early Canadian Communist Party, Canadian Bolsheviks (Montreal: Vanguard Publications, 1981), the Canadian Communists won leadership of the Cape Breton miners, solidly organized in District 26 of the United Mine Workers (UMW). The party led an August 1922 strike against wage cuts to partial victory and subsequently did an exemplary job in maintaining the district union intact against the bosses’ attacks and UMW chief John L. Lewis’s attempts to wrest back control. The UMW collapsed in most of the rest of Canada. The American party did not lead even a substantial region of an AFL union until it won control of some New York needle trades locals in 1925. The party led a successful furriers strike in 1926, but a long and militant needle trades strike the same year failed to win its main demand. In the aftermath, the reformist needle trades tops went after the TUEL supporters and succeeded in purging many from leadership positions. The Communists’ heroic efforts in the 1926-28 “Save the Union” movement in opposition to the Lewis bureaucracy in the UMW, which won significant support from black miners, were also defeated.
The party’s work, both in the trade unions and in particular as regards the black population, was hampered by Foster’s insistence that the only course was to “bore from within” the AFL (though he was forced to abandon this long-held belief to remain a party leader during the Third Period). AFL unions mostly retained their racist color bars throughout the 1920s. Cannon rightly opposed a sole emphasis on the AFL, although his factional co-leader, William F. Dunne, leaned more toward Foster’s position.
With Foster and Cannon both in the USSR attending the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI in 1926, Albert Weisbord and other party supporters propelled themselves into the leadership of an organizing strike among the textile workers of Passaic, New Jersey, outside of the AFL framework. Palmer gives the Passaic strike the attention it deserves. As the strike dragged on, the party moved to hand control over to the AFL, agreeing to the Gompers bureaucracy’s demand to dump Weisbord from the strike leadership. Cannon wrote in later years that this had been a mistake (see The First Ten Years of American Communism). Far better that the party gain the reputation of following through on its commitments to working-class leadership. Defeated strikes, too, if well fought, can pave the way for a party to attain mass influence in subsequent class struggles.
In this period of reaction, the TUEL could and should have played a role as a largely educational vehicle for Communist propaganda in the AFL, and for the episodic organizing of solidarity actions in support of strikes and other labor actions. Simply maintaining the TUEL as a fighting force for militant class struggle would have put party trade unionists in a good position for the future. However, the TUEL became a factional football in late 1925-26, and Palmer’s detailing of the dispute, based on documents from the Moscow archives, is quite useful. Cannon and Ruthenberg wanted to liquidate the TUEL in favor of “broader” trade-union oppositions. Foster vehemently opposed this move. When the Comintern insisted that the TUEL be maintained, Cannon still insisted that it seek to organize on a broader basis than hitherto. But the support the TUEL had won in its 1922-23 campaigns for amalgamation and a labor party was based on the bloc with the Fitzpatrick forces in the CFL. For Communists to insist on organizing “broad” trade-union oppositions without a clear and principled programmatic basis is an opening for opportunist adaptation.
The ILD…and Lovestone
U.S. president Harding’s “normalcy” notwithstanding, state repression against radical and labor activists was a fact of life. Defense of those threatened by the state had a real urgency; defense work was the one arena where the party’s work could garner something approaching mass support. Cannon was always proud of the role he played in helping to found and lead the International Labor Defense (ILD), whose work has served as a model for the Partisan Defense Committee in the U.S. and the other fraternal non-sectarian defense organizations set up by ICL sections around the world. Building in large part on the ties Cannon maintained from his days as an IWW agitator and his reputation in the broader labor and Socialist movement, the ILD was a real, ongoing united-front organization (impossible in the current period for the tiny and exemplary defense organizations associated with national sections of the ICL).
The ILD’s founding convention in 1925 was attended by over 100 delegates. By the end of 1926 it had 20,000 individual members (dues were ten cents a month, raised to 15 cents in 1927) and 156 branches. The trade-union and other labor organizations that affiliated to the ILD as bodies claimed some 75,000 members. Palmer’s section on the ILD excels in the detail and care with which he recounts the organization’s activities and its scrupulous methods of financial accountability. He is careful to credit Rose Karsner’s significant role in the organization, which was linked to the CI’s International Red Aid. Palmer reports that Cannon faction lieutenant Martin Abern eventually took over some of Karsner’s duties, exercising his abilities as an excellent administrator; the young Max Shachtman gained further experience as a communist journalist editing the ILD’s Labor Defender.
The most famous campaign of the ILD in that period was the defense of Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Arrested in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids in 1920 and falsely accused of robbing a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, and killing the paymaster, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted in a 1921 trial saturated with anti-Italian chauvinism and anti-anarchist hysteria. The death sentence was pronounced in April 1927. Cannon’s writings on Sacco and Vanzetti, available in Notebook of an Agitator, are exceptional examples of communist agitation, combining pedagogy with polemics. Cannon combatted illusions in the capitalist courts, insisting that the case was “an issue of the class struggle and not merely one of an exceptional miscarriage of so-called justice.”
Reading James P. Cannon and the Revolutionary Left, it is impossible not to see the parallels between the American capitalist state’s vendetta against the two immigrant anarchists and its current determination to execute MOVE supporter and former Black Panther Party member Mumia Abu-Jamal. Sacco and Vanzetti were seen by the state as symbols of all those who challenge capitalist rule. Mumia, a Philadelphia journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” was falsely accused of killing a police officer and sentenced to death in a 1982 trial that was saturated with racism and hatred for his past as an activist in the Black Panther Party. He is seen as a symbol of all those who would challenge the capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression.
And just as the ILD had to combat the attempts by various bourgeois liberals and trade-union reformists to sabotage a class-struggle policy to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, the PDC has had to expose those who seek to derail the fight for Mumia’s freedom into dead-end reliance on the capitalist courts and politicians. Unfortunately, Palmer spends little time examining the ways and means by which Cannon exposed the treachery of sundry socialists, anarchists and liberals in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. But he does amply illustrate that the ILD built the broadest possible united-front actions against the threatened execution.
As Palmer writes, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti “stirred the soul of America in the 1920s.” Not just America, but the world. Tens of thousands participated in protests in U.S. cities in the spring and summer of 1927; millions hit the streets from Moscow to Paris. As the date of the execution approached, there were a few sporadic strikes and other labor actions. The bourgeois state was determined to execute Sacco and Vanzetti for their political views. Cannon knew from his experience in the campaign to free Big Bill Haywood and Charles Moyer, who were acquitted in 1907, that mass protest could at times compel the forces of bourgeois reaction to back down. But despite a massive protest movement, the state executed Sacco and Vanzetti in August 1927. Their funeral march in Boston drew 100,000 participants.
Palmer correctly sees Cannon at his “organizational and journalistic best” in the ILD work, but he also sees Cannon’s participation in this mass agitation as something separate and apart from his role as a Workers Party leader. He writes, “The ILD had been something of an interlude of peaceful coexistence in the factional gang warfare of Workers (Communist) Party internal struggle in the mid- to late 1920s.” Palmer’s assertion is belied by the many instances, which he himself recounts, in which the Ruthenberg-Lovestone forces tried to undercut the ILD’s work. The ILD was conceived and founded in the midst of one of the most intense periods of factional struggle, which lasted from the Fifth ECCI Plenum in the spring of 1925 through the party’s Fourth Convention that August. As noted in the PRL Introduction to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism, Ruthenberg tried to scuttle the ILD even before it was founded.
The Sacco-Vanzetti campaign was at its height in the spring and summer of 1927, when the faction fight again exploded in the aftermath of Ruthenberg’s sudden death in March. Lovestone pulled out all the stops to have himself anointed Ruthenberg’s successor as party secretary, rushing off to Moscow in May to attend the CI’s Eighth Plenum. With Cannon, Foster and other party leaders forced to follow Lovestone to Moscow, the ILD’s work in the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign had to continue without Cannon for a period. Throughout that summer, a revived Cannon-Foster bloc devoted its efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to preventing Lovestone from winning a majority at the party’s Fifth Convention in August. Despite Cannon’s attempt to postpone it, the convention took place in the midst of the ILD’s final burst of agitation against the execution.
The ILD’s accomplishments are the more impressive in light of Cannon’s simultaneous concentration on the internal factional struggle. But the ILD was founded and did its work only because Cannon was a major leader of the Workers Party with a factional base of his own that was able to safeguard the defense work from factional intrigues.
Collective Leadership Is No Panacea
Though occasional faction fights are crucial to maintaining the programmatic integrity of a Leninist party in the face of the relentless pressures of bourgeois society, the permanent factional warfare in the American party indicated that something was deeply wrong. The different approaches that distinguished Foster’s largely trade-union base from the more immigrant, ex-ultraleftists of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone forces would have provided for healthy political debate in a real Leninist party. It was not principally differences over the real work of the party that fueled the factional lineups, nor was it Lovestone’s overweening personal ambition, though this was certainly a factor. The fight in the American party was fueled in part by the fight in the Russian party and the Comintern, which pitted Trotsky’s Left Opposition (blocking in 1926-27 with Kamenev and Zinoviev to form the Joint Opposition) against the rising bureaucracy led by Stalin, for whom the cause of world proletarian revolution was rapidly receding.
Palmer astutely characterizes the situation as the “balkanization of the American leadership,” writing:
“A weakened Central Executive Committee majority, in which Ruthenberg’s political authority was counterposed to the hegemony of Foster in trade union work, with Cannon’s role shunted off as something of an appendage to each (by which his labor defense field was necessarily related to these bifurcated wings, but somewhat subordinate to both), undoubtedly satisfied competing sectors of the Comintern and suited Stalin’s agenda adroitly.”
Stalin’s struggle against Trotsky greatly affected the American party situation: one of the principal reasons for the Comintern’s deposing of the Foster-Cannon majority in 1925 was certainly its alignment with Ludwig Lore, who had publicly defended Trotsky. More of a left social democrat than a Bolshevik, Lore was duly drummed out of the party. The generally rightist political thrust of this putative Trotskyist may well have confused the Workers Party cadre about the true nature of Trotsky’s fight in the Russian party. After 1925, ritual denunciations of Trotsky were de rigueur for Comintern party leaders. As Palmer notes, “Cannon distinguished himself in the general Central Executive Committee factional rush to condemn Trotsky by refusing to jump on the bandwagon of political invective, but he did go along for the ride.”
There are certainly indications that Cannon harbored some doubts about the struggle in the Russian party. But as he later stated:
“My state of mind then was that of doubt and dissatisfaction. Of course, if one had no responsibility to the party, if he were a mere commentator or observer, he could merely speak his doubts and have it over with. You can’t do that in a serious political party. If you don’t know what to say, you don’t have to say anything. The best thing is to remain silent.”
—Cannon, History of American Trotskyism
Cannon was deeply unhappy with the state of permanent factional war in the Workers Party. Palmer points to the fact that Cannon, after his 1925 break with Foster, argued for the primacy of program over faction and insisted that votes should be taken on the “main political line, regardless of who is for or against.” In late 1926, Cannon managed to win over two key Ruthenberg-Lovestone supporters in New York—Jack Stachel and William Weinstone—on a program of fighting to end party factionalism. This was a promising development. Palmer does not, unfortunately, discuss the indications that Cannon’s campaign was making headway with Ruthenberg before the latter’s untimely death in 1927.
Since the party factional pot was kept boiling by the heat supplied by the Comintern, Cannon’s “faction to end factions” was doomed to failure. Palmer describes how the CI leadership simply brushed the Cannon group aside as inconvenient. After Ruthenberg died, Foster joined Cannon and Weinstone in campaigning for Weinstone to be general secretary of the party. But it was Lovestone who won the Comintern’s approval, and Weinstone subsequently slipped back into the Lovestone fold.
Cannon’s energetic efforts to end the factionalism were unique among the party leadership. But collective leadership is, in itself, no panacea. The experience of the Canadian Communist Party demonstrates that neither collective leadership nor refusal to join in the Comintern’s anti-Trotsky chorus were guarantees of resistance to Stalinist degeneration. Ian Angus in Canadian Bolsheviks details the admirable lack of permanent factions—or indeed of any factional struggle at all—at the top of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) through 1928. From the party’s founding in 1921, the Canadian leadership worked collectively in an axis around Maurice Spector, editor of the Worker and national chairman from 1923-28, and Jack MacDonald, who was first national chairman, then party secretary.
Spector went to Germany to cover the unfolding revolution in 1923, in which the Communist Party faltered in the face of the left Social Democrats’ opposition and refused to try to lead an insurrection in a situation where it had the mass of the working class behind it. Spector subsequently attended the 13th Party Conference in Moscow in January 1924, where the Stalinist bureaucracy won its decisive victory. These experiences led him to harbor real doubts about the campaign against Trotsky and to agree with Trotsky’s analysis of the German defeat when he later read The Lessons of October. Under Spector’s editorship, the Worker maintai
Autumn 2007
A Review
Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Originsof the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928
A Biography of James P. Cannon
The publication of a major biography of James P. Cannon, a founding American Communist and the foremost leader of American Trotskyism for its first 40-plus years, is a significant event for Marxist revolutionaries. Cannon was the finest communist leader yet produced in the United States. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)—which has its origins in the Revolutionary Tendency, a faction expelled from Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1963-64—claims Cannon as a central revolutionary forebear. At his death in 1974, Cannon was the National Chairman emeritus of the SWP, which had de facto abandoned the Trotskyist program more than ten years earlier. But in his prime Cannon had the evident capacity to lead the proletarian revolution in America to victory.
James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 by Bryan Palmer, a well-known social historian who is currently a professor at Canada’s Trent University, is quite good—far better than one would expect from a sympathetic, but nonetheless academic, source. The Prometheus Research Library, library and archive of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S., section of the ICL, was among the many institutions and individuals that provided Palmer with assistance in preparing this volume, as he notes in the book’s “Acknowledgements.”
Palmer’s 542-page volume, which covers Cannon’s early years through his 1928 expulsion from the Communist Party, is a substantial addition to the existing published material on Cannon’s political evolution and his leadership role in the first decade of American Communism, when it attracted the best American working-class fighters and before it was homogenized into a rigid, non-revolutionary Stalinist dogmatism. The Communist Party had been formed with the intent of following the model of Russia’s Bolsheviks, who led the world’s first successful workers revolution, the October Revolution of 1917. Those who flocked to the Bolshevik cause in the U.S. included Cannon, a former member of the Socialist Party (SP) and the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The study of this period of Cannon’s history as a communist is critical for revolutionaries not only in the U.S. but internationally. As Cannon noted:
“Out of the Communist Party in the United States came the nucleus of the Fourth International in this country. Therefore, we should say that the early period of the Communist movement in this country belongs to us; that we are tied to it by indissoluble bonds; that there is an uninterrupted continuity from the early days of the Communist movement, its brave struggles against persecution, its sacrifices, mistakes, faction fights and degeneration to the eventual resurgence of the movement under the banner of Trotskyism.”
—Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)
And Cannon stayed the course, becoming a leader of the Fourth International when it was founded in 1938. For various historical reasons, the American Trotskyists became a mainstay of the Fourth International. They had the advantage of operating in conditions of relative stability, unlike a number of other Opposition groups, which were crushed by state repression before or during World War II. Moreover, Cannon, unlike other prominent figures in Trotsky’s International Left Opposition (ILO), brought with him a factional following that had worked together for years in the Communist Party.
Palmer’s solidly researched volume helps round out the picture drawn in the late Theodore Draper’s essential two-volume history of the early American Communist movement, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960). One of the many ex-Communists who became anti-Communists, Draper nonetheless maintained a feel for the concerns and struggles of Communist cadre. He was aided in his research by Cannon, many of whose substantial letters to Draper were subsequently selected for publication as The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962). These letters fleshed out Cannon’s earlier recollections of the period in the first chapters of The History of American Trotskyism.
Palmer reports that Draper consciously downplayed Cannon’s contributions to his second volume. Nonetheless, Draper paid tribute to Cannon, writing a preface to First Ten Years. Explaining why Cannon’s memory of events in the 1920s was significantly better than that of his contemporaries, Draper concluded, “Unlike other communist leaders of his generation, Jim Cannon wanted to remember. This portion of his life still lives for him because he has not killed it within himself.”
Palmer’s biography supplements Cannon’s own published speeches and writings from the period under study, including those compiled in Notebook of an Agitator (1958) and the more internally oriented party material published in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism, Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 (1992). The latter volume was published by the Prometheus Research Library, which acquired a substantial collection of Cannon material from the 1920s in preparing the book.
The PRL introduction to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism noted that the archives of the Communist International (CI) in Moscow were likely to contain additional documents by Cannon from the 1920s. Shortly after the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92, PRL researchers were given access to the archives and were able to make copies of previously unavailable papers by and about Cannon from the archives of the Comintern, the American party, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU)—also known as the Profintern—and the International Red Aid. Palmer received permission from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) to use the PRL’s copies of their material in researching his book. Palmer’s frequent references to Communist Party Political Committee minutes contrast favorably to the biographies of William Z. Foster by Edward P. Johanningsmeier (Forging American Communism, the Life of William Z. Foster [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]) and James R. Barrett (William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999]). Johanningsmeier and Barrett write as if the factional battles of the period were incidental to the party’s trade-union work, with which they are overwhelmingly concerned.
Palmer was also able to use the James P. Cannon Papers, which were deposited by the SWP at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, as well as substantial documentary material on early American Communism from other libraries. Palmer collected an impressive amount of material documenting Cannon’s little-known early years and his activities in the IWW. His portrayal of Cannon’s leadership of the International Labor Defense, including the years-long campaign in defense of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti until their execution in 1927, is second to none. Palmer paints a picture of James P. Cannon that is not fundamentally new, but it is significantly enhanced.
An “Age of Innocence”?
We take exception, however, to Palmer’s conclusion that Cannon represented the “revolutionary Left in its age of innocence up to 1928,” free of the “worldly-wise knowledges that have calloused the politics of our time, undermining belief in the possibility of thoroughgoing transformation, dismissing the broad capacity of working-class people to effect material change, containing the expansiveness of radicalism in various liberal accommodations to ‘the art of the possible’.” Palmer attributes this supposed loss of innocence to the corrupting and corrosive effects of Stalinism.
Corruption and rejection of revolutionary purpose in the American workers movement preceded the Russian Revolution and its Stalinist degeneration; the Communist movement was founded in rebellion against the reformist Socialists and trade-union bureaucrats who insisted on the politics of the “possible.” The rise of American imperialism and its huge superprofits had led to the development of a labor aristocracy that gave rise to a particularly venal trade-union bureaucracy at the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). American Marxist Daniel De Leon popularized the description of the AFL tops as “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,” a term later picked up by Lenin. Revulsion at the open racism and reformist municipal “sewer socialism” of Victor Berger and his ilk in the heterogeneous Socialist Party propelled Cannon out of its ranks and into the IWW in 1911, on the road that would eventually lead him to communism.
The idea of Cannon as an innocent stands in contrast to the description written by West Indian poet Claude McKay of Cannon’s demeanor in fighting for the liquidation of the underground Communist Party in favor of the legal Workers Party at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. McKay wrote that Cannon “had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in a radical way” (A Long Way From Home [New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969]).
Cannon was an authentic American communist leader. As noted in the PRL introduction to Early Years of American Communism, “If Cannon, feeling at a dead end in the internal factional wars, was able to make the leap in 1928 to Trotsky’s programmatic and international understanding of Stalinism, it was in large part because he had tried, in the preceding period, to chart a path for the party based on revolutionary communism.” Only with the help of Trotsky’s seminal 1928 Critique of the draft program of the Comintern (subsequently published in The Third International After Lenin) did Cannon extricate himself from the Stalinizing party to continue the struggle that he had taken up early in his youth—the fight to lead the American working people to socialist revolution. The Third International After Lenin was the de facto founding document of the International Left Opposition. Cannon’s recruitment to the ILO—along with a good part of the faction he had led—was a tremendous validation of Trotsky’s struggle against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
Draper vs. New Left Historians
Palmer astutely realized that a biography of Cannon, who had largely been ignored by historians since Draper wrote his two volumes, would be a way to cut through the schism that has dominated the academic study of American Communism. This debate pits anti-Communist historians like Draper and, more actively, Draper’s epigones such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, against New Left-derived historians like Maurice Isserman. (Klehr is the author of a major study of the CP in the 1930s, The Heyday of American Communism [New York: Basic Books, 1984], while Isserman’s major work in the New Left mode is Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War [Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982].) Klehr, Haynes and their ilk, in whose hands Draper’s thorough research has degenerated into shallow anti-Communist muckraking, paint a picture of American Communism as little more than a Soviet espionage network that slavishly followed the foreign policy dictates of the Kremlin from its inception. In contrast, the New Left historians, many of whom were influenced by parents or other mentors who were activists in the Stalinized CP after 1928, argue that the political line coming from Moscow played at most a secondary role in what was mainly an indigenous movement of the American left.
Palmer’s Introduction, based on an earlier article by him (“Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism,” American Communist History, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2003), motivates his biography of Cannon as a way to transcend the sterility of that academic debate by injecting the question of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, i.e., of Stalinism. The breadth and depth with which Palmer surveys the existing works on American Communist history—both secondary histories and firsthand memoirs—is very impressive, as is the sheer weight of documentary material he marshals. More casual readers will find the 155 pages of footnotes more than they can handle, but Palmer’s detailed list of sources and comments on them will be an important resource for historians of American Communism for some time to come.
Palmer writes from the point of view of one who is sympathetic not to some kind of ersatz academic “Marxism,” but to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution itself. Such sympathy has been nonexistent among academic historians of American Communism, as Palmer himself noted in an earlier reply to his critics:
“Almost nobody in academic circles in the year 2003 is willing to stand the ground of the original Bolshevik tradition. The study of US Communism is no exception to this. Recognition of the colossal and overwhelmingly positive accomplishments of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is side-stepped…. The immense resources and programmatic guidance of this Bolshevism, willingly given to the cause of the only force which could sustain the gains of October, the world revolution and its armies of proletarian internationalism, are quibbled about, as if the early Communist International’s motivation was nothing more than ‘domination’ and ‘foreign control’.”
—Palmer, “Communist History: Seeing It Whole. A Reply to Critics,” American Communist History, Vol. 2, No. 2, December 2003
It is unfortunate, then, that Palmer situates Cannon as a leader of something called the “revolutionary Left,” presenting communism as part of a continuum of “Left” organizations. Even prefaced by the word “revolutionary,” “Left” has only an amorphous, relative political meaning (Left vs. Right), with no class content. In current as well as historical usage, “Left” includes not only working-class political formations, but bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties as well. It is thus a notion that encompasses reformist class collaboration—the working class is seen simply as a constituent part of all “progressive” forces.
The formation of the Socialist Party in 1901 represented a more widespread recognition that the working class needed its own political party as distinct from the bourgeois parties; it was formed through a merger of the Social Democratic Party—which included a split led by Eugene Debs from the bourgeois Populists—with Morris Hillquit’s split from Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party. The formation of the American Communist movement represented a giant step forward from the SP because it recognized the need for a clear political break not just with the bourgeois parties but also with reformist currents within the working class. Cannon wrote:
“The launching of the Communist Party in 1919 represented, not simply a break with the old Socialist Party, but even more important a break with the whole conception of a common party of revolutionists and opportunists. That signified a new beginning for American socialism, far more important historically than everything that had happened before, including the organization of the Socialist Party in 1901. There can be no return to the outlived and discredited experiment of the past.”
—Cannon, “Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Movement of His Time,” reprinted in The First Ten Years of American Communism
Palmer’s use of “revolutionary Left” reflects a failure to make a qualitative distinction between communism and the radical-populist, social-democratic, anarchist and syndicalist movements that were often intertwined in the left internationally before the Bolshevik Revolution. Palmer’s dissolution of communism—the program of the revolutionary international working class for the overthrow of capitalism—into the amorphous “Left” is a bow in the direction of the pervasive retrogression of political consciousness that followed the destruction of the world’s first workers state in 1991-92. This retrogression is evident not only in academic circles but, especially, in the ostensibly Marxist movement itself. A prime example is Alan Wald’s review of Palmer’s book (“The Story of James P. Cannon, A Revolutionary Life,” Against the Current, July/August 2007), which questions the applicability in the 21st century of the program stemming from the Russian Revolution.
The Significance of the Russian Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution, in the words of a 1939 “Speech on the Russian Question” by Cannon, “took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality” (Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party [1943]). It vindicated the Marxist understanding, reasserted in Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917), that the bourgeois state could not be reformed to serve the interests of the workers but had to be smashed and replaced by a workers state, the dictatorship of the proletariat. It demonstrated, as Cannon makes clear above, that the proletariat needed a disciplined vanguard party based on a clear revolutionary program if it was to conquer state power. Cannon and the other co-founders of the American Communist movement, many of whom had long histories in the American Socialist and syndicalist movements, made a political leap—at least in intent—when they decided that the experience of the October Revolution was decisive. This involved not simply recognizing that the revolution in Russia had won, but grasping that working-class revolutionaries had to apply the lessons of that victory to the American terrain.
This was easier said than done, and the misunderstandings that ran through the early American Communist movement—the insistence on an “underground” party, the advocacy of “revolutionary” unions counterposed to the reformist-led trade unions, the refusal to run candidates for bourgeois parliamentary office—were enormous. These misconceptions were not limited to the American party. In his seminal work written for the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, addressing ultraleft tendencies in Holland, Britain, Germany and elsewhere, Lenin stressed the singular experience that led to the crystallization of a Bolshevik vanguard party in tsarist Russia:
“Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?…
“For about half a century—approximately from the forties to the nineties of the last century—progressive thought in Russia, oppressed by a most brutal and reactionary tsarism, sought eagerly for a correct revolutionary theory, and followed with the utmost diligence and thoroughness each and every ‘last word’ in this sphere in Europe and America. Russia achieved Marxism—the only correct revolutionary theory—through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment, verification, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.
“On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate ‘last word’ of American and European political experience.”
—V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920)
During the latter half of the 19th century, two generations of Russian intellectuals underwent intense political ferment in search of means to throw off the stultifying tsarist yoke. Out of this ferment the most able gravitated to revolutionary Marxism. These intellectuals, in turn, led the nascent proletariat of the tsarist empire in the same direction. The 1903 split in the Russian Social Democracy between Lenin’s “hard” Bolsheviks and the “soft” Mensheviks, originally over the narrow question of how to define party membership, anticipated the subsequent definitive split carried through by Lenin between Bolshevism and Menshevik labor reformism in 1912. The key importance of a political and organizational break from reformism was only generalized by Lenin in 1914, when—after the ignominious collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism in the face of World War I—he called for a Third International. The new International was founded in early 1919, 18 months after the Bolshevik victory in Russia.
The necessity of a break with reformism was not the only lesson the Bolsheviks had to impart. The revolutionary Russian Social Democrats (the Bolsheviks adopted the title “Communist” only in 1918) had had to find a way to mobilize the peasantry—the vast majority of the tsarist empire—behind the proletariat. This was key to the Russian victory. They also had to come up with a revolutionary proletarian approach to the national question—only some 50 percent of the population of the tsarist empire was ethnic Russian. If the Bolsheviks had not successfully grappled with these issues, it would have shipwrecked the Russian Revolution. The Polish Communist Party, for example, was sterilized in the postwar period by its failure to develop a revolutionary approach to the peasantry, and paid a price for its earlier inability to deal with the Polish national question.
Lenin speaks of the quick succession of political conditions in Russia that compelled the Bolsheviks to develop a variety of tactics. There were other places in East Europe where conditions of material backwardness and severe repression meant that Marxist-inclined workers were not offered the luxury of parliamentary reformism. Many of the Social Democratic parties of the Balkans also had merit (e.g., Dimitar Blagoev’s Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party and the Serbian Social Democrats, which were the only other parties in belligerent countries besides the Bolsheviks to vote against war credits from the beginning of World War I). In contrast, the relative bourgeois-democratic stability that had prevailed before the war in the English-speaking world worked against the possibility of revolutionaries transcending the divisions among radical populism, anarcho-syndicalism and parliamentary socialism as the Bolsheviks did.
Palmer understands that the overwhelming authority the Bolsheviks enjoyed in the early Communist International stemmed from the fact that they had much to teach, but he gives short shrift to the substance of those lessons. He does not, for example, include any discussion of the collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism as the war began. This is where Palmer’s use of “revolutionary Left” does more to obscure than to illuminate the political evolution of those who came to found American Communism, feeding into his insistence that the 1920s was an “age of innocence.”
The Corruption Didn’t All Come from Moscow
Palmer sympathizes not simply with the October Revolution, but with Trotsky’s fight against the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. This degeneration grew out of the utter devastation to which an already economically backward Russia had been subjected as a result of World War I and the bloody Civil War that erupted a few months after the Bolsheviks took power. The proletariat that had made the revolution was decimated, with the better elements being drawn into the Red Army and party and state administration. Conditions of great material scarcity produced strong objective pressures toward bureaucratism, which had an impact on both the party and state. These were compounded by the isolation of the young workers state, felt especially after the defeat of a revolutionary opportunity in Germany in 1923. Amid the profound demoralization that swept through the Soviet proletariat, a growing bureaucratic caste seized political power from the working class, ostentatiously rigging the delegate elections to the January 1924 Thirteenth Conference of the Soviet party and thus stifling the voice of the Bolshevik Opposition led by Trotsky. While an account of this process is outside the scope of his book, Palmer correctly points to the adoption of the dogma of “socialism in one country,” first promulgated by Stalin in late 1924, as key to the CI’s abandonment of its revolutionary purpose.
The degeneration of the Russian Revolution was a process that began in 1924 but did not end there. Palmer correctly distinguishes the revolutionary program and principles that characterized the decisions of the Communist International in 1919-22 from the zigzags of the degenerating CI in 1924-28, first under Zinoviev and then Bukharin. As Palmer wrote in his earlier essay in American Communist History, “The Comintern was invested with a powerful and justified authority, but it was not, before 1923, regarded as some ‘sacrosanct deity’” (“Communist History: Seeing It Whole. A Reply to Critics”).
Palmer understands that the ouster of Bukharin in 1929 and Stalin’s domestic turn to forced collectivization of the peasantry—in the face of an imminent counterrevolutionary threat by the kulaks (the wealthier peasants), who had grown emboldened by Stalin/Bukharin’s conciliationist policies—dictated the sterile, sectarian adventurism of the Comintern’s 1928-34 “Third Period.” During the Third Period, all parties (not just the American) abandoned reformist-led trade unions in favor of building “revolutionary” ones. A useful documentary record of the CI’s degeneration can be found in the two volumes by Helmut Gruber, a history professor (now emeritus) at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York: International Communism in the Era of Lenin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967) and Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974).
The adoption of the popular-front policy at the CI’s Seventh World Congress in 1935, which mandated that the Communist parties seek out class-collaborationist alliances with putatively “democratic” and “anti-fascist” wings of the bourgeoisie, signaled the final descent of the Communist International into reformism, though there was a brief period of left rhetoric during the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939-41. In 1943, Stalin ignominiously and formally interred the CI as a hindrance to continuing his World War II alliance with the “democratic” imperialists. Most Communist parties retained their allegiance to Moscow into the 1970s, making them not very desirable governmental partners as far as the imperialist bourgeoisies were concerned. But the participation of the Communist parties in France and Italy in popular-front governments in the immediate postwar period played a critical role in staving off proletarian revolutions in those countries.
An understanding of this process of programmatic degeneration and its link to the fights going on in the Russian party is the beginning of wisdom for any serious study of Communist history. If Palmer’s account of this process in the 1920s has a flaw, it is in its overemphasis on the process of Bolshevization and what he calls “Zinoviev’s appetite for bureaucratic centralism” rather than on the political drift away from a revolutionary program.
Palmer insists that it was the “bureaucratization and triumphant Stalinization of the Comintern” which “lowered a final curtain on the innocence of the revolutionary Left in 1928.” He ignores the very real objective pressures in the United States that were also pushing the party away from a revolutionary purpose. In fact, no party of the Comintern degenerated simply under the influence of Moscow. There was a co-degeneration as the 1920s went on. Though the particulars were very different in the Soviet Union, the same underlying objective pressure affected the cadre of the Western Communist parties—the recession of the post-WWI revolutionary wave and the stabilization of the capitalist world after the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923. It was the relative lack of revolutionary opportunities that underlay both the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the corruption of the Comintern’s national parties, as Cannon recognized:
“The party was influenced from two sides—nationally and internationally—and this time adversely in each case. Its decline and degeneration in this period, no less than its earlier rise, must be accounted for primarily, not by national or international factors alone, but by the two together. These combined influences, at this time working for conservatism, bore down with crushing weight on the still infant Communist Party of the United States.
“It was difficult to be a working revolutionist in America in those days, to sustain the agitation that brought no response, to repeat the slogans which found no echo. The party leaders were not crudely corrupted by personal benefits of the general prosperity; but they were affected indirectly by the sea of indifference around them….
“The party became receptive to the ideas of Stalinism, which were saturated with conservatism, because the party cadres themselves were unconsciously yielding to their own conservative environment.”
—Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism
Cannon’s Formative Years
Cannon wrote little about his youth and upbringing in Rosedale, Kansas (now a part of Kansas City), but Palmer uncovered what he could about Cannon’s working-class Irish immigrant parents and family. His mother, Ann, who died when Cannon was 14, was his father’s second wife. Palmer has managed to unravel Jim Cannon’s relations to his five siblings and half-siblings, formerly quite murky. Cannon’s father, John, was only intermittently employed, but the young Jim sometimes went with him to work in the building trades. Cannon’s right thumb was smashed in an accident at his father’s work site, resulting in the amputation of the top of the digit. This minor disfigurement was seldom mentioned by Cannon.
Cannon’s father later left the working class to open an insurance office and real estate business. Palmer insists that in later life Cannon embellished his father’s proletarian credentials. Regardless, Cannon was won to socialist politics by his father, and his upbringing was typical of the Irish immigrant proletariat—Jim left school at 13 to work first at a packing house, then on the railroads and subsequently in the printing trades. He hung out in pool halls and bars with other young Irish workingmen. Palmer uses Cannon’s unpublished semi-autobiographical fiction—written in the 1950s—to throw light on his early youth and social attitudes. Given the paucity of other sources, this is probably merited. But one can imagine the very private Cannon squirming at some of Palmer’s suppositions.
What was unusual in Cannon’s youth was the fact that at age 17, when he was already supporting himself and living on his own, he decided to go back to high school. Cannon had been sympathetic to socialism since participating in the 1906-07 defense campaign for Western Federation of Miners leaders William “Big Bill” Haywood and Charles Moyer, falsely accused of murder. But Cannon joined the Socialist Party only in 1908, shortly after enrolling in high school. Cannon found it difficult to support himself and attend school; he attended for only three years and did not graduate. Palmer acquired the yearbooks of Rosedale High for the relevant years, gleaning details about Cannon’s high school career and obtaining a picture of the young man as part of the Rosedale Society of Debate in 1910.
Cannon made a serious study of oratory in high school, developing himself as a powerful public speaker. Leaving high school, Cannon joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911, cultivating his speaking ability as a soapbox agitator on the streets of Kansas City, and subsequently as an itinerant Wobbly (as IWW members were known). Later, in the Communist Party, Cannon was much in demand as a speaker. Cannon could explain complicated political concepts in easily understandable language, as the material in Notebook of an Agitator amply demonstrates. He excelled as a communist propagandist.
A young teacher, Lista Makimson, was the mentor of the debate society. She and Cannon developed a romantic relationship while he was still in school; they married in 1913. Palmer debunks the myth that Lista was greatly Cannon’s senior—they were separated by only seven years. Cannon’s relationship with an older woman, as well as his membership in the IWW, where agitation for non-conformist ideas overlapped with labor radicalism, contradicts Palmer’s assertion that Cannon “seemed to embody an odd fusion of traditionalist, Victorian notions of gender relations and sexuality and a bohemian, avant-garde disdain for material acquisitions and the trappings of money.”
Cannon certainly had a disdain for material acquisitions. He was also a private man, especially about sexual matters, as were many of his day and age. But he traveled in bohemian circles, and Palmer himself recounts Cannon’s enthusiastic remembrances of a speech on “free love” by anarchist Emma Goldman. Jim and Lista married only because it looked as though he was going to spend six months in jail for his labor activities; they subsequently had two children. Cannon left Lista in 1923 for fellow Communist Rose Karsner, who became his lifelong companion. He and Rose only married at the end of their lives, when they thought it necessary in order to get full Social Security benefits. This is hardly evidence of “Victorian notions of gender relations.”
Palmer’s complaint that Cannon practiced a “conventional monogamy” and “never really engaged with the potentially transformative gender politics of a militantly feminist approach to the personal realm” says more about the postmodern conceits of academic milieus than it does about Cannon. Ted Morgan’s A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999) is more of an extended gossip column than a serious attempt to examine the life of this unprincipled adventurer who latched on to the Communist movement in his youth only to become a CIA operative later in life. But Lovestone’s private affairs, unearthed by Morgan, show that eschewal of “conventional monogamy” is hardly a ticket to “transformative gender politics,” whatever they may be.
Cannon was elected Kansas City delegate to the Seventh National Convention of the IWW in 1912. Here he caught the eye of legendary Wobbly leader Vincent St. John, who subsequently sent him on the road as an itinerant organizer. Palmer writes, “More than any other single individual, St. John put Cannon on the track of being a professional revolutionary.” Palmer has discovered much that is new here, and his book excels in the account of Cannon’s life as a Wobbly. Cannon went to Newcastle, Pennsylvania, where he helped produce the IWW paper Solidarity. From there, in early 1913, St. John sent Cannon to Akron, where a strike for union organization had erupted among the rubber workers, both native-born and immigrant. According to Palmer, “Cannon became one of the central IWW figures writing for the rebel press, appealing for funds, and taking the struggle of Akron’s workers beyond the boundaries of Ohio.” With the defeat of the Akron strike, Cannon was active in a manufacturing strike in Peoria (where he and Lista married). Palmer reports that by the end of the summer of 1913 “Cannon was one of only sixteen Wobbly agitators who were recognized by the General Executive Board of the IWW as having ‘voluntary credentials’ as itinerant organizers.” From Peoria, Cannon moved on to organizing a strike by immigrant iron-ore dock workers in Duluth. Here Cannon was pretty much in charge of the IWW’s efforts, working with the famous Frank Little.
Palmer writes that Lista’s marriage to Cannon precluded her working any longer at Rosedale High. Cannon was thus forced to return to Kansas City in the fall of 1913. He worked on a local syndicalist paper, The Toiler, and helped to lead a major free speech fight, though because of his domestic responsibilities he kept himself off the front lines in order to avoid arrest. He became, as Palmer puts it, “a member of what some Wobblies rather condescendingly referred to as ‘the homeguard’.” Palmer says that Cannon grew increasingly disillusioned as the Wobblies concentrated more on organizing rural workers than the industrial proletariat; he was even more disillusioned at the lack of a coordinated defense campaign to counter the state raids and arrests that broke upon the Wobblies after the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Palmer concludes that Cannon’s “homeguard years as a disillusioned Wobbly, then, were among the worst of Cannon’s life, whereas his year as a hobo rebel, immersed in the rough-and-tumble class struggles of his time, was a period of his fondest memories and most prideful accomplishments.”
The Founding of American Communism
It was the October Revolution that propelled Cannon back on the road to being a professional revolutionary. Seeing the “anti-political” IWW crushed by the action of the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party committed to political activity led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the Socialist Party in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. Palmer adds only a few new details to the account of Cannon’s role in the founding of the American Communist movement, divided at first into two parties—the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party—both dominated by ultraleftism.
One of the few native-born American radicals who joined the largely immigrant Communist movement, and one of the very few with real experience in workers struggles, Cannon was among the first to assimilate the lessons of Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism. From the outset, Cannon opposed the American Communists’ “dual unionist” insistence on the formation of revolutionary unions, and he quickly rose to prominence in the fight against those who believed the party should be underground in principle. He was appointed editor of the Cleveland-based Toiler, which subsequently became the Daily Worker. Cannon was the chairman of the above-ground Workers Party when it was founded in December 1921. (The party changed its name to Workers [Communist] Party in 1925 and to Communist Party in 1929.)
Ironically, the Comintern’s campaign against the ultraleftism that infected the young Communist parties led to the reversal of a correct position that had been adopted by sections of the American Communist movement: opposition to running candidates for executive office. The program adopted by the United Communist Party (UCP) at its founding in May 1920, reasserting a position in the September 1919 manifesto of the Communist Party of America, declared:
“The United Communist Party participates in election campaigns and parliamentary action only for the purpose of revolutionary propaganda. Nominations for public office and participation in elections are limited to legislative bodies, such as the national congress, state legislatures and city councils.”
—UCP Program, reprinted in Revolutionary Radicalism, Lusk Commission Report to
New York State Senate, submitted 24 April 1920
This position indicated a healthy, and correct, revulsion with the arch-reformist practice of the Socialist Party, whose ranks included 56 mayors and 22 police officials in 1912. The UCP program, however, wrongly declared that Communist representatives elected to legislative bodies “will not introduce nor support reform measures.”
As we point out elsewhere in this issue (see “Down With Executive Offices!”, page 20), in combatting the ultraleftists at the Second Congress, the distinction between executive and legislative positions was lost. In the wake of the contradictory Second Congress theses on parliamentarism, the plank against running for executive office—evidently a position pushed in particular by C.E. Ruthenberg—became a subject of debate in the American party. The following year, in the lead-up to the December 1921 founding of the Workers Party, the Communists in New York City ran Ben Gitlow for mayor. Cannon had a big hand in advocating and orchestrating this campaign. A Comintern document written for the August 1922 underground party convention declared, “The communists must participate as revolutionists in all general election campaigns, municipal, state and congressional, as well as presidential” (“Next Tasks of the Communist Party in America,” printed in Reds in America [New York City: Beckwith Press, 1924]).
Five months after the Workers Party was founded, Cannon left for Moscow to serve as American representative to the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI). Cannon’s seven-month stay in Soviet Russia was a critical experience in deepening his understanding of Bolshevism and the importance of the Communist International. It also provided him with a yardstick by which to later measure the degeneration of the Comintern. In a 1955 letter to Draper quoted by Palmer, Cannon recalled:
“I never was worth a damn on a mission to Moscow after my first trip in 1922. Then everything was open and aboveboard. A clear-cut political issue was presented by both sides in open debate and it was settled straightforwardly, on a political basis, without discrimination or favoritism to the factions involved, and without undisclosed reasons, arising from internal Russian questions, motivating the decision and determining the attitude toward the leaders of the contending factions. That was the Lenin-Trotsky Comintern, and I did all right there. But after 1924 everything was different.”
—Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism
Palmer adds new and sometimes fascinating detail in his account of Cannon’s Moscow activities. Cannon’s November 1922 speech to the American Commission (see “We Want the Comintern to Give Us Assistance,” page 44) was but the culmination of a long and trying battle against those who insisted on maintaining an illegal Communist Party parallel to the legal Workers Party. The victory by the so-called “Liquidators” in Moscow laid the basis for the American Communists to finally really engage in the American class struggle.
The Comintern and the Black Question
The American Communist movement—like that in most other industrial countries—had been formed on the crest of the wave of labor radicalism that swept much of the globe at the end of World War I. Trade-union membership doubled in the U.S. between 1916 and 1920, and the end of the war saw a massive strike wave involving large numbers of unskilled immigrant workers for the first time. The war years had seen an 80 percent fall in immigration and a mass influx of blacks from the American South to the North, beginning the transformation of the black population from rural sharecroppers into an integral part of the industrial working class. The mass migration of black people had interacted with the pre-existing division between the largely Protestant, native-born white workers and the overwhelmingly Catholic workers from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe, leading over the next two decades to the displacement of religious and ethnic hostilities by anti-black racism as the central divide in the proletariat.
The significance of the black question was little understood by revolutionaries in the U.S. It was the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky that brought to the American workers movement the crucial understanding that the struggle for black emancipation is a central, strategic question for the American workers revolution. In his essay “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” Cannon writes:
“The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism....
“The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the over-all program—and to start doing something about it....
“Everything new and progressive on the Negro question came from Moscow, after the revolution of 1917, and as a result of the revolution—not only for the American communists who responded directly, but for all others concerned with the question.”
—Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism
By 1917, almost one-quarter of the 45,000 workers who labored in the Chicago stockyards were black. Black workers were a significant section of the workforce in steel as well, making up some 12-14 percent of the workers at the key Homestead mill. Yet most AFL unions refused to admit black workers or else organized them in separate Jim Crow locals. The first major efforts to bring unskilled laborers into the AFL—in the Chicago stockyards and in the steel industry nationally—were led at the end of the war years by William Z. Foster, a longtime syndicalist activist. Foster had broken with the IWW in 1911, opposing its strategy of building revolutionary unions in favor of “boring from within” (i.e., working to undermine the AFL bureaucracy from within the craft unions). But Foster also bowed to the reactionary Gompers bureaucracy on the question of support to the imperialist world war, going so far as to sell war bonds.
The stockyard organizing drive, concentrated at first among the Slavic immigrant workers, made some initial headway in organizing black workers—some 4,000-5,000 were union members by 1919. An integrated union march through Chicago’s South Side in July 1919 gave promise of success; but the brutal race riots that swept the city three weeks later destroyed the interracial organizing efforts. A disastrous strike against a wage cut in 1921, in which black workers largely scabbed, wiped out the gains that had been won in the earlier struggles. The organizing drive among steel workers led to 250,000 workers, almost half the total workforce in steel, walking off the job in September 1919. Within ten days, 14 workers had been killed. Troops were brought in to occupy Gary, Indiana. While the strike was initially solid among the unskilled immigrant workers, few black workers joined and many native-born skilled workers scabbed. The strike had collapsed in the Midwest by November and was broken nationally by the middle of December, though it was not officially called off until the following month.
The 1919 defeats, the result of state repression and racist reaction, occurred as the American Communists were first breaking from the Socialist Party. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. government began a wave of repression aimed at the Communists. Beginning in November 1919 and lasting over four months, the “Palmer Raids” (named for then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) involved raids of Communist offices, closing of newspapers and mass arrests of Communists, anarchists and other leftist workers (over 6,000 in the first week of January 1920 alone). Foreign-born Communists and other radicals were deported en masse. Many leading Communists were jailed on “criminal syndicalism” charges. The repression quickly abated, though many leading Communists remained under indictment well into the decade. But the Palmer Raids gave credence to the ultraleftists’ undergroundism, leading to the prolonged debate on whether or not the fledgling Communist movement could function openly.
The Early TUEL
By the time the Workers Party was founded in December 1921, it was clear that American Communists could publicly propagate their views. The American bourgeoisie was largely satisfied that the smashing of the organizing drives and the repression in 1919-20 had had the desired effect. Republican Warren G. Harding was elected president in November 1920 on a program of returning the country to “normalcy.” A national strike by railway shop workers in 1922 was the last gasp of postwar labor militancy. The strike centrally involved 256,000 machinists (members of the International Association of Machinists [IAM] and maintenance workers); Workers Party supporters played a role in helping to lead it. The strike was defeated by the scabbing by some of the AFL craft brotherhoods, and by a sweeping government injunction, issued at the request of U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty, that basically forbade the striking unions to take any action to further the strike (known as the Daugherty injunction). This set the tone for repeated use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against the unions in the ’20s. The union-busting offensive combined with a resurgence of racist terror (the Ku Klux Klan had several million members in the 1920s) and anti-immigrant legislation to make the 1920s a decade of racist, juridical and anti-labor reaction.
The American Communists paid a high price for this period of reaction—higher than they did for the intense repression of 1919-20—which led to great pressures toward abandoning the revolutionary purpose on which the Communist movement had been founded. Objective conditions in the 1920s dictated that the Communist Party would encompass only a small minority of the working class. The American Communists, including Cannon, were themselves slow to recognize this, and the twists and turns dictated by the Stalinizing Comintern in the latter half of the ’20s didn’t help.
It looked at first as if the Workers Party was destined for great success in the labor movement. Having been recruited by former fellow syndicalist Earl Browder to be part of a labor delegation to the Soviet Union in 1921, William Z. Foster was won to Bolshevism by all he saw and experienced in his three-and-a-half months there. After attending the founding conference of the Profintern in Moscow, Foster returned to Chicago in the late summer and joined the Communist Party, at the time still an underground organization.
Under the influence of Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, the American Communists had abandoned their dual-unionist perspective; their policy now dovetailed with Foster’s long-held strategy, though not without some differences over his rigid opposition to any trade-union organizing outside the AFL framework. The Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), which Foster had founded in late 1920, was placed at the service of the Workers Party and functioned as its trade-union arm from early 1922. Foster’s own party membership was to remain a secret until 1923, and the TUEL was headquartered in Chicago, separate from the party headquarters in New York. Foster retained the close ties he had cultivated with John Fitzpatrick’s Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), under whose aegis he had begun his organizing campaigns. An ardent Irish nationalist and trade-union “progressive,” Fitzpatrick had for a while been advocating the formation of a labor party. He was a thorn in the side of the AFL bureaucracy under Samuel Gompers. The TUEL received substantial protection from Gompers’ virulent anti-Communism because of Foster’s work for the CFL.
Organized around the journal Labor Herald, the TUEL had no dues or membership structure so as to avoid any charge of dual unionism (its public income came from literature sales and donations, and it also received Comintern subsidies). It fought “to develop trade unions from their present antiquated and stagnant condition into modern, powerful labor organizations capable of waging successful warfare against Capital” (William Z. Foster, “The Principles and Program of the Trade Union Educational League,” Labor Herald, March 1922). Advocating the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers republic, the TUEL sought the affiliation of American trade unions to the Red International of Labor Unions. The TUEL program did not mention the Jim Crow restrictions that kept blacks out of the AFL craft unions; nor did it oppose the draconian restrictions the government had just imposed on immigration. This failure to confront the anti-black and anti-immigrant prejudices common in the working class was a real weakness. The fight against anti-black racism was a question that the American Communists, under prodding from the Comintern, were only beginning to address.
The TUEL saw as its immediate task an aggressive campaign for the amalgamation of AFL craft unions into unions organized on an industry-wide basis, raising the slogan, “amalgamation or annihilation.” Beginning with a motion for amalgamation in the CFL in March 1922, the TUEL managed in the succeeding 18 months to get amalgamation motions passed in 16 international unions, 17 state federations, many city labor councils and thousands of union locals.
Grappling with the Labor Party Question
As they came up from the underground, the American Communists began to grapple with the issue of whether or not to call for a labor party. In a chapter appropriately titled “Pepper Spray,” Palmer details the ways in which the Workers Party under the tutelage of a Hungarian-born Communist named Jószef Pogány (known in the U.S. as John Pepper) made a mess of it.
In “Left-Wing” Communism Lenin advocated that the British Communists affiliate to the British Labour Party (BLP) and give it critical support in the coming elections. Though its program and leadership were reformist, the BLP was based on affiliated trade unions; it had been formed as an expressly working-class party. Lenin termed it a “bourgeois workers party.” In order to maintain their hold on the working class in the face of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar radicalization, the BLP tops were talking left and had in 1918 adopted a provision in the party constitution (Clause Four) calling for wholesale nationalization of industry. Lenin advocated that the Communists vote for the BLP—while retaining their complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity—to help prove to the masses that once elected to government the BLP tops would in fact betray the interests of the working class. This exposure would facilitate the Communists winning the working-class base of the Labour Party.
Lenin had brought up in his discussions with American delegates at both the Second and Third CI Congresses the question of whether or not an equivalent party to the BLP could be formed in the United States. The Workers Party finally adopted the call for a labor party in May 1922. In his November 1922 speech Cannon endorses the idea of a labor party “something after the nature of the English Labour Party.”
The formation of a labor party can be a big step forward on the road to a mass communist party, but it can also easily become a giant obstacle. The problem with the slogan is objective; as Trotsky later explained, everything depends on the context in which it is raised:
“One can say that under the American conditions a labor party in the British sense would be a ‘progressive step,’ and by recognizing this and stating so, we ourselves, even though indirectly, help to establish such a party. But that is precisely the reason I will never assume the responsibility to affirm abstractly and dogmatically that the creation of a labor party would be a ‘progressive step’ even in the United States, because I do not know under what circumstances, under what guidance, and for what purpose that party would be created. It seems to me more probable that especially in America, which does not possess any important traditions of independent political action by the working class (like Chartism in England, for example) and where the trade-union bureaucracy is more reactionary and corrupted than it was at the height of the British empire, the creation of a labor party could be provoked only by mighty revolutionary pressure from the working masses and by the growing threat of communism. It is absolutely clear that under these conditions the labor party would signify not a progressive step but a hindrance to the progressive evolution of the working class.”
—Trotsky, “The Labor Party Question in the United States,” 19 May 1932
Elements in the trade-union bureaucracy in the United States had begun to raise the idea of a labor party during the post-WWI strike wave. John Fitzpatrick had run for mayor of Chicago in 1919 on a Labor Party ticket, garnering 56,000 votes. Fitzpatrick sought to unite into a national party the local labor parties that had sprung up in several cities, including Seattle and Minneapolis. But by the time the American Communists, having emerged from the underground, began to pay attention to these efforts, Fitzpatrick’s party was no longer an unambiguous attempt to create a working-class party organizationally independent of the bourgeoisie. At a convention in 1920, the Labor Party had merged forces with the bourgeois Committee of 48, the remnants of the “Progressive” movement that had dominated both bourgeois parties earlier in the century but was distinctly on the outs in President Harding’s America.
The Progressives wanted to run the old Republican warhorse Robert La Follette for president. Fitzpatrick would not go along with support to such an openly bourgeois candidate. But his divergence from a proletarian orientation was indicated by his party’s change of name to Farmer-Labor Party (FLP). The FLP ran its own candidate for president, Parley Parker Christensen, who received a quarter of a million votes. His vote was not centered in urban working-class centers: it was overwhelmingly in the Western agrarian states where American family farmers were facing ruin and where the bourgeois populist tradition remained strong.
The American Communists could not at first agree on what attitude to take toward Fitzpatrick’s FLP. This was a source of dispute right up to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. The ECCI advised the American Communists to enter the labor party movement:
“The idea now prevailing of the establishment of a labor party in America has enormous political importance. The basis of our activity must be the Left Wing of the Trade Union Movement. All attention and energy must be devoted to our activity among the masses of the Left Wing in the Trade Union movement. If we succeed in building a large Labor Party—at first only with a moderate political program—it will be an event of historical importance, not only for the American Labor movement, but for the Labor movement of the whole world.”
—“To the Communist Party of America from the Executive Committee of the Communist International,” undated but written shortly after the Fourth CI Congress, reprinted in Spartacist No. 40, Summer 1987
This CI decision was based on reports at the Fourth Congress that there was a growing movement for an “independent labor party” in the left wing of the trade-union movement in the United States (see “We Want the Comintern to Give Us Assistance,” page 44). The FLP per se was not mentioned in the CI decision.
The American Communists began to campaign for a labor party even before the ink was dry on the ECCI letter. They did so while in an implicit bloc with Fitzpatrick’s CFL and without explicitly criticizing Fitzpatrick’s Farmer-Labor orientation. The Labor Herald declared:
“The pioneer work in this movement, as in many other things, came from the Chicago Federation of Labor. This organization was the initiator of the Farmer-Labor Party, the first attempt to give expression to the trade unions on the political field.”
—National Committee of the Trade Union Educational League, “A Political Party for Labor,” Labor Herald, December 1922
The article did not mention Fitzpatrick’s merger with the bourgeois Committee of 48, nor the fact that the FLP’s support was overwhelmingly from small capitalist farmers. It insisted, “In order to mobilize all the potential strength of the Labor Party, it is necessary that it make provision for including the exploited small-farming class along with the industrial workers. But the actual workers, being the only class whose interests give them a clear-cut line of action at all times, must dominate the party…. It must be a Labor Party in fact as well as name.” In the absence of any concrete criticism of Fitzpatrick’s FLP, this insistence on a “labor” party was meaningless.
The only principled basis for participation in a labor party movement at this time would have been an attempt to polarize and split the FLP by insisting on a break with the bourgeois Progressives and an unambiguously working-class orientation. The Workers Party had embarked on an opportunist and class-collaborationist course.
The party agreed to participate in a national conference called by Fitzpatrick’s FLP for July 3 to found a party of workers and farmers. In this case, the Workers Party’s own opportunist impulse to cash in on Fitzpatrick’s popularity dovetailed with the emphasis on a “workers and peasants” united front, then coming from Zinoviev’s Comintern. A Peasant International was formed in the autumn of 1923; the CI would soon begin pushing for the establishment of two-class worker and peasant parties. John Pepper had arrived in the U.S. with an ECCI delegation in 1922 and appointed himself permanent CI representative. Pepper made it his business to keep up on the shifts in policy as the CI degenerated and he soon made himself indispensable to the New York WP leadership around C.E. Ruthenberg. Pepper, whom Palmer aptly terms “a living articulation of the nascent degeneration of the Russian Revolution,” was in the forefront of the U.S. party’s wholesale adoption of farmer-laborism.
In joining in with Fitzpatrick’s call for a farmer-labor party, the American Communists were submerging the crucial call for political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie into the “progressive” petty-bourgeois radical morass they had set out to combat. Two-class parties, supposedly uniting the working class with the peasantry or small farmers, are inevitably and invariably bourgeois parties, as Trotsky exhaustively demonstrates in The Third International After Lenin. Trotsky derisively wrote of the American variant:
“According to Pepper’s conception, a party of a few thousand members, consisting chiefly of immigrants, had to fuse with the farmers through the medium of a bourgeois party and by thus founding a ‘two-class’ party, insure the socialist revolution in the face of the passivity or neutrality of the proletariat corrupted by super-profits.”
—Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin
Pepper, a consummate opportunist maneuverer, indicated no knowledge of the history of bourgeois agrarian Populism in the United States. He had grandiose illusions and thought that if the Workers Party could capture the farmer-labor movement, the party would catapult itself into national influence. Under his direction, the Communists rode roughshod over the concerns of Fitzpatrick, packing the July 3 Farmer-Labor convention with Communist delegates and provoking a walkout by the vengeful CFL leader. The Federated Farmer-Labor Party (FFLP) that was created on July 3 consisted largely of the Communists and no one else.
The effect of the split with Fitzpatrick was exactly the opposite of what Pepper intended. The Workers Party lost the protection of its bloc partners in the AFL. Gompers, with the full backing of Fitzpatrick, launched a witchhunt that drove TUEL supporters out of labor councils and unions around the country. By 1925, the TUEL had been driven virtually underground in the shrinking AFL craft unions. Though forced by Pepper’s idiocies, the break with Fitzpatrick was very likely, given the string of labor defeats and the political climate in the U.S. at the time. Gompers had cut the subsidy to the Chicago Federation of Labor to force it to sever ties with the Workers Party. But a sliding apart based on clear political differences would have been far less damaging than an acrimonious split over organizational grievances.
The debacle of the July 3 convention led Foster and Cannon to make a pact to fight for leadership of the party against Pepper and his American supporters. Foster and Cannon were horrified at the growing isolation of the TUEL in the AFL. But they fully imbibed the opportunist adaptation to farmer-laborism and the unprincipled call for a “two-class party” that had led to the July 3 debacle. Thus they helped lead the Workers Party into deepening its unprincipled course, taking the FFLP far down the road to support for Republican Senator La Follette in the 1924 presidential elections.
Palmer’s account downplays the political problems with the Workers Party’s uncritical adoption of farmer-laborism. He blames the problem on Pepper and Moscow, not the opportunist impulse in the American party itself. Far from being the sole source of opportunism, it was the Comintern—where Trotsky had vehemently opposed the support to La Follette—that pulled the American party back from supporting La Follette. Trotsky wrote:
“For a young and weak Communist Party, lacking in revolutionary temper, to play the role of solicitor and gatherer of ‘progressive voters’ for the Republican Senator La Follette is to head toward the political dissolution of the party in the petty bourgeoisie.”
—Trotsky, Introduction (1924), The First Five Years of the Communist International
Palmer wrongly writes that the sudden pullback from support to La Follette was like the Fitzpatrick split “all over again.” He insists that “the mechanical reversal of communist policy spoke to the ways in which the WP was now subject to a Communist International bureaucratism that had no sensitivity to international realities and little flexibility in its local renegotiation of programmatic error.” There is no room for “flexibility” on the elemental question of drawing the class line in electoral activity. If the Workers Party had persisted in support to a bourgeois candidate, its cadre would have been finished as a revolutionary force.
The conflation of bourgeois third parties with genuine labor parties has been a source of opportunism before and since. Cannon earnestly sought to assimilate the lessons and turn the party around, as Palmer lays out. But the Comintern under Zinoviev only confused the party more by insisting that it maintain the fictitious Federated Farmer-Labor Party front group. Cannon and the American Trotskyists originally drew the wrong lessons from the American Communist experience in the 1920s, dropping the labor party slogan from their arsenal entirely until Trotsky insisted that they adopt it again in the midst of the labor upsurge that built the mass industrial unions in 1938. This will hopefully be a topic in Palmer’s second volume.
Issues in the Factional Wars
Cannon and Foster’s successful fight to win a majority of delegates to the Workers Party’s Third Convention in December 1923, and hence a majority on the incoming Central Executive Committee (CEC, the leading body between party conferences), is well laid out by Palmer. They drew into their faction Ludwig Lore’s supporters in the German federation and the needle trades, and most importantly, the Finnish-language federation, the largest single voting bloc. Cannon was key to establishing and cementing this alliance.
The factional struggle took on the ferocity it did in part because of the role played by Jay Lovestone, an indefatigable Ruthenberg factional operative who learned quickly in the Pepper school. The split between Foster-Cannon and Ruthenberg-Lovestone reflected in part a national bifurcation between the TUEL, based in industrial Chicago, and the central party leadership based in New York. In his It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Charles Shipman gives a sense of the social and political tensions in the party at the time. Shipman (known at that time as Manuel Gomez) was a member of the Workers Party in Chicago in 1923-24, later joining the Cannon faction and becoming head of the party’s All-American Anti-Imperialist League.
Ruthenberg viewed the Foster-Cannon bloc as a collection of trade-union opportunists. There was an element of truth in this view. As Cannon himself later wrote, he was “not very sensitive” to the risk of opportunist errors at the time. Though there were certainly differences of approach and nuance between the groups, there were no fundamental programmatic disagreements. After their December 1923 victory, Cannon and Foster managed to get the party headquarters moved to Chicago. But they insisted that Ruthenberg remain party secretary. Cannon was assistant secretary and Foster party chairman. They succeeded in having Pepper recalled to Moscow. However, lines hardened, leading to the factional wars that dominated the party until Lovestone’s expulsion in 1929.
Pepper continued to play a role as a Ruthenberg operative in Moscow. The Cannon-Foster faction’s majority in the party leadership was overthrown by Comintern fiat at the party’s Fourth Convention in 1925. Cannon and Foster parted ways in reaction to the Comintern edict, with Cannon leading those faction members who refused to organize a revolt against the Comintern decision. After 1925, Cannon maintained his own separate faction. Palmer writes particularly well about the Foster-Cannon split and its aftermath.
Palmer uses material from the Comintern archives to shed new light on issues under dispute in the Workers Party. For example, he reports that the formation of the United Council of Working Class Women/Wives and similar local women’s organizations led by party activists was a source of controversy in 1924. Palmer asserts that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction tended to support these auxiliary party women’s organizations while Cannon did not. Cannon expressed concern that “the theory of operating under another name is somewhat a survival of the days when our Party was obliged to work illegally” (Cannon Letter to Jeanette Pearl, 22 September 1924). Cannon wrote that “political work among the women must be conducted directly by the Party, in the name of the Party…and not under some other organization—real or camouflage.” However, he also wrote that he had “hesitated a long while over the question,” adding, “Women’s work is very complicated, and I am far from being able to qualify as an ‘expert’ on the question. However, its importance is self-evident.”
Palmer incorrectly takes Cannon to task for insisting that work among women be directly under the political control of the party leadership, seeing this as evidence of a “blind spot” on the need for special work among women. The Workers Party had created an internal Women’s Commission/Bureau in 1922, as mandated by the Third CI Congress resolution on methods and forms of work among women. The task was to make this a real body overseeing real party work. But, as Palmer notes, this body “was largely a figurehead organization.” In fact, the Workers Party appears to have produced very little propaganda about women’s oppression, and to have carried out very little work on the woman question per se, reflecting a tendency to bend to the backward attitudes in the working class. This was true no matter which faction was in power. Neither side pushed women to take leadership roles. Only a few women—largely intellectuals like Juliet Stuart Poyntz and Rose Pastor Stokes—served on the Central Executive Committee. Women were, however, a large part of the party’s base in the heavily Jewish needle trades, where Rose Wortis helped lead the work. The garment workers’ leaders were originally part of the Foster-Cannon group, though they switched to Ruthenberg-Lovestone after 1925.
The trade-union work, and in particular the TUEL, was always a source of controversy in the party’s factional wars. The only AFL unions in which the party retained a base after the early 1920s were in the needle trades and in coal mining. Both of these industries were in decline and their workers suffered job and wage cuts throughout the decade, making them particularly volatile. As Ian Angus details in his excellent history of the early Canadian Communist Party, Canadian Bolsheviks (Montreal: Vanguard Publications, 1981), the Canadian Communists won leadership of the Cape Breton miners, solidly organized in District 26 of the United Mine Workers (UMW). The party led an August 1922 strike against wage cuts to partial victory and subsequently did an exemplary job in maintaining the district union intact against the bosses’ attacks and UMW chief John L. Lewis’s attempts to wrest back control. The UMW collapsed in most of the rest of Canada. The American party did not lead even a substantial region of an AFL union until it won control of some New York needle trades locals in 1925. The party led a successful furriers strike in 1926, but a long and militant needle trades strike the same year failed to win its main demand. In the aftermath, the reformist needle trades tops went after the TUEL supporters and succeeded in purging many from leadership positions. The Communists’ heroic efforts in the 1926-28 “Save the Union” movement in opposition to the Lewis bureaucracy in the UMW, which won significant support from black miners, were also defeated.
The party’s work, both in the trade unions and in particular as regards the black population, was hampered by Foster’s insistence that the only course was to “bore from within” the AFL (though he was forced to abandon this long-held belief to remain a party leader during the Third Period). AFL unions mostly retained their racist color bars throughout the 1920s. Cannon rightly opposed a sole emphasis on the AFL, although his factional co-leader, William F. Dunne, leaned more toward Foster’s position.
With Foster and Cannon both in the USSR attending the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI in 1926, Albert Weisbord and other party supporters propelled themselves into the leadership of an organizing strike among the textile workers of Passaic, New Jersey, outside of the AFL framework. Palmer gives the Passaic strike the attention it deserves. As the strike dragged on, the party moved to hand control over to the AFL, agreeing to the Gompers bureaucracy’s demand to dump Weisbord from the strike leadership. Cannon wrote in later years that this had been a mistake (see The First Ten Years of American Communism). Far better that the party gain the reputation of following through on its commitments to working-class leadership. Defeated strikes, too, if well fought, can pave the way for a party to attain mass influence in subsequent class struggles.
In this period of reaction, the TUEL could and should have played a role as a largely educational vehicle for Communist propaganda in the AFL, and for the episodic organizing of solidarity actions in support of strikes and other labor actions. Simply maintaining the TUEL as a fighting force for militant class struggle would have put party trade unionists in a good position for the future. However, the TUEL became a factional football in late 1925-26, and Palmer’s detailing of the dispute, based on documents from the Moscow archives, is quite useful. Cannon and Ruthenberg wanted to liquidate the TUEL in favor of “broader” trade-union oppositions. Foster vehemently opposed this move. When the Comintern insisted that the TUEL be maintained, Cannon still insisted that it seek to organize on a broader basis than hitherto. But the support the TUEL had won in its 1922-23 campaigns for amalgamation and a labor party was based on the bloc with the Fitzpatrick forces in the CFL. For Communists to insist on organizing “broad” trade-union oppositions without a clear and principled programmatic basis is an opening for opportunist adaptation.
The ILD…and Lovestone
U.S. president Harding’s “normalcy” notwithstanding, state repression against radical and labor activists was a fact of life. Defense of those threatened by the state had a real urgency; defense work was the one arena where the party’s work could garner something approaching mass support. Cannon was always proud of the role he played in helping to found and lead the International Labor Defense (ILD), whose work has served as a model for the Partisan Defense Committee in the U.S. and the other fraternal non-sectarian defense organizations set up by ICL sections around the world. Building in large part on the ties Cannon maintained from his days as an IWW agitator and his reputation in the broader labor and Socialist movement, the ILD was a real, ongoing united-front organization (impossible in the current period for the tiny and exemplary defense organizations associated with national sections of the ICL).
The ILD’s founding convention in 1925 was attended by over 100 delegates. By the end of 1926 it had 20,000 individual members (dues were ten cents a month, raised to 15 cents in 1927) and 156 branches. The trade-union and other labor organizations that affiliated to the ILD as bodies claimed some 75,000 members. Palmer’s section on the ILD excels in the detail and care with which he recounts the organization’s activities and its scrupulous methods of financial accountability. He is careful to credit Rose Karsner’s significant role in the organization, which was linked to the CI’s International Red Aid. Palmer reports that Cannon faction lieutenant Martin Abern eventually took over some of Karsner’s duties, exercising his abilities as an excellent administrator; the young Max Shachtman gained further experience as a communist journalist editing the ILD’s Labor Defender.
The most famous campaign of the ILD in that period was the defense of Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Arrested in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids in 1920 and falsely accused of robbing a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, and killing the paymaster, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted in a 1921 trial saturated with anti-Italian chauvinism and anti-anarchist hysteria. The death sentence was pronounced in April 1927. Cannon’s writings on Sacco and Vanzetti, available in Notebook of an Agitator, are exceptional examples of communist agitation, combining pedagogy with polemics. Cannon combatted illusions in the capitalist courts, insisting that the case was “an issue of the class struggle and not merely one of an exceptional miscarriage of so-called justice.”
Reading James P. Cannon and the Revolutionary Left, it is impossible not to see the parallels between the American capitalist state’s vendetta against the two immigrant anarchists and its current determination to execute MOVE supporter and former Black Panther Party member Mumia Abu-Jamal. Sacco and Vanzetti were seen by the state as symbols of all those who challenge capitalist rule. Mumia, a Philadelphia journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” was falsely accused of killing a police officer and sentenced to death in a 1982 trial that was saturated with racism and hatred for his past as an activist in the Black Panther Party. He is seen as a symbol of all those who would challenge the capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression.
And just as the ILD had to combat the attempts by various bourgeois liberals and trade-union reformists to sabotage a class-struggle policy to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, the PDC has had to expose those who seek to derail the fight for Mumia’s freedom into dead-end reliance on the capitalist courts and politicians. Unfortunately, Palmer spends little time examining the ways and means by which Cannon exposed the treachery of sundry socialists, anarchists and liberals in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. But he does amply illustrate that the ILD built the broadest possible united-front actions against the threatened execution.
As Palmer writes, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti “stirred the soul of America in the 1920s.” Not just America, but the world. Tens of thousands participated in protests in U.S. cities in the spring and summer of 1927; millions hit the streets from Moscow to Paris. As the date of the execution approached, there were a few sporadic strikes and other labor actions. The bourgeois state was determined to execute Sacco and Vanzetti for their political views. Cannon knew from his experience in the campaign to free Big Bill Haywood and Charles Moyer, who were acquitted in 1907, that mass protest could at times compel the forces of bourgeois reaction to back down. But despite a massive protest movement, the state executed Sacco and Vanzetti in August 1927. Their funeral march in Boston drew 100,000 participants.
Palmer correctly sees Cannon at his “organizational and journalistic best” in the ILD work, but he also sees Cannon’s participation in this mass agitation as something separate and apart from his role as a Workers Party leader. He writes, “The ILD had been something of an interlude of peaceful coexistence in the factional gang warfare of Workers (Communist) Party internal struggle in the mid- to late 1920s.” Palmer’s assertion is belied by the many instances, which he himself recounts, in which the Ruthenberg-Lovestone forces tried to undercut the ILD’s work. The ILD was conceived and founded in the midst of one of the most intense periods of factional struggle, which lasted from the Fifth ECCI Plenum in the spring of 1925 through the party’s Fourth Convention that August. As noted in the PRL Introduction to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism, Ruthenberg tried to scuttle the ILD even before it was founded.
The Sacco-Vanzetti campaign was at its height in the spring and summer of 1927, when the faction fight again exploded in the aftermath of Ruthenberg’s sudden death in March. Lovestone pulled out all the stops to have himself anointed Ruthenberg’s successor as party secretary, rushing off to Moscow in May to attend the CI’s Eighth Plenum. With Cannon, Foster and other party leaders forced to follow Lovestone to Moscow, the ILD’s work in the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign had to continue without Cannon for a period. Throughout that summer, a revived Cannon-Foster bloc devoted its efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to preventing Lovestone from winning a majority at the party’s Fifth Convention in August. Despite Cannon’s attempt to postpone it, the convention took place in the midst of the ILD’s final burst of agitation against the execution.
The ILD’s accomplishments are the more impressive in light of Cannon’s simultaneous concentration on the internal factional struggle. But the ILD was founded and did its work only because Cannon was a major leader of the Workers Party with a factional base of his own that was able to safeguard the defense work from factional intrigues.
Collective Leadership Is No Panacea
Though occasional faction fights are crucial to maintaining the programmatic integrity of a Leninist party in the face of the relentless pressures of bourgeois society, the permanent factional warfare in the American party indicated that something was deeply wrong. The different approaches that distinguished Foster’s largely trade-union base from the more immigrant, ex-ultraleftists of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone forces would have provided for healthy political debate in a real Leninist party. It was not principally differences over the real work of the party that fueled the factional lineups, nor was it Lovestone’s overweening personal ambition, though this was certainly a factor. The fight in the American party was fueled in part by the fight in the Russian party and the Comintern, which pitted Trotsky’s Left Opposition (blocking in 1926-27 with Kamenev and Zinoviev to form the Joint Opposition) against the rising bureaucracy led by Stalin, for whom the cause of world proletarian revolution was rapidly receding.
Palmer astutely characterizes the situation as the “balkanization of the American leadership,” writing:
“A weakened Central Executive Committee majority, in which Ruthenberg’s political authority was counterposed to the hegemony of Foster in trade union work, with Cannon’s role shunted off as something of an appendage to each (by which his labor defense field was necessarily related to these bifurcated wings, but somewhat subordinate to both), undoubtedly satisfied competing sectors of the Comintern and suited Stalin’s agenda adroitly.”
Stalin’s struggle against Trotsky greatly affected the American party situation: one of the principal reasons for the Comintern’s deposing of the Foster-Cannon majority in 1925 was certainly its alignment with Ludwig Lore, who had publicly defended Trotsky. More of a left social democrat than a Bolshevik, Lore was duly drummed out of the party. The generally rightist political thrust of this putative Trotskyist may well have confused the Workers Party cadre about the true nature of Trotsky’s fight in the Russian party. After 1925, ritual denunciations of Trotsky were de rigueur for Comintern party leaders. As Palmer notes, “Cannon distinguished himself in the general Central Executive Committee factional rush to condemn Trotsky by refusing to jump on the bandwagon of political invective, but he did go along for the ride.”
There are certainly indications that Cannon harbored some doubts about the struggle in the Russian party. But as he later stated:
“My state of mind then was that of doubt and dissatisfaction. Of course, if one had no responsibility to the party, if he were a mere commentator or observer, he could merely speak his doubts and have it over with. You can’t do that in a serious political party. If you don’t know what to say, you don’t have to say anything. The best thing is to remain silent.”
—Cannon, History of American Trotskyism
Cannon was deeply unhappy with the state of permanent factional war in the Workers Party. Palmer points to the fact that Cannon, after his 1925 break with Foster, argued for the primacy of program over faction and insisted that votes should be taken on the “main political line, regardless of who is for or against.” In late 1926, Cannon managed to win over two key Ruthenberg-Lovestone supporters in New York—Jack Stachel and William Weinstone—on a program of fighting to end party factionalism. This was a promising development. Palmer does not, unfortunately, discuss the indications that Cannon’s campaign was making headway with Ruthenberg before the latter’s untimely death in 1927.
Since the party factional pot was kept boiling by the heat supplied by the Comintern, Cannon’s “faction to end factions” was doomed to failure. Palmer describes how the CI leadership simply brushed the Cannon group aside as inconvenient. After Ruthenberg died, Foster joined Cannon and Weinstone in campaigning for Weinstone to be general secretary of the party. But it was Lovestone who won the Comintern’s approval, and Weinstone subsequently slipped back into the Lovestone fold.
Cannon’s energetic efforts to end the factionalism were unique among the party leadership. But collective leadership is, in itself, no panacea. The experience of the Canadian Communist Party demonstrates that neither collective leadership nor refusal to join in the Comintern’s anti-Trotsky chorus were guarantees of resistance to Stalinist degeneration. Ian Angus in Canadian Bolsheviks details the admirable lack of permanent factions—or indeed of any factional struggle at all—at the top of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) through 1928. From the party’s founding in 1921, the Canadian leadership worked collectively in an axis around Maurice Spector, editor of the Worker and national chairman from 1923-28, and Jack MacDonald, who was first national chairman, then party secretary.
Spector went to Germany to cover the unfolding revolution in 1923, in which the Communist Party faltered in the face of the left Social Democrats’ opposition and refused to try to lead an insurrection in a situation where it had the mass of the working class behind it. Spector subsequently attended the 13th Party Conference in Moscow in January 1924, where the Stalinist bureaucracy won its decisive victory. These experiences led him to harbor real doubts about the campaign against Trotsky and to agree with Trotsky’s analysis of the German defeat when he later read The Lessons of October. Under Spector’s editorship, the Worker maintai
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