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.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Anytime you have person who has been through the key left-wing movements of his century (IWW, Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party) as a militant and leader you had best listen up-listen up closely
****
Questions of American Radical History
The following interview was conducted at James P. Cannon's home in Los Angeles July 16.
Sidney Lens is a labor historian who was active hi the anti-Vietnam war movement He is also an editor of Liberation magazine.
Lens: I interviewed Earl Browder before he died. What was your reaction to him personally?
Cannon: Well, that's quite a story, because I knew him for many years.
Lens: Yes, I know, but did you like him personally?
Cannon: For a long time we worked together.
Lens: He never joined the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World — IWW), did he?
Cannon: I don't think so. He became a disciple of Foster. 2 Foster came through Kansas City, I think it was in 1913. He had been a Wobbly who had gone to France and had become converted to syndicalism. He came back and made a tour of the IWW locals, trying to convince them of his ideas of 'boring from within' the AFL (American Federation of Labor). Browder was one of his converts from Kansas City.
Lens: Did he try to convert you?
1.Earl Browder was general secretary
of the American Communist Party from
1930 to 1945.
2. William Z. Foster was the most im
portant trade-union figure to join the early
Communist Party.
Cannon: No.
Lens: Why not?
Cannon: I didn't run into him personally. I don't know whether Browder had been a Wobbly or not. I had been traveling around the country shortly before that and had been out of Kansas City. I knew he was a radical.
Lens: What made Browder become a Stalinist?
Cannon: That's a long story. What made all the others become Stalinists?
Lens: Was it a matter of just belonging to something big?
Cannon: Yes.
Lens: He told me that he disliked Trotsky personally. He was quite senile when I saw him, and he spoke very cryptically. He gave the impres-
sion that the biggest basis for not joining with Trotsky was that he considered Trotsky a show-off and very egotistical.
Cannon: When the first world war broke out for this country in 1917, Browder had been working in the (food and farm) cooperative movement. He was an accountant by profession. I think he was impressed by the cooperative movement, which at that tune there was quite a sentiment for.
He had been to New York. He may have been influenced by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's demonstrations of opposition to the war. He came back to Kansas City. He and his two brothers and his brother-in-law, Bob Sullivan, made an open demonstration against the entry into the war with leaflets. They were promptly arrested. He got a year in the Missouri State Penitentiary. They got out about 1918.
Recruited Browder
By that time I had become a communist. I saw them immediately after they came out. They had no inclination toward the communist movement because it was harebrained. There was some truth in that. There was a large element of harebrains in the new communist movement. But I think it's safe to say that I convinced him there was fundamental merit in it. And he became a communist.
In the fall of 1918 we decided to start a paper in Kansas City. It had no political allegiance at its start, but it was an exponent of the Russian revolution and defense of class-war prisoners and so on. Browder was the first editor and I worked very closely with him, promoting the idea of the paper and then getting started on it.
Along about early summer of 1919 he and his brothers had to go back to serve a federal sentence in Leaven-worth, Kans., and I had to take over the paper as editor.
We remained close associates while he was in prison. I became rather prominent in the new communist movement. I was elected to the central committee at the first Bridgeman, Mich., convention in the spring of 1920 and became organizer of the St. Louis-Southern Illinois coal district for the party. A few months after that I was moved to Cleveland to become editor of a paper called the Toiler, which was a continuation of the Ohio Socialist
(Alfred) Wagenknecht and his group had control of the state (Socialist Party) organization and they took the paper along with them when the split came (the split of the left wing from the SP). A few months later they decided to move the paper to New York and change the name to the Worker and I went along with that. That would be in the late fall of 1920. Eventually it became the Daily Worker. So if you want to have a record of my sins, you can say I was the original editor of the Daily Worker.
Lens: Yes, I know that record.
Cannon: Browder was in prison till the spring of 1921. He wasn't known to the leadership of the party. It was on my recommendation that he was brought to New York. He became right away the assistant of Foster, who had also at that time decided to join the party clandestinely.
They decided to start a monthly magazine, the Labor Monthly, in Chicago, with Foster as editor and Browder as managing editor. We were close together all that time up until Foster and I had a falling out —in 1925, I think it was.
Lens: What was that all about?
Cannon: I tell the story in my book The First Ten Years of American Communism in reply to some of (Theodore) Draper's questions. The split took place rather dramatically at a plenary meeting, right down the middle of the Foster-Cannon group. People like Bill Dunne, Arne Swabeck, and others came with me. Browder and (Jack) Johnstone and others went with Foster in this split, which* was never fully healed, although we had relations later. That amounted to a personal falling out to 1925. That would be about 12 years after I first met him.
Lens: Would you consider Browder a creative person to that period, independent?
Cannon: No.
Lens: Did he always have to attach himself to somebody, like to Foster or you?
Cannon: He wasn't by nature a leader or a politician. There was never such a thing as a Browder group in the party. There was a Foster group, and a Cannon group, and a Ruthenberg group. But he was a very energetic and intelligent, capable worker.
Lens: Was there anything in the twenties similar to the present counter-culture amongst the youth?
Cannon: Not to my knowledge.
Lens: What were the main reasons for the failure of the Communist Party (CP) to take off? I know that's a big story, but do you think they were mainly subjective reasons?
Cannon: Well, of course, first there were the persecutions, quite severe in the first few years. The party was driven underground. Next there was a sharp economic depression and then an ascending boom that continued throughout the twenties. That wasn't a very fertile field for communism to expand. And it was a new movement with a lot to learn.
Lens: Did you anticipate the depression of 1929?
Cannon: Well, we kept forecasting it.
Lens: Yes, you kept forecasting it from about 1922 on.
Cannon: So we were eventually vindicated in 1929.
Lens: But did you anticipate that particular depression and that it would come through the stock market crash?
Cannon: I wouldn't say specifically so, but the Lovestoneites3 wrote a document on American exception-alism. The Comintern (Communist International) was just beginning its left turn. They wrote a document on American exceptionalism. That's what they called it. Sort of exempting America from the world trend for the time being.
And we wrote a counter-document in collaboration with the Fosterites that we presented at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was called "The Right Danger in the American Party." There you'll see that we took a rather radical approach to the whole question, including the economy.
Lens: When the depression came, what were your personal reactions? Did you feel that America was moving close to an actual revolution?
Cannon: I can't say that I did. Lens: Then what was your reaction?
Cannon: Like most everybody else, stunned.
Lens: Stunned?
Workers atomized
Cannon: Yes, it was so severe. It was hard to see an immediate revolution. The workers were atomized. The organized labor movement had lost ground in the twenties. The unions had fewer than three million members at the time of the crash and they began losing more after that.
Lens: Did the CP really believe that a revolution impended?
Cannon: At that time they were in the midst of the "third period."4 So they were running hog-wild for a while, but they weren't getting much response to that appeal.
3. Jay Lovestone was secretary of the CP in the 1920s. He headed a rightist faction in the party that was aligned internationally with Bukharin. In 1928, Love-stone carried out the expulsion of the American Trotskyists from the CP. When Stalin turned on his rightist allies in 1929, Lovestone was demoted from his post and expelled.
The Lovestone group maintained itself until the outbreak of World War II and then dissolved. Lovestone subsequently became an anticommunist expert for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.
Lens: Was your organization called the Communist League of America at first, or was it called Communist Party Majority or Left Opposition?
Cannon: Communist League of America (Opposition). The Lovestoneites called themselves Communist Party (Majority Group).5
Lens: Then you dropped the word "opposition" eventually.
Cannon: Eventually, yes. But for four years we continued to direct our agitation mainly to the Communist Party.
Lens: Were you disappointed in the results?
Cannon: Well, we were trying to recruit our primary cadre and we recruited more than a hundred people to begin with. I guess we had a couple of hundred or a little more by 1934 and then we got into the Minneapolis strike and that gave us a big boost. It identified us as workers in the mass movement.
Then came the fusion with the Muste-ites6 in the same year. So it was sort of a period of expansion in the later thirties.
4The "third period" was a schema pro
claimed by the Stalinists in 1928 accord
ing to which capitalism was in its final
period of collapse. Following from this
schema, the Comintern's tactics during
the next six years were marked by ultra-
leftism, adventurism, sectarian "red"
unions, and opposition to forming united
fronts with other working-class organiza
tions.
5The Communist League of America
(Opposition) was the organization formed
by Cannon and others who were expelled
from the Communist Party in 1928 for
supporting the program of the Left Op
position in the Soviet CP, led by Leon
Trotsky.
6In December 1934 the Communist
League of America fused with the Ameri
can Workers Party, led by A. J. Muste,
to form the Workers Party of the United
States.
Lens: What happened then in the relalively large mass movement before World War II and during World War II? Did you feel that there was something impeding your development or your progress, or were you going too slow, or what?
Cannon: Do you mean our organization?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Our big obstacle was the Communist Party. It had complete domination of what there was of the radical movement. The SP was an empty shell. And we were isolated. The membership of the Communist Party largely identified Stalin with the Comintern. And whatever the Comintern said was the law. But we kept recruiting one here and one there until we'd built up quite a cadre of capable people.
Lens: Why didn't you take over the Communist Party? Why didn't the majority come over to your point of view? Must a radical party have the support of a government in some foreign country to survive or prosper?
Cannon: The Comintern represented the Russian revolution in the minds of the American communists. The Comintern said we were counterrevolutionaries and that Trotsky was a fascist, a traitor, and everything else; and they accepted that.
Lens: From a theoretical point of view, though, Marxism is supposed to be the science of revolution, and your estimate of events was more lucid than Browder's, say and yet here were ten or twenty thousand communists to whom you couldn't get through. Their emotions were much stronger than their intellectual probing.
Cannon: That's true; it took a long time for us to break through.
Lens: Is that a handicap that the left can always expect, that emotion plays a bigger role than science of revolution?
Cannon: The pull of a radical organization that is dominant in the field is almost gravitational. The average worker and activist doesn't want to be connected with some little sect on the sidelines. He wants to be where the action is.
Muste group
Lens: Did the Muste group make any sensational spurt in its early days, or was it growing about like your group?
Cannon: It was growing about like ours. Muste was a remarkable personal character. He was a preacher, you know, to start with.
In 1917, as a minister in Boston, he went to Lawrence, Mass., and got into the textile strike there and became the head of it Next, if I'm correct, he became the head of the textile workers union, or what was left of it.
Then he started the Brookwood Labor College in New York State, which quite a number of people attended, and he recruited some of them. Out of that he developed the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and recruited people here and there. Then this organization developed an unemployed movement of its own.
The Communist Party dominated the main unemployment movement in the big cities, the Unemployed Councils. The Musteites organized around the fringes rather effectively, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other places. The Unemployed Leagues, they called them. Through all these operations Muste accumulated a cadre.
We were greatly impressed with their actions in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in 1934, at the same time that we were occupied with the Teamsters' fight in Minneapolis. They had done an unprecedented thing. Their leaders there
— Sam Pollock, Ted Selander, and Art Preis — were in the unemployment movement, the Unemployed League of the Musteites. And they organized to support the strike.
Contrary to the custom of the unemployed being recruited as strikebreakers, they became the most militant supporters of the strike. They practically led the strike. We were tremendously impressed by that, and it led to our negotiations with them for fusion. Meanwhile Muste was turning to the left politically, so there wasn't much trouble in bringing about a unification.
Some of the people that Muste had attracted —such as (J. B. S.) Hardman and (Louis) Budenz and a few others wouldn't go along with it, but Muste
decided to do it and he brought along a majority of his people and it gave
the movement quite a boost.
Lens: Did you expect a revolution in the 1930s —that capitalism would collapse?
Cannon: I can't say that I expected it, but looking back on it now, as I have said many times, anything was possible in the thirties. After the workers recovered from their paralysis. In the first four or five years they were simply stunned, they didn't know what to do. But beginning with Minneapolis in 1934, three strikes —Minneapolis, the San Francisco general strike, and the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo — seemed to give the impetus needed for a new movement. And it began to develop by leaps and bounds.
Lens: What stopped it?
Tremendous upheaval
Cannon: The American Communist Party.
The industrial union movement developed millions of members and John L. Lewis, recognizing the tide, turned toward it and gave quite effective leadership for a time. The sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich., and the organization of General Motors and Ford represented a tremendous upheaval. That was accomplished in a few years.
Lens: When you say the Communist Party stopped it, in what way?
Cannon: The Communist Party was the dominant force in the radical movement. They dominated the unemployed movement and by that time there developed a radical movement on the campuses, which they also dominated. And they trained some cadres in the unemployment and student movements who took part in various actions.
You know, the average worker is afraid to stand up and make a motion in a meeting. They aren't accustomed to that. The CP trained a whole cadre of people who could stand up and make motions and parliamentary moves, and run meetings, and things of this sort.
In the mid-thirties there was a certain upsurge out of the depression. Not a real economic recovery, but a revival. They began to open factories and take some people back to work. And the Communist Party colonized a lot of their people in the strategic industries and their radical talk appealed widely. They were competitors for control of the auto workers union for a while.
Right in the middle of this came the turn of the Comintern toward the right. The "third period" had passed and the Kremlin began turning over toward conservatism and naturally the Communist Party just carried it out here in the United States to the letter.
I believe that if the Communist Party had remained a revolutionary party, it could have made great things out of that mass movement of the thirties.
Lens: If you go back to the Russian revolution, you also had a Menshevik group, and the Bolsheviks were a minority in relation to the Mensheviks, and yet they were able to pull people away from them. Why weren't the Trotskyists able to pull people from the Stalinists here? You also had capable people, you also knew how to make motions in meetings and all the rest of that, and probably were more dedicated.
Excluded
Cannon: Unquestionably. But we didn't have the numbers. The Communist Party excluded us from every movement they controlled, like the unemployed movement. A hungry unemployed member of the Trotskyist organization couldn't get into the Unemployed Councils because the Stalinists branded him a "counterrevolutionary."
The CP formed alliances with other radicals and socialists in the League Against War and Fascism, but we were not admitted to it. So although we expanded somewhat with the success of the Minneapolis strikes, the fusion with the Musteites, and the entry into the Socialist Party, ? which gained us quite a group of new members, we were still a small minority in comparison to the Communist Party.
Lens: You expected quite a bit more from the entry in the Socialist Party, didn't you, than you eventually got?
Cannon: We won over the majority of the Young People's Socialist League.
Lens: I know, but you really expected to become an important mass party.
Cannon: We expected the Socialist Party itself to grow and that we would grow with it.
Lens: Why didn't it?
Cannon: The competition of the Communist Party, and partly the inadequacy of its leadership, I guess.
Lens: Of the Communist or Socialist leadership?
Cannon: Of the Socialist Party leadership.
Lens: But you were playing an important role in it by then. Weren't you in the Socialist leadership?
Cannon: I came out to California during that period. We soon got a majority in the state executive committee of the Socialist Party and published a weekly paper in San Francisco. The right-wingers remaining in the Socialist Party got alarmed about that and began expelling our people. And we had nothing to do but fight it out and come to a break.
Lens: Had you expected a break? Cannon: No, we tried to prevent it.
Lens: You had hoped to remain in the Socialist Party?
Cannon: Yes, we were not ready to bring things to a head yet. But we had no choice.
Lens: Why do you think the Comintern got rid of Browder?8 Or, to put it a different way, why didn't he adjust to the Comintern? He had been adjusting to it all his life.
7 In 1936 the Trotskyists joined the So
cialist Party in order to win over the
growing left wing to revolutionary poli
tics. •
8 Browder was deposed as secretary of
the CP in 1945 and expelled from the
party in 1946. Except for his first few
years in office (the end of the ultraleft
"third period") and the brief interlude of
the Stalin-Hitler pact, his regime coincided
with those years in which the CP engaged
in blatant class collaboration of the peo
ple's front variety.
During the World War II alliance of the U. S. and the Soviet Union, Browder ardently supported U. S. imperialism and publicly urged that the wartime no-strike pledge be continued after the war ended.
Cannon: It began with his appointment as secretary. Foster was a far more publicly prominent and able man than Browder. That was his trouble. You might say he was the logical man to succeed Lovestone when they got rid of Lovestone. But by that time Stalin didn't want any able people heading national parties.
I think Browder's defects were his merits. His lack of leadership capacity was just what they wanted from him — somebody to do what they told him to do. I don't say Foster wouldn't have done it, but Foster had ideas and initiative of his own.
Lens: Did you like Foster personally?
Cannon: At first I did. I was associated with him in the political fights. But I didn't like his character.
Lens: Why?
Cannon: Why don't you like somebody? He was terribly self-centered and dishonest, when it served his purpose, and disloyal in personal relations. All the kinds of things that I especially don't like.
Lens: Getting back to Browder. He had shifted gears with the Comintern all along, and then 1946 comes along and he refuses to shift gears. How do you account for that?
Cannon: I think he was taken by surprise. He carried the conciliationism of the Kremlin bureaucracy to an extreme that they were not prepared to go to after the war ended. They were getting ready for the outbreak of the cold war, while Browder was going ahead as before.
You remember his famous statement, when he said something like, "I'm ready
to shake hands with J. Pierpont Morgan on this —to have peace, no strikes during thewar, speedup, incentive pay, and all the rest."
Out of favor
It's remarkable how easily the Stalinists disposed of him. They didn't even have to send any message directly from Moscow. All they had to do was to have somebody in France, Duclos (Jacques Duclos, longtime leader of the French Communist Party), write a piece in the French CP magazine criticizing Browder. And all the hacks in the party took that as a sign that this fellow was out of favor with the big power.
Lens: Why do you feel the Lovestone-ites fell apart?
Cannon: What stages do you mean?
Lens: When they dissolved, about 1937 or 1938 (actually, 1939).
Cannon: In 1929 they took a hundred or more with them out of the Communist Party. That in itself was an indication of the tremendous power of Stalin over the party. The CP had just had a convention where the Love-stoneites had a big majority, or so they thought, because the party wasn't aware that Stalin was getting ready to dump him.
The Lovestoneites claimed to be the champions of the Comintern above all others. But the Comintern had two representatives here at the CP's 1929 convention early in the year, and the campaign against Bukharin was beginning already in Moscow. Bukharin had been their mentor and their protector, and Lovestone didn't get the signal quickly enough.
Lens: Then they survived for about 10 years. And they did have some influence in the auto workers and the ladies garment workers unions.
Cannon: As late as 1934 one of the big events in the radical movement in New York was a debate between me and Lovestone at Irving Plaza on the question of whether we should build a new international or support the Communist International. At that time he strongly supported the Comintern of Stalin. He was still, I think, hoping to convince them that he was their boy. And probably still had some idea that the Communist movement had a future here.
Some people don't have to believe things out of conviction; if they believe something is going to be a success, that's enough for them. I think that was the case with Lovestone. I think he was a careerist from the very beginning.
Lens: Let me sidetrack to another issue. The emergence of the New Left after World War II, or quite a long time after World War II, was accompanied by a tremendous counterculture movement. Why wasn't there one in the 1930s?
Cannon: This counter-culture movement of the recent past was an intellectual student movement, wasn't it?
Lens: Yes, but you had a growing student movement hi the thirties too.
Cannon: Yes, but the real power that asserted itself was a workers uprising in the 1930s. We don't have anything like that today. Nothing comparable.
Lens: In other words you feel that the students were pretty much secondary to the workers.
Cannon: In the thirties, yes.
Lens: And therefore they didn't take on characteristics of their own?
Cannon: I just don't recall them making any special mark for themselves in the thirties.
Lens: How do you account for that?
Cannon: There was a student movement, but it was mainly composed of groups affiliated to the two radical parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
I don't know whether you've heard this story, I've told it a hundred tunes: Among the big events on the campuses of New York in the thirties were the debates between the Draper brothers. Have you heard of that?
Lens: No. Theodore and Hal?
Cannon: Theodore Draper was an ardent Stalinist. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist. And they had a number of debates. I didn't attend any of them, but I heard about them.
The left wing of the Socialist Party didn't develop as a counter-cultural nut movement, but as a radical, Leninist movement. I heard Gus Tyler debate with Gil Green —who later became head of the Young Communist League —on the question of policy toward war. Green took the peaceful coexistence position of the Comintern and Tyler defended the Leninist policy.
Tyler, who's now an ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) leader, simply cut him to pieces, in my judgment.
This whole counter-culture business expressed in this New Left phenomenon seems to me like it sprang out of nowhere. And it disappeared almost as rapidly.
New Left
Lens: How do you account for the emergence of the New Left? Why didn't all those young people come into the Socialist Workers Party?
Cannon: It started with the League for Industrial Democracy, didn't it?
Lens: But that was pretty much of a dead organization.
Cannon: But they had a "Port Huron Statement" that seemed to just catch fire. It took most everybody by surprise. I certainly didn't anticipate it.
Lens: Why? Here was the SWP. Eighteen of your comrades had gone to jail for opposing World War II. You had an unsullied personal record. You had worked throughout the war rather consistently against the Stalin-Hitler pact, and then against Mc-Carthyism. And yet, when the youth began to choose sides, they bypassed the CP and they bypassed you.
Cannon: You mustn't forget that the 1950s were a period of terrible reaction in the labor movement. In the cold war period the union bureaucrats were able with the help of the government to clean out all the Stalinists and all the other radicals from the CIO. And everything was dead on the campus. They called it the "silent generation."
We had counted greatly in the postwar period on young veterans being a natural recruiting ground for a big expansion. Instead, the soldiers came back and got the GI Bill of Rights. They went to school and they were studying to get degrees and get jobs. There was no response to radical ideas.
Lens: Did you expect a depression after the war like the depression of 1929?
Cannon: No, we were taken by surprise.
Lens: But you didn't expect an economic slump in 1946-47 like Eugene Dennis did.9
Cannon: We expected it, but we didn't put a time limit on it. We suffered terrible reverses. We lost a lot of members in the fifties.
Lens: To what, the persecutions?
Cold war period
Cannon: The persecution, the lack of response, the inactivity of the workers. People began falling away. Our biggest struggle in the whole cold war period of the fifties was to hold our nucleus together.
Lens: How big was the SWP?
Cannon: I would say we came out of the fifties with about 500 members.
Lens: And how many members did you have in 1945?
Cannon: In 1945 we had about 3,000, I guess, because at the 1946 convention I recall we made a ceremony of initiating 1,000 new members who had been recruited since the 1944 convention. During the latter years of the war there was considerable radicaliza-tion in anticipation of the war's end and labor struggles.
But there was no sign of radicaliza-tion in the fifties, and no sign of action in the labor unions to speak of. The campuses were dead. It was the civil rights movement that sparked the rebirth of a radical movement. We oriented ourselves as much as we could to that, and we recruited some people from the campuses, and we started a youth organization again, the Young Socialist Alliance. It began to attract a cadre. In general we've been advancing ever since, not spectacularly, but rather steadily.
Lens: But my question is why did all the energy go into the organizations of the New Left? And although you've made some gains, you never made a
9. Eugene Dennis was general secretary of the CPin the 1950s.
Lens: Why? Was it something you did that was wrong?
Cannon: No, I don't know of anything we did that was wrong. In the late fifties the Khrushchev revelations opened up the Communist Party periphery.
We plunged into that very determinedly. We recruited some members out of the CP itself after the Khrushchev revelations especially in Los Angeles. And since then we have confronted the Communist Party in mass movements of various kinds virtually as equals. They can't brush us aside any more.
Lens: But you never were able to become the dominant force on the left.
Cannon: No.
Lens: When I asked Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden why they joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) rather than the CP or the SWP, they said they felt that there was no magnetism there.
Recruited women
Cannon: We did recruit fairly substantially, and some excellent cadres. And we have recruited women comrades on a scale never before in the radical movement. Forty percent of our members are women. And I think about 40 percent of our staff members are women. This takes place not as a quota policy but just naturally. So many talented women have come forward to fill this and that position.
Lens: But even with all the work you've done in the antiwar movement, you're not back to your 1945 strength yet.
Cannon: We're much stronger in the cadre sense.
Lens: Having influence.
Cannon: But I don't think we're much stronger numerically. A large number of the people we recruited during that period at the end of the war were Blacks as well as industrial workers. There was a big turnover as soon as the climate in the country turned conservative with the cold war. Then they dropped out because they expected more immediate advantages than we could offer. But this membership we have today is a pretty solid membership both in the YSA and in the SWP.
Lens: Do you anticipate a revolution in America in the near future?
Cannon: -It depends on what you mean by near.
Lens: Next 10 or 15 years.
Anything possible
Cannon: I say anything is possible in this century in the years that are left of it. That's 26 years.
Lens: But you don't sound very optimistic.
Cannon: I don't want to make any categorical statements, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its climactic end.
Lens: Didn't you say that in the thirties?
Cannon: I did, yes.
Lens: And in the forties? Cannon: And in the forties.
Lens: I mean, that must sound like something peculiar when you say it every decade.
Cannon: But when you stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race.
Lens: What do you see in the near future for the capitalist system?
Cannon: I see one crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such a jam in this country as they are right now, both poltically and economically. _,
Lens: Yet the average man is living well compared to 40 years ago.
Cannon: Materially, you mean?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Yes, but they got used to the new standard and now they see
the beginning of the decline and they don't like that.
One phenomenon that interests me greatly is the extraordinary development of union action among public workers. It's an entirely new phenomenon. And very widespread, very militant, and continuing.
Lens: You have two separate groups outside the CP and SWP that are radical, the New American Movement and the People's Party, which believe in the idea of a mass party. And then you have the Maoist parties, like the Revolutionary Union and the October League. Can you see the Trotskyists uniting with either of those forces?
Cannon: No.
Lens: You don't think that either one of them has a future?
Cannon: They have a future. I think this New American Movement or something like it can easily develop and have a temporary existence. But I don't think we can ever be isolated again. We will be in the midst of any kind of public mass movement that begins, and we will recruit out of it.
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