Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American Communist leader (CP and SWP) James P. Cannon.
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Youth and the Socialist Movement
Rich Finkel, National Secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance, had the following discussion with James P. Cannon on March 15, 1974, in Los Angeles.
Finkel: On my tour this spring, I've already visited Texas, Arizona and part of California. I get the impression that many students who were active during the height of the antiwar movement and the Black struggle haven't quite figured out what kind of role they can play in a period of different dimensions, opportunities and problems, such as we are facing right now.
Cannon: I think it's very important for us to adopt a completely realistic view of the situation and adjust to the changed consciousness and attitude on the campus. The party is tested just as much by times like this as by times of an upswing in activity.
During the fifties, we lived so long in hard times, I think some of the old-timers found it difficult to adjust to the big upsurge we had during the Vietnam war.
It should be made a point of our educational propaganda that a revolutionist's spirit and attitude is not determined by the popular mood of the moment. We have a historical view and we don't allow the movement to fade away when it runs into changed times, which can happen as we know from experience.
You're acquainted with my pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism? It's a series of six lectures given at the height of the McCarthyite period in the fall of 1952, when reaction seemed to reign supreme. There were practically no actions of any kind. So we decided on the lectures as a deliberate party action. They were given here in Los Angeles as a series of forums on what socialism means. What socialist America will look like. We had a regular attendance of 100, give or take a few, at each lecture.
Don't you find that the young people you talk to have a great interest in what socialism is, what it will look like and so on? There's a temptation in a period of upswing of activities to neglect the exposition of our fundamental program in its historical perspective. But I can recall from
my youth, which was in the heyday of the Socialist Party! in this country —the Debs2 period — that seemed to be the question that most interested people who were contacted around the party. What is this socialism? What will it look like? How will it come about? And so on. And I think that's true today too, if you really probe the minds of young people.
Finkel: We've noticed that quite a bit. I think one of the stimulants right now is the energy crisis. People know that the oil monopolies prevail. They see what capitalism does, and they ask, "What is socialism? How do we organize it? How do we get there?"
We get more of these questions about socialism today than we did during the antiwar movement. I think that the questions are different at this particular period —more fundamental. With the Watergate revelations, people want to know, "How can we organize government without corruption? Is it possible?"
Your pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism, was one of the first things I read when I joined the YSA in 1968. It was an old copy, but it answered a lot of questions I had. I think that's true for many YSA members.
Could you explain a little about some of the previous experiences of the workers movement with youth groups? That's one of the questions that we often get in the YSA. What happened with the Wobblies? How did the Socialist and Communist parties build their youth organizations? What were their problems and successes?
Cannon: First of all, we've got to understand that the past of the radical and revolutionary movement in this country is part of our heritage — both with its positive and negative sides. We have to know about that. Our new members should be thoroughly schooled in our exposition and analysis of the preceding movements — their strong points and their errors which we are trying to correct as a result of experience and greater knowledge that we've gained from other sources, most importantly from the Russian revolution.
Finkel: Did young people play a special role in the Wobblies or in the early Socialist Party? Were there student members? What sort of role did the radicalizing youth find in the socialist movement?
Cannon: The IWW itself was predominantly a young workers movement. It had no special youth organization. The drive and idealism of youth were a large part of its power and its merit, but again, it had no separate youth organization. There was no need for it as far as anybody could see. There was not even any talk of it.
In the West particularly, the IWW was predominantly a movement of migratory workers. They had to be young because it was a hard life. In the Midwest, for example, the harvest would start early in Texas and Oklahoma, and a great mass of migratory workers traveled by freight train down to the centers where the hiring took place and worked a few weeks or a month —whatever it took to finish the harvest.
Then they rode north by freight until they ended up in Minnesota and the Dakotas. That would be the whole summer long. And there would be railroad construction work and things of that kind. Migratory workers, as they were called, were something like the harvest pickers of today, except that they were all single men in those days. The wheat fields of Texas and Oklahoma would just be harvested about the time it was getting ripe in Kansas, and then in Nebraska and so on.
Another big source of their membership was the lumber woods of the Northwest. That constituency consisted of the same type of workers. And in the East in the textile mills, the IWW at one time had a strong movement, many strikes, mostly of young foreign-born and women workers.
Socialist youth organizations
Finkel: What were the first socialist youth organizations in this country?
Cannon: Well, to my recollection, there have been several histories written of the socialist movement which I think I mentioned in my book, The First Ten Years of American Communism. Up until the thirties, the socialist movement didn't amount to much on the campuses. There was a pretty sharp division between students and workers in those days. College boys came from the better-off classes and didn't associate with the workers.
The first manifestation of a ripple of the movement on the colleges came when Jack London and Upton Sinclair, who were the two literary heroes of the movement at that time, gave some lectures at Yale or Harvard or a place like that on socialism—"How I Became a Socialist" and so on.
They received a favorable response, and the result of it was the formation of what I think was called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. It was a very thin movement because the percentage of people going to college was not great in those days.
Colleges were by no means the center of radicalization. Just the contrary. They were the center of conservatism. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, I think, later changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). It still exists, doesn't it?
Finkel: Yes. In fact, SDS —the Students for a Democratic Society — was originally the youth group of LID. Prior to 1959, I think, it was called the Student League for Industrial Democracy. But in 1964 the LID disowned it, because SDS wouldn't exclude groups like the YSA from an antiwar march it was planning in Washington, D.C.
Cannon: Anyway, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society became sort of a gentlemen's socialist club on the campuses. They called it the country club of the movement. The real movement itself had virtually nothing on the campuses. I don't know the exact year when the Young People's Socialist League4 was formed. You can probably check it in the history books, but it didn't really amount to much before the thirties when there was an upsurge of interest in political questions during the depression. Campus radicalism was at that time dominated by the Communist Party. The Socialists were quite a secondary factor, but they were largely swamped by the Communist Party.
There's been of course a great, fundamental change since then. One of the big changes to note is the percentage of people going to college now. I don't know the statistics, but you can easily check it. I think you'll find that the difference is practically qualitative.
In the old days of the IWW, anybody who'd been to high school was an exception. The average worker was lucky enough to finish grade school, get some kind of job, and that was it. But various factors, including the development of technology and the improved standard of living, greatly expanded the college population. Have you ever thought of that or have you ever read anything about it? Tremendous expansion.
For example, we've had here in our household over the last number of years 15 or 20 people who've lived here with me. There are two people here now. Six months ago there were two others. I think every single one of them had been to college. They were all working. They have either finished college or have had some college experience, but they're working. And I guess a large percentage of those who attend college today go to work not as managers of prosperous family empires, but as workers in the labor force.
In 1919 Harvard students-had a great holiday going to Lawrence to help break a strike^ there. You can hardly imagine such a thing today.
The same thing happened in England in the general strike of 1926. There was a big movement recruiting strikebreakers from universities and prep schools and so on. They tried to help break the general strike.
Student radicalism in the '30s
In the thirties during the depression, that was the first time I ever noticed — the first time it came to general public attention —that there was a great rumbling on campus. The Communist Party had a very strong student membership. The Socialist Party too. We had a few, but nothing numerically significant.
The CP developed an antiwar movement on the campuses during the depression years. They absorbed to a large extent the young socialists, the YPSL people, in a broader movement called the League Against War and Fascism.
The big problem for a person going to college then was what you were going to do after you got out There was no job to go to. That was the fate of many of them.
I remember Ted Draper, the author of The Roots of American Communism, told me that he concentrated on the humanities courses in college rather than on the courses that would equip him for some kind of technical job. He said, "What was the use? Everybody knew there was no job to go to." He was preparing himself to be a writer.
An odd little story about the Socialist Party and the Communist Party is the story of the Draper brothers. You've heard of Hal Draper, the perennial YPSL? He's the brother of Ted Draper, the historian. Hal Draper was the Socialist, and the Socialists had a rather militant left wing in those days. He was one of the outstanding leaders of YPSL, and Ted Draper was one of the outstanding leaders of the Stalinists in the New York college community.
I was told that a big feature of that period was the debates between the two Draper brothers over questions of policy, war and so on. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist and Ted Draper was a Stalinist. In those days many Socialists stood to the left of the Stalinists.
A great many of those young people recruited by the Stalinists came out of college — either as graduates or dropouts. The Communist Party dominated a big unemployment movement, the Unemployed Councils. And young CP members who had acquired certain skills on the campuses in the organization of the movement—learning how to speak at meetings, make motions and do other things which the average person is afraid to even think of—went into the unemployment movement where they got further experience in organizational work.
When a slight upturn in industry came in the mid-thirties, they were sent into the factories. Many of these leaders of the Stalinist movement, as well as the Socialist Party to a lesser extent, became prominent. Some of their leaders in auto and other mass production industries began as former students, former Unemployed Council workers. I bet if a statistical record could be made, a large percentage of their most dynamic and influential people had had some experience on the colleges, as well as in the Unemployed Councils.
I always think of that whenever I hear this chatter of the sectarian groups who make a hue and cry about leaving the campus and getting into the factories. Theoretically if s all right in the long run, because you certainly can't make a revolution on the campuses. For one reason, they don't have the industrial power. But workers recruited and convinced of the historical trend toward socialism and committed to it—and who have also had the benefit of a college education and experience in college organizations —can become very effective leaders in the mass movement of the workers.
And the same holds true for the unemployment movement, which will become, in my opinion, a big phenomenon in a period of serious economic crisis in this country.
I think we should think of our work on the campuses as preparatory work for the coming upsurge of the workers movement, in which the people who were recruited and trained as socialists can play a great role. Both their education and their experience in organization will be very important factors and can be extremely advantageous in a surging new movement of workers—whether in unemployed movements or in unions or both.
Organizational independence
Finkel: How did the YPSL and the Young Communists organize? Were they independent of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party? Were they controlled from the top down?
Cannon: They were completely controlled. The theory of the Communist youth organization as laid down in Russia by the Bolsheviks was applied only on paper here. The formula was an organization of young people politically subordinate, but organizationally independent of the party. That was the formula. But in practice it didn't amount to much here. The control of the party was pretty absolute—as you see it now in the Communist Party.
The Young Communist League in my day in the twenties played no independent role. It was an appendage of the party. And the able young people in it were only too eager to get through with their YCL experience and get into the party, into the party faction fights where the real action was.
Max Shachtman, for instance, was the editor of the Young Worker, which was the Young Communist League paper. And Martin Abern was national secretary. As I say, they considered themselves as going through an apprenticeship. Their real interest was in the party. They belonged to the Cannon faction, as it was called, in the early twenties.
I didn't take much interest in YPSL in the twenties, so I can't speak from direct experience. But I think it was pretty much the same thing. Sort of shepherded by the party.
YPSL broke loose in the thirties. The YPSLs turned left politically faster than the Socialist Party. So that when we came to the showdown in 1937 — at the time we were in the Socialist Party6—at the national convention held in Philadelphia, the Trotskyists had a majority in YPSL, and we took a majority of YPSL with us.
I think YPSL at that time had about 1,000 members. Hal Draper was the national secretary, and he stayed with us a few years and then went out with the Shachtmanites. He remained a YPSL at heart. The last I heard of him, he was still operating on the campus.
YSA a new phenomenon
The Young Socialist Alliance of today is an entirely new phenomenon, as far as my experience can judge, by its composition, its general activity and in practically every other way.
The earlier youth movements were not nearly as serious as the party itself. A great many of them seemed really to be playing with ideas for awhile before turning their attention to some career. I used to hear the expression "career-oriented." That meant that they were not aiming to fight the rest of their lives for socialism; they were looking for a good job or profession or something of that sort.
This was true even of the left-wing young socialists that we recruited in 1937. The great majority were not serious. The Shachtman and Burn-ham gang took the majority of them and they were fully entitled to them because they weren't made for a serious party.
Our youth movement of today benefits greatly from the tradition that we carried over with us from the Communist Party —the Leninist concepts of the movement. A serious movement of people who join and commit themselves to fight for socialism under any circumstances. And the conception of a professional staff.
This concept was not originated in America. It came entirely from the Bolsheviks like many of our other best ideas. I don't know how big a staff we now have in the party and the youth movement, but in the movement before the Russian revolution everything was a very casual affair. The national office consisted of a national secretary, a couple of stenographers, a bookkeeper and a lecture bureau and that was about it The IWW national office consisted of a general secretary, Vincent St John, in the days when I used to go there. SL John, a stenographer and a bookkeeper and that was it
Finkel That was all?
How the IWW was organized
Cannon: That was the national office of the IWW. There was a tremendous movement of what was called the "decentralizers," who thought even that was too damn big of a bureaucracy to have hanging around their necks. They conducted a bitter fight to transform the national office into simply a communications center where the locals would send communications that would be forwarded to others. In 1913 we had a knock-down-drag-out fight at the convention with the decentralizers.
In addition to the national office of St John, the stenographer and the bookkeeper, you see, there was a General Executive Board of I think seven members who met about once every three months. The rest of the time they went out as field organizers, sometimes on the payroll, sometimes not, according to how the finances stood out in the field.
And the decentralizers howled their heads off at the 1913 convention (that's the last one I attended) demanding that the organization be decentralized and that all power be in the hands of the rank and file. The rank and file meant the locals. Each local for itself. They should communicate with each other through the national office, sending letters to Chicago. And Chicago would forward a copy. On such things they argued for days and days.
Well, they were defeated by St. John, who had an overwhelming personality. He was an organizer of the first quality and knew that organization required some centralization. And then St. John was succeeded by Bill Haywood7 —in 1914 I think.
Haywood went to prison in 1918, and the de-centralizers took over by a quiet operation in 1919. They adopted a motion that the national officers, the national secretary and the national organizer (who was not in the office but out in the field all the time) and any other national officials should serve only one term. Just about the time they got their hands into their jobs, they'd be out and the new force would come in. And that was one, but not the main reason I think, for the decline of the IWW after the big persecution8 during the First World War and the prison terms of the top leaders and so on.
I think there's some kind of myth or legend about the IWW which is entertained maybe by a lot of students. They've heard so much about it. And there was a wonderful militancy in the IWW.
But the IWW after the big persecution where hundreds were jailed, after 1920 or 1921, had no action whatever in the industrial field that anybody can recall. When the time came for the IWW project of industrial unions to be realized, it came from below in the mass production industries and the IWW was standing on the sidelines with their mouths open.9 They had nothing to do with it except as participants under different auspices.
Finkel: One of the questions we often get is how students can be effective. They don't see the working class in motion and they often wonder what difference it makes or matters if they join the YSA. It's very abstract to them. How would you answer a question like that?
Cannon: Well, I would say a good beginning is to adopt a historical view of society. Try to get a clear idea of where we came from and where from all indications we're heading.
And the second would be, as a beginning, to read my pamphlet America's Road to Socialism and get the beginning of a concept of the historical collision that's in the making and that's not so far away. Students today are going to face such crises that they will see that any plan they've made for a settled, secure and a quiet career of making a lot of money is not in the cards anymore.
Things are going to blow up. There's either going to be a revolution that transforms the whole social system or there isn't going to be anything left.
And we don't need to say that with any exaggeration or hysteria at all. That's what practically all scholars and other observers of society take for granted. One of the most common expressions you read in historical prognoses these days is "In the future, if there is to be a future of the human race, it has to be different."
If you think, on top of everything else, that they've already got enough atomic weapons of various kinds that can reach all points on the globe at the push of a button — enough to destroy the whole human race seven or eight times over. And if you think that every time there's any sign of a sharp international crisis everybody gets apprehensive about who's going to drop the first atom bomb and what will follow it, then you realize that the old slogan of the days before the First World War — that is, the historical perspective is either socialism or barbarism — is even more true today.
Today everybody with any knowledge of things will have to admit that the perspective is either socialism or annihilation. That's even worse than barbarism, because theoretically you can recover from a new barbarism. But nobody's yet recovered from the ashes of atomic destruction.
I believe that young people are particularly responsive to discussions of that kind. And that's not some pipe dream at all. These are the demonstrable facts of life in the year 1974. The only worthwhile thing for a young person to commit herself or himself to is a movement to make possible the continuation of the human race and its further evolution, development and progress. That can be stated seriously as a practical proposition. "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite says when he winds up his evening news.
We couldn't say that with such assurance in the old days. One of the hardest things to answer was, "Well it's a good idea, but we'll never realize it. People will never agree to it." or "It's a hundred years away, so what's the use of worrying about it?"
But that's not the case today. The young generation you're talking to is going to see it one way or another. And you may be able to decide. That's really a terrific thought—that one single person may make the difference.
I heard on TV several years ago an interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russell who was greatly disturbed about the development of atomic weapons and was agitated about the danger of them. He had accumulated considerable knowledge of atomic weapons' potential for destruction.
He was asked, "What do you consider is your main concern?" He hesitated a moment, and he said, "I want to see the human race continue." And then he was asked, "And what do you think are the odds?" He replied, "About four to six as I see it right now" — about four to six, for the chances of the human race continuing. The next question was, "What can we do about it?" And he said, "The only thing I know is to keep working and struggling to change the odds."
I always thought of this as a very perceptive statement of the dilemma facing the young generation today. Not at all what it was 50 or 100 years ago. In some of my last speeches before I fell into retirement, so to speak, I quoted this along with opinions of other informed people. I found a great response to that formulation and developed it further.
I said, "Suppose by our efforts we can push the odds up to 50-50, which is easily conceivable. By our efforts we can make it five to five instead of four to six! There's a point where one feather on one side of the scale or the other can make a difference on the basic question. It doesn't matter who we are, or where we're situated, or what we do; any one of us can make that difference."
It's a sobering formulation, isn't it? And yet, I personally feel that it is not at all a fantastic formulation. I feel that the human race is at the point where it's got to decide and hasn't too much time to do it. I'm almost certain it's going to be decided one way or another in the lifetime of the new generation entering the world of political action.
And then you should consider that the human race hasn't yet had a real chance to show what it's capable of doing. It has been the victim throughout the millenia of the social system that it has been born into. Humanity has done pretty well in coping with the problems of nature, of science and technology, but we have not yet gained control of our own social system. Nobody knows what's possible. But we can say all things are possible if we had an organized, consciously directed and planned organization of society and production.
It just staggers the mind to think of what could be done if everybody in the world had access to all the knowledge that has been accumulated over the ages and had an opportunity to develop the latent talents that everybody has to a greater or lesser extent. How much waste in the social system could be eliminated and converted to constructive uses! Good God! Just think, in this country we throw away $80 billion a year on weapons of destruction. Just that alone, to say nothing of what we throw away on useless advertising, dirty tricks and things of that sort in politics. God almighty!
And then, as Trotsky said in one of his articles in Literature and Revolution, humanity under socialism for the first time will begin to understand itself and to consciously develop to its best capacity. That's never been done. That requires a change in the social system. And he predicted that we will develop the human race to the point where the average person reaches the height of an Aristotle, or a Goethe or a Marx, and beyond that, new peaks will rise.
Well, I think a young person listening to those arguments will have a hard time coming up with an answer to them. You've got to pose the question flatly: that there's a danger that the human race may not continue; and if it's going to continue it's got to take control of its own social system and reorganize it and plan and eliminate the constant day-to-day danger of annihilation.
Finkel: Then they ask you how do you do it?
Cannon: Well, we're not going to say it's an easy thing to do. It's a lifetime job for each and everyone of us. But the thing that inspires one's life and makes it worth living in the face of all this calamitous danger everywhere, uncertainties and insecurity, is to commit yourself to an effort to change it. And not to belittle oneself and think you don't count. You may be the decisive factor.
Finkel: Thank you very much, Jim.
Cannon: Thank you for giving me a chance to sound off. I don't get on the soapbox much any more these days. If I can convey any suggestion to you it's this —the longer you live in this fight, the more determined you are to try to win it and the more confident you are that the human race will survive.
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Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Youth and the Socialist Movement
Rich Finkel, National Secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance, had the following discussion with James P. Cannon on March 15, 1974, in Los Angeles.
Finkel: On my tour this spring, I've already visited Texas, Arizona and part of California. I get the impression that many students who were active during the height of the antiwar movement and the Black struggle haven't quite figured out what kind of role they can play in a period of different dimensions, opportunities and problems, such as we are facing right now.
Cannon: I think it's very important for us to adopt a completely realistic view of the situation and adjust to the changed consciousness and attitude on the campus. The party is tested just as much by times like this as by times of an upswing in activity.
During the fifties, we lived so long in hard times, I think some of the old-timers found it difficult to adjust to the big upsurge we had during the Vietnam war.
It should be made a point of our educational propaganda that a revolutionist's spirit and attitude is not determined by the popular mood of the moment. We have a historical view and we don't allow the movement to fade away when it runs into changed times, which can happen as we know from experience.
You're acquainted with my pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism? It's a series of six lectures given at the height of the McCarthyite period in the fall of 1952, when reaction seemed to reign supreme. There were practically no actions of any kind. So we decided on the lectures as a deliberate party action. They were given here in Los Angeles as a series of forums on what socialism means. What socialist America will look like. We had a regular attendance of 100, give or take a few, at each lecture.
Don't you find that the young people you talk to have a great interest in what socialism is, what it will look like and so on? There's a temptation in a period of upswing of activities to neglect the exposition of our fundamental program in its historical perspective. But I can recall from
my youth, which was in the heyday of the Socialist Party! in this country —the Debs2 period — that seemed to be the question that most interested people who were contacted around the party. What is this socialism? What will it look like? How will it come about? And so on. And I think that's true today too, if you really probe the minds of young people.
Finkel: We've noticed that quite a bit. I think one of the stimulants right now is the energy crisis. People know that the oil monopolies prevail. They see what capitalism does, and they ask, "What is socialism? How do we organize it? How do we get there?"
We get more of these questions about socialism today than we did during the antiwar movement. I think that the questions are different at this particular period —more fundamental. With the Watergate revelations, people want to know, "How can we organize government without corruption? Is it possible?"
Your pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism, was one of the first things I read when I joined the YSA in 1968. It was an old copy, but it answered a lot of questions I had. I think that's true for many YSA members.
Could you explain a little about some of the previous experiences of the workers movement with youth groups? That's one of the questions that we often get in the YSA. What happened with the Wobblies? How did the Socialist and Communist parties build their youth organizations? What were their problems and successes?
Cannon: First of all, we've got to understand that the past of the radical and revolutionary movement in this country is part of our heritage — both with its positive and negative sides. We have to know about that. Our new members should be thoroughly schooled in our exposition and analysis of the preceding movements — their strong points and their errors which we are trying to correct as a result of experience and greater knowledge that we've gained from other sources, most importantly from the Russian revolution.
Finkel: Did young people play a special role in the Wobblies or in the early Socialist Party? Were there student members? What sort of role did the radicalizing youth find in the socialist movement?
Cannon: The IWW itself was predominantly a young workers movement. It had no special youth organization. The drive and idealism of youth were a large part of its power and its merit, but again, it had no separate youth organization. There was no need for it as far as anybody could see. There was not even any talk of it.
In the West particularly, the IWW was predominantly a movement of migratory workers. They had to be young because it was a hard life. In the Midwest, for example, the harvest would start early in Texas and Oklahoma, and a great mass of migratory workers traveled by freight train down to the centers where the hiring took place and worked a few weeks or a month —whatever it took to finish the harvest.
Then they rode north by freight until they ended up in Minnesota and the Dakotas. That would be the whole summer long. And there would be railroad construction work and things of that kind. Migratory workers, as they were called, were something like the harvest pickers of today, except that they were all single men in those days. The wheat fields of Texas and Oklahoma would just be harvested about the time it was getting ripe in Kansas, and then in Nebraska and so on.
Another big source of their membership was the lumber woods of the Northwest. That constituency consisted of the same type of workers. And in the East in the textile mills, the IWW at one time had a strong movement, many strikes, mostly of young foreign-born and women workers.
Socialist youth organizations
Finkel: What were the first socialist youth organizations in this country?
Cannon: Well, to my recollection, there have been several histories written of the socialist movement which I think I mentioned in my book, The First Ten Years of American Communism. Up until the thirties, the socialist movement didn't amount to much on the campuses. There was a pretty sharp division between students and workers in those days. College boys came from the better-off classes and didn't associate with the workers.
The first manifestation of a ripple of the movement on the colleges came when Jack London and Upton Sinclair, who were the two literary heroes of the movement at that time, gave some lectures at Yale or Harvard or a place like that on socialism—"How I Became a Socialist" and so on.
They received a favorable response, and the result of it was the formation of what I think was called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. It was a very thin movement because the percentage of people going to college was not great in those days.
Colleges were by no means the center of radicalization. Just the contrary. They were the center of conservatism. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, I think, later changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). It still exists, doesn't it?
Finkel: Yes. In fact, SDS —the Students for a Democratic Society — was originally the youth group of LID. Prior to 1959, I think, it was called the Student League for Industrial Democracy. But in 1964 the LID disowned it, because SDS wouldn't exclude groups like the YSA from an antiwar march it was planning in Washington, D.C.
Cannon: Anyway, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society became sort of a gentlemen's socialist club on the campuses. They called it the country club of the movement. The real movement itself had virtually nothing on the campuses. I don't know the exact year when the Young People's Socialist League4 was formed. You can probably check it in the history books, but it didn't really amount to much before the thirties when there was an upsurge of interest in political questions during the depression. Campus radicalism was at that time dominated by the Communist Party. The Socialists were quite a secondary factor, but they were largely swamped by the Communist Party.
There's been of course a great, fundamental change since then. One of the big changes to note is the percentage of people going to college now. I don't know the statistics, but you can easily check it. I think you'll find that the difference is practically qualitative.
In the old days of the IWW, anybody who'd been to high school was an exception. The average worker was lucky enough to finish grade school, get some kind of job, and that was it. But various factors, including the development of technology and the improved standard of living, greatly expanded the college population. Have you ever thought of that or have you ever read anything about it? Tremendous expansion.
For example, we've had here in our household over the last number of years 15 or 20 people who've lived here with me. There are two people here now. Six months ago there were two others. I think every single one of them had been to college. They were all working. They have either finished college or have had some college experience, but they're working. And I guess a large percentage of those who attend college today go to work not as managers of prosperous family empires, but as workers in the labor force.
In 1919 Harvard students-had a great holiday going to Lawrence to help break a strike^ there. You can hardly imagine such a thing today.
The same thing happened in England in the general strike of 1926. There was a big movement recruiting strikebreakers from universities and prep schools and so on. They tried to help break the general strike.
Student radicalism in the '30s
In the thirties during the depression, that was the first time I ever noticed — the first time it came to general public attention —that there was a great rumbling on campus. The Communist Party had a very strong student membership. The Socialist Party too. We had a few, but nothing numerically significant.
The CP developed an antiwar movement on the campuses during the depression years. They absorbed to a large extent the young socialists, the YPSL people, in a broader movement called the League Against War and Fascism.
The big problem for a person going to college then was what you were going to do after you got out There was no job to go to. That was the fate of many of them.
I remember Ted Draper, the author of The Roots of American Communism, told me that he concentrated on the humanities courses in college rather than on the courses that would equip him for some kind of technical job. He said, "What was the use? Everybody knew there was no job to go to." He was preparing himself to be a writer.
An odd little story about the Socialist Party and the Communist Party is the story of the Draper brothers. You've heard of Hal Draper, the perennial YPSL? He's the brother of Ted Draper, the historian. Hal Draper was the Socialist, and the Socialists had a rather militant left wing in those days. He was one of the outstanding leaders of YPSL, and Ted Draper was one of the outstanding leaders of the Stalinists in the New York college community.
I was told that a big feature of that period was the debates between the two Draper brothers over questions of policy, war and so on. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist and Ted Draper was a Stalinist. In those days many Socialists stood to the left of the Stalinists.
A great many of those young people recruited by the Stalinists came out of college — either as graduates or dropouts. The Communist Party dominated a big unemployment movement, the Unemployed Councils. And young CP members who had acquired certain skills on the campuses in the organization of the movement—learning how to speak at meetings, make motions and do other things which the average person is afraid to even think of—went into the unemployment movement where they got further experience in organizational work.
When a slight upturn in industry came in the mid-thirties, they were sent into the factories. Many of these leaders of the Stalinist movement, as well as the Socialist Party to a lesser extent, became prominent. Some of their leaders in auto and other mass production industries began as former students, former Unemployed Council workers. I bet if a statistical record could be made, a large percentage of their most dynamic and influential people had had some experience on the colleges, as well as in the Unemployed Councils.
I always think of that whenever I hear this chatter of the sectarian groups who make a hue and cry about leaving the campus and getting into the factories. Theoretically if s all right in the long run, because you certainly can't make a revolution on the campuses. For one reason, they don't have the industrial power. But workers recruited and convinced of the historical trend toward socialism and committed to it—and who have also had the benefit of a college education and experience in college organizations —can become very effective leaders in the mass movement of the workers.
And the same holds true for the unemployment movement, which will become, in my opinion, a big phenomenon in a period of serious economic crisis in this country.
I think we should think of our work on the campuses as preparatory work for the coming upsurge of the workers movement, in which the people who were recruited and trained as socialists can play a great role. Both their education and their experience in organization will be very important factors and can be extremely advantageous in a surging new movement of workers—whether in unemployed movements or in unions or both.
Organizational independence
Finkel: How did the YPSL and the Young Communists organize? Were they independent of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party? Were they controlled from the top down?
Cannon: They were completely controlled. The theory of the Communist youth organization as laid down in Russia by the Bolsheviks was applied only on paper here. The formula was an organization of young people politically subordinate, but organizationally independent of the party. That was the formula. But in practice it didn't amount to much here. The control of the party was pretty absolute—as you see it now in the Communist Party.
The Young Communist League in my day in the twenties played no independent role. It was an appendage of the party. And the able young people in it were only too eager to get through with their YCL experience and get into the party, into the party faction fights where the real action was.
Max Shachtman, for instance, was the editor of the Young Worker, which was the Young Communist League paper. And Martin Abern was national secretary. As I say, they considered themselves as going through an apprenticeship. Their real interest was in the party. They belonged to the Cannon faction, as it was called, in the early twenties.
I didn't take much interest in YPSL in the twenties, so I can't speak from direct experience. But I think it was pretty much the same thing. Sort of shepherded by the party.
YPSL broke loose in the thirties. The YPSLs turned left politically faster than the Socialist Party. So that when we came to the showdown in 1937 — at the time we were in the Socialist Party6—at the national convention held in Philadelphia, the Trotskyists had a majority in YPSL, and we took a majority of YPSL with us.
I think YPSL at that time had about 1,000 members. Hal Draper was the national secretary, and he stayed with us a few years and then went out with the Shachtmanites. He remained a YPSL at heart. The last I heard of him, he was still operating on the campus.
YSA a new phenomenon
The Young Socialist Alliance of today is an entirely new phenomenon, as far as my experience can judge, by its composition, its general activity and in practically every other way.
The earlier youth movements were not nearly as serious as the party itself. A great many of them seemed really to be playing with ideas for awhile before turning their attention to some career. I used to hear the expression "career-oriented." That meant that they were not aiming to fight the rest of their lives for socialism; they were looking for a good job or profession or something of that sort.
This was true even of the left-wing young socialists that we recruited in 1937. The great majority were not serious. The Shachtman and Burn-ham gang took the majority of them and they were fully entitled to them because they weren't made for a serious party.
Our youth movement of today benefits greatly from the tradition that we carried over with us from the Communist Party —the Leninist concepts of the movement. A serious movement of people who join and commit themselves to fight for socialism under any circumstances. And the conception of a professional staff.
This concept was not originated in America. It came entirely from the Bolsheviks like many of our other best ideas. I don't know how big a staff we now have in the party and the youth movement, but in the movement before the Russian revolution everything was a very casual affair. The national office consisted of a national secretary, a couple of stenographers, a bookkeeper and a lecture bureau and that was about it The IWW national office consisted of a general secretary, Vincent St John, in the days when I used to go there. SL John, a stenographer and a bookkeeper and that was it
Finkel That was all?
How the IWW was organized
Cannon: That was the national office of the IWW. There was a tremendous movement of what was called the "decentralizers," who thought even that was too damn big of a bureaucracy to have hanging around their necks. They conducted a bitter fight to transform the national office into simply a communications center where the locals would send communications that would be forwarded to others. In 1913 we had a knock-down-drag-out fight at the convention with the decentralizers.
In addition to the national office of St John, the stenographer and the bookkeeper, you see, there was a General Executive Board of I think seven members who met about once every three months. The rest of the time they went out as field organizers, sometimes on the payroll, sometimes not, according to how the finances stood out in the field.
And the decentralizers howled their heads off at the 1913 convention (that's the last one I attended) demanding that the organization be decentralized and that all power be in the hands of the rank and file. The rank and file meant the locals. Each local for itself. They should communicate with each other through the national office, sending letters to Chicago. And Chicago would forward a copy. On such things they argued for days and days.
Well, they were defeated by St. John, who had an overwhelming personality. He was an organizer of the first quality and knew that organization required some centralization. And then St. John was succeeded by Bill Haywood7 —in 1914 I think.
Haywood went to prison in 1918, and the de-centralizers took over by a quiet operation in 1919. They adopted a motion that the national officers, the national secretary and the national organizer (who was not in the office but out in the field all the time) and any other national officials should serve only one term. Just about the time they got their hands into their jobs, they'd be out and the new force would come in. And that was one, but not the main reason I think, for the decline of the IWW after the big persecution8 during the First World War and the prison terms of the top leaders and so on.
I think there's some kind of myth or legend about the IWW which is entertained maybe by a lot of students. They've heard so much about it. And there was a wonderful militancy in the IWW.
But the IWW after the big persecution where hundreds were jailed, after 1920 or 1921, had no action whatever in the industrial field that anybody can recall. When the time came for the IWW project of industrial unions to be realized, it came from below in the mass production industries and the IWW was standing on the sidelines with their mouths open.9 They had nothing to do with it except as participants under different auspices.
Finkel: One of the questions we often get is how students can be effective. They don't see the working class in motion and they often wonder what difference it makes or matters if they join the YSA. It's very abstract to them. How would you answer a question like that?
Cannon: Well, I would say a good beginning is to adopt a historical view of society. Try to get a clear idea of where we came from and where from all indications we're heading.
And the second would be, as a beginning, to read my pamphlet America's Road to Socialism and get the beginning of a concept of the historical collision that's in the making and that's not so far away. Students today are going to face such crises that they will see that any plan they've made for a settled, secure and a quiet career of making a lot of money is not in the cards anymore.
Things are going to blow up. There's either going to be a revolution that transforms the whole social system or there isn't going to be anything left.
And we don't need to say that with any exaggeration or hysteria at all. That's what practically all scholars and other observers of society take for granted. One of the most common expressions you read in historical prognoses these days is "In the future, if there is to be a future of the human race, it has to be different."
If you think, on top of everything else, that they've already got enough atomic weapons of various kinds that can reach all points on the globe at the push of a button — enough to destroy the whole human race seven or eight times over. And if you think that every time there's any sign of a sharp international crisis everybody gets apprehensive about who's going to drop the first atom bomb and what will follow it, then you realize that the old slogan of the days before the First World War — that is, the historical perspective is either socialism or barbarism — is even more true today.
Today everybody with any knowledge of things will have to admit that the perspective is either socialism or annihilation. That's even worse than barbarism, because theoretically you can recover from a new barbarism. But nobody's yet recovered from the ashes of atomic destruction.
I believe that young people are particularly responsive to discussions of that kind. And that's not some pipe dream at all. These are the demonstrable facts of life in the year 1974. The only worthwhile thing for a young person to commit herself or himself to is a movement to make possible the continuation of the human race and its further evolution, development and progress. That can be stated seriously as a practical proposition. "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite says when he winds up his evening news.
We couldn't say that with such assurance in the old days. One of the hardest things to answer was, "Well it's a good idea, but we'll never realize it. People will never agree to it." or "It's a hundred years away, so what's the use of worrying about it?"
But that's not the case today. The young generation you're talking to is going to see it one way or another. And you may be able to decide. That's really a terrific thought—that one single person may make the difference.
I heard on TV several years ago an interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russell who was greatly disturbed about the development of atomic weapons and was agitated about the danger of them. He had accumulated considerable knowledge of atomic weapons' potential for destruction.
He was asked, "What do you consider is your main concern?" He hesitated a moment, and he said, "I want to see the human race continue." And then he was asked, "And what do you think are the odds?" He replied, "About four to six as I see it right now" — about four to six, for the chances of the human race continuing. The next question was, "What can we do about it?" And he said, "The only thing I know is to keep working and struggling to change the odds."
I always thought of this as a very perceptive statement of the dilemma facing the young generation today. Not at all what it was 50 or 100 years ago. In some of my last speeches before I fell into retirement, so to speak, I quoted this along with opinions of other informed people. I found a great response to that formulation and developed it further.
I said, "Suppose by our efforts we can push the odds up to 50-50, which is easily conceivable. By our efforts we can make it five to five instead of four to six! There's a point where one feather on one side of the scale or the other can make a difference on the basic question. It doesn't matter who we are, or where we're situated, or what we do; any one of us can make that difference."
It's a sobering formulation, isn't it? And yet, I personally feel that it is not at all a fantastic formulation. I feel that the human race is at the point where it's got to decide and hasn't too much time to do it. I'm almost certain it's going to be decided one way or another in the lifetime of the new generation entering the world of political action.
And then you should consider that the human race hasn't yet had a real chance to show what it's capable of doing. It has been the victim throughout the millenia of the social system that it has been born into. Humanity has done pretty well in coping with the problems of nature, of science and technology, but we have not yet gained control of our own social system. Nobody knows what's possible. But we can say all things are possible if we had an organized, consciously directed and planned organization of society and production.
It just staggers the mind to think of what could be done if everybody in the world had access to all the knowledge that has been accumulated over the ages and had an opportunity to develop the latent talents that everybody has to a greater or lesser extent. How much waste in the social system could be eliminated and converted to constructive uses! Good God! Just think, in this country we throw away $80 billion a year on weapons of destruction. Just that alone, to say nothing of what we throw away on useless advertising, dirty tricks and things of that sort in politics. God almighty!
And then, as Trotsky said in one of his articles in Literature and Revolution, humanity under socialism for the first time will begin to understand itself and to consciously develop to its best capacity. That's never been done. That requires a change in the social system. And he predicted that we will develop the human race to the point where the average person reaches the height of an Aristotle, or a Goethe or a Marx, and beyond that, new peaks will rise.
Well, I think a young person listening to those arguments will have a hard time coming up with an answer to them. You've got to pose the question flatly: that there's a danger that the human race may not continue; and if it's going to continue it's got to take control of its own social system and reorganize it and plan and eliminate the constant day-to-day danger of annihilation.
Finkel: Then they ask you how do you do it?
Cannon: Well, we're not going to say it's an easy thing to do. It's a lifetime job for each and everyone of us. But the thing that inspires one's life and makes it worth living in the face of all this calamitous danger everywhere, uncertainties and insecurity, is to commit yourself to an effort to change it. And not to belittle oneself and think you don't count. You may be the decisive factor.
Finkel: Thank you very much, Jim.
Cannon: Thank you for giving me a chance to sound off. I don't get on the soapbox much any more these days. If I can convey any suggestion to you it's this —the longer you live in this fight, the more determined you are to try to win it and the more confident you are that the human race will survive.
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