From The Pen Of American Communist Leader James P. Cannon- The Cause That Passes Through The Prisons- A Book Review

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Book Review

LETTERS FROM PRISON, JAMES P. CANNON, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1973

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the communist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded in the 1930s, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.

In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation after a long and fruitful political collaboration working with LeonTrotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary.

The period under discussion in his letters to his long time companion Rose Krasner- the years of World War II after Cannon and 17 other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party had been indicted, convicted and refused appeal by the United States Supreme Court under the then new Smith Act provisions and finally were imprisoned- demonstrate a continued commitment to the goals of revolutionary socialism and a desire to fight for those goals. One thing is sure- in his prime, which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
When the American Government under Franklin D. Roosevelt goaded on by one of his favorite abject ‘labor lieutenants of capitalism’ , Daniel Tobin President of the International Teamsters Union, went after the real opponents of the second imperialist war known as World war II, the Socialist Workers Party and the Teamsters local in Minneapolis, they went to the right address. Unfortunately, unlike in World War I, those organizations were politically virtually the only ones in opposition to th egoverment from the left. The American Socialist Party and the American Communist Party- the latter after a short opposition during the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact- had both made their peace with imperialism. If anything those organizations were the chief labor cheerleaders of the prosecutions. As an aside, but indicative of the nature of that organization, the Workers Party led by Max Shachtman, which had split from the SWP in 1940 over the question of defense of the Soviet Union, did not face government prosecution.
This volume of letters from prison by James P. Cannon, leader of the Socialist Workers Party are testimony to what happens to revolutionaries when they fundamentally oppose a bourgeois government on its most cherished right, the right to make war-they go to jail. Kicking and screaming, yes, and using every avenue to avoid that situation but when the time comes that is what they do. In no case do they flinch from the consequences of the necessary action to oppose war. This comes with the territory of being a revolutionary. While few today remember such boldness, militants in the face of opposition to the current Iraq War would do well to honor that commitment by the Minneapolis 18.
As his letters indicate, political people do not roll over when in prison but within the limited circumstances they find themselves in act as political people and carry on as best they can –whether it is Czarist, fascist, Stalinist or bourgeois prisons. In the present case it was an advantage that many of the party leaders were with Cannon and could essentially form a leadership in exile to supplement the official leadership left behind on the outside. Of course all things being equal prison definitely cuts into the effectiveness of a revolutionary but the enforced idleness from the outside struggle is a time to study and reflection, which Cannon did, very ambitiously and systematically. Through his companion Rose Karsner and other sources Cannon kept up with internal party affairs and made plans for the future of the party.
Finally, it is rather ironic that Cannon, who was the guiding force in the American Communist Party’s class struggle defense organization-the International Labor Defense- in the mid-1920’s should need the services of the Socialist Workers Party’s class struggle defense organization -the Non-Partisan Labor Defense. What Cannon said in the 1920’s applied to his own case. The struggle of the class-war prisoners- the cause that passes through the prisons- is the concern of the whole working class. An injury to one is an injury to all. That slogan is still valid for today’s militants to organize around.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor American Communist Leader James P. Cannon -A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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James P. Cannon A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941


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

December 22, 1941

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York, December 22, 1941

From The Partisan Defense Committee "Class Struggle Defense" Archives- What Defense Policy for Revolutionaries?-"An Injury To One Is An Injury To All"

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Markin comment:
The several documents presented in this compilation cover a wide range of issues that confront any serious left-wing class struggle defense organization committed to non-sectarian defense based on the old Wobblie (and maybe before the Wobblies, around the time of the Haymarket martyrs if an article that I have read lately is any indication) of “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Most of those issues have been adequately addressed in one form or another by the writers and/or editors of the documents.

There is one point, however, mentioned here that I would like to highlight a little more based on my own long- time experience with legal defense cases, work, given the dearth of more direct class-struggle issues, that has consumed much more of my political time (and that of others who I have spoken to on the matter) lately than I would have expected. That is the question of “hiding” the relationship between the defense organization and the political organization leading up the case, the question of front groups. Most of these radical legal cases from defense of the Panthers back in the 1960s to the latest death penalty cases start with some leftist organization’s impetus.

Those seeking to center their campaigns on beseeching hard-core liberal support (and some vital cash nexus that goes with seeking such support) will “hide’ their “parent” organizational affiliations and “pretend” the cause is a simple democratic one. The Stalinists of the Communist Party, after their short bout with “third period” purity in the late 1920s were past masters of this technique. The clearest example of this that I can give, and that radicals today might either remember or be somewhat familiar with, was the Angela Davis case in connection with her involvement with the Jonathan Jackson (George Jackson’s brother)/Sam Melville Brigade. Now Angela Davis was then, and now, a hard Stalinist and then a leading public member of the party. One would have thought that her party affiliation would have been front and center since everybody knew it anyway.

And, more importantly, that those Communist Party members working on this important campaign would have identified themselves proudly with their fellow comrade. Well, I guess you cannot teach an old dog new tricks as the worn-out adage goes. At least a Stalinist old dog. One meeting that I went to concerning her defense had about fifty people in attendance. Some liberals, known to me. Some unaffiliated radicals, also known to me. And the rest CPers. Except, if you were not politically savvy you would not have known that last fact because not one CPer, not one identified him or herself as such. Oh sure there were representatives from the Croatian Anti-Fascist League, The League For International Peace, Mothers for Peace and the like. Yes, you guessed it all CPers. And to what end? You see, maybe the liberals could be fooled, or wanted to be, and maybe even a few radicals who believe in some “family of the left” notion of politics, as well. But when the deal goes down the bourgeoisie is not fooled, not by a long shot. And then not only are you defending one comrade but the whole organization. So learn a new trick, okay?

Note:

An additional twist on the CP's catering to the liberals in the Angela Davis case was that they left class-war prisoner Ruchell McGee, Ms. Davis' co-defendant, to basically fend for himself. His profile would not have gone down as well with such elements enamored with celebrity Davis. I also note that forty years later I am still calling for Ruchell McGee's freedom as part of my June Class-War Prisoners series. Enough said.

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What Defense Policy for Revolutionaries?

Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter No. 17, May-June 1973
The decline of U.S. economic hegemony and the resultant economic chaos has meant intensified capitalist attacks on the labor and radical movements. Facing an increasing inability to provide the minimal democratic and economic rights of working people and oppressed minorities, the American capitalist class has pursued a dual offensive: governmental legislation to curb the power of the trade-union movement and tie it more closely to the state machinery, combined with persecution of the left to forestall any resurgence of even the reformist social-protest movement of the 1960’s. Central to the ruling-class policy is to forestall the growth of any organized left oppositions in the labor movement. While the radical students, women’s liberationists and black nationalists who typified 1960’s radicalism lacked the social strength to seriously threaten capitalist rule, the current growth of the left in the labor movement poses a much greater potential threat. The gross violation of democratic rights in the Watergate affair indicates the Nixon regime’s contempt for the formalities of bourgeois democracy, a contempt that will be violently amplified in dealing with an actual left threat. The strategy to defeat ruling-class attacks on the labor and radical movements must be based on an examination of the historic experience of the working-class movement.

The International Red Aid
In the early 1920’s, the Communist International (CI) organized the International Red Aid as a broad defense organization of working-class militants. While the CI rejected bourgeois-democratic illusions and idealizations, it recognized the need to defend the democratic gains of the bourgeois revolutions and proletarian struggle as an integral part of the class struggle. Lenin summarized the communist perspective toward democratic struggles:

"It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy."
--Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 133

The International Red Aid was also an application of the united-front policy of the CI under Lenin and Trotsky, which proposed joint action of workers’ organizations over specific and concrete tasks. The united front was designed to unite the working class against capitalist attacks and in doing so create an arena in which the Communist parties, retaining full freedom to criticize other participants, could counterpose their program to the social-democratic misleadership in order to "set the base against the top." The slogan of the united front was "March Separately, Strike Together."

The International Labor Defense (ILD), the American affiliate of the International Red Aid, led the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, C.E. Ruthenberg, imprisoned Wobblies and numerous strike efforts. In a period of sharp class struggle, the ILD utilized all legal rights, seeking support from professional petty-bourgeois forces, while always emphasizing the importance of mass working-class action. It welcomed support from all quarters, but refused to politically compromise itself in order to gain support from non-proletarian elements. James P. Cannon, National Secretary of the ILD until his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, summarized this policy in writing on the Sacco and Vanzetti case:

"Our policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations--organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other questions…. The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’… of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle. It shrinks from the ‘vulgar and noisy’ demonstrations of the militant workers and throws the mud of slander on them. It tries to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way. The objective of this policy is a whitewash of the courts of Massachusetts and ‘clemency’ for Sacco and Vanzetti, in the form of a commutation to life imprisonment for a crime of which the world knows they are innocent."
--"Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?" Labor Defender, January 1927

This was the consistent policy of the CI throughout its early years. The ILD never blurred the nature of the capitalist state or bourgeois justice; its policy was "class against class," combatting the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state through the independent mobilization of the proletariat.

The Policy of Social Fascism
In conjunction with the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the world-historic defeat of the Chinese proletariat in 1927 and the internal Soviet need for rapid agricultural collectivization, the CI's political line switched in 1928 to the policy of the "third period." The Stalinist CI claimed the social-democratic parties were more of a threat to the proletariat than ascending fascism, labeling them "social fascists" and rejecting joint defense against the fascist threat. This policy, which amounted to a refusal to challenge the social-democratic arch-betrayers’ hegemony over the German working class, allowed Hitler to rise to power without a shot being fired. "Social fascism" became the guiding theory of the ILD, which rejected the defense of democratic rights and united fronts because this would "create illusions." Breaking with the tradition of its earlier years, the ILD often ignored legal work, romanticizing the use of non-professional workers’ self-defense in the courts. This foolish ultra-leftism allowed many courageous workers, unversed in court procedure and legal jargon, to be sent to jail, compliments of "Communist" advice.

During the Scottsboro defense, the ILD refused the support of the NAACP, another "social-fascist" outfit. Instead, the ILD posed the "united front from below"--unity of the CP, CP front groups and local unions somehow untainted by their "social-fascist" leaderships [see, for example, Scottsboro Boys National Bureau Letter, No. 1, 1932, p. 4].

The "Social-Fascists" Become the Great Defenders of Democracy

Recoiling empirically from a policy which had resulted in the destruction of the German labor movement, the CI dumped "social fascism" but, in typical Stalinist fashion, embraced a symmetrically disastrous line having nothing in common with the Leninist policy of the united front. At the 7th World Congress, Georgi Dimitrov formulated the policy of the popular front--a strategic alliance with the social democrats and the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie to defend bourgeois democracy against the fascist onslaught.

Marxists recognize that bourgeois democracy is simply one form of the dictatorship of capital, which is, however, forced to preserve some limited democratic rights which are vital to the self-organization of the proletariat. The working class thus has an interest in the defense of bourgeois-democratic rights against fascism and bonapartism, but not at the expense of tying itself politically to the bourgeoisie and subordinating its own organizations to bourgeois leadership. Thus, Marxists may call for limited blocs with the representatives of bourgeois democracy (e.g., the suppression of the Kornilov assault on the bourgeois Kerensky regime) but at all times seek the independent mobilization of the working class through its own organizations and under its own slogans. These tactical blocs are not a defense of the bourgeois order, but are steps on the road of replacing bourgeois democracy by the proletarian dictatorship.

Paving the way for Communist participation in capitalist governments (as in France and Spain), the Dimitrov popular-front policy, based on the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy, has been a central point of Stalinist theory and practice (Soviet and Chinese alike) for the last 35 years.

The Trotskyist movement upheld the united-front policy of the Third and Fourth CI Congresses--"class against class." The Fourth International understood that the task of communists was to promote class unity against fascism, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution. While the Stalinists sought "national unity," the Trotskyists called for workers militias formed through a united front of all proletarian organizations, and raised demands such as nationalization of industry under workers control. In this way they attempted to prepare the working class for a successful fight against fascism, while raising demands that pointed to the need for the working class to organize production in its own interest.

Except for the brief period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the CPUSA loyally supported the "anti-fascist" democracy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During WW II, the CP became the staunchest adherent of "national unity" in the labor movement. Placing itself in the right wing of the trade-union movement, it denounced all strikes as "fascist-inspired" and proposed speed-up to strengthen the "national war drive." As a result of the CP’s patriotic frenzy, defense work became virtually nonexistent; the CP ignored the round-up of Japanese-Americans into detention camps and the continued repression of blacks.

In the most important frame-up of the war years, the Smith Act prosecution of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, the CP rejected the principle of labor solidarity and heartily endorsed the government’s prosecution [see Daily Worker, 16 August 1941]. (The CP’s treachery in abetting the government in setting a precedent by the imprisonment of the 18 SWP leaders for "conspiracy to violently overthrow the government" paved the way for the virtual destruction of the CP in the McCarthy witchhunt. The bitter truth that "an injury to one is an injury to all" became clear after the war, when CP members were constantly prosecuted under similar indictments.) Abandoning the elementary duties of class solidarity, the International Red Aid was disbanded in the mid-forties and the CP junked the ILD.

The CP’s "lesser-evil" strategy has been maintained to this day, with Nixon substituted for Hitler as "the main enemy." The task of programmatically "uniting all progressive forces" remains the common thread of all variants of Stalinism. The Stalinists use defense efforts to cement the "anti-monopoly" popular front, watering down the thrust and program of campaigns to snare a few liberals. The CP worked tirelessly to promote a respectable image for Angela Davis--cooling down the emphasis on the anti-communist character of her trial, refusing to tie her defense with the less popular Ruchell Magee case, at one point limiting her defense to a call for bail, unwilling to take the defense into the trade-union movement--all in an attempt to pacify liberals. In a recent march in Buffalo protesting the murders at Attica, the CP-supported coalition went so far as to make the major operational thrust of the demonstration the demand for the state to construct a memorial statue to the slain Attica prisoners outside the prison alongside the already completed memorial for slain prison guards! The CP constantly muddles the nature of the state and the capitalist political parties, attacking the Republican Party without condemning the Democratic Party in the Davis case.

The "Anti-Revisionist" Left

The ostensible left groupings outside the CP have failed to pursue a principled united-front policy. The Panthers "United Front Against Fascism" Conference in 1969 saw an amalgam of the CP, the Maoist Revolutionary Union, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (later to dissolve into the RU and October League) and the Workers World Party, all enthusiastically tailing after the Panthers "community control" popular-front program (complete with appropriate quotes from Dimitrov). Their enthusiasm spilled over into the streets with forcible exclusion and beating of members of the Spartacist League, Progressive Labor, International Socialists and the Workers League.

PL for a number of years pursued a carbon-copy replica of "third-period" defense tactics, rejecting united fronts with "revisionists," spurning the struggle for democratic rights and using political differences as an excuse to avoid unconditionally defending the Panthers and Weathermen against ruling-class repression. The WL stubbornly refused support from other left tendencies in the Juan Fariñas defense campaign, and the once-Trotskyist, now-reformist SWP limits all its defense activities to civil-libertarian politics.

The SL/RCY unconditionally defends the left and working-class movement from bourgeois repression and right-wing attack, in spite of our political differences with any particular victimized group or individual. We have refused to opportunistically restrict our defense work to those campaigns which garnish temporary popularity and liberal support in the bourgeois-press cocktail circuit, such as the Panther and Angela Davis defense campaigns; we have explicitly made clear our solidarity with those less popular groups like the Weathermen and Venceremos, which, no matter how misguided their actions, nonetheless are part of the left. Successful government repression of such groups represents a threat to all left and working-class organizations--defense is not a moral question, but a class question. It is necessary to have a Marxist comprehension of the words, "an injury to one is an injury to all." Groups like PL, the SWP, CP, WL and National Caucus of Labor Committees--which claimed to defend the Panthers but, at the height of the FBI-led anti-Weathermen hysteria, joined in the chorus of bourgeois "public opinion" condemning the Weathermen as "proto-fascists," "criminals" and "crazies"--thereby demonstrated that they are more concerned about their respectability in the eyes of radical petty-bourgeois "public opinion" than in the elementary obligation of working-class solidarity.

At the same time, we distinguish between the self-destructive substitutionism of the Weathermen, who chose as the targets for their bombs the symbols of the bourgeois order, and the indiscriminate terror of some elements in the Irish Republican Army, or the Japanese supporters of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When the former blows up working-class pubs in Belfast or the latter machine-guns a crowd in an Israeli airline hangar, it has crossed the class line. Such "exemplary" actions exemplify genocide, and while they may be motivated by the frustrated aspirations of the oppressed, Marxists cannot possibly solidarize with activities which have as their targets not the bourgeois order but simply people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Such actions may be akin to racial or religious war, but not class war.

As part of our struggle for both the unity and the political clarity of the left and labor movement, we are unconditionally opposed to substitution of gangsterism for political struggle. Thus, we defended a Boston Student Mobilization Committee meeting on 24 May 1970 from an unprovoked attack by PL. And we defended PL from the SWP goons at the July 1971 National Peace Action Coalition Conference in New York when the SWP physically excluded PL (followed by the physical exclusion of the SL and Revolutionary Marxist Caucus) for vocal opposition to the presence of bourgeois politician Vance Hartke.

Only militant defense campaigns based on the Leninist conception of the united front can effectively defend left and working--class tendencies from bourgeois attack. The slogan of the united front is "March Separately, Strike Together," i.e., each participant in the united front, while agreeing on common actions, keeps its organizational and political independence. Thus the unity of the class is maintained without compromising political clarity. In recent cases in San Francisco and New Orleans (see RCYN, No. 15 and 16), where we have been denied our legal right to function on campus, our campaigns have had a dual character: We have fought for our democratic rights, while exposing the anti-communist character of the attacks on our rights. We formed united fronts for defense around the demand, "Rescind the Ban on RCY," and worked with all forces in agreement with the slogan, while maintaining our independent propaganda and revolutionary program.

The united front is an important component part of the tactic of revolutionary regroupment. The superiority of the revolutionary program is demonstrated by the testing in action of competing political programs. The best militants who gave their allegiances to other programs and banners yesterday, rally to the banner and program of proletarian revolution in the course of the struggle. For the unity of the class, for communist hegemony--these were the goals of the united-front and defense work of Lenin and Trotsky and the early CI, and the defense work of the early SWP. It is to that heritage and to those goals that the RCY is committed.
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How International Working-Class Defense Was Built

PDC Forum Hails Victory of Muñoz Campaign
[from Workers Vanguard, No. 123, 3 September 1976]
NEW YORK, August 29—A hundred people attended a forum here last night on class-struggle defense work and the successful campaign to save Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners leader whose safe exit from Argentina was brought about by a broad international campaign of protest and pressure. The talk by Reuben Shiffman—cochairman of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC) which initiated the campaign for Muñoz in the U.S.—wrapped up a PDC victory tour which included forums in Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit.

The Committee to Save Mario Muñoz was sponsored jointly by the PDC and the Europe-based Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile. Shiffman explained that the campaign was a prodigious undertaking for an organization with the PDC’s limited resources. The impressive international solidarity and generous financial support mobilized by the campaign testifies to the deep revulsion among trade unionists, liberal intellectuals and civil liberties exponents against the Latin American junta butchers.

The obstacles were immense. Although known in Chile as a militant miners’ leader, Mario Muñoz is not a figure of the sort who would be familiar to the liberal and radical intelligentsia and labor movement activists in Europe and the U.S. His case and political history had to be widely publicized. The Committee’s task was to make Muñoz a symbol of the thousands of political refugees in Argentina for whom international protest is the only hope of escape from imprisonment, deportation, torture and murder.

The Committee had to contest the giant whitewash attempted by the Videla government, which sought to portray itself as “moderate” and even “democratic” and the coup as “bloodless.” Initially, the Committee was faced with a bourgeois press which blacked out or downplayed the escalating rightist terror. As reports began to filter through of arrests of Argentine leftists and unionists, raids on refugee centers and summary executions of “terrorists” by the extra-legal “AAA” death squads, the Committee’s own publicity efforts played a significant role in exposing the whitewash and drawing attention to the mortal danger faced by Argentine left and labor militants and political refugees.

Bourgeois efforts to lend the Argentine junta a “respectable” image were abetted by the Communist Party (CP) Stalinists, Shiffman explained. The Argentine CP had acclaimed the democratic hypocrisy of the Videla junta, echoing the junta’s lies and welcoming the generals’ “respect for representative democracy, social justice, the reaffirmation of the State’s role in controlling society, and defense of the capacity for national decisiveness” (quoted in Militant, 23 April). As the murderous junta increasingly displayed “national decisiveness” in suppressing the Argentine CP, the Stalinist movement began to interrupt its silence with an occasional tepid protest.

The Stalinists’ traditional sectarianism toward any campaign which includes Trotskyists was reinforced in the case of Muñoz by the Chilean miners leader’s record of criticism of the betrayals of the Allende government in Chile. The Chilean Stalinists and their counterparts internationally were the foremost proponents of the Allende popular front, which physically and politically disarmed the workers as the reactionary forces massed for the coup. To cover their crimes in Chile—crimes which they now repeat in Argentina— the Stalinists and their apologists resorted to suppression and slander against the Muñoz campaign.

The goal of the reactionary Videla regime, Shiffman explained, is the total destruction of all democratic liberties and of all organizations outside the military and government apparatus. The direct danger facing Muñoz from the Argentine central government— which showed no hesitation in deporting MIR leader Edgardo Enriquez back to probable execution in Pinochet’s Chile—was compounded by the virtual autonomy of official armed units of the state as well as the “AAA.”

Furthermore an arbitrary military regime such as the Videla junta, Shiffman noted, might respond to efforts to publicize the case of a leftist political refugee by killing him rather than letting him go. The Committee undertook to secure Muñoz’s release through open legal channels rather than by other possible means, recognizing the dangers this strategy implied if the protests were not forceful enough to compel the junta to release Muñoz unharmed.

As part of the pressure exerted by the Committee, approaches to the United Nations were important. Shiffman pointed out that the UN is “no different than its member states (the U.S., Chile…)"—merely more impotent. He reminded the audience that Muñoz was seized at a UN refugee [camp] and arrested, and read a section from Muñoz’s European press conference speech which described how the police had quoted verbatim from Muñoz’s statement to a UN refugee committee.

In order to secure asylum for Muñoz, not only the UN but also various bourgeois governments had to be approached. The Committee centered its efforts especially on countries with social-democratic governments, in the hope of exploiting the lip-service which these bureaucrats must pay to working-class solidarity in order to maintain their capacity to mislead their working-class base. It was the social-democratic government of Austria which granted Muñoz a visa out of Argentina. The speaker pointed out that at the very moment that Muñoz was arriving in Austria, the Austrian government was engaged in prosecuting the Austrian Trotskyist ÖBL in an attempt to suppress its publication.

Shiffman concluded by expressing the gratitude of the PDC toward all, those who solidarized with and worked on behalf of the campaign to save Mario Muñoz. He asked all those who consider themselves partisans of the oppressed and exploited throughout the world to continue to support the PDC in its struggle for freedom for all class-war prisoners.
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USLA Redbaiting: Sectarian Sabotage Fails
Class-Struggle Defense Saves Mario Muñoz
[from Workers Vanguard, No. 123, 3 September 1976]

The safe exit from Argentina of Chilean miners’ leader Mario Muñoz Salas in early August was a victory for the international workers movement. The broad support mobilized behind the international campaign to defend Muñoz against the four-month police manhunt in General Videla’s Argentina transformed the campaign into a symbol of the plight of all victims of right-wing repression in Argentina and Chile. Labor, socialist and civil-libertarian organizations and prominent individuals on five continents endorsed and contributed to the campaign to save this courageous workers leader and his family. Coinciding with Muñoz’s safe arrival in Western Europe, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees announced that six countries were now willing to grant asylum to 2,000 South American political refugees from Argentina, reflecting the impact of this exemplary militant protest campaign based on anti-sectarian, class-struggle defense policies.

Against the backdrop of this impressive victory for international workers solidarity, those groups which placed narrow factionalism above the defense of this imperiled workers leader stand out with special infamy. Criminal sectarianism could be expected from the Stalinists since the Communist Party of Argentina actually acclaimed the “democratic” hypocrisy of the Videla junta following the Argentine coup. But the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) demonstrated that it is second to nobody in its willingness to sacrifice elementary proletarian solidarity to the pursuit of reformist respectability and narrow factional considerations.

The SWP did more than bloc with the Stalinist sycophants and apologists for Videla in refusing to endorse the campaign: it consciously attempted to sabotage the defense of Muñoz. The SWP in its own name simply refused to endorse the campaign and left the dirty work to the Latin American defense organization it dominates, the U.S. Committee for Justice to Latin American Political Prisoners (USLA).

USLA claims to defend victims of political repression in Latin America. In a mimeographed letter dated April 1976, USLA even claimed it was launching a special campaign on behalf of victims of repression in Argentina. Not very much has been seen of this “campaign.” In regard, however, to the particular campaign to save the life of Mario Muñoz—a campaign which focused international attention on repression in Argentina and was a real factor in pressuring several countries into accepting political refugees currently in Argentina—USLA’s role was that of wrecker and saboteur.

At first USLA simply refused to endorse or support the campaign to save Muñoz. But the impressive and growing support for the campaign finally forced a reluctant verbal endorsement out of USLA. Then on May 17 USLA spokesman Mike Kelly informed the Committee to Save Mario Muñoz that USLA was withdrawing its endorsement because the campaign was “sectarian.” Kelly’s consummately anti-communist circular reasoning is perfect McCarthyite “logic”: the campaign is closely associated with the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC), the PDC is closely associated with the Spartacist League (SL), the SL is “sectarian” (as every supporter has been taught to repeat like a “Hail Mary” to ward off the evil spirit of the SL’s revolutionary politics), therefore the campaign must be “sectarian.”

The only concrete example of the campaign’s “sectarianism” that Kelly could conjure up was the singing of the “Internationale” at the conclusion of the April 22 New York demonstration. What USLA and the SWP really object to about the “Internationale,” the song of international labor solidarity, is its class partisanship on the side of the international proletariat.

USLA knew before it endorsed the Committee to Save Mario Muñoz that the PDC was the U.S. co-sponsor of the campaign and that the PDC explicitly describes itself as in accordance with the political views of the SL. Thus the redbaiting “sectarianophobic” departure of USLA was nothing but a calculated attempt to disrupt the campaign and drive away supporters. USLA’s narrow factionalism was underlined by Kelly’s proposal that the Committee to Save Mario Muñoz liquidate into USLA’s non-existent “campaign” against repression in Argentina.

When the SWP hypocrites wished to feign concern for the victims of reactionary terror in Argentina, they were very willing to exploit propaganda and protest carried out by the Committee to Save Mario Muñoz. The SWP’s Intercontinena/ Press (3 May) quoted extensively from the “Urgent Appeal for Solidarity to Save the Life of Mario Muñoz” in an article on repression in Argentina and also reported on the April 22 demonstration at the Argentine Consulate. The demonstration report listed several liberal endorsers of the Committee who did not attend the march, while omitting the PDC and SL, both of which had prominent contingents present. Thus the alleged “sectarian domination” of the campaign— which is supposed to bear the blame for the SWP’s criminally sectarian willingness to abandon Mario Muñoz to the tender mercies of the Argentine assassination squads—is conveniently disappeared so that the SWP can implicitly share credit for the defense work when it suits.

USLA’s Sectarian Record

This is not the first time that USLA’s sectarianism has marred the defense of the victims of reactionary terror in Latin America. In early 1974 the SL initiated the Committee to Save Van Schouwen and Romero, two leaders of the Chilean MIR imprisoned and subjected to brutal torture by the Chilean secret police. As part of the defense of all victims of the Chilean junta’s rightist terror, it was particularly important to underline the cases of far-left militants, who are often ignored while support is mobilized around the defense of liberal-bourgeois opponents of the military juntas. These efforts were endorsed by the Chile Solidarity Committee, North American Congress on Latin America, Puerto Rican Socialist Party—but not by USLA. Claiming it was too busy with activities around the “respectable” Chile 7 (of whom only two were leftist political leaders), USLA from the beginning refused to campaign in defense of Van Schouwen and Romero.

Last year, USLA announced it was launching a campaign of its own against the State Department’s barring from the U.S. of Hugo Blanco, a Peruvian peasant leader and spokesman for the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (where he is a member of the same international faction which the SWP supports). USLA deliberately restricted its “campaign” for Blanco to telegrams to the American government, refusing to organize militant protest activities.

On 3 October 1975 the PDC addressed a letter to USLA proposing a demonstration on behalf of Blanco and pointing out:

“It was just such broad public, united front demonstrations combined with other forms of publicity and protest which galvanized international support behind Blanco when he was imprisoned on the Peruvian prison island of El Fronton and saved him from execution, eventually winning him his freedom…”
But the legalistic USLA would have none of it, explaining by telephone that it intended to rely on other channels.

When the PDC took the initiative in calling a demonstration on behalf of Blanco in San Francisco on October 16, USLA and the SWP openly worked to sabotage it, proclaiming they would contact sponsoring organizations and urge them to withdraw their backing. An SWP supporter intervened into a meeting on the Berkeley campus to insist that Blanco wanted only telegrams to Kissinger and that people should not participate in activities in defense of Blanco unless they were initiated by USLA.

USLA adamantly opposes militant protests because of its exclusive reliance on “different” channels. What this’ policy means is clarified by a set of correspondence involving USLA, Congressman Edward Koch and the State Department. USLA wrote to Koch asking him to intervene on Blanco’s behalf (backed up by a personal letter to Koch from prominent pacifist liberal Dr. Benjamin Spock). When the State Department responded to Koch’s solicitations by informing him that Blanco had been accused of terrorist activities in Peru, Koch backed off in a hurry—and submitted the entire correspondence to the 1 March Congressional Record (as reprinted in Intercontinental Press, 15 March 1976).

To be sure, a responsible defense campaign must spare no effort to bring pressure to bear through governmental and diplomatic channels. But USLA’s exclusive reliance on legalistic pressure tactics—seeking to suck in liberal support by avoiding an open association with leftists and rejecting militant public protests—is a testimonial to the arid reformist bankruptcy of the SWP. In contrast, the Muñoz campaign spearheaded in this country by the openly class-partisan PDC enlisted the active support of left-wing militants and trade unionists while winning impressive hacking among prominent liberals, academics and civil libertarians.

Hypocrisy and Liberalism

The broad support mobilized by the Muñoz campaign compelled USLA to respond, albeit in the privacy of the SWP internal bulletin. “Perspectives on Latin American Defense Work” (SWP Internal Discussion Bulletin Volume 34, Number 3. June 1976), co-authored by Mike Kelly and USLA head Mirta Vidal, blithely informs us that:

“USLA was formed in 1966 in an attempt to find the best way to defend Hugo Blanco and other political prisoners in Latin America. Existing organizations, such as Amnesty International (AI) tended to turn a cold shoulder when it came to defending revolutionaries and rejected certain effective methods of defense such as teach-ins, pickets and demonstrations.”

But it is USLA which turns a “cold shoulder” or red-baiting finger toward the defense of leftist militants like Mario Muñoz or Van Schouwen and Romero, while rejecting pickets and demonstrations even on behalf of the SWP’s own co-thinkers such as Hugo Blanco.

From the time of its formation, USLA demonstrated that its commitment is to liberalism and not to class-struggle defense. At a founding meeting of USLA on 21 December 1966. supporters of the SL objected to the proposed “Statement of Aims” which began: “To aid in defending victims of political persecution and injustice in the countries of Latin America regardless of their particular beliefs, affiliations or associations.” Since this class-neutral formulation deliberately does not preclude the defense of ultra-rightist action groups and outright fascists, SL supporters proposed as an alternative formulation “victims of rightist political persecution.” SWP supporters, insisting that a clear statement of class partisanship would alienate liberals, pushed through their “civil libertarian” formulation. This class neutrality now finds its logical expression in USLA’s criminal abstention from the Muñoz campaign and its McCarthyite attempt to red-bait the Committee.

Returning to the Kelly Vidal document, we find the following amazing passage: “Taking the International Labor Defense (ILD) of the 1920’s as a model, USLA agrees to defend victims of political repression regardless of their political persuasion and seeks support for their cases on a civil liberties basis.” To claim the ILD as the model for defense on a “civil liberties basis” is like claiming that the Third International was founded by Lenin and Trotsky on the principles of “peaceful coexistence.”

According to James Cannon, the founder and first Secretary of the ILD (1925-28), writing in the January 1927 issue of the ILD’s monthly magazine, the Labor Defender:

“Our policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for the unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other question.”

These are the principles of anti-sectarian, class-struggle defense upon which the campaign to save Mario Muñoz was based and to which the PDC is dedicated. They are as distant from liberal-reformist “civil liberties defense” as the class struggle is from class collaboration. A “civil liberties defense” puts its faith in the justice of the capitalist state. It was “civil liberties defense” which laid the basis for that standard bearer of civil liberties, the American Civil Liberties Union, to cave in to the witchhunt paranoia of the 1950’s, refusing to defend members of the Communist Party, and in 1940 expelling Founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from its Executive Board because she was a Communist.

The criminal sectarianism of the SWP and the Stalinists toward the campaign to save Mario Muñoz from the bloodstained butchers of the Pinochet and Videla juntas stands in sharpest contrast to the wide outpouring of sympathy and support for Muñoz mobilized by the Committee. All those whose solidarity and generous financial support contributed to the successful outcome of the campaign on behalf of Muñoz and his family must he proud of their participation in this significant victory for the cause of the victims of reactionary terror in Latin America.
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On the Partisan Defense Committee
By Reuben Samuels
from Spartacist League/U.S. Discussion Bulletin No. 27, June 1977
The Partisan Defense Committee was launched over two years ago. Since then the PDC has been involved in numerous defense and legal cases, the most important being the recently concluded Muñoz campaign. That the Muñoz campaign was such an outstanding success, especially given our slender resources, while not without a substantial element of luck, was a testament to the correctness of our defense policies. Nonetheless there continues to be fundamental questions and unclarities about the purpose, character, perspectives and even the definition of the PDC. Nor are these the questions of a few newly recruited members. They are raised by leading cadre, including leading cadre centrally involved in the work of the PDC center. Our failure to produce in the past two years a clear, short statement of principles suitable for a brochure format has no doubt contributed to the existing unclarities. But the failure to produce the brochure is not principally a literary failure; this failure is itself a product of the existing questions and unclarity within the PDC staff regarding the organization we are supposed to be launching and running. The brochure went through five drafts by four comrades, all of whom, at least from time to time, can both write and think. Yet the fifth draft was not so much a document as a poorly organized scrapbook of four previous drafts. The short two-paragraph description of the PDC which concludes the Muñoz brochure split the PDC staff and almost prevented the production of this brochure. In particular, much of the disagreement, questions and unclarities centers on the current working definition of the PDC as a "class-struggle anti-sectarian defense organization which is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League." But behind this squabble over a definition lie larger differences over the character of class-struggle legal defense.

United Front and Transitional Organization

The class-struggle defense organization represents the intersection of the united front and the transitional organization. Since both the united front and transitional organization have engendered significant controversy in our movement, it is not surprising that launching the PDC would also engender controversy around these two questions.

The united-front character of defense work is generated by the wide appeal evoked by defense cases. Defending an exiled, Chilean mine union leader subjected to a bloodthirsty police manhunt, a young black college student in L.A. subjected to police intimidation which leads to a racist frame-up, a female union militant fired for standing up while working by a company notorious for vicious, arbitrary, authoritarian and sexist working conditions, call forth a broader response of sympathy and solidarity than perhaps any other area of work of the revolutionary proletarian movement. Defense issues have an urgent and dramatic appeal within the labor movement and among those concerned for human rights which transcends organizational and political affiliation. Not only is our list of Muñoz campaign endorsements overwhelming, but it continues to grow even after the case has been successfully concluded! Even mushy liberals and wretched social democrats fear the knock in the middle of the night and know that behind the parliamentarian facade of bourgeois democracy there lurks the jackboot terror that has been unleashed in South America. The Labour Party MP or SP minister knows that the social attitudes which shape a Pinochet or Videla are endemic to the bourgeois officer caste and that the military officer who today chauffeurs his limousine and guards his office door could tomorrow be his torturer and prison guard. SP ministers who dislike Muñoz’ class-struggle policies and would under other conditions sign the papers for his arrest, today sign the papers granting Muñoz asylum because they look at South America, recall the 1930’s and realize that they could share Muñoz’ plight. Working-class defense necessarily intersects the larger social issues of democratic rights and special oppression so that a Philip Allen can become the cause of those who fear and despise the police and courts and protest the racist character of "justice" in America.

Communist-initiated defense organizations, the International Red Aid (MORP) and International Labor Defense (ILD), were clearly seen as applications of the united front. The MORP was founded under the direction of the Fourth Comintern Congress in recognition of the need for an international workers defense organization in the face of growing capitalist repression and white terror. Further the MORP and ILD were committed to the principles of the united front, not only in their anti-sectarian attitude toward the cases they would seek to defend, but also in the widest mobilization of support for the cause of workers defense. The principles of the united front were incorporated into the organizational structure of the MORP and ILD themselves. In this sense they were analogous to the Profintern and TUEL. Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair, the California liberal churchman Robert Whitaker, the mine leader Alexander Howat, the feminist Alice Robert Blackwell and the Wobbly songwriter Robert Chaplin sat on the ILD National Committee. At its second national conference in September 1926 the ILD had 156 branches, 20,000 individual members and 75,000 collective memberships (affiliated organizations). The CPUSA had a total membership at the time of 15,000.

The MORP and ILD were also transitional organizations. The transitional organizations were non-party organizations which were part of a common revolutionary movement led by the vanguard party. Their struggles advanced the common interests of the revolutionary movement. Through these organizations the authority, influence, leadership and program of the proletarian vanguard is transmitted to sections of the oppressed and areas of work not as accessible through the direct intervention of the vanguard party. Such organizations were neither seen as a substitute for the vanguard party nor were their programs a simple reduplication of the party’s program, but the application of the program of the revolutionary party to a particular area of work.

Thus, while the total membership of the ILD was many times that of the CP and its National Committee included a wide spectrum of political beliefs and affiliation within the framework of working—class defense, nonetheless important administrative and executive posts were held by well-known Communists. Nor did the CP hide its initiating role in founding the ILD but rather took great pride in it. Open CP members who played prominent roles in the ILD did not disguise their membership in the CP. On the contrary they continued to play prominent roles as CP spokesmen who were also ILD members. Thus James Cannon, who was National Secretary of the ILD, was also National Chairman of the CP. Martin Abern, Max Shachtman and Rose Karsner, who were also prominent members of the CP, played leading roles in the ILD. No doubt their many years of common political work, including defense work, facilitated their coming together in solidarity with Trotsky’s Left Opposition in 1928. In rebutting the anti-communist charge that the ILD was simply formed to serve the narrow factional interest of the CP, Cannon wrote to Draper:

"To be sure I was an undisguised communist, and I thought and said that the honest work of solidarity practiced by the ILD would bring, at least indirectly, some credit to the CP. But don’t people who represent all kinds of causes and organizations do what they consider their good works with this motivation?"
Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism, p. 160
"Pure and Simple" Defense Work?

There is a tendency to conceive of the PDC as an apolitical front group of the SL dispensing charity for legal work to victimized workers and blacks and disguising its relation to the SL. However defense work is as political as union or youth work. To give an example from the early history of the American labor movement, the Bay Area based International Workers Defense League (IWDL) initiated a National Labor Congress on the Mooney Case. The Congress was held for four days during January 1919 in Chicago. Attendance was restricted to accredited delegates of "official unions" (AFL, Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Railroad Brotherhoods). Nevertheless, over 1,000 delegates attended. This was a truly rank-and-file gathering as the delegates represented union locals, city labor councils and state federations. The Congress was split between "radicals" and "moderates" over whether to restrict their work to the Mooney case or to fight for such demands as the eight-hour day and industrial unionism and whether to call a general strike for Mooney’s freedom on May Day or July 4. Even though the "moderates" were victorious through bureaucratic manipulation, nevertheless the Congress went on record demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Soviet Union and freedom for "all political and industrial prisoners." Two resolutions passed demanding Gompers’ resignation as president of the AFL for sitting on government boards. Clearly spokesmen for "pure and simple" defense like those for "pure and simple" trade unionism would have been to the right of even the "moderates" at this Congress.

At the other extreme is the tendency to substitute the PDC for the SL, i.e., for the PDC to intervene where it would be more natural and better for the party to make the central intervention and the defense organization to play an auxiliary role. The pressure towards substitutionalism is particularly acute in other defense and legal organizations like the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) which presents itself as a self-sufficient "movement." Behind all the anti-vanguardist New Left false modesty and "serve the people" works of mercy lies the supercilious arrogance of the narrow professional organization which claims to be able to generate—independent of other political currents in the left and labor movement and independent of history—a political "line." In this milieu it is especially important for an SL spokesman to be called upon to confront the NLG when they want to debate Israel or the Russian question per se precisely because it underlines the need for the proletarian vanguard party apart from its defense auxiliary.

Of course the PDC is not without views regarding the Middle East or the Russian question but these views should be presented where and insofar as they are relevant to working-class defense. For example, recently there have been battles in central Hebron, between Arab Muslims and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Gush Emmunim, over who can pray at certain religious shrines. The reason the PDC does not see these battles as simple sectarian squabbles and defends the Arab Muslims from victimization and calls for mass mobilization against Gush Emmunism is directly linked to our attitudes toward the Middle East in general and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in particular.

The PDC, the ILD and the Transformation of the SL

The PDC cannot simply reduplicate the formative experience of the ILD. The ILD was not only conceived in Moscow, but it was built on the authority of the Russian Revolution which rallied to its banners almost the entire left wing of the American labor movement including many non-communists. It was also built on the considerable authority of the CP in the labor movement. Equally important, the ILD was founded by communists and non-communists who had worked together for over a decade in many labor defense cases. The MORP and the ILD were able to mount demonstrations totaling millions of workers in 36 countries for Sacco and Vanzetti while the Committee to Save Mario Muñoz was able to mobilize a few hundred supporters in a handful of protests.

The PDC asserts that its heritage is that of the ILD. It shares with the ILD common principles and goals, to become the "shield" of the labor movement and to fight for the freedom of all class-war prisoners. The PDC more directly stands on the heritage of the defense work of the Spartacist League. Even our opponents, if they retain a grain of honesty, must acknowledge the SL’s record of anti-sectarian class-struggle defense (e.g., the IT writes of the SL in "Anatomy of a Sect":

"they have established a generally commendable record of support for other left tendencies under attack from the bourgeois state..."
--Hate Trotskyism..., Vol. I, p. 1

The PDC differs from the ILD in scale, but this difference in scale is qualitative. The PDC is not prepared at this point to become a membership organization like the ILD, not so much because it lacks a large non-party following, but because we lack the party cadre to run such an organization. The transformation of the PDC into an autonomous membership organization is entirely dependent on the growth of the authority of the Spartacist League and its program in the labor movement. At the same time the fact that the SL felt compelled to launch a separate defense organization two years ago is part of the overall tension of the transformation of the SL which, with the forces of a sub-propaganda group, is compelled to function like the nucleus of the vanguard party.

Presently the PDC is both a united front and a transitional organization, functioning as an auxiliary of the SL with an organizational reality somewhere between our youth organization and a party commission like the Commission for Work Among Women.

Definition of the PDC

Nearly 50 years have passed since the demise of the ILD as a principled working-class defense organization. With few exceptions this past half century has consistently witnessed the need for united labor defense subordinated to narrow factional gain. It is therefore harder now to build a working-class defense organization than it was in the 1920’s not only because of our slender resources, but also because what were once commonly accepted principles of defense within the labor movement have been eroded and poisoned by sectarianism, especially on the part of the Stalinists. It is therefore necessary to purge this poison and corruption from the labor movement both by exemplary defense work and by the kind of sharp polemics which expose our opponents for their crimes in defense work. There is nothing more anti-sectarian than our necessary polemical work. The article "USLA Redbaiting..." (WV No. 123, 3 September 1976) is an example of this kind of polemic which could equally as well have gone into a PDC newsletter. This long history of the debasement of labor defense principles dictates our rather angular self-definition. Saying that the PDC is "anti-sectarian" is not only an assertion of the united-front principles to which the PDC is dedicated, but also asserts that there has to be a struggle to re-establish these principles. Unfortunately, traditionally "non-partisan" has usually meant, even for class-struggle organizations like the ILD, the same thing as "non." or "anti-sectarian." Therefore the name Partisan Defense Committee engenders unnecessary confusion as we must explain that by "partisan" we mean on the side of the workers and the oppressed.

The other controversial side of the PDC definition is the phrase "in accordance with the political views of the SL." Some comrades point out that the ILD did not include the formulation "in accordance with the political views of the CP." Nonetheless it was well known within the entire left that with James Cannon as its National Secretary the ILD, both in its work and program, was consistent with the political views of the CP. It is necessary to assert the relationship between the PDC and SL precisely because, on the one hand, the SL does not have the authority in the labor movement of the CP of the 1920’s and therefore does not have a figure like Cannon to transmit that authority to its defense auxiliary. On the other hand, given the erosion and abuse of the principles of labor defense in the last 50 years, the PDC has no other direct political capital and little else to inspire and guide its work than the defense work of the SL, while the CP could look back on numerous defense campaigns which preceded its organizational existence and which it could claim as its own. Further, the open assertion of this relationship protects us from red-baiting.

Some comrades have recommended the formulation "in accordance with the defense policies of the SL." This is too narrow and would deny the transitional organizational character of the PDC. For example, we would never define a youth section as "based on the youth policies of the SL" or the organization for work among women as based on "SL policies for work among women." Transitional organizations flow from the application of the revolutionary working-class world outlook and program to a particular arena of struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression.

Reuben Samuels
7 October 1976
******
For Class-Struggle Defense
by Toni Reade
Discussion Bulletin, No. 28, Spartacist League/U.S., June 1977
Since the third North American Summer Camp in 1975, at which the successful conclusion of the Jagadish Jha fund-raising campaign was announced, the PDC has undertaken two major international campaigns Muñoz and Marcos) in addition to a considerable volume of other defense and legal work. The impressive success of our campaigns testifies not only to increased professionalism on the part of the comrades but also to the development of a PDC and party periphery which respects and trusts the PDC.

Our comrades can take pride in the recent work of the PDC and the hard work and developing political sensitivity and sophistication which made success possible. The purpose of this document is to seek to illuminate some confusions and disorientations which were brought to light in the course of this work, as a technical political memo supplementing the main PDC discussion document, "On the Partisan Defense Committee" by Comrade Samuels, printed in Discussion Bulletin No. 27.

The most common problems indicate some misunderstandings of the PDC’s purpose and scope. Most concretely, these are expressed in an inability to fully grasp and apply the working definition of the PDC: "The PDC is a class-struggle, anti-sectarian defense organization which stands in defense of the whole of the working people without sectarian or factional regard, in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League." In particular the political tie between the PDC and the party ("in accordance with the political views...") has been the source of recurring confusion and defensiveness among some comrades.

Lingering Legacy of Stalinist "Defense" Work

For us to want to suppress or downplay the political link between the PDC and the SL would be to accept a Stalinist perversion of the united-front anti-sectarian defense policies embodied in the tradition which produced the early International Labor Defense (ILD). One of the primary tasks of the PDC is to cut through this poisoned atmosphere to reestablish those principles, which means that we swim against the stream by rejecting the front-group methods of most other current defense organizations. Comrades should see our working definition as a valuable tool for demonstrating that we have nothing in common with sectarian front groupism, which covers up its real political links.

During the Marcos campaign, some Chicago comrades expressed an impulse to "drop" the SL’s relationship to the PDC when contacting potential contributors, believing that funds would be more easily collected. To "drop" the SL is to vitiate one of the political aims of the PDC, which is to show that only a Marxist world view and Marxist understanding of the class nature of the state produces the principled defense work which many people find pragmatically appealing. Such defensiveness is short-sighted at best, seeing fund-raising as the ultimate or sole function of the PDC. Our campaigns serve immediate and often urgent ends, but also serve to build the authority of the PDC and SL.

A front group hides the identity and politics of the organization which controls it, adapting to its putative supporters’ lowest common denominator politics. Eventually it is unmasked by people who wish to destroy it; often these people are successful. Our definition and above-board approach to soliciting support and funds, acknowledging the PDC’s political tie to the SL, protects us against liberal/Stalinist red-baiting. The PDC cannot be "exposed" as a "front group" precisely because it is not a front group--that is, it openly acknowledges its politics, including their necessary organizational connection.

Is PDC Work "Political"?

A symmetrical impulse which has sometimes impelled some comrades to deviate in a different direction is the argument that PDC work is not fully "political," or that its defense--centered axis constitutes a watering down of our program. A logical outcome of this fear was a proposal that the SL and PDC carry duplicate slogans at an intervention. A demonstration in defense of "Soviet dissidents" sponsored by various anti-communists and the SWP/USLA, scheduled to be held in front of the Soviet airlines’ office in New York, prompted in our comrades a correct impulse to see anti-Sovietism as the main thrust of the mobilization and to sharply counterpose ourselves. Signs calling for the military defense of the USSR against imperialist attack were produced, signed by both the SL and the PDC. The error was not in desiring that the PDC as well as the party separate itself from "human rights" Carter-style, but in proposing that the PDC in effect usurp the essential responsibility of the vanguard party which must be the central bearer of the Trotskyist position of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union. In the present political situation, an appropriate response might have been a counterdemonstration. Depending on the relationship of forces, another possible PDC counterpoint to a party intervention might have been to carry PDC slogans defending particular Soviet dissidents who have not embraced anti-communism. As long as the PDC marches with the party, the point is made of the PDC’s solidarity with the SL’s slogans.

Thus, interpretation of "in accordance with the political views of the SL" to mean duplication of roles is a flawed and mechanical understanding of the division of labor between the two organizations. In some instances the PDC will carry the greater emphasis in a defense-centered intervention or within the amorphous "defense" milieu. During defense efforts on behalf of Desmond Trotter and the SASO 9 this approach was used most effectively.

Exemplary Work and Selectivity

With our limited resources, the PDC cannot devote equal attention to defense of all those whose militant defense is in the interests of the working class. Even the ILD picked and chose its cases selectively, concentrating its resources on those causes and cases which were most symbolic of the needs of the workers movement in that period. Hence, the Palmer Raids and related attempts to deport or frame up immigrant leftists were emphasized in the ILD’s international campaign on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti; repression of militant trade unionists was played up in defense work on behalf of Mooney and Billings. Some of the ILD’s major campaigns centered unashamedly on the state’s attack on the CP’s own members and supporters.

Thus, the PDC’s first emphasis will be where repression endangers our political work. The PDC can be an important auxiliary of the struggle to build and consolidate the vanguard nucleus to the extent it can help protect our political work and our comrades from legal harassment and bourgeois repression. As our tendency grows and becomes more obtrusive, there will be an acceleration of legal defense work involving defense of our movement, and an increased priority devoted to the crucial legal work of our legal counsel.

That the PDC is for us and others was a founding premise of the PDC. A letter to supporters in September 1973 explained:

"The Spartacist League is about to initiate a Partisan Defense Fund. This will be a special fund designed primarily to provide legal defense for the members of the Spartacist League and for our supporters and also to make contributions to other appropriate defense cases.

"...Bourgeois ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ are frequently not extended to the left and working-class movements; we realize that we must prepare for the inevitable frame-ups and arrests of our own members and supporters.

"The Spartacist League has always insisted that an attack on one section of the left is a threat to the entire movement. We have an outstanding and principled record of defending the working-class movement against bourgeois attack and of struggling for democracy on the left.... We believe also that energetic provisions for our own defense are necessary to preserve our ability to intervene with the full strength of our political program and organization at critical moments in the class struggle. Without such preparations we could be fatally deflected as defenseless others have been before us."

Selectivity toward cases has nothing in common with sectarianism. Our tendency’s international campaign for MIR leaders Van Schouwen and Romero was an exemplary expression of the responsibility to defend the "far left" of the political spectrum, nearly always ignored by liberals and by Stalinists and others who defend only the prominent victims of repression (intellectuals, bourgeois politicians) and their own co-thinkers.

The PDC’s campaign for Mario Muñoz also proceeded from the recognition that the far left, in this case opponents of the Chilean popular front, could rely on nobody but the PDC and SL to initiate a militant campaign on their behalf. The disproportionate resources devoted to this campaign reflected a responsibility to our own fraternal comrades of the OTR. Intersecting powerful popular revulsion against junta terror in Latin America, our campaign became a real symbol of the plight of Latin American political refugees fleeing right-wing repression. Through exposing the repressive Argentine junta, the PDC and SL were able to assist these refugees on an unexpectedly significant scale.

The PDC also seeks to emphasize cases and causes which illuminate aspects of the characteristic political program of the SL. One illustrative example was the case of two imprisoned South African black playwrights, Kani and Ntshona, who were not likely to be defended by most radicals because their efforts to produce their anti-apartheid plays within South Africa did not accord with the "cultural boycott" of South Africa. In such cases, our responsibility to defend all those whose defense is in the interests of the workers movement intersects an opportunity to emphasize the unique Trotskyist program of the SL.

In the recent period, the PDC has made some impressive beginnings in reestablishing the tradition of anti-sectarian, class-struggle defense work. We can continue to extend and consolidate these gains if we continue to deepen and refine our organization’s grasp of the intimate political connection between the work of the PDC and the tasks of the SL.

T. Reade
9 June 1977

From The James P. Cannon Internet Archives-"How To Organize A (Marxist) Study Class"

Markin comment:

Every once in a while it is beneficial to go back to the archives to see what our political forebears were up to. And since we are very much in a period where the study of Marxist classics, and socialist concepts in general, is on the order of the day Cannon, a central leader in almost all of the left-wing political organizations of the first three-fourths of the 20th century, has something to tell us about how to organize those inquiries.
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How to Organise and
Conduct a Study Class


Written: December 13, 1924
Source: Fighting for Socialism in the “American Century” (c) Resistance Books 2001. Resistance Books 2001 ISBN 1876646217; Published by Resistance Books 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Permission for on-line publication provided by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2003.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters

The following article was first published in the Daily Worker magazine supplement, December 13, 1924. At the time, Cannon was the educational director of the Workers Party.

The problem of educational work is many-sided. Enthusiasm for this work among the party members must be aroused and maintained. A general recognition of its fundamental importance must be established. It must be organically connected with the life and struggles of the party, and must not become academic and sterile. And it must be conducted in a systematic manner, becoming an established part of the life of the party throughout the year. This last will not just “happen”. It will take much work and the introduction of correct organisational and technical principles. All our theories will come to nothing if our educational apparatus does not function properly.

Many classes have landed on the rocks because they were not conducted properly. One of the most frequent inquiries we have received from comrades who are undertaking party educational work is: “What is the best way to conduct a study class?” It is the purpose of this article to give an answer to this question based on the collective experience in the field of educational work from which a few general principles can be extracted.

Let us begin at the beginning and proceed step by step. When the responsible party committee in the given localities has decided to establish a class, let us say, for example, in the “ABC of Communism”, the next move must be to appoint a leader for the class. This leader must understand that the class will not move of itself, but must be organised and directed from beginning to end, otherwise it will fall to pieces. The comrade in charge of the class must then proceed to enrol students, having them register for the class and making sure he has a sufficient number who agree in advance to attend the classes before he sets the time for calling it. As soon as a sufficient number of students have been enrolled, a date is set for the first class and all the students are notified.

At this point we should speak a word about the danger of haphazardness in the attendance at the classes on the part of any of the students. The party committee must decide that the attendance at class once a week, or more frequently, as the case may be, is a part of the member’s party duty and should excuse him from party obligations for those nights. The systematic and regular attendance at class by all students must be constantly stressed, and the party committee and the leader of the class must constantly fight against the tendency, which always grows up, to regard the study class as a series of lectures at which one can “drop in” whenever he feels like it. Good results can only be obtained when the class is an organised body and is regularly attended by the same students.

Methods of conducting classes

The methods of conducting the classes which have proved most successful from past experience can be roughly divided into two general methods. These methods may be modified and varied in many ways, according to local circumstances, experience and qualifications of the teacher, etc.

These two methods are:

1. The lecture-question method.

2. The method of reading from and discussing the text in the class.

The lecture-question method. This is the method most frequently employed by experienced teachers, and one which yields the most satisfactory results if qualified comrades can be found to conduct the class along this line. The use of this method presupposes that the teacher, who is himself thoroughly familiar with the subject matter of the text, possesses some ability and experience as a lecturer. It is not necessary, however, for him to be a professional. The average communist who has a firm grasp of his subject will find that with a little practice he can succeed in holding the attention of a class.

Under this method the teacher delivers a lecture for the period of about one hour on some phase of the general subject, dealt with in the text. In addition he requires the students to read, outside the class, in connection with his lecture, certain portions of the text and sometimes portions of other books which deal with the same subject. When the class comes together for the second time it is opened with a question period of about thirty minutes during which the lecturer quizzes the students on the subject matter of the previous week’s lecture and the reading in connection with it. It is best to have a short recess at the end of the question period in order to get a fresh start for the lecture. A lecture of about an hour then completes the evening’s work. Again the students are referred to sections of the text for reading in connection with the lecture. The same procedure is then followed at each successive meeting of the class until the end of the course.

When this method is employed it is not advisable to have indiscriminate discussion in the class, as this will almost invariably divert the attention of the class from the immediate subject at hand and destroy the possibility of consecutive instruction. For a teacher to conduct a class according to this method he must take it firmly in hand, establish his authority at the very beginning, and maintain it throughout the course. Nothing is more fatal to the success of such a class than for the opinion to grow up amongst some of the students that the teacher knows less then they do about the subject. For he will then be unable to maintain the proper discipline in the class and hold it to its course. Whenever a study class, organised for the purpose of consecutive study of a certain aspect of communist theory or tactics, begins to resolve itself into a group for general discussion or a debating society, its early demise can be confidently expected.

Reading and discussing the text. This method also works out very well, especially in elementary classes. In this method, as in all others, however, the first prerequisite is a class leader who takes a responsible attitude towards the work and who takes it upon himself to organise and lead the class and hold it down to the matter in hand. This class leader should by all means thoroughly study the text before the class commences and make himself master of it.

The class conducted according to this method proceeds by the class leader calling upon the students, one after another, to read a few sentences or a paragraph from the text. After each student finishes reading the part assigned to him, the leader asks the student who has read the passage to explain it in his own words. If he fails to bring out the meaning clearly or interprets the passage incorrectly, the question is directed to other students, the leader himself finally intervening to clarify the matter if necessary.

Proceeding along this line the class will cover a chapter or so of the text each evening. Before the reading commences each time, the leader should conduct a brief quiz of the class on the part of the text dealt with on the preceding evening in order to bring out the points clearly for the second time, refresh the memory of the students, and connect the preceding class with the one about to begin.

In the course of a few months, proceeding along this line, the class will get through the “ABC of Communism” and will have acquired a grasp of the fundamental theories of the movement. Moreover, if the class has been conducted successfully, if it has had the good fortune to have a leader that can inspire confidence and enthusiasm and who can hold it together as an organised body in spite of all difficulties, the students of the class, or at least a large part of them, will emerge from their first course of training with a strong will and spirit to acquire more knowledge and thereby equip themselves better to become worthy fighters in the cause of communism.

The success of the study class work is to a very large extent dependent upon organisation, leadership and class discipline. It should start on time and stop on time each evening. It must not accommodate itself to casual students or chronic latecomers. It should not degenerate into a mere discussion group over the general problems of the movement but must confine itself in a disciplined manner to the specific subjects dealt with in the course. It should be conducted in a businesslike fashion from start to finish, students being enrolled and the roll called each evening. Above all it should have a leader who, notwithstanding lack of previous experience, will take his task so seriously as to thoroughly master the subject himself. Then he will be able to establish sufficient authority in the class to lead it step by step to the end of the course.

*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party

Markin comment:

In the introduction to a recent posting that started a series entitled From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) I noted the following that applies to this series on the roots of the American Communist Party as well:

“In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive…..”

I am continuing today in that vane in what I also anticipate will be an on-going series on the early days of the American Communist party from which we who are students of Leon Trotsky trace our roots. Those roots extend from the 1919 until 1929 when those who would go on after being expelled, led by James P. Cannon, to form the Socialist Workers Party which also is part of our heritage. That is not the end of the matter though as the American Communist Party also represented a trend in the 1930s, the Popular front strategic policy, that has bedeviled revolutionaries ever since in one form or another. Those 1930s issues need to be addressed as well.
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Additional comment on this article-Markin
A certain amount of caution is needed in dealing with the Stalinized American Communist Party, as with the Communist International, because the Stalinists, then and now, were more than happy to slander political opponents on their left, and to rewrite history for their own purposes. Hardly a new idea among those who “win” whatever battle they are fighting. But a little bit tough on those of us who are trying to draw the lessons of the past for today’s left-wing militants. This series starts with the reflections of that early Communist leader mentioned above, James P. Cannon, who had his own axes to grind politically, no question. However, as Theodore Draper who wrote the definitive study on the history of the early American Communist Party in two volumes noted, of all the people whom he interviewed for the his books James Cannon was the one that stood out as wanting to remember as truthfully as he could that early history. I will use that statement as the touchstone for using Cannon’s work first. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and the others will get their chance later.
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James P. Cannon
Letters to a Historian
(1954 – 1956)
* * *
These articles from the magazines Fourth International and International Socialist Review are based on letters Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper who was then researching his two-volume series on the history of the US Communist Party

Written: March 1954 to February 1956.
Published: Fourth International, Summer 1954–Spring 1956, & International Socialist Review, Summer 1956–Spring 1957. Source: Original bound volumes of Fourth International and International Socialist Review and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive


James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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[First Letter]

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Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Summer 1954, pp.91-92.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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March 2, 1954

Dear Sir:

I received your letter stating that you are working on a history of the American communist movement. I am interested in your project and am willing to give you all the help I can.

Your task will not be easy, for you will be traveling in an undiscovered country where most of the visible road signs are painted upside down and point in the wrong directions. All the reports that I have come across, both from the renegades and from the official apologists, are slanted and falsified. The objective historian will have to keep up a double guard in searching for the truth among all the conflicting reports.

The Stalinists are not only the most systematic and dedicated liars that history has yet produced; they have also won the flattering complement of imitation from the professional anti-Stalinists. The history of American communism is one subject on which different liars, for different reasons in each case, have had a field day.

However, most of the essential facts are matters Of record. The trouble begins with the interpretation; and I doubt very much whether an historian, even with the best will in the world, could render a true report and make the facts understandable without a correct explanation of what happened and why.

As you already know, I have touched on the pioneer days of American communism, in my book, The History of American Trotskyism. During the past year I have made other references to this period in connection with the current discussion in our movement. The party resolution on American Stalinism and Our Attitude Toward It, which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fourth International, was written by me.

I speak there also of the early period of the Communist Party, and have made other references in other articles and letters published in the course of our discussion. All this material can be made available to you. I intend to return to the subject again at greater length later on, for I am of the definite opinion that an understanding of the pioneer days of American communism is essential to the education of the new generation of American revolutionists.

My writings on the early history of American communism are mainly designed to illustrate my basic thesis, which as far as I know, has not been expounded by anyone else. This thesis can be briefly stated as follows:

The Communist Party originally was a revolutionary organization. All the original leaders of the early Communist Party, who later split into three permanent factions within the party, began as American revolutionists with a perspective of revolution in this country. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been in the movement in the first place and wouldn’t have split with the reformist socialists to organize the Communist Party.

Even if it is maintained that some of these leaders were careerists – a contention their later evolution tends to support – it still remains to be explained why they sought careers in the communist movement and not in the business or professional worlds, or in bourgeois politics, or in the trade union officialdom. Opportunities in these fields were open to at least some of them, and were deliberately cast aside at the time.

In my opinion, the course of the leaders of American communism in its pioneer days, a course which entailed deprivations, hazards and penalties, can be explained only by the assumption that they were revolutionists to begin with; and that even the careerists among them believed in the future of the workers’ revolution in America and wished to ally themselves with this future.

It is needless to add that the rank and file of the party, who had no personal interests to serve, were animated by revolutionary convictions. By that I mean, they were believers in the perspective of revolution in this country, for I do not know any other kind of revolutionists.

The American Communist Party did not begin with Stalinism. The Stalinization of the party was rather the end result of a process of degeneration which began during the long boom of the Twenties. The protracted prosperity of that period, which came to be taken for permanence by the great mass of American people of all classes, did not fail to affect the Communist Party itself. It softened up the leading cadres of that party, and undermined their original confidence in the perspectives of a revolution in this country. This prepared them, eventually, for an easy acceptance of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country.”

For those who accepted this theory, Russia, as the “one country” of the victorious revolution, became a substitute for the American revolution. Thereafter, the Communist Party in this country adopted as its primary a task the “defense of the Soviet Union” by pressure methods of one kind or another on American foreign policy, without any perspective of a revolution of their own. All the subsequent twists and turns of Communist policy in the United States, which appears so irrational to others, had this central motivation – the subordination of the struggle for a revolution in the United States to the “defense” of a revolution in another country.

That explains the frenzied radicalism of the party in the first years of the economic crisis of the Thirties, when American foreign policy was hostile to the Soviet diplomacy; the reconciliation with Roosevelt after he recognized the Soviet Union and oriented toward a diplomatic rapprochement with the Kremlin; the split with Roosevelt during the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the later fervent reconciliation and the unrestrained jingoism of the American Stalinists when Washington allied itself with the Kremlin in the war.

The present policy of the Communist Party, its subordination of the class struggle to a pacifistic “peace” campaign, and its decision to ally itself at all costs with the Democratic Party, has the same consistent motivation as all the previous turns of policy.

The degeneration of the Communist Party began when it abandoned the perspective of revolution in this country, and converted itself into a pressure group and cheering squad for the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia – which it mistakenly took to be the custodian of a revolution “in another country.”

I shouldn’t neglect to add the final point of my thesis: The degeneration of the Communist Party is not to be explained by the summary conclusion that the leaders were a pack of scoundrels to begin with; although a considerable percentage of them – those who became Stalinists as well as those who became renegades – turned out eventually to be scoundrels of championship caliber; but by the circumstance that they fell victim to a fake theory and a false perspective.

What happened to the Communist Party would happen without fail to any other party, including our own, if it should abandon its struggle for a social revolution in this country, as the realistic perspective of our epoch, and degrade itself to the role of sympathizer of revolutions in other countries.

I firmly believe that American revolutionists should indeed sympathize with revolutions in other lands, and try to help them in every way they can. But the best way to do that is to build a party with a confident perspective of a revolution in this country.

Without that perspective, a Communist or Socialist party belies its name. It ceases to be a help and becomes a hindrance to the revolutionary workers’ cause in its own country. And its sympathy for other revolutions isn’t worth much either.

That, in my opinion, is the true and correct explanation of the Rise and Fall of the American Communist Party.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon

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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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Birth of the Communist Party

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Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Summer 1954, pp.92-94.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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April 21, 1954

Dear Sir:

I am very sorry that I delayed so long in answering your letter of March 5. This has not been due to lack of interest in your project or unwillingness to help you in any way I can. The trouble is that I am working on a rather full schedule which I have not been able to interrupt long enough to answer your questions adequately. I take them far too seriously to give offhand answers. Some of the questions require considerable time for thought and recollection of matters which have been long buried in memory.

I will undertake to answer all your questions as fully as I can, although I will not be able to do this all at once. Here I will make a beginning and will undertake to send you other comments later.

I attended the National Conference of the Socialist Party Left Wing in New York in May 1919 as a delegate from Kansas City. I did not attend the Party Convention in September of that year, which resulted in the split and the formation of the two Communist Parties. The reasons which motivated my non-attendance at this Convention were soon flooded out by events, but they seemed important to me at the time and still do. Perhaps they are worth stating.

The Left Wing Conference was my first introduction to the New York atmosphere and my first view of the dominating role of the foreign-language groups. I was in agreement with the Left Wing program, but I was appalled by the tactical unrealism of the language-federation leaders, represented there in the first place by Hourwich. Their manifest determination to speed up the split of the Socialist Party convinced me that they weren’t really living in this country and didn’t know or care about the state of mind of the Socialist Party membership outside New York at that time.

I was afraid that a premature split would run far ahead of the readiness of the rank and file in many sections of the country. For that reason, I was strongly opposed to any procedure which might precipitate it. Reed, Gitlow, etc., whom I first met at this Conference, impressed me as far more realistic. They were also more informed and concerned about the industrial labor movement, which was my major interest. I identified myself with their group, which later emerged as the Communist Labor Party.

My failure to be a delegate to the Chicago Convention in September followed from my opposition to a premature split and, because of that, my insistence on respecting party legality in the factional struggle. The party constitution at that time, as I recall, required that delegates to a National Convention be party members for a certain number of years. I did not strictly qualify under this provision, and did not wish to appear at the Convention as a contested delegate. My previous activity had been in the IWW; I only joined the Socialist Party in 1918, after the Russian Revolution and the rise of the left wing. For that reason, I declined the nomination as delegate and the election went to another comrade who was legally qualified under the party constitution.

In the light of later events this exaggerated “legalism” may appear as a quixotic reason for failing to attend the historic Convention. But that’s the way it was, and I still think I was right. The precipitate split cut the left wing off from thousands of radical socialists who were revolutionary in their sentiments but not yet ready to follow the left wing in a split. They didn’t stay with the right wing either. They just dropped out in discouragement over the split, and nearly all of them were lost to the movement.

Of course, the right wing leaders were bent on a split too, and it probably could not have been prevented in any case. But it might have been delayed if the left wing leadership hid followed a more careful tactic, had shown more respect for party legalism and more patience and respect for those thousands of party members who were sympathetic to the Russian Revolution but had yet to be convinced of the necessity for a new party. The Communist Party was born in Chicago as a result of an unnecessary, or at any rate a premature, Caesarian operation, which weakened and nearly killed the child at birth. There is an important lesson in this experience which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. Splits are sometimes unavoidable, but unprepared splits can do more harm than good.

Faced with the accomplished fact of the split, indeed of the double split, which brought two Communist Parties into existence – despite our wishes to the contrary – the Kansas City Local of the Socialist Party followed political lines and promptly aligned itself with the Communist Labor Party. This was the direct continuation of the informal alliance I had made with the Reed-Gitlow group at the National Left Wing Conference in New York four months previously.

I attended the underground Convention in Bridgeman, Michigan, in the spring of 1920, where the Communist Labor Party united with the Ruthenberg faction of the Communist Party to form the United Communist Party.

At that Convention I was elected to the Central Committee, and was assigned as organizer of the St. Louis-Southern Illinois district of the party. After a number of months in this post, working mainly among the coal miners of Southern Illinois, I was appointed editor of the Toiler and moved to Cleveland to take up the new post. A few months later I was called to New York and remained there as a resident member of the Central Committee.

I soon became convinced that the party could not survive in a completely underground existence where we were cut off from the labor movement and the real life of the country in general. But there were still two Communist Parties in existence and they were exhausting themselves in the underground factional struggle. The final unification of forces at a unity convention in the spring of 1921 brought a new leadership to the fore. Ruthenberg and Gitlow were in prison at that time, and several other previous members of the Central Committee failed of re-election. Lovestone and Weinstone were elected to the Central Committee at this Convention, and Bittleman was coopted soon after.

We began a determined struggle for a step-by-step legalization of the movement. I was perhaps more determined than the others on the eventual complete legalization of the party; but this had to wait for some experimental tests.

We took a series of steps to test our legal possibilities. The first of these was the formation of a number of legal branches under the name of the American Labor Alliance. These groups sponsored the first election campaign of the Communist movement by nominating Gitlow for mayor of New York in that year. We also began to conduct forums and lectures under the name of the Workers Alliance.

Meantime, a belated left wing of the Socialist Party, headed by Salutsky (Hardman), Engdahl, Olgin, etc., had seceded from the Socialist Party and formed the Workers Council. I was one of the Communist Party representatives on the committee named to negotiate with this group for the joint formation of a legal party, which finally came into existence in late December 1921.

It is not true and could not be true, as Melech Epstein says, in his Jewish Labor in the USA, that a promise was made to disband the underground party and that this promise was broken. We were absolutely without authority to make such an agreement at that time. We were supported by a majority of the Communist Party in our proposal to unite with the Workers Council group in the formation of a legal party, with the distinct understanding that the underground party would be maintained. In fact, as I recall, the paper of the Communist Party published at that time contained articles explaining how we conceived the functioning of both a legal and an illegal party and the relations between them.

The Workers Council group knew all about that. It is true that they wanted a single legal party without any underground organization. But they knew very well that we were in no position at that time to promise that. It is quite possible and even probable that they counted, as I did, on the logic of developments to assure the predominance of the legal party and the eventual liquidation of the underground organization as unnecessary in the political circumstances of the time. This proved to be correct, but another year’s experience, plus the friendly help of the Communist International, were necessary to bring this about.

We had several meetings with the Workers Council people in the Joint Negotiating committee. I do not recall any great difficulties, since both sides were eager for the unification. The Workers Council delegates were most concerned about being swallowed up and steam-rollered by the Communist Party majority. This difficulty was overcome by many organizational concessions which we made. They were accorded representation in the Convention and on the new National Committee far beyond their numerical strength. These concessions were easily made on our part, since we wanted to create the impression of a big unification to attract unaffiliated radicals, and the Workers Council group had a number of prominent and capable people whom the new party could use most advantageously.

The Convention which launched the Workers Party was quite successful and harmonious, and it gave a big impulse to the development of the movement. Max Eastman wrote a sympathetic and perspicacious account of the Convention in the Liberator of January or February 1923, which you may check for references. As you note, I was the keynote speaker at the Convention and was elected Chairman of the National Committee by agreement of both sides. Perhaps some special considerations accounted for this agreement. I was a sort of symbol of the “Western-American” orientation which it was deemed necessary to emphasize. Besides that, I have no doubt that the Workers Council people considered me to be more of a “liquidator” than some of the other Communist Party leaders – an impression which was not entirely unfounded.

In answer to. your question, I would say that the political cooperation between me and Lovestone was the main driving force in all these party developments of the year 1921. Bittelman and Weinstone were also very effective in the collaboration. In fact, we worked quite effectively as a team in that period, considering the fact that we all came into the leadership cold, without much previous experience to go by. The overriding political consideration – the imperative need to legalize party activity – proved stronger in this case than differences of background and temperament which played a part in later friction and conflict.

We did not succeed in forming the Workers Party without another split with die-hard undergrounders in the Communist Party. The two members of the Central Committee whom I remember as leaders of the secession were Dirba and Ballam. Wicks belonged to the Proletarian Party. He joined the seceding faction of the Communist Party – which became known as the United Toilers – only after the split, and was appointed editor of their paper.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon

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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian

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[First Letter]

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Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Summer 1954, pp.91-92.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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March 2, 1954

Dear Sir:

I received your letter stating that you are working on a history of the American communist movement. I am interested in your project and am willing to give you all the help I can.

Your task will not be easy, for you will be traveling in an undiscovered country where most of the visible road signs are painted upside down and point in the wrong directions. All the reports that I have come across, both from the renegades and from the official apologists, are slanted and falsified. The objective historian will have to keep up a double guard in searching for the truth among all the conflicting reports.

The Stalinists are not only the most systematic and dedicated liars that history has yet produced; they have also won the flattering complement of imitation from the professional anti-Stalinists. The history of American communism is one subject on which different liars, for different reasons in each case, have had a field day.

However, most of the essential facts are matters Of record. The trouble begins with the interpretation; and I doubt very much whether an historian, even with the best will in the world, could render a true report and make the facts understandable without a correct explanation of what happened and why.

As you already know, I have touched on the pioneer days of American communism, in my book, The History of American Trotskyism. During the past year I have made other references to this period in connection with the current discussion in our movement. The party resolution on American Stalinism and Our Attitude Toward It, which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fourth International, was written by me.

I speak there also of the early period of the Communist Party, and have made other references in other articles and letters published in the course of our discussion. All this material can be made available to you. I intend to return to the subject again at greater length later on, for I am of the definite opinion that an understanding of the pioneer days of American communism is essential to the education of the new generation of American revolutionists.

My writings on the early history of American communism are mainly designed to illustrate my basic thesis, which as far as I know, has not been expounded by anyone else. This thesis can be briefly stated as follows:

The Communist Party originally was a revolutionary organization. All the original leaders of the early Communist Party, who later split into three permanent factions within the party, began as American revolutionists with a perspective of revolution in this country. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been in the movement in the first place and wouldn’t have split with the reformist socialists to organize the Communist Party.

Even if it is maintained that some of these leaders were careerists – a contention their later evolution tends to support – it still remains to be explained why they sought careers in the communist movement and not in the business or professional worlds, or in bourgeois politics, or in the trade union officialdom. Opportunities in these fields were open to at least some of them, and were deliberately cast aside at the time.

In my opinion, the course of the leaders of American communism in its pioneer days, a course which entailed deprivations, hazards and penalties, can be explained only by the assumption that they were revolutionists to begin with; and that even the careerists among them believed in the future of the workers’ revolution in America and wished to ally themselves with this future.

It is needless to add that the rank and file of the party, who had no personal interests to serve, were animated by revolutionary convictions. By that I mean, they were believers in the perspective of revolution in this country, for I do not know any other kind of revolutionists.

The American Communist Party did not begin with Stalinism. The Stalinization of the party was rather the end result of a process of degeneration which began during the long boom of the Twenties. The protracted prosperity of that period, which came to be taken for permanence by the great mass of American people of all classes, did not fail to affect the Communist Party itself. It softened up the leading cadres of that party, and undermined their original confidence in the perspectives of a revolution in this country. This prepared them, eventually, for an easy acceptance of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country.”

For those who accepted this theory, Russia, as the “one country” of the victorious revolution, became a substitute for the American revolution. Thereafter, the Communist Party in this country adopted as its primary a task the “defense of the Soviet Union” by pressure methods of one kind or another on American foreign policy, without any perspective of a revolution of their own. All the subsequent twists and turns of Communist policy in the United States, which appears so irrational to others, had this central motivation – the subordination of the struggle for a revolution in the United States to the “defense” of a revolution in another country.

That explains the frenzied radicalism of the party in the first years of the economic crisis of the Thirties, when American foreign policy was hostile to the Soviet diplomacy; the reconciliation with Roosevelt after he recognized the Soviet Union and oriented toward a diplomatic rapprochement with the Kremlin; the split with Roosevelt during the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the later fervent reconciliation and the unrestrained jingoism of the American Stalinists when Washington allied itself with the Kremlin in the war.

The present policy of the Communist Party, its subordination of the class struggle to a pacifistic “peace” campaign, and its decision to ally itself at all costs with the Democratic Party, has the same consistent motivation as all the previous turns of policy.

The degeneration of the Communist Party began when it abandoned the perspective of revolution in this country, and converted itself into a pressure group and cheering squad for the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia – which it mistakenly took to be the custodian of a revolution “in another country.”

I shouldn’t neglect to add the final point of my thesis: The degeneration of the Communist Party is not to be explained by the summary conclusion that the leaders were a pack of scoundrels to begin with; although a considerable percentage of them – those who became Stalinists as well as those who became renegades – turned out eventually to be scoundrels of championship caliber; but by the circumstance that they fell victim to a fake theory and a false perspective.

What happened to the Communist Party would happen without fail to any other party, including our own, if it should abandon its struggle for a social revolution in this country, as the realistic perspective of our epoch, and degrade itself to the role of sympathizer of revolutions in other countries.

I firmly believe that American revolutionists should indeed sympathize with revolutions in other lands, and try to help them in every way they can. But the best way to do that is to build a party with a confident perspective of a revolution in this country.

Without that perspective, a Communist or Socialist party belies its name. It ceases to be a help and becomes a hindrance to the revolutionary workers’ cause in its own country. And its sympathy for other revolutions isn’t worth much either.

That, in my opinion, is the true and correct explanation of the Rise and Fall of the American Communist Party.

Yours truly,
James P. Cannon