Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of a performance of the Internationale.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
********************
The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]
Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
L'Internationale
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud
L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits
Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Die Internationale
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht
Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!
In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(The English version most commonly sung in South Africa. )
The Internationale
Arise ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye toilers of the earth
For reason thunders new creation
`Tis a better world in birth.
Never more traditions' chains shall bind us
Arise ye toilers no more in thrall
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We are naught but we shall be all.
Then comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Zulu) i-Internationale
n'zigqila zezwe lonke
Vukan'ejokwen'lobugqili
Sizokwakh'umhlaba kabusha
Siqed'indlala nobumpofu.
lamasik'okusibopha
Asilwise yonk'incindezelo
Manj'umhlab'unesakhiw'esisha
Asisodwa Kulomkhankaso
Maqaban'wozan'sihlanganeni
Sibhekene nempi yamanqamu
I-Internationale
Ibumb'uluntu lonke
*****
British Translation Billy Bragg's Revision[16] American version
First stanza
Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We'll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
Stand up, all victims of oppression,
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don't cling so hard to your possessions,
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended,
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended,
Unless enjoyed by one and all.
So come brothers and sisters,
For the struggle carries on.
The Internationale,
Unites the world in song.
So comrades, come rally,
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal,
Unites the human race.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Christmas In The Trenches" (World War I)
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of a performace of Christmas In The Trenches.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*********
Christmas In The Trenches lyrics
My name is Francis Tolliver.
I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here,
I fought for King and country I love dear.
It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen field of France were still, no Christmas song was sung.
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lyin' with my mess-mates on the cold and rocky ground
when across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I "Now listen up me boys", each soldier strained to hear
as one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singin' bloody well you know",
my partner says to me.
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony.
The cannons rested silent.
The gas cloud rolled no moreas Christmas brought us respite from the war. As soon as they were finished a reverent pause was spent.
'God rest ye merry, gentlemen' struck up some lads from Kent.
The next they sang was 'Stille Nacht".
"Tis 'Silent Night'" says I
and in two tougues one song filled up that sky.
"There's someone commin' towards us" the front-line sentry cried.
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side.
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
as he bravely strode, unarmed, into the night.
Then one by one on either side walked into no-mans-land
with neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand.
We shared some secret brandy and wished each other well
and in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photgraphs from home
these sons and fathers far away from families of their own.
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
this curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more.
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war.
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
"whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung.
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
had been crumbled and were gone for ever more.
My name is Francis Tolliver.
In Liverpool I dwell.
Each Christmas come since World War One I've learned it's lessons well.
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
and on each end of the rifle we're the same.
-- John McCutcheon "Christmas in the trenches"
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*********
Christmas In The Trenches lyrics
My name is Francis Tolliver.
I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here,
I fought for King and country I love dear.
It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen field of France were still, no Christmas song was sung.
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lyin' with my mess-mates on the cold and rocky ground
when across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I "Now listen up me boys", each soldier strained to hear
as one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singin' bloody well you know",
my partner says to me.
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony.
The cannons rested silent.
The gas cloud rolled no moreas Christmas brought us respite from the war. As soon as they were finished a reverent pause was spent.
'God rest ye merry, gentlemen' struck up some lads from Kent.
The next they sang was 'Stille Nacht".
"Tis 'Silent Night'" says I
and in two tougues one song filled up that sky.
"There's someone commin' towards us" the front-line sentry cried.
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side.
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
as he bravely strode, unarmed, into the night.
Then one by one on either side walked into no-mans-land
with neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand.
We shared some secret brandy and wished each other well
and in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photgraphs from home
these sons and fathers far away from families of their own.
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
this curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more.
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war.
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
"whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung.
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
had been crumbled and were gone for ever more.
My name is Francis Tolliver.
In Liverpool I dwell.
Each Christmas come since World War One I've learned it's lessons well.
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
and on each end of the rifle we're the same.
-- John McCutcheon "Christmas in the trenches"
Friday, December 24, 2010
*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party -After Ruthenberg (Early Party General Secretary)
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.
*********
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.
********
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After Ruthenberg
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.17 No.3, Summer 1956, pp.89-92, 107.
Original bound volumes of 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 22, 1955
Dear Sir:
The sudden death of Ruthenberg in March 1927 upset the shaky equilibrium in the party, and called forth the second direct intervention of the Comintern to thwart the will of the party majority and to determine the composition of the party leadership over its head.
Ruthenberg had always played a big role in the party, and he had seemed to be perennially established in the office of General Secretary. His death in the prime of his life really shook things up.
The two “big names” in the party at that time were those of Foster and Ruthenberg, and the prestige of both had been well earned by their previous record of constructive activity. Foster was renowned for his work as organizer and leader of the great steel strike of 1919 and his subsequent achievements as organizer of the TUEL; Ruthenberg for his heroic fight against the war and his outstanding activity as a pioneer communist, and also for his prison terms, bravely borne. The party members were well aware of the value of their public reputations and, by common consent, the two men held positions of special eminence as party leaders and public spokesmen for that reason. Factional activity had added nothing to the prestige of the two most popular leaders; if anything, it had somewhat tarnished it.
Of all the leading people in his faction, Ruthenberg had by far the greatest respect and personal influence in the party ranks. The faction was demonstratively called the “Ruthenberg Group” in order to capitalize on his prestige. But the Ruthenberg group, with Ruthenberg, was a minority in the party, as the hard-fought elections to the 1925 Convention had clearly demonstrated.
At the time of the 1925 Convention the “cable from Moscow,” as interpreted by the Comintern representative on the ground, had abruptly turned this minority into a majority and left the party members, who had innocently voted for their choice of delegates to the party convention, looking like fools who had mistakenly thought they had some rights and prerogatives in the matter of electing the party leadership.
Another “cable from Moscow” worked the same miracle of turning a minority into a majority in 1927. Supplementary decisions along the same line gradually bludgeoned the party members into acquiescence and reduced their democratic powers to a fiction. The role of the Comintern in the affairs of the American Communist Party was transformed from that of a friendly influence in matters of policy into that of a direct, brutal arbiter in organizational questions, including the most important question, the selection of the leadership.
Thereafter, the party retained only the dubious right to go through the motions; the decisions were made in Moscow. The process of transforming the party from a self-governing, democratic organization into a puppet of the Kremlin, which had been started in 1925, was advanced another big stage toward completion in 1927. That is the essential meaning of this year in party history. Everything else is secondary and incidental.
* * *
The shaky formal “majority” of the Ruthenberg group had been upset even before Ruthenberg died by the defection of committee members Weinstone and Ballam. Then came the sudden death of Ruthenberg, to deprive the faction of its most influential personality and its strongest claim to the confidence of the party ranks. How then could such an attenuated minority faction, without Ruthenberg, hope to “control” the party and avoid coming to agreement for cooperation with the other groups who constituted the majority in the Central Executive Committee?
We took it for granted that it couldn’t be done, and proceeded on the assumption that a rearrangement of the leading staff had to follow as a matter of course. But it didn’t work out that way. The cards were stacked for a different outcome; and we were defeated before we started. All we had on our side were the rules of arithmetic, the constitutional rights of the majority of the Central Executive Committee, the logic of the situation, and the undoubted support of the majority of the party at the time. All that was not enough.
On his side, Lovestone had his own driving frenzy to seize control of the party, regardless of the will of the majority, and the support of Moscow. These proved to be the ace cards in the game that was drawn out over a period of six months to its foreordained conclusion. Lovestone came out of the skirmish of 1927 with the “majority“ – given to him by the Comintern – and held it until the same supreme authority decided to take it away from him two years later.
* * *
Lovestone took the first trick by having himself appointed by the Political Committee to the post of General Secretary, vacated by Ruthenberg’s death. Constitutionally, this was out of order. The right to appoint party officers belonged to the full Plenum of the Central Executive Committee, the Political Committee being merely a subcommittee of that body.
We demanded the immediate calling of a full Plenum to deal with all the problems arising from Ruthenberg’s death, including the appointment of his successor in the post of party secretary. Weinstone and I had come to agreement with Foster that Weinstone should become the new party secretary; and since we represented a majority of the Plenum, we expected to execute the decision.
Then came trick number two for Lovestone. The Comintern cabled its decision that the Plenum could meet all right, but it could not make any binding decisions on organizational questions pending a consideration of the whole matter in Moscow. All the leading representatives of the factions were to come to Moscow for that purpose. Since the chief “organizational questions” were the reorganization of the Political Committee along the lines of the Plenum majority, and the appointment of a new party secretary, this cable of the Comintern, ostensibly withholding judgment, actually left Lovestone in control at both points – de facto if not de jure.
The meeting of the sovereign Plenum of the Communist Party of the United States, forbidden in advance to make any binding decisions, was made even more farcical by the failure of Lovestone to show up for the second session. He and Gitlow had abruptly departed for Moscow, where the decisions were to be made, without so much as a by-your-leave or goodbye to the elected leading body of the party to which they, like all other party members, were presumably-or so it said in the constitution-subordinate.
In a moderately healthy, self-governing party, involved in the class struggle in its own country and functioning under its own power, such reckless contempt for its own leading body would no doubt be sufficient to discredit its author and bring prompt condemnation from the party ranks. Nothing like that happened in reaction to the hooligan conduct of Lovestone on this occasion. The majority of the Plenum blew up in anger. Foster fussed and fumed and gave vent to his indignation in unparliamentary language. But there was nothing that we, the duly elected majority, could do about it; we could not make any “binding decisions” on any question – the Comintern cable had forbidden that.
Since 1925 the party had gradually been acquiescing in the blotting out of its normal rights as a self-governing organization until it had already lost sight of these rights. Lovestone’s scandalous action on this occasion only underscored the real status of the party in relation to the Moscow overlords.
* * *
There was nothing to do but head for Moscow once again in order to try to straighten out another supposed “misunderstanding.” Viewed retrospectively, our credulity in those days passeth all understanding, and it gives me a sticky feeling to recall it. I feel a bit shy about admitting it even now, after the lapse of so many years and the occurrence of so many more important things, but Weinstone and I went to Moscow together full of confidence that our program for the rearrangement of the leadership on a collective basis, and the liquidation of the old factions, would receive the support of the Comintern.
Since neither of the other factions claiming the right to control and “hegemony” in the leadership could muster a majority in the Central Executive Committee, while we constituted a definite balance of power, we believed that the other factions would be compelled to acquiesce in our program, at least for the next period.
We ourselves did not aim at organizational control of the party, either as a separate faction or in combination with one of the others. Our aim was to loosen up all the factional alignments and create conditions in the leading committee where each individual would be free to take a position objectively, on the merits of any political question which might come up, without regard to previous factional alignments.
In discussion among ourselves, and in our general propaganda in the party, we were beginning to emphasize the idea that political questions should take precedence over organizational considerations, including even party “control.” There were no irreconcilable political differences between the factions at the moment. That seemed to favor our program for the assimilation of the leading elements of each faction in a collective leading body. We believed that the subordination of political questions to organizational considerations of faction control – a state of affairs already prevailing to a considerable extent – could only miseducate and corrupt the party membership as well as the leadership.
For my part, I was just then beginning to assimilate with full understanding, and to take in dead earnest, the Leninist principle that important political considerations should always come first. That marked the beginning of a reorientation which was eventually to lead me out of the factional jungle of that time onto the high road of principled politics. I did not see how the Comintern, which I still regarded as the embodied representative of the principles of Lenin, could fail to support our stand.
* * *
Sharp practices in many factional struggles have given rise to the skeptical saying: “When one accepts a position ’in principle’ it means that he rejects it in practice.” That is not always true, but that is what we got in Moscow in 1927 – an acceptance of our program “in principle,” with supplementary statements to vitiate it. We found agreement on all sides that the factions should be liquidated and the leadership unified. But this was followed by the intimation in the written decision that the Lovestoneites should have “hegemony” in the unification – -which was the surest way to guarantee that the “unification” would be a farcical cover for factional domination.
The official decision condemned “the sharpening of the factional struggle“ – which the Lovestoneites had caused by their conduct at the party Plenum – but blamed the “National Committee of the Opposition Bloc” for this “sharpening.” The decision incorporated our formula that “the previous political and trade union differences have almost disappeared.” Then it went on to condemn “factionalism without political differences as the worst offense against the party” – which was precisely what the Lovestoneites’ attempt to seize party control consisted of – but blamed this “offense” on the “Opposition Bloc.” The Comintern decision on the “American Question” in 1927 is a real study in casuistry for those who may be interested in that black art.
There was nothing clear-cut and straightforward in the Comintern decision this time, as had been the case in earlier times over disputed political questions. The moderation of factional struggle, party peace, unity and cooperation were emphasized. But the official decision was slanted to imply – without anywhere clearly stating – that the Lovestone faction was favored in the coming election of delegates to the party convention. That made certain that there would be no unity and cooperation, but a factional gangfight for control of the convention, and a factional regime in the party afterward if the Lovestoneites gained a majority.
* * *
We knew that we had won no victory at Moscow in 1927. But the acceptance of our “general principles” encouraged us to continue the fight; we knew that these general principles did not have a dog’s chance in the party if the Lovestone faction established itself in control with a formal majority at the Convention.
It was only then, in the course of the discussion in Moscow and after the formal decision, that the bloc of Weinstone-Cannon with Foster was formally cemented to put up a joint slate in the pre-convention struggle for delegates to the pending party convention.
Previously there had been only an agreement at the Plenum to vote for Weinstone as party secretary. Now we agreed to unite our forces in the pre-convention fight to prevent the Lovestoneites from gaining factional control.
That six-months period, from the death of Ruthenberg to the party convention at the end of August, was an eye-opener to me in two respects. First, clearly apparent changes had taken place in the party which already then aroused in me the gravest misgivings for the future. The party had started out as a body of independent-minded rebels, regulating its internal affairs and selecting its own leaders in an honest, free-and-easy democracy. That had been one of its strongest attractions.
But by 1927 the Communist Party was no longer its original self. Its membership was visibly changing into a passive crowd, subservient to authority and subject to manipulation by the crudest demagogy. This period showed, more clearly than I had realized before, the extent to which the independent influence of the national party leaders, as such, had been whittled down and subordinated to the overriding authority of Moscow. Many party members had begun to look to Moscow, not only for decisions on policy, but even for suggestions as to which national leader or set of leaders they should vote for.
Secondly, in 1927 Lovestone became Lovestone. That, in itself, was an event boding no good for the party. Previously Lovestone had worked under cover of Ruthenberg, adapting himself accordingly and buying the favor, or at least the toleration, of the party on Ruthenberg’s credit. In those days, even the central leaders of the factions, who encountered Lovestone at close quarters and learned to have a healthy awareness of his malign talents, never saw the whole man.
We now saw Lovestone for the first time on his own, with all his demonic energy and capacity for reckless demagogy let loose, without the restraining influence of Ruthenberg. It was a spectacle to make one wonder whether he was living in a workers’ organization, aiming at the rational reorganization of society, or had wandered into a madhouse by mistake.
The death of Ruthenberg was taken by everyone else as a heavy blow to the faction he formally headed. But Lovestone bounded forward from the event as though he had been freed from a straitjacket. Beginning with the announcement, before Ruthenberg’s body was cold, that he had expressed the dying wish for Lovestone to become his successor in office, and a simultaneous appeal to Moscow to prevent the holding of a Plenum to act on the question, Lovestone was off to a running start in the race for control of the party; and he set a pace and a pattern in party factionalism, the like of which the faction-ridden party had never seen before.
* * *
Many critical observers were amazed and depressed by the cynical efficiency with which Eisenhower and Nixon were packaged and sold to a befuddled electorate in the last presidential election. I was perhaps less astonished by this slick and massively effective manipulation because I had seen the same kind of thing done before – in the Communist Party of the United States. Allowing for the necessary differences of scale and resources involved, Lovestone’s job of selling himself as the chosen heir of Ruthenberg and the favorite son of Moscow, in the 1927 party elections, was no less impressive than the professional operation of the Madison Avenue hucksters in 1952.
The sky was the limit this time, and all restraints were thrown aside. The internal party campaign of 1927 was a masterpiece of brazen demagogy calculated to provoke an emotional response in the party ranks. The pitch was to sell the body of Ruthenberg and the decision of the Comintern, with Lovestone wrapped up in the package. Even the funeral of Ruthenberg, and the attendant memorial ceremonies, were obscenely manipulated to start off the factional campaign on the appropriate note.
Lovestone, seconded by Wolfe, campaigned “for the Comintern” and created the atmosphere for a yes or no vote on that question, as though the elections for convention delegates simply posed the question of loyalty or disloyalty to the highest principle of international communism. The Comintern decision was brandished as a club to stampede the rank and file, and fears of possible reprisals for hesitation or doubt were cynically played upon.
These techniques of agitation, which, properly speaking, belong to the arsenal of fascism, paid off in the Communist Party of the United States in 1927. None of the seasoned cadres of the opposition were visibly affected by this unbridled incitement, but all along the fringes the forces of the opposition bloc gave way to the massive campaign. New members and weaker elements played safe by voting “for the Comintern”; furtive careerist elements, with an eye to the main chance, came out of their hiding places and climbed on the bandwagon.
The Lovestone faction, now headed by Lovestone, perhaps the least popular and certainly the most distrusted man in the party leadership, this time accomplished what the same faction, formerly headed by the popular and influential Ruthenberg, had never been able to do. Lovestone won a majority in the elections to the party convention and established the faction for the first time in real, as well as formal, control of the party apparatus.
* * *
Lovestone sold himself to the party as the choice of Moscow. He couldn’t know at that time, and neither could we, that he had really oversold himself. The invocation of the authority of Moscow in the internal party elections, and the conditioning of the party members to “vote for the Comintern,” rebounded against Lovestone himself two years later, when the same supreme authority decided that it was his time to walk the plank. Then it was easily demonstrated that what the Lord had given the Lord could take away.
The “majority” he had gained in the party was not his own. The same party members whom Lovestone had incited and conditioned to “vote for the Comintern” responded with the same reflex when they were commanded by the Comintern to vote against him. By his too-successful campaign “for the Comintern” in 1927, Lovestone had simply helped to create the conditions in the party for his own disaster.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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.
*********
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.
********
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After Ruthenberg
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.17 No.3, Summer 1956, pp.89-92, 107.
Original bound volumes of 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 22, 1955
Dear Sir:
The sudden death of Ruthenberg in March 1927 upset the shaky equilibrium in the party, and called forth the second direct intervention of the Comintern to thwart the will of the party majority and to determine the composition of the party leadership over its head.
Ruthenberg had always played a big role in the party, and he had seemed to be perennially established in the office of General Secretary. His death in the prime of his life really shook things up.
The two “big names” in the party at that time were those of Foster and Ruthenberg, and the prestige of both had been well earned by their previous record of constructive activity. Foster was renowned for his work as organizer and leader of the great steel strike of 1919 and his subsequent achievements as organizer of the TUEL; Ruthenberg for his heroic fight against the war and his outstanding activity as a pioneer communist, and also for his prison terms, bravely borne. The party members were well aware of the value of their public reputations and, by common consent, the two men held positions of special eminence as party leaders and public spokesmen for that reason. Factional activity had added nothing to the prestige of the two most popular leaders; if anything, it had somewhat tarnished it.
Of all the leading people in his faction, Ruthenberg had by far the greatest respect and personal influence in the party ranks. The faction was demonstratively called the “Ruthenberg Group” in order to capitalize on his prestige. But the Ruthenberg group, with Ruthenberg, was a minority in the party, as the hard-fought elections to the 1925 Convention had clearly demonstrated.
At the time of the 1925 Convention the “cable from Moscow,” as interpreted by the Comintern representative on the ground, had abruptly turned this minority into a majority and left the party members, who had innocently voted for their choice of delegates to the party convention, looking like fools who had mistakenly thought they had some rights and prerogatives in the matter of electing the party leadership.
Another “cable from Moscow” worked the same miracle of turning a minority into a majority in 1927. Supplementary decisions along the same line gradually bludgeoned the party members into acquiescence and reduced their democratic powers to a fiction. The role of the Comintern in the affairs of the American Communist Party was transformed from that of a friendly influence in matters of policy into that of a direct, brutal arbiter in organizational questions, including the most important question, the selection of the leadership.
Thereafter, the party retained only the dubious right to go through the motions; the decisions were made in Moscow. The process of transforming the party from a self-governing, democratic organization into a puppet of the Kremlin, which had been started in 1925, was advanced another big stage toward completion in 1927. That is the essential meaning of this year in party history. Everything else is secondary and incidental.
* * *
The shaky formal “majority” of the Ruthenberg group had been upset even before Ruthenberg died by the defection of committee members Weinstone and Ballam. Then came the sudden death of Ruthenberg, to deprive the faction of its most influential personality and its strongest claim to the confidence of the party ranks. How then could such an attenuated minority faction, without Ruthenberg, hope to “control” the party and avoid coming to agreement for cooperation with the other groups who constituted the majority in the Central Executive Committee?
We took it for granted that it couldn’t be done, and proceeded on the assumption that a rearrangement of the leading staff had to follow as a matter of course. But it didn’t work out that way. The cards were stacked for a different outcome; and we were defeated before we started. All we had on our side were the rules of arithmetic, the constitutional rights of the majority of the Central Executive Committee, the logic of the situation, and the undoubted support of the majority of the party at the time. All that was not enough.
On his side, Lovestone had his own driving frenzy to seize control of the party, regardless of the will of the majority, and the support of Moscow. These proved to be the ace cards in the game that was drawn out over a period of six months to its foreordained conclusion. Lovestone came out of the skirmish of 1927 with the “majority“ – given to him by the Comintern – and held it until the same supreme authority decided to take it away from him two years later.
* * *
Lovestone took the first trick by having himself appointed by the Political Committee to the post of General Secretary, vacated by Ruthenberg’s death. Constitutionally, this was out of order. The right to appoint party officers belonged to the full Plenum of the Central Executive Committee, the Political Committee being merely a subcommittee of that body.
We demanded the immediate calling of a full Plenum to deal with all the problems arising from Ruthenberg’s death, including the appointment of his successor in the post of party secretary. Weinstone and I had come to agreement with Foster that Weinstone should become the new party secretary; and since we represented a majority of the Plenum, we expected to execute the decision.
Then came trick number two for Lovestone. The Comintern cabled its decision that the Plenum could meet all right, but it could not make any binding decisions on organizational questions pending a consideration of the whole matter in Moscow. All the leading representatives of the factions were to come to Moscow for that purpose. Since the chief “organizational questions” were the reorganization of the Political Committee along the lines of the Plenum majority, and the appointment of a new party secretary, this cable of the Comintern, ostensibly withholding judgment, actually left Lovestone in control at both points – de facto if not de jure.
The meeting of the sovereign Plenum of the Communist Party of the United States, forbidden in advance to make any binding decisions, was made even more farcical by the failure of Lovestone to show up for the second session. He and Gitlow had abruptly departed for Moscow, where the decisions were to be made, without so much as a by-your-leave or goodbye to the elected leading body of the party to which they, like all other party members, were presumably-or so it said in the constitution-subordinate.
In a moderately healthy, self-governing party, involved in the class struggle in its own country and functioning under its own power, such reckless contempt for its own leading body would no doubt be sufficient to discredit its author and bring prompt condemnation from the party ranks. Nothing like that happened in reaction to the hooligan conduct of Lovestone on this occasion. The majority of the Plenum blew up in anger. Foster fussed and fumed and gave vent to his indignation in unparliamentary language. But there was nothing that we, the duly elected majority, could do about it; we could not make any “binding decisions” on any question – the Comintern cable had forbidden that.
Since 1925 the party had gradually been acquiescing in the blotting out of its normal rights as a self-governing organization until it had already lost sight of these rights. Lovestone’s scandalous action on this occasion only underscored the real status of the party in relation to the Moscow overlords.
* * *
There was nothing to do but head for Moscow once again in order to try to straighten out another supposed “misunderstanding.” Viewed retrospectively, our credulity in those days passeth all understanding, and it gives me a sticky feeling to recall it. I feel a bit shy about admitting it even now, after the lapse of so many years and the occurrence of so many more important things, but Weinstone and I went to Moscow together full of confidence that our program for the rearrangement of the leadership on a collective basis, and the liquidation of the old factions, would receive the support of the Comintern.
Since neither of the other factions claiming the right to control and “hegemony” in the leadership could muster a majority in the Central Executive Committee, while we constituted a definite balance of power, we believed that the other factions would be compelled to acquiesce in our program, at least for the next period.
We ourselves did not aim at organizational control of the party, either as a separate faction or in combination with one of the others. Our aim was to loosen up all the factional alignments and create conditions in the leading committee where each individual would be free to take a position objectively, on the merits of any political question which might come up, without regard to previous factional alignments.
In discussion among ourselves, and in our general propaganda in the party, we were beginning to emphasize the idea that political questions should take precedence over organizational considerations, including even party “control.” There were no irreconcilable political differences between the factions at the moment. That seemed to favor our program for the assimilation of the leading elements of each faction in a collective leading body. We believed that the subordination of political questions to organizational considerations of faction control – a state of affairs already prevailing to a considerable extent – could only miseducate and corrupt the party membership as well as the leadership.
For my part, I was just then beginning to assimilate with full understanding, and to take in dead earnest, the Leninist principle that important political considerations should always come first. That marked the beginning of a reorientation which was eventually to lead me out of the factional jungle of that time onto the high road of principled politics. I did not see how the Comintern, which I still regarded as the embodied representative of the principles of Lenin, could fail to support our stand.
* * *
Sharp practices in many factional struggles have given rise to the skeptical saying: “When one accepts a position ’in principle’ it means that he rejects it in practice.” That is not always true, but that is what we got in Moscow in 1927 – an acceptance of our program “in principle,” with supplementary statements to vitiate it. We found agreement on all sides that the factions should be liquidated and the leadership unified. But this was followed by the intimation in the written decision that the Lovestoneites should have “hegemony” in the unification – -which was the surest way to guarantee that the “unification” would be a farcical cover for factional domination.
The official decision condemned “the sharpening of the factional struggle“ – which the Lovestoneites had caused by their conduct at the party Plenum – but blamed the “National Committee of the Opposition Bloc” for this “sharpening.” The decision incorporated our formula that “the previous political and trade union differences have almost disappeared.” Then it went on to condemn “factionalism without political differences as the worst offense against the party” – which was precisely what the Lovestoneites’ attempt to seize party control consisted of – but blamed this “offense” on the “Opposition Bloc.” The Comintern decision on the “American Question” in 1927 is a real study in casuistry for those who may be interested in that black art.
There was nothing clear-cut and straightforward in the Comintern decision this time, as had been the case in earlier times over disputed political questions. The moderation of factional struggle, party peace, unity and cooperation were emphasized. But the official decision was slanted to imply – without anywhere clearly stating – that the Lovestone faction was favored in the coming election of delegates to the party convention. That made certain that there would be no unity and cooperation, but a factional gangfight for control of the convention, and a factional regime in the party afterward if the Lovestoneites gained a majority.
* * *
We knew that we had won no victory at Moscow in 1927. But the acceptance of our “general principles” encouraged us to continue the fight; we knew that these general principles did not have a dog’s chance in the party if the Lovestone faction established itself in control with a formal majority at the Convention.
It was only then, in the course of the discussion in Moscow and after the formal decision, that the bloc of Weinstone-Cannon with Foster was formally cemented to put up a joint slate in the pre-convention struggle for delegates to the pending party convention.
Previously there had been only an agreement at the Plenum to vote for Weinstone as party secretary. Now we agreed to unite our forces in the pre-convention fight to prevent the Lovestoneites from gaining factional control.
That six-months period, from the death of Ruthenberg to the party convention at the end of August, was an eye-opener to me in two respects. First, clearly apparent changes had taken place in the party which already then aroused in me the gravest misgivings for the future. The party had started out as a body of independent-minded rebels, regulating its internal affairs and selecting its own leaders in an honest, free-and-easy democracy. That had been one of its strongest attractions.
But by 1927 the Communist Party was no longer its original self. Its membership was visibly changing into a passive crowd, subservient to authority and subject to manipulation by the crudest demagogy. This period showed, more clearly than I had realized before, the extent to which the independent influence of the national party leaders, as such, had been whittled down and subordinated to the overriding authority of Moscow. Many party members had begun to look to Moscow, not only for decisions on policy, but even for suggestions as to which national leader or set of leaders they should vote for.
Secondly, in 1927 Lovestone became Lovestone. That, in itself, was an event boding no good for the party. Previously Lovestone had worked under cover of Ruthenberg, adapting himself accordingly and buying the favor, or at least the toleration, of the party on Ruthenberg’s credit. In those days, even the central leaders of the factions, who encountered Lovestone at close quarters and learned to have a healthy awareness of his malign talents, never saw the whole man.
We now saw Lovestone for the first time on his own, with all his demonic energy and capacity for reckless demagogy let loose, without the restraining influence of Ruthenberg. It was a spectacle to make one wonder whether he was living in a workers’ organization, aiming at the rational reorganization of society, or had wandered into a madhouse by mistake.
The death of Ruthenberg was taken by everyone else as a heavy blow to the faction he formally headed. But Lovestone bounded forward from the event as though he had been freed from a straitjacket. Beginning with the announcement, before Ruthenberg’s body was cold, that he had expressed the dying wish for Lovestone to become his successor in office, and a simultaneous appeal to Moscow to prevent the holding of a Plenum to act on the question, Lovestone was off to a running start in the race for control of the party; and he set a pace and a pattern in party factionalism, the like of which the faction-ridden party had never seen before.
* * *
Many critical observers were amazed and depressed by the cynical efficiency with which Eisenhower and Nixon were packaged and sold to a befuddled electorate in the last presidential election. I was perhaps less astonished by this slick and massively effective manipulation because I had seen the same kind of thing done before – in the Communist Party of the United States. Allowing for the necessary differences of scale and resources involved, Lovestone’s job of selling himself as the chosen heir of Ruthenberg and the favorite son of Moscow, in the 1927 party elections, was no less impressive than the professional operation of the Madison Avenue hucksters in 1952.
The sky was the limit this time, and all restraints were thrown aside. The internal party campaign of 1927 was a masterpiece of brazen demagogy calculated to provoke an emotional response in the party ranks. The pitch was to sell the body of Ruthenberg and the decision of the Comintern, with Lovestone wrapped up in the package. Even the funeral of Ruthenberg, and the attendant memorial ceremonies, were obscenely manipulated to start off the factional campaign on the appropriate note.
Lovestone, seconded by Wolfe, campaigned “for the Comintern” and created the atmosphere for a yes or no vote on that question, as though the elections for convention delegates simply posed the question of loyalty or disloyalty to the highest principle of international communism. The Comintern decision was brandished as a club to stampede the rank and file, and fears of possible reprisals for hesitation or doubt were cynically played upon.
These techniques of agitation, which, properly speaking, belong to the arsenal of fascism, paid off in the Communist Party of the United States in 1927. None of the seasoned cadres of the opposition were visibly affected by this unbridled incitement, but all along the fringes the forces of the opposition bloc gave way to the massive campaign. New members and weaker elements played safe by voting “for the Comintern”; furtive careerist elements, with an eye to the main chance, came out of their hiding places and climbed on the bandwagon.
The Lovestone faction, now headed by Lovestone, perhaps the least popular and certainly the most distrusted man in the party leadership, this time accomplished what the same faction, formerly headed by the popular and influential Ruthenberg, had never been able to do. Lovestone won a majority in the elections to the party convention and established the faction for the first time in real, as well as formal, control of the party apparatus.
* * *
Lovestone sold himself to the party as the choice of Moscow. He couldn’t know at that time, and neither could we, that he had really oversold himself. The invocation of the authority of Moscow in the internal party elections, and the conditioning of the party members to “vote for the Comintern,” rebounded against Lovestone himself two years later, when the same supreme authority decided that it was his time to walk the plank. Then it was easily demonstrated that what the Lord had given the Lord could take away.
The “majority” he had gained in the party was not his own. The same party members whom Lovestone had incited and conditioned to “vote for the Comintern” responded with the same reflex when they were commanded by the Comintern to vote against him. By his too-successful campaign “for the Comintern” in 1927, Lovestone had simply helped to create the conditions in the party for his own disaster.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
**Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- A Fragment Of Working Class Culture-Out In The School Dance Night- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Teen Angels performing Eddie, My Love.
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: 1956: various artists, Time-Life Music, 1987
I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing this Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we, we small-time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billie who I will talk about some other time, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.
Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears, at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Ya right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.
But can you blame me, or us, for our jail-break visions and our clandestine subterranean life-transistor radio dreams of lots of girls (or boys as the case may be), lots of cars, and lots of money if we could just get out from under that parental noise. Now this Time-Life series has many compilations but, as if to prove my point beyond discussion, the year 1956 has two, do you hear me, two CDs to deal with that proposition that I mentioned above. And neither includes Elvis, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley or some other stuff that I might have included. I already reviewed the other 1956 compilation previously but here are the stick outs from this selection:
Blue Suede Shoes, Carl Perkins (Elvis covered it and made millions but old Carl had a better old rockabilly back beat on his version); In The Still Of The Night, The Five Satins (a doo wop classic that I am humming right this minute, sha dot do be doo, sha dot do be doo or something like that spelling, okay); Eddie, My Love, The Teen Queens (incredible harmony, doo wop back-up, and, and “oh Eddie, please don’t make me wait too long” as part of the lyrics, Whoa!); Roll Over Beethoven, Chuck Berry ( a deservedly early break-out rock anthem. Hell I thought it was big deal just to trash Patti Page old Chuck went after the big boys.); Be-Bop-a-Lula, Gene Vincent (the guy was kind of a one hit wonder but Christ what a one hit, "ya, she’s my baby now"); Blueberry Hill, Fats Domino (that old smooth piano riffing away); Rip It Up, Little Richard (he/she wild man Richard rips it up; Young Love, Sonny James ( dreamy stuff that those giggling girls at school loved, and so you "loved" too); Why Do Fools Fall In Love?, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (for a minute the king be-bop, doo wop teenage angel boy. Everybody wanted to be the doo wop king or queen); See You Later, Alligator, Bill Haley and The Comets (ya, these “old guys” could rock, especially that sax man. Think about it people still use the expression “see you later alligator”); and Since I Met You Baby, Ivory Joe Hunter (every dance pray, every last dance pray, oh my god, let them play Ivory Joe at the end so I can dance close with that certain she I have been eying all night).
Note: I have mentioned previously the excellent album cover art that accompanies each Time-Life classic rock series compilation. Not only does it almost automatically evoke long ago memories of red hot youth, and those dreams, those steamy dance night dreams too, but has supplied this writer with more than one idea for a commentary. This 1956 compilation album cover is in that same vein. The cover shows what looks like a local cover band from the 1950s getting ready to perform at the local high school dance. Although the guys, especially the lead vocalist, look a little skittish they know they have to make a good showing because this is their small time chance at the big time. Besides there are about six thousand other guys hanging around in their fathers’ garages ready and willing to step up if the Danny and the Bluenotes fall flat.
This live band idea is actually something of a treat because, from what I recall, many times these school dance things survived on loud record playing dee-jay chatter, thus the term “record hop.” From the look of it the school auditorium is the locale (although ours were inevitably held in the school gym), complete with the obligatory crepe, other temporary school-spirit related ornaments and a mesmerized girl band groupie to give the joint a festive appearance.
More importantly, as I said before, at least for the band, as they are to be warming up for the night’s work, is that they have to make their mark here (and at other such venues) and start to get a following if they want to avoid another dreaded fate of rock life. Yes, the dreaded fate of most bands that don’t break out of the old neighborhood, the fate of having to some years down the road play at some of the students they are performing for today children’s birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings and the like. That thought should be enough to keep these guys working until late in the night, jamming the night away, disturbing some old fogy Frank Sinatra fans in the neighborhood, perfecting those covers of Roll Over Beethoven, Rip It Up, Rock Around The Clock and Jailhouse Rock. Go to it boy, you bet.
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: 1956: various artists, Time-Life Music, 1987
I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing this Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we, we small-time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billie who I will talk about some other time, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.
Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears, at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Ya right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.
But can you blame me, or us, for our jail-break visions and our clandestine subterranean life-transistor radio dreams of lots of girls (or boys as the case may be), lots of cars, and lots of money if we could just get out from under that parental noise. Now this Time-Life series has many compilations but, as if to prove my point beyond discussion, the year 1956 has two, do you hear me, two CDs to deal with that proposition that I mentioned above. And neither includes Elvis, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley or some other stuff that I might have included. I already reviewed the other 1956 compilation previously but here are the stick outs from this selection:
Blue Suede Shoes, Carl Perkins (Elvis covered it and made millions but old Carl had a better old rockabilly back beat on his version); In The Still Of The Night, The Five Satins (a doo wop classic that I am humming right this minute, sha dot do be doo, sha dot do be doo or something like that spelling, okay); Eddie, My Love, The Teen Queens (incredible harmony, doo wop back-up, and, and “oh Eddie, please don’t make me wait too long” as part of the lyrics, Whoa!); Roll Over Beethoven, Chuck Berry ( a deservedly early break-out rock anthem. Hell I thought it was big deal just to trash Patti Page old Chuck went after the big boys.); Be-Bop-a-Lula, Gene Vincent (the guy was kind of a one hit wonder but Christ what a one hit, "ya, she’s my baby now"); Blueberry Hill, Fats Domino (that old smooth piano riffing away); Rip It Up, Little Richard (he/she wild man Richard rips it up; Young Love, Sonny James ( dreamy stuff that those giggling girls at school loved, and so you "loved" too); Why Do Fools Fall In Love?, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (for a minute the king be-bop, doo wop teenage angel boy. Everybody wanted to be the doo wop king or queen); See You Later, Alligator, Bill Haley and The Comets (ya, these “old guys” could rock, especially that sax man. Think about it people still use the expression “see you later alligator”); and Since I Met You Baby, Ivory Joe Hunter (every dance pray, every last dance pray, oh my god, let them play Ivory Joe at the end so I can dance close with that certain she I have been eying all night).
Note: I have mentioned previously the excellent album cover art that accompanies each Time-Life classic rock series compilation. Not only does it almost automatically evoke long ago memories of red hot youth, and those dreams, those steamy dance night dreams too, but has supplied this writer with more than one idea for a commentary. This 1956 compilation album cover is in that same vein. The cover shows what looks like a local cover band from the 1950s getting ready to perform at the local high school dance. Although the guys, especially the lead vocalist, look a little skittish they know they have to make a good showing because this is their small time chance at the big time. Besides there are about six thousand other guys hanging around in their fathers’ garages ready and willing to step up if the Danny and the Bluenotes fall flat.
This live band idea is actually something of a treat because, from what I recall, many times these school dance things survived on loud record playing dee-jay chatter, thus the term “record hop.” From the look of it the school auditorium is the locale (although ours were inevitably held in the school gym), complete with the obligatory crepe, other temporary school-spirit related ornaments and a mesmerized girl band groupie to give the joint a festive appearance.
More importantly, as I said before, at least for the band, as they are to be warming up for the night’s work, is that they have to make their mark here (and at other such venues) and start to get a following if they want to avoid another dreaded fate of rock life. Yes, the dreaded fate of most bands that don’t break out of the old neighborhood, the fate of having to some years down the road play at some of the students they are performing for today children’s birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings and the like. That thought should be enough to keep these guys working until late in the night, jamming the night away, disturbing some old fogy Frank Sinatra fans in the neighborhood, perfecting those covers of Roll Over Beethoven, Rip It Up, Rock Around The Clock and Jailhouse Rock. Go to it boy, you bet.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Reflections On The Winter Soldier Resistance -The White House, December 16, 2010- Down With Imperialist War!
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House.
Markin comment:
White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders. Many are Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some are pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some are rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some are, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed, and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly.
All, I say all, show the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, mainly, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
Markin comment:
White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders. Many are Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some are pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some are rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some are, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed, and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly.
All, I say all, show the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, mainly, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party -On The 1926 Passiac Strike
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.
********
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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The Passaic Strike
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 9, 1955
Dear Sir:
I remember the December 1925 Plenum of the CP of the US I was allied with the Ruthenberg faction at this particular Plenum and took a very active part in the debate on the trade-union question. It probably marked the tentative beginning of resistance to AFL fetishism, although the details of the specific issues in dispute at the Plenum have not remained in my memory.
According to my recollection, the Passaic issue came up at the Plenum, but it did not originate there. It was rather thrust upon the party by the cyclonic activities of Weisbord, who had gone into the field and actually begun to organize the unorganized textile workers. Looking back on it now, we deserve censure, not for giving conditional support to the organizing work of Weisbord, but for failing to go all-out in such support and to make the issue of AFL fetishism clear-cut.
The “United Front Committee” under which the organizing campaign in Passaic proceeded, instead of under the auspices of a new union, which the situation really called for, was a concession to the party’s prevailing policy of AFL-ism. To be sure, the recruitment of individual members to the “United Front Committee” twisted the conception of the united front, as an alliance of organizations, out of shape. But the real problem at Passaic was to organize the unorganized, unskilled and low-paid workers neglected by the AFL.
The Fosterite opposition to the recruitment of individual members to this “United Front Committee” showed up the bankruptcy of the ultra-AFL policy in a clear light for the first time. It could have had no other effect than to paralyze the organization of the textile workers in Passaic for fear of committing the sin of “dual unionism” – for which the Fosterites had a real phobia.
The Passaic strike started in the spring of 1926 while we were still in Moscow attending the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern. I don’t know or remember any of the immediate circumstances attending it. It is my definite impression, however, that the strike was not precipitated by the party leadership. Rather it was dumped in its lap as a result of Weisbord’s successes in organizing the textile workers there.
Gitlow’s pretensions about masterminding the Passaic situation, as related in his compendium of distortions and fabrications entitled I Confess, should be taken with a grain of salt. All his stories which are not outright inventions are slanted to enlarge his own role in party affairs and to denigrate others – in this case, Weisbord.
The organization of the workers in Passaic and the effective leadership of the strike itself, were pre-eminently Weisbord’s work. I had a chance to see that on the ground after we returned from Moscow. I, myself, had nothing to do with the Passaic strike, but I spent a little time there and had a good chance to see Weisbord in action. As a strike leader he was first class, no mistake about it. It is true that he worked under the close supervision and direction of a party committee in New York appointed by the national party leadership in Chicago. But it’s a long way from committee meetings in a closed room, off the scene, to the actual leadership of a strike on the ground. The full credit for that belongs to Weisbord.
There was an apparent contradiction between the decision of the Sixth Plenum of the CI to confirm Foster’s faction – with its pro-AFL policy – in its hegemony over party trade-union work and the concurrent conduct of the Passaic strike under the auspices of a “United Front Committee” outside the AFL. That was not due to factional manipulation. It happened that way because life intruded into the internal affairs of the party.
It happened because Weisbord – a brash young egocentric fresh out of college, and in general an unattractive specimen at close range, but a powerful mass orator and a human dynamo if there ever was one – stirred up a lot of workers and organized them into the “United Front Committee.” The sense of strength that came from their organization emboldened them to call a strike without waiting for the sanction of the AFL union. The strike soon exploded into violent clashes with the police which were splashed all over the front pages of the metropolitan press. The Passaic strike was the Number One labor news story for a long time.
This action at Passaic did indeed violate both the letter and the spirit of Fosterite trade-union policy, which the party had followed for years and which had been implicitly supported once again in Moscow. But that didn’t change the fact that the party had a big strike on its hands. And the party certainly made the most of its opportunity.
The Passaic strike really put the party on the labor map. In my opinion it deserves a chapter in party history all by itself. It revealed the Communists as the dynamic force in the radical labor movement and the organizing center of the unorganized workers disregarded by the AFL unions – displacing the IWW in this field. The Passaic strike was well organized and expertly led, and under all ordinary circumstances should have resulted in a resounding victory. The only trouble was that the bosses were too strong, had too many financial resources and were too determined to prevent the consolidation of a radical union organization. The strikers, isolated in one locality, were simply worn out and starved out and there was nothing to be done about it.
A poor settlement was the best that could be squeezed out of the deadlock. Such experiences were to be repeated many times before the unionization drive in the Thirties gained sufficient scope and power to break the employers’ resistance.
* * *
The Passaic strike was destined to have an influence on party trade-union policy which in the long run was far more important than the strike itself. The genesis of the drastic change in trade-union policy a few years later can probably be traced to it. There was a belated reaction to the party’s attempt to outwit the textile bosses and the AFL fakers by yielding to their principal demand – the elimination of the strike leader, Weisbord.
When it became clear that the strike was sagging, and that the bosses would not make a settlement with the “United Front Committee,” negotiations were opened up with the AFL Textile Union. The AFL was invited to take over the organization and try to negotiate a settlement. These accommodating fakers agreed – on one small condition, which turned out to be the same as that of the bosses, namely, that Weisbord, the communist strike leader, should walk the plank.
I do not know who first proposed the acceptance of this monstrous condition. What stands out in my memory most distinctly is the fact that both factions in the party leadership agreed with it, and that there was no conflict on the issue whatever. The fateful decision to sacrifice the strike leader was made unanimously by the party leadership and eventually carried out by the strike committee.
Such questions cannot be viewed abstractly. Perhaps those who, in their experience, have been faced with the agonizing problem of trying to save something from the wreckage of a defeated strike have a right to pass judgment on this decision. Others are hardly qualified. The main consideration in the Passaic situation was the fact that the strike had passed its peak. Real victory was already out of the question and the general feeling was that a poor settlement would be better than none. Other strikes have been settled under even more humiliating conditions. Workers have been compelled time and time again to “agree” to the victimization and blacklisting of the best militants in their ranks as a condition for getting back to work with a scrap of an agreement.
But what stands out in retrospect in the Passaic settlement – and what is painful even now to recall – was the alacrity with which the party leadership agreed to it, the general feeling that it was a clever “maneuver,” and its falsely grounded motivations.
The decision to sacrifice the strike leader and to disband the “United Front Committee,” implied recognition that the moth-eaten, reactionary, good-for-nothing AFL set-up in the textile industry at that time was the “legitimate” union in that field; and that the “United Front Committee” was only a holding operation and recruiting agency for the AFL union.
All that was wrong from start to finish. The “United Front Committee” should have been regarded as the starting point for an independent union of textile workers. For that it would have been far better to “lose” the strike than to end it with a disgraceful settlement. Independent unionism was the only prescription for the textile industry, and had been ever since the great days of the IWW. “Boring from within” the AFL union in that field, as an exclusive policy, never had a realistic basis.
The Passaic settlement and the motivations for it carried the AFL fetishism of Foster, with which all the others in the party leadership had gone along more or less uneasily, to the point of absurdity. It brought a kickback which was to result, a couple of years later, in a complete reversal of party policy on the trade union question.
When the Comintern got ready for its wild “left turn” toward “red trade unions” in 1928, Losovsky singled out the Passaic capitulation as the horrible example of the party’s policy of “dancing quadrilles around the AFL.” The party then embarked on an adventurous course, going to the other extreme of building independent communist unions all up and down the line.
The disastrous results of this experiment with the Trade Union Unity League, as the organizing center of a separate communist labor movement, were in part a punishment for the sin of the Passaic settlement.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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After 1925
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
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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July 14, 1955
Dear Sir:
The three-year period following the 1925 Convention of the Communist Party must present far more difficulties for the inquiring student than all the preceding years put together. The party entered into a uniquely different situation, without parallel in all the previous history of American radicalism, and the seeds of all the future troubles were sown then. It was a time when factionalism without principle in the internal party conflict prepared and conditioned many people for the eventual abandonment and betrayal of all principle in the broader class struggle of the workers, which the party had been organized to express.
The printed record alone obscures more than it explains about the real causes of the party troubles in these bleak years. The important thing, as I see it, is not the specific disputes and squabbles over party policy, as they are recorded in print, but the general situation in which all the factions were caught – and which none of them fully understood – and their blind, or half-blind, attempts to find a way out.
Prior to that time the factional struggles, with all their excesses and occasional absurdities, had revolved around basic issues which remain fully comprehensible; and settlement of the disputes had been followed by the dissolution of the factions. From the 1925 Convention onward, the evolution of party life took a radically different turn. The old differences had become largely outlived or narrowed down to nuances, but the factions remained and became hardened into permanent formations.
After 1925 the factional gang-fights for power predominated over whatever the rival factions wanted – or thought they wanted – the power for. That, and not the differences over party policy, real or ostensible, was the dominating feature of this period. The details of the various skirmishes are important mainly as they relate to that.
The factional struggle became bankrupt for lack of real political justification for the existence of the factions. For that reason nothing could be solved by the victory of one faction, giving it the opportunity to execute its policy, since the policies of the others were basically the same. There were differences of implicit tendency, to be sure, but further experience was required to show where they might lead. The factions lived on exaggerations and distortions of each others’ positions and the anticipation of future differences.
At any rate, the, real differences on questions of national policy, in and of themselves, insofar as they were clearly manifested at the time, were not serious enough to justify hard and fast factions. The factions in that period were simply fighting to keep in trim, holding on and waiting, without knowing it, for their futile struggle to fill itself with a serious political content.
The factions were driving blindly toward the two explosions of 1928-1929, when the latent tendencies of each faction were to find expression and formulation in real political issues of international scope, issues destined to bring about a three-way split beyond the possibility of any further reconciliation. But that outcome was not foreseen by any of the participants in the futile struggles of those days. These struggles, for all their intensity and fury, were merely anticipations of a future conflict over far more serious questions.
* * *
I began to recognize the bankruptcy of factional struggle without a clearly defined principled basis as early as 1925, and began to look for a way out of it. That still did not go to the root of the problem – the basic causes out of which the unprincipled factionalism had flourished – but it was a step forward. It set me somewhat apart from the central leaders of both factions, and was a handicap in the immediate conflict. Blind factionalists have more zeal than those who reflect too much. But the reflections of 1925 eventually helped me to find my way to higher ground.
The experiences of the conflict in the Foster-Cannon caucus at the 1925 Convention had revealed the Fosterites’ basic conception of the faction as that of a permanent gang, claiming prior loyalty of its members in a fight for supremacy and the extermination of the opposing faction. I couldn’t go along with that, and the disagreement brought us to a parting of the ways.
The definitive split of the Foster-Cannon faction took place, not at the 1925 Convention, where the first big conflict over the “Comintern cable” arose, but some weeks later, after numerous attempts to patch up the rift. When Foster and Bittelman insisted on their conception of the faction, and tried to press me into line for the sake of factional loyalty, I, and others of the same mind, had no choice but to break with them.
It was a deep split; the cadres of the faction divided right down the middle along the same lines as the division in the caucus at the Convention. Prominent in support of my position were the following: William F. Dunne, and with him the whole local leadership of the Minnesota movement; Arne Swabeck and Martin Abern in Chicago; the principal leaders of the youth organization – Shachtman, Williamson, Schneiderman and several others who later became prominent in the party: Hathaway, Tom O’Flaherty, Gomez; Fisher and his group in the South Slavic Federation; Bud Reynolds of Detroit; Gebert, the Pole, later to become District Organizer in Detroit before his departure for Poland; and several District Organizers of the party.
The conception of the central leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction was basically the same as Foster’s, as was soon demonstrated in a brief and futile experiment in cooperation with them. I didn’t agree with the claim of either group to party domination and could see no solution of the party conflict along that line. This left no room for me in either faction as a full-time, all-out participant, which is the only way I can function anywhere.
The simple fact of the matter, as we came to see it in 1925, was that the party crisis could not be solved by the victory of one faction over the other. Each was weak where the other was strong. The two groups supplemented each other and were necessary to each other and to the party.
While I considered that the Foster group as a whole was more proletarian, nearer to the workers and for that reason the “better” group, I had begun to recognize all too clearly its trade union one-sideness. In this respect I was nearer to the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group. But the latter, although more “political” than the Fosterite trade unionists, was too intellectualistic to suit me. I thought that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group by itself could not lead the party and build it as a genuine workers’ organization, and nothing ever happened in the ensuing years to change that opinion.
The cadres of both groups were too strong numerically, and had too many talented people, to be eliminated from the party leadership. The two groups, united and working together, would have been many times stronger and more effective than either one alone. We thought the time had come to move toward the liquidation of the factions and the unification of the party under a collective leadership.
In relating this I do not mean to intimate that I had suddenly become a pacifist in internal party affairs. I was as much a factionalist as the others, when factional struggle was the order of the day, and I have never seen any reason to deny it or apologize for it. Those pious souls who were not factionalists didn’t count in the days when the party life was dominated by internal struggle, and have nothing to report. It is true that factionalism can be carried to extremes and become a disease – as was the case in the CP after 1925. But professional abstainers, as is always the case, only made the game easier for the others who were not restrained by qualms and scruples.
I was not against factions when there was something serious to fight about. But I was already then dead set against the idea of permanent factions, after the issues which had brought them about had been decided or outlived. I never got so deeply involved in any factional struggle as to permit it to become an end in itself. In this I was perhaps different from most of the other factional leaders, and it eventually led me on a far different path.
This was a deliberate policy on my part; the result of much reflection on the whole problem of the party and the revolution. I was determined above all not to forget what I had started out to fight for, and this basic motivation sustained me in that dark, unhappy time. I felt that I had not committed myself in early youth to the struggle for the socialist reorganization of society in order to settle for membership in a permanent faction, to say nothing of a factional gang. I tried always to keep an over-all party point of view and to see the party always as a part of the working class.
And by and large I succeeded, although it was not easy in the atmosphere of that time. Many good militants succumbed to factionalism and lost their bearings altogether. It is only a short step from cynicism to renegacy. Betrayal of principle in little things easily leads to betrayal in bigger things. I have lived to see many who were first-class revolutionists in the early days turn into traitors to the working class. Some even became professional informers against former comrades. Cynical factionalism was the starting point of this moral and political degeneration.
We could see that the factional struggle was degenerating into a gang fight, and we set out to resist it. Being serious about it, we did not disperse our forces and hope for luck. On the contrary, we promptly organized a “third group” to fight for unity and the liquidation of all factions. This may appear as a quixotic enterprise – and so it turned out to be – but it took a long struggle for us to prove it to ourselves.
The international factor, which had frustrated all our efforts, eventually came to our aid and showed us a new road. When I got access to the enlightening documents of Trotsky in 1928, I began to fit the American troubles into their international framework. But that came only after three years of fighting in the dark, on purely national grounds.
No one can fight in the dark without stumbling now and then. We did our share of that, and I am far from contending that every move we made was correct. No political course can be correct when its basic premise is wrong. Our premise was that our party troubles were a purely American affair and that they could somehow be straightened out with the help of the Comintern, particularly of the Russian leaders, as had been done in earlier difficulties.
That was wrong on both counts. The objective situation in the country was against us, and we all contributed our own faults of ignorance and inadequacy to the bedevilment of the party situation. But the chief source of our difficulties this time was the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern; and the chief mischief-makers in our party, as in every other party of the Comintern, were these same people whom we trustingly looked to for help and guidance.
It took me a long time to get that straight in my head. In the meantime I fumbled and stumbled in the dark like all the others. My basic approach to the problem was different, however, and it eventually led me to an understanding of the puzzle and a drastic new orientation.
* * *
In the objective circumstances of the time, with the booming prosperity of the late Twenties sapping the foundations of radicalism, with the trade-union movement stagnating and declining, feverish activity in the factional struggle in the party became for many a substitute for participation in the class struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie. This sickness particularly infected those who were most isolated from the daily life of the workers. They did not take kindly to our formula for party peace and party unity through the liquidation of the factions. They didn’t understand it, and above all they didn’t believe in it.
In the underworld of present-day society, with which I have had contact at various times in jail and prison, there is a widespread sentiment that there is no such thing as an honest man who is also intelligent. The human race is made up of honest suckers and smart crooks, and that’s all there is to it; the smartest crooks are those who pretend to be honest, the confidence men. Professional factionalism, unrelated to the living issues of the class struggle of the workers, is also a sort of underworld, and the psychology of its practitioners approaches that of the other underworld.
In the eyes of such people, for whom the internal struggle of the Communist Party had become the breath of life, an end in itself, anyone who proposed peace and unity was either a well. meaning fool or a hypocrite with an axe to grind. In our case the first possibility was rejected out of hand by the esteemed colleagues with whom we had been associated in numerous struggles, and that left only the second. A third possible reason or motivation for our position was excluded.
Our formula for party unity and party peace was not taken at face value by the leaders of the Foster-Bittelman and Ruthenberg-Lovestone groups. We were regarded as trouble-making anarchists, violating the rules of the game by forming a “third group” when the rules called for two and only two.
The Fosterites waged an especially vicious campaign against me as a “traitor,” as if I had been born into this world as a member of a family and clan and was required by blood relationship to have no truck with the feuding opponents on the other side of the mountain. That was a complete misunderstanding on their part; they had my birth certificate all mixed up.
As for the Lovestoneites, they even introduced motions in the party branches specifically condemning the formation of a “third group.” For them two groups belonged to the accepted order of things; a third group was unnatural. This dictum, however, was not binding on us for the simple reason that we did not accept it.
It was evident from the start that our program could not be achieved by persuasion. Some force and pressure would be required, and this could be effectively asserted only by an organized independent group. We set out to build such a group as a balance of power, and thus to prevent either of the major factions from monopolizing party control.
Despite the all-consuming factionalism of the top and secondary leaders, our stand for unity undoubtedly reflected a wide sentiment in the ranks of both factions. Many of the rank and file comrades were sick of the senseless internal struggle and eager for unity and all-around cooperation in constructive party work. This was strikingly demonstrated when Weinstone, secretary of the New York District, and a group around him, came out for the same position in 1926.
That broke up the Ruthenberg “majority,” as our earlier revolt had broken up Foster’s. Weinstone soon came to an agreement with us, and the new combination constituted a balance of power grouping in the leadership. It didn’t stop the factional struggle-far from it-but it did prevent the monopolistic domination of the party by one faction and the exclusion of the other, and created conditions in the party for the leading activists in all factions to function freely in party work.
* * *
I had been closely associated with Weinstone in the old struggle for the legalization of the party – 1921-1923 – and knew him fairly well. We always got along well together and had remained friendly to each other, even though we were in opposing camps in the new factional line-up and struggle which began in 1923. He had gone along with the Ruthenberg-Pepper-Lovestone faction and was its outstanding representative in New York while the national center was located in Chicago.
In the course of the new developments I came to know Weinstone better and to form a more definitive judgment of him. He was one of that outstanding trio – Lovestone, Weinstone and Wolfe – who were known among us as the “City College boys.” They were still in school when they were attracted to the left-wing movement in the upsurge following the Russian Revolution, but they were thrust forward in the movement by their exceptional qualities and their educational advantages.
They came into prominent positions of leadership without having had any previous experience with the workers in the daily class struggle. All three of them bore the mark of this gap in their education, and Lovestone and Wolfe never showed any disposition to overcome it. They always impressed me as aliens, with a purely intellectualistic interest in the workers’ movement. Weinstone had at least a feeling for the workers, although in the time that I knew him, he never seemed to be really at home with them.
All three were articulate, Wolfe being the best and most prolific writer and Weinstone the most gifted speaker among them. Lovestone, who had indifferent talents both as writer and speaker, was the strongest personality of the three, the one who made by far the deepest impression on the movement at all times, arid most times to its detriment.
It was everybody’s opinion that Lovestone was unscrupulous in his ceaseless machinations and intrigues; and in my opinion everybody was right on that point, although the word “unscrupulous” somehow or other seems to be too mild a word to describe his operations. Lovestone was downright crooked, like Foster-but in a different way. Foster was in and of the workers’ movement and had a sense of responsibility to it; and he could be moderately honest when there was no need to cheat or lie. Foster’s crookedness was purposeful and utilitarian, nonchalantly resorted to in a pinch to serve an end. Lovestone, the sinister stranger in our midst, seemed to practice skulduggery maliciously, for its own sake.
It was a queer twist of fate that brought such a perverse character into a movement dedicated to the service of the noblest ideal of human relationships. Never was a man more destructively alien to the cause in which he sought a career; he was like an anarchistic cancer cell running wild in the party organism. The party has meaning and justification only as the conscious expression of the austere process of history in which the working class strives for emancipation, with all the strict moral obligations such a mission imposes on its members. But Lovestone seemed to see the party as an object of manipulation in a personal game he was playing, with an unnatural instinct to foul things up.
In this game, which he played with an almost pathological frenzy, he was not restrained by any recognized norms of conduct in human relations, to say nothing of the effects his methods might have on the morale and solidarity of the workers’ movement. For him the class struggle of the workers, with its awesome significance for the future of the human race, was at best an intellectual concept; the factional struggle for “control” of the party was the real thing, the real stuff of life. His chief enemy was always the factional opponent in the party rather than the capitalist class and the system of exploitation they represent.
Lovestone’s factional method and practice were systematic miseducation of the party; whispered gossip to set comrades against each other; misrepresentation and distortion of opponents’ positions; unrestrained demagogy and incitement of factional supporters until they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. He had other tricks, but they were all on the same order.
The party leaders’ opinions of each other in those days varied widely and were not always complimentary; but at bottom, despite the bitterness of the conflicts, I think they respected each other as comrades in a common cause, in spite of all. Lovestone, however, was distrusted and his devotion to the cause was widely doubted. In intimate circles Foster remarked more than once that if Lovestone were not a Jew, he would be the most likely candidate for leadership of a fascist movement. That was a fairly common opinion.
Wolfe, better educated and probably more intelligent than Lovestone, but weaker, was Lovestone’s first assistant and supporter in all his devious maneuvers. He was different from Lovestone mainly in his less passionate concentration on the intrigues of the moment and less desperate concern about the outcome.
A prime example of Lovestone’s factional method is his 1929 pamphlet, Pages from Party History. He makes an impressive “case” against his factional opponents by quoting, with a liberal admixture of falsification, only that which is compromising to them and leaving out entirely a still more impressive documentation which he could have cited against himself. Wolfe’s factional writing was on the same order, crooked all the way through. His 1929 pamphlet against “Trotskyism” shows Wolfe for what he is worth. These two people in particular had little or nothing to learn from Stalin. In their practices in the factional struggles they were Stalinists before Stalin’s own method was fully disclosed to the Americans.
* * *
Weinstone was different in many ways. He was not as shrewd and cunning, and he lacked Lovestone’s driving will. But he was more honest than Lovestone and Wolfe, more party-minded, and in those days he was undoubtedly devoted to the cause of communism. Also, in my opinion, Weinstone was more broadly intelligent, more flexible and objective in his thinking, than any of the other leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group.
Weinstone never got completely swamped in the factional struggle. That was the starting point for his independent course in 1926-1927. He recognized the merits of the comrades in the other camp. More clearly than others in his group, he saw the blind alley into which the factional struggle had entered at that time, and was honestly seeking to find a way out in the higher interest of the party.
Weinstone was perhaps dazzled for a time by the phony brilliance of Pepper, but he was never a personal follower of either Ruthenberg or Lovestone. His criticisms of both, in numerous conversations with me, were penetrating and objective; at least so they seemed to me. He was revolted by the Ruthenbergian claim to party “hegemony” – they actually proposed the formula of “unity of the party under the hegemony of the Ruthenberg group“! That sounded something like the unity of colonies in an imperialist empire, and that is really the way it was meant. Weinstone feared, with good reason, that encouragement of such an unrealistic and untenable pretension would lead to a party stalemate which could only culminate in a split.
Already in 1926, before the death of Ruthenberg, Weinstone began to take a stand within the faction for unity, through the dissolution of the factions and the establishment of a “collective leadership” of the most capable and influential people, without factional barriers to their free collaboration. This naturally brought him into consultation and eventually into close collaboration with us, since we had evolved the same position out of our own experiences in the Foster faction.
The Lovestoneites, who proceeded from the a priori judgment that everything that happens is the result of a conspiracy, and that nothing is ever done through good will and the exercise of independent intelligence, were dead sure that I had cooked up Weinstone’s defection and talked him into his factional heresy. That’s the way Gitlow tells it in his sorry memoirs; but that’s not the way I remember it.
When Weinstone became secretary of the New York District, as a result of the overturn manipulated by the Comintern in 1925, the bigger half of the effective militants in the New York District, who only yesterday had been the duly elected majority, became an artificially created minority. Weinstone recognized their value as party workers and deliberately instituted a policy in the New York District, on his own account, of conciliation and cooperation.
Most of the New York Fosterites, after a period of suspicious reservation, responded to Weinstone’s conciliatory policy, and a considerable measure of cooperation with them in party work was effected. This favorable result of local experience induced Weinstone to extend his thoughts to the party problem on a national scale. That soon brought him to virtually the same position that we had worked out in Chicago.
I doubt whether I personally had much to do with shaping his thoughts along this line – at least in the early stage. The fact that he came to substantially the same position that we had already worked out gave us a certain reassurance that we had sized things up correctly; and it naturally followed that we came into closer and closer relations with Weinstone.
We came to a definite agreement to work together already before the sudden and unexpected death of Ruthenberg in March 1927. We often speculated how things might have worked out if Ruthenberg had lived. Ruthenberg was a factionalist like the rest, but he was not so insane about it as Lovestone was. He was far more constructive and responsible, more concerned for the general welfare of the party and for his own position as a leader of a party rather than of a fragmented assembly of factions. Moreover, he was far more popular and influential, more respected in the party ranks, and strong enough to veto Lovestone’s factional excesses if he wanted to.
It is quite possible that an uneasy peace, gradually leading to the dissolution of factions, might have been worked out with him. His sudden death in March 1927 put a stop to all such possibilities. The Ruthenberg faction then became the Lovestone faction, and the internal party situation changed for the worse accordingly.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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
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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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The Passaic Strike
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
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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June 9, 1955
Dear Sir:
I remember the December 1925 Plenum of the CP of the US I was allied with the Ruthenberg faction at this particular Plenum and took a very active part in the debate on the trade-union question. It probably marked the tentative beginning of resistance to AFL fetishism, although the details of the specific issues in dispute at the Plenum have not remained in my memory.
According to my recollection, the Passaic issue came up at the Plenum, but it did not originate there. It was rather thrust upon the party by the cyclonic activities of Weisbord, who had gone into the field and actually begun to organize the unorganized textile workers. Looking back on it now, we deserve censure, not for giving conditional support to the organizing work of Weisbord, but for failing to go all-out in such support and to make the issue of AFL fetishism clear-cut.
The “United Front Committee” under which the organizing campaign in Passaic proceeded, instead of under the auspices of a new union, which the situation really called for, was a concession to the party’s prevailing policy of AFL-ism. To be sure, the recruitment of individual members to the “United Front Committee” twisted the conception of the united front, as an alliance of organizations, out of shape. But the real problem at Passaic was to organize the unorganized, unskilled and low-paid workers neglected by the AFL.
The Fosterite opposition to the recruitment of individual members to this “United Front Committee” showed up the bankruptcy of the ultra-AFL policy in a clear light for the first time. It could have had no other effect than to paralyze the organization of the textile workers in Passaic for fear of committing the sin of “dual unionism” – for which the Fosterites had a real phobia.
The Passaic strike started in the spring of 1926 while we were still in Moscow attending the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern. I don’t know or remember any of the immediate circumstances attending it. It is my definite impression, however, that the strike was not precipitated by the party leadership. Rather it was dumped in its lap as a result of Weisbord’s successes in organizing the textile workers there.
Gitlow’s pretensions about masterminding the Passaic situation, as related in his compendium of distortions and fabrications entitled I Confess, should be taken with a grain of salt. All his stories which are not outright inventions are slanted to enlarge his own role in party affairs and to denigrate others – in this case, Weisbord.
The organization of the workers in Passaic and the effective leadership of the strike itself, were pre-eminently Weisbord’s work. I had a chance to see that on the ground after we returned from Moscow. I, myself, had nothing to do with the Passaic strike, but I spent a little time there and had a good chance to see Weisbord in action. As a strike leader he was first class, no mistake about it. It is true that he worked under the close supervision and direction of a party committee in New York appointed by the national party leadership in Chicago. But it’s a long way from committee meetings in a closed room, off the scene, to the actual leadership of a strike on the ground. The full credit for that belongs to Weisbord.
There was an apparent contradiction between the decision of the Sixth Plenum of the CI to confirm Foster’s faction – with its pro-AFL policy – in its hegemony over party trade-union work and the concurrent conduct of the Passaic strike under the auspices of a “United Front Committee” outside the AFL. That was not due to factional manipulation. It happened that way because life intruded into the internal affairs of the party.
It happened because Weisbord – a brash young egocentric fresh out of college, and in general an unattractive specimen at close range, but a powerful mass orator and a human dynamo if there ever was one – stirred up a lot of workers and organized them into the “United Front Committee.” The sense of strength that came from their organization emboldened them to call a strike without waiting for the sanction of the AFL union. The strike soon exploded into violent clashes with the police which were splashed all over the front pages of the metropolitan press. The Passaic strike was the Number One labor news story for a long time.
This action at Passaic did indeed violate both the letter and the spirit of Fosterite trade-union policy, which the party had followed for years and which had been implicitly supported once again in Moscow. But that didn’t change the fact that the party had a big strike on its hands. And the party certainly made the most of its opportunity.
The Passaic strike really put the party on the labor map. In my opinion it deserves a chapter in party history all by itself. It revealed the Communists as the dynamic force in the radical labor movement and the organizing center of the unorganized workers disregarded by the AFL unions – displacing the IWW in this field. The Passaic strike was well organized and expertly led, and under all ordinary circumstances should have resulted in a resounding victory. The only trouble was that the bosses were too strong, had too many financial resources and were too determined to prevent the consolidation of a radical union organization. The strikers, isolated in one locality, were simply worn out and starved out and there was nothing to be done about it.
A poor settlement was the best that could be squeezed out of the deadlock. Such experiences were to be repeated many times before the unionization drive in the Thirties gained sufficient scope and power to break the employers’ resistance.
* * *
The Passaic strike was destined to have an influence on party trade-union policy which in the long run was far more important than the strike itself. The genesis of the drastic change in trade-union policy a few years later can probably be traced to it. There was a belated reaction to the party’s attempt to outwit the textile bosses and the AFL fakers by yielding to their principal demand – the elimination of the strike leader, Weisbord.
When it became clear that the strike was sagging, and that the bosses would not make a settlement with the “United Front Committee,” negotiations were opened up with the AFL Textile Union. The AFL was invited to take over the organization and try to negotiate a settlement. These accommodating fakers agreed – on one small condition, which turned out to be the same as that of the bosses, namely, that Weisbord, the communist strike leader, should walk the plank.
I do not know who first proposed the acceptance of this monstrous condition. What stands out in my memory most distinctly is the fact that both factions in the party leadership agreed with it, and that there was no conflict on the issue whatever. The fateful decision to sacrifice the strike leader was made unanimously by the party leadership and eventually carried out by the strike committee.
Such questions cannot be viewed abstractly. Perhaps those who, in their experience, have been faced with the agonizing problem of trying to save something from the wreckage of a defeated strike have a right to pass judgment on this decision. Others are hardly qualified. The main consideration in the Passaic situation was the fact that the strike had passed its peak. Real victory was already out of the question and the general feeling was that a poor settlement would be better than none. Other strikes have been settled under even more humiliating conditions. Workers have been compelled time and time again to “agree” to the victimization and blacklisting of the best militants in their ranks as a condition for getting back to work with a scrap of an agreement.
But what stands out in retrospect in the Passaic settlement – and what is painful even now to recall – was the alacrity with which the party leadership agreed to it, the general feeling that it was a clever “maneuver,” and its falsely grounded motivations.
The decision to sacrifice the strike leader and to disband the “United Front Committee,” implied recognition that the moth-eaten, reactionary, good-for-nothing AFL set-up in the textile industry at that time was the “legitimate” union in that field; and that the “United Front Committee” was only a holding operation and recruiting agency for the AFL union.
All that was wrong from start to finish. The “United Front Committee” should have been regarded as the starting point for an independent union of textile workers. For that it would have been far better to “lose” the strike than to end it with a disgraceful settlement. Independent unionism was the only prescription for the textile industry, and had been ever since the great days of the IWW. “Boring from within” the AFL union in that field, as an exclusive policy, never had a realistic basis.
The Passaic settlement and the motivations for it carried the AFL fetishism of Foster, with which all the others in the party leadership had gone along more or less uneasily, to the point of absurdity. It brought a kickback which was to result, a couple of years later, in a complete reversal of party policy on the trade union question.
When the Comintern got ready for its wild “left turn” toward “red trade unions” in 1928, Losovsky singled out the Passaic capitulation as the horrible example of the party’s policy of “dancing quadrilles around the AFL.” The party then embarked on an adventurous course, going to the other extreme of building independent communist unions all up and down the line.
The disastrous results of this experiment with the Trade Union Unity League, as the organizing center of a separate communist labor movement, were in part a punishment for the sin of the Passaic settlement.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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After 1925
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
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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July 14, 1955
Dear Sir:
The three-year period following the 1925 Convention of the Communist Party must present far more difficulties for the inquiring student than all the preceding years put together. The party entered into a uniquely different situation, without parallel in all the previous history of American radicalism, and the seeds of all the future troubles were sown then. It was a time when factionalism without principle in the internal party conflict prepared and conditioned many people for the eventual abandonment and betrayal of all principle in the broader class struggle of the workers, which the party had been organized to express.
The printed record alone obscures more than it explains about the real causes of the party troubles in these bleak years. The important thing, as I see it, is not the specific disputes and squabbles over party policy, as they are recorded in print, but the general situation in which all the factions were caught – and which none of them fully understood – and their blind, or half-blind, attempts to find a way out.
Prior to that time the factional struggles, with all their excesses and occasional absurdities, had revolved around basic issues which remain fully comprehensible; and settlement of the disputes had been followed by the dissolution of the factions. From the 1925 Convention onward, the evolution of party life took a radically different turn. The old differences had become largely outlived or narrowed down to nuances, but the factions remained and became hardened into permanent formations.
After 1925 the factional gang-fights for power predominated over whatever the rival factions wanted – or thought they wanted – the power for. That, and not the differences over party policy, real or ostensible, was the dominating feature of this period. The details of the various skirmishes are important mainly as they relate to that.
The factional struggle became bankrupt for lack of real political justification for the existence of the factions. For that reason nothing could be solved by the victory of one faction, giving it the opportunity to execute its policy, since the policies of the others were basically the same. There were differences of implicit tendency, to be sure, but further experience was required to show where they might lead. The factions lived on exaggerations and distortions of each others’ positions and the anticipation of future differences.
At any rate, the, real differences on questions of national policy, in and of themselves, insofar as they were clearly manifested at the time, were not serious enough to justify hard and fast factions. The factions in that period were simply fighting to keep in trim, holding on and waiting, without knowing it, for their futile struggle to fill itself with a serious political content.
The factions were driving blindly toward the two explosions of 1928-1929, when the latent tendencies of each faction were to find expression and formulation in real political issues of international scope, issues destined to bring about a three-way split beyond the possibility of any further reconciliation. But that outcome was not foreseen by any of the participants in the futile struggles of those days. These struggles, for all their intensity and fury, were merely anticipations of a future conflict over far more serious questions.
* * *
I began to recognize the bankruptcy of factional struggle without a clearly defined principled basis as early as 1925, and began to look for a way out of it. That still did not go to the root of the problem – the basic causes out of which the unprincipled factionalism had flourished – but it was a step forward. It set me somewhat apart from the central leaders of both factions, and was a handicap in the immediate conflict. Blind factionalists have more zeal than those who reflect too much. But the reflections of 1925 eventually helped me to find my way to higher ground.
The experiences of the conflict in the Foster-Cannon caucus at the 1925 Convention had revealed the Fosterites’ basic conception of the faction as that of a permanent gang, claiming prior loyalty of its members in a fight for supremacy and the extermination of the opposing faction. I couldn’t go along with that, and the disagreement brought us to a parting of the ways.
The definitive split of the Foster-Cannon faction took place, not at the 1925 Convention, where the first big conflict over the “Comintern cable” arose, but some weeks later, after numerous attempts to patch up the rift. When Foster and Bittelman insisted on their conception of the faction, and tried to press me into line for the sake of factional loyalty, I, and others of the same mind, had no choice but to break with them.
It was a deep split; the cadres of the faction divided right down the middle along the same lines as the division in the caucus at the Convention. Prominent in support of my position were the following: William F. Dunne, and with him the whole local leadership of the Minnesota movement; Arne Swabeck and Martin Abern in Chicago; the principal leaders of the youth organization – Shachtman, Williamson, Schneiderman and several others who later became prominent in the party: Hathaway, Tom O’Flaherty, Gomez; Fisher and his group in the South Slavic Federation; Bud Reynolds of Detroit; Gebert, the Pole, later to become District Organizer in Detroit before his departure for Poland; and several District Organizers of the party.
The conception of the central leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction was basically the same as Foster’s, as was soon demonstrated in a brief and futile experiment in cooperation with them. I didn’t agree with the claim of either group to party domination and could see no solution of the party conflict along that line. This left no room for me in either faction as a full-time, all-out participant, which is the only way I can function anywhere.
The simple fact of the matter, as we came to see it in 1925, was that the party crisis could not be solved by the victory of one faction over the other. Each was weak where the other was strong. The two groups supplemented each other and were necessary to each other and to the party.
While I considered that the Foster group as a whole was more proletarian, nearer to the workers and for that reason the “better” group, I had begun to recognize all too clearly its trade union one-sideness. In this respect I was nearer to the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group. But the latter, although more “political” than the Fosterite trade unionists, was too intellectualistic to suit me. I thought that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group by itself could not lead the party and build it as a genuine workers’ organization, and nothing ever happened in the ensuing years to change that opinion.
The cadres of both groups were too strong numerically, and had too many talented people, to be eliminated from the party leadership. The two groups, united and working together, would have been many times stronger and more effective than either one alone. We thought the time had come to move toward the liquidation of the factions and the unification of the party under a collective leadership.
In relating this I do not mean to intimate that I had suddenly become a pacifist in internal party affairs. I was as much a factionalist as the others, when factional struggle was the order of the day, and I have never seen any reason to deny it or apologize for it. Those pious souls who were not factionalists didn’t count in the days when the party life was dominated by internal struggle, and have nothing to report. It is true that factionalism can be carried to extremes and become a disease – as was the case in the CP after 1925. But professional abstainers, as is always the case, only made the game easier for the others who were not restrained by qualms and scruples.
I was not against factions when there was something serious to fight about. But I was already then dead set against the idea of permanent factions, after the issues which had brought them about had been decided or outlived. I never got so deeply involved in any factional struggle as to permit it to become an end in itself. In this I was perhaps different from most of the other factional leaders, and it eventually led me on a far different path.
This was a deliberate policy on my part; the result of much reflection on the whole problem of the party and the revolution. I was determined above all not to forget what I had started out to fight for, and this basic motivation sustained me in that dark, unhappy time. I felt that I had not committed myself in early youth to the struggle for the socialist reorganization of society in order to settle for membership in a permanent faction, to say nothing of a factional gang. I tried always to keep an over-all party point of view and to see the party always as a part of the working class.
And by and large I succeeded, although it was not easy in the atmosphere of that time. Many good militants succumbed to factionalism and lost their bearings altogether. It is only a short step from cynicism to renegacy. Betrayal of principle in little things easily leads to betrayal in bigger things. I have lived to see many who were first-class revolutionists in the early days turn into traitors to the working class. Some even became professional informers against former comrades. Cynical factionalism was the starting point of this moral and political degeneration.
We could see that the factional struggle was degenerating into a gang fight, and we set out to resist it. Being serious about it, we did not disperse our forces and hope for luck. On the contrary, we promptly organized a “third group” to fight for unity and the liquidation of all factions. This may appear as a quixotic enterprise – and so it turned out to be – but it took a long struggle for us to prove it to ourselves.
The international factor, which had frustrated all our efforts, eventually came to our aid and showed us a new road. When I got access to the enlightening documents of Trotsky in 1928, I began to fit the American troubles into their international framework. But that came only after three years of fighting in the dark, on purely national grounds.
No one can fight in the dark without stumbling now and then. We did our share of that, and I am far from contending that every move we made was correct. No political course can be correct when its basic premise is wrong. Our premise was that our party troubles were a purely American affair and that they could somehow be straightened out with the help of the Comintern, particularly of the Russian leaders, as had been done in earlier difficulties.
That was wrong on both counts. The objective situation in the country was against us, and we all contributed our own faults of ignorance and inadequacy to the bedevilment of the party situation. But the chief source of our difficulties this time was the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern; and the chief mischief-makers in our party, as in every other party of the Comintern, were these same people whom we trustingly looked to for help and guidance.
It took me a long time to get that straight in my head. In the meantime I fumbled and stumbled in the dark like all the others. My basic approach to the problem was different, however, and it eventually led me to an understanding of the puzzle and a drastic new orientation.
* * *
In the objective circumstances of the time, with the booming prosperity of the late Twenties sapping the foundations of radicalism, with the trade-union movement stagnating and declining, feverish activity in the factional struggle in the party became for many a substitute for participation in the class struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie. This sickness particularly infected those who were most isolated from the daily life of the workers. They did not take kindly to our formula for party peace and party unity through the liquidation of the factions. They didn’t understand it, and above all they didn’t believe in it.
In the underworld of present-day society, with which I have had contact at various times in jail and prison, there is a widespread sentiment that there is no such thing as an honest man who is also intelligent. The human race is made up of honest suckers and smart crooks, and that’s all there is to it; the smartest crooks are those who pretend to be honest, the confidence men. Professional factionalism, unrelated to the living issues of the class struggle of the workers, is also a sort of underworld, and the psychology of its practitioners approaches that of the other underworld.
In the eyes of such people, for whom the internal struggle of the Communist Party had become the breath of life, an end in itself, anyone who proposed peace and unity was either a well. meaning fool or a hypocrite with an axe to grind. In our case the first possibility was rejected out of hand by the esteemed colleagues with whom we had been associated in numerous struggles, and that left only the second. A third possible reason or motivation for our position was excluded.
Our formula for party unity and party peace was not taken at face value by the leaders of the Foster-Bittelman and Ruthenberg-Lovestone groups. We were regarded as trouble-making anarchists, violating the rules of the game by forming a “third group” when the rules called for two and only two.
The Fosterites waged an especially vicious campaign against me as a “traitor,” as if I had been born into this world as a member of a family and clan and was required by blood relationship to have no truck with the feuding opponents on the other side of the mountain. That was a complete misunderstanding on their part; they had my birth certificate all mixed up.
As for the Lovestoneites, they even introduced motions in the party branches specifically condemning the formation of a “third group.” For them two groups belonged to the accepted order of things; a third group was unnatural. This dictum, however, was not binding on us for the simple reason that we did not accept it.
It was evident from the start that our program could not be achieved by persuasion. Some force and pressure would be required, and this could be effectively asserted only by an organized independent group. We set out to build such a group as a balance of power, and thus to prevent either of the major factions from monopolizing party control.
Despite the all-consuming factionalism of the top and secondary leaders, our stand for unity undoubtedly reflected a wide sentiment in the ranks of both factions. Many of the rank and file comrades were sick of the senseless internal struggle and eager for unity and all-around cooperation in constructive party work. This was strikingly demonstrated when Weinstone, secretary of the New York District, and a group around him, came out for the same position in 1926.
That broke up the Ruthenberg “majority,” as our earlier revolt had broken up Foster’s. Weinstone soon came to an agreement with us, and the new combination constituted a balance of power grouping in the leadership. It didn’t stop the factional struggle-far from it-but it did prevent the monopolistic domination of the party by one faction and the exclusion of the other, and created conditions in the party for the leading activists in all factions to function freely in party work.
* * *
I had been closely associated with Weinstone in the old struggle for the legalization of the party – 1921-1923 – and knew him fairly well. We always got along well together and had remained friendly to each other, even though we were in opposing camps in the new factional line-up and struggle which began in 1923. He had gone along with the Ruthenberg-Pepper-Lovestone faction and was its outstanding representative in New York while the national center was located in Chicago.
In the course of the new developments I came to know Weinstone better and to form a more definitive judgment of him. He was one of that outstanding trio – Lovestone, Weinstone and Wolfe – who were known among us as the “City College boys.” They were still in school when they were attracted to the left-wing movement in the upsurge following the Russian Revolution, but they were thrust forward in the movement by their exceptional qualities and their educational advantages.
They came into prominent positions of leadership without having had any previous experience with the workers in the daily class struggle. All three of them bore the mark of this gap in their education, and Lovestone and Wolfe never showed any disposition to overcome it. They always impressed me as aliens, with a purely intellectualistic interest in the workers’ movement. Weinstone had at least a feeling for the workers, although in the time that I knew him, he never seemed to be really at home with them.
All three were articulate, Wolfe being the best and most prolific writer and Weinstone the most gifted speaker among them. Lovestone, who had indifferent talents both as writer and speaker, was the strongest personality of the three, the one who made by far the deepest impression on the movement at all times, arid most times to its detriment.
It was everybody’s opinion that Lovestone was unscrupulous in his ceaseless machinations and intrigues; and in my opinion everybody was right on that point, although the word “unscrupulous” somehow or other seems to be too mild a word to describe his operations. Lovestone was downright crooked, like Foster-but in a different way. Foster was in and of the workers’ movement and had a sense of responsibility to it; and he could be moderately honest when there was no need to cheat or lie. Foster’s crookedness was purposeful and utilitarian, nonchalantly resorted to in a pinch to serve an end. Lovestone, the sinister stranger in our midst, seemed to practice skulduggery maliciously, for its own sake.
It was a queer twist of fate that brought such a perverse character into a movement dedicated to the service of the noblest ideal of human relationships. Never was a man more destructively alien to the cause in which he sought a career; he was like an anarchistic cancer cell running wild in the party organism. The party has meaning and justification only as the conscious expression of the austere process of history in which the working class strives for emancipation, with all the strict moral obligations such a mission imposes on its members. But Lovestone seemed to see the party as an object of manipulation in a personal game he was playing, with an unnatural instinct to foul things up.
In this game, which he played with an almost pathological frenzy, he was not restrained by any recognized norms of conduct in human relations, to say nothing of the effects his methods might have on the morale and solidarity of the workers’ movement. For him the class struggle of the workers, with its awesome significance for the future of the human race, was at best an intellectual concept; the factional struggle for “control” of the party was the real thing, the real stuff of life. His chief enemy was always the factional opponent in the party rather than the capitalist class and the system of exploitation they represent.
Lovestone’s factional method and practice were systematic miseducation of the party; whispered gossip to set comrades against each other; misrepresentation and distortion of opponents’ positions; unrestrained demagogy and incitement of factional supporters until they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. He had other tricks, but they were all on the same order.
The party leaders’ opinions of each other in those days varied widely and were not always complimentary; but at bottom, despite the bitterness of the conflicts, I think they respected each other as comrades in a common cause, in spite of all. Lovestone, however, was distrusted and his devotion to the cause was widely doubted. In intimate circles Foster remarked more than once that if Lovestone were not a Jew, he would be the most likely candidate for leadership of a fascist movement. That was a fairly common opinion.
Wolfe, better educated and probably more intelligent than Lovestone, but weaker, was Lovestone’s first assistant and supporter in all his devious maneuvers. He was different from Lovestone mainly in his less passionate concentration on the intrigues of the moment and less desperate concern about the outcome.
A prime example of Lovestone’s factional method is his 1929 pamphlet, Pages from Party History. He makes an impressive “case” against his factional opponents by quoting, with a liberal admixture of falsification, only that which is compromising to them and leaving out entirely a still more impressive documentation which he could have cited against himself. Wolfe’s factional writing was on the same order, crooked all the way through. His 1929 pamphlet against “Trotskyism” shows Wolfe for what he is worth. These two people in particular had little or nothing to learn from Stalin. In their practices in the factional struggles they were Stalinists before Stalin’s own method was fully disclosed to the Americans.
* * *
Weinstone was different in many ways. He was not as shrewd and cunning, and he lacked Lovestone’s driving will. But he was more honest than Lovestone and Wolfe, more party-minded, and in those days he was undoubtedly devoted to the cause of communism. Also, in my opinion, Weinstone was more broadly intelligent, more flexible and objective in his thinking, than any of the other leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group.
Weinstone never got completely swamped in the factional struggle. That was the starting point for his independent course in 1926-1927. He recognized the merits of the comrades in the other camp. More clearly than others in his group, he saw the blind alley into which the factional struggle had entered at that time, and was honestly seeking to find a way out in the higher interest of the party.
Weinstone was perhaps dazzled for a time by the phony brilliance of Pepper, but he was never a personal follower of either Ruthenberg or Lovestone. His criticisms of both, in numerous conversations with me, were penetrating and objective; at least so they seemed to me. He was revolted by the Ruthenbergian claim to party “hegemony” – they actually proposed the formula of “unity of the party under the hegemony of the Ruthenberg group“! That sounded something like the unity of colonies in an imperialist empire, and that is really the way it was meant. Weinstone feared, with good reason, that encouragement of such an unrealistic and untenable pretension would lead to a party stalemate which could only culminate in a split.
Already in 1926, before the death of Ruthenberg, Weinstone began to take a stand within the faction for unity, through the dissolution of the factions and the establishment of a “collective leadership” of the most capable and influential people, without factional barriers to their free collaboration. This naturally brought him into consultation and eventually into close collaboration with us, since we had evolved the same position out of our own experiences in the Foster faction.
The Lovestoneites, who proceeded from the a priori judgment that everything that happens is the result of a conspiracy, and that nothing is ever done through good will and the exercise of independent intelligence, were dead sure that I had cooked up Weinstone’s defection and talked him into his factional heresy. That’s the way Gitlow tells it in his sorry memoirs; but that’s not the way I remember it.
When Weinstone became secretary of the New York District, as a result of the overturn manipulated by the Comintern in 1925, the bigger half of the effective militants in the New York District, who only yesterday had been the duly elected majority, became an artificially created minority. Weinstone recognized their value as party workers and deliberately instituted a policy in the New York District, on his own account, of conciliation and cooperation.
Most of the New York Fosterites, after a period of suspicious reservation, responded to Weinstone’s conciliatory policy, and a considerable measure of cooperation with them in party work was effected. This favorable result of local experience induced Weinstone to extend his thoughts to the party problem on a national scale. That soon brought him to virtually the same position that we had worked out in Chicago.
I doubt whether I personally had much to do with shaping his thoughts along this line – at least in the early stage. The fact that he came to substantially the same position that we had already worked out gave us a certain reassurance that we had sized things up correctly; and it naturally followed that we came into closer and closer relations with Weinstone.
We came to a definite agreement to work together already before the sudden and unexpected death of Ruthenberg in March 1927. We often speculated how things might have worked out if Ruthenberg had lived. Ruthenberg was a factionalist like the rest, but he was not so insane about it as Lovestone was. He was far more constructive and responsible, more concerned for the general welfare of the party and for his own position as a leader of a party rather than of a fragmented assembly of factions. Moreover, he was far more popular and influential, more respected in the party ranks, and strong enough to veto Lovestone’s factional excesses if he wanted to.
It is quite possible that an uneasy peace, gradually leading to the dissolution of factions, might have been worked out with him. His sudden death in March 1927 put a stop to all such possibilities. The Ruthenberg faction then became the Lovestone faction, and the internal party situation changed for the worse accordingly.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
*From The Partisan Defense Committee- The 25th Holiday Appeal In Support Of Class-War Prisoners
Markin comment:
December 2, 2010
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may have not used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
25th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
“The mills of capitalist justice grind out victims for the penitentiary....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
Following in the tradition of Cannon’s International Labor Defense (ILD), the Partisan Defense Committee honors the class-war prisoners—those brave men and women railroaded to prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—irrespective of their particular political views or affiliation. Twenty-five years ago, the PDC revived the ILD program of providing monthly stipends to class-war prisoners and additional funds for their birthdays as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. We raise money for this unique and necessary program during the holiday season. Fund-raising efforts will include benefits in Chicago on December 18, New York City on January 21 and Toronto on January 28.
The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten. In letters to the PDC before last year’s Holiday Appeal, the prisoners gave a glimpse of what the program means to them:
Hugo Pinell: “Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well. I am with you, in life and struggle.”
Janine Africa: “I want to thank everybody for yalls support all of these years. I’m not just talking about the holiday donations, I’m talking about the work yall do for the release of political prisoners from prison.”
Jaan Laaman: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
Tom Manning, Laaman’s Ohio 7 comrade: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.”
The struggle to free all class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters for the oppressed. This is given added meaning as we build for this Holiday Appeal. Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join them. The Obama administration has launched an ominous escalation of state repression, accelerating the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that will be wielded against those who propelled him to office—labor, blacks, immigrants and leftist youth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case will again be a focus of the Holiday Appeal, is threatened with the reinstitution of the death sentence (see article, page 12). Seventy-one-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart has been resentenced to ten years in prison for the “crime” of representing her client. The PDC has added Stewart to the stipend recipients. In Chicago and Minneapolis, the FBI recently raided the homes of leftists, antiwar activists and unionists under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” Among those targeted were members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, who have run afoul of Washington for their open support to leftist rebels in Colombia opposed to the U.S. puppet regime, the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
In February, Obama signed into law yet another extension of the USA Patriot Act with its provisions of indefinite detention, expansion of secret FBI searches of homes and offices and elimination of formal restrictions on domestic spying, wiretapping and Internet surveillance. The message to all who would fight against the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis, war and racist repression: This is what’s in store for you if you step out of line.
The PDC initiated the stipend program at the height of the reactionary Reagan years, defining features of which included the destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune and efforts to classify leftists and union militants as terrorists and criminals. It was an important component of fighting efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent—and it remains so today, as the “war on terror” has given the government repressive powers that Reagan could only dream of.
We have provided stipends to over 30 prisoners, including eight union militants, on three continents. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been there from nearly the beginning of our stipends program. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to make sure they die behind bars from old age or medical neglect—or in the case of Mumia, by legal lynching. In fighting for their freedom, we are dedicated to searing the injustice of these cases into the consciousness of the working masses—today and for generations to come. Regular features of the Holiday Appeal are presentations by PDC representatives to union locals in cities across the country. As Cannon noted, “The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 17 class-war prisoners described below receive monthly stipends from the PDC.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward the legal lynching of this innocent man. The Court vacated a March 2008 decision of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. The high court in essence gave marching orders to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the death penalty. A hearing was held in Philadelphia on November 9.
This December marks the 29th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with President Obama and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 66-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Last year, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and shockingly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 33rd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for zealously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. On July 15 she was resentenced to ten years—more than quadrupling her original sentence—in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now 71 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audiotape long-suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole last year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 151/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
December 2, 2010
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may have not used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
25th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
“The mills of capitalist justice grind out victims for the penitentiary....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
Following in the tradition of Cannon’s International Labor Defense (ILD), the Partisan Defense Committee honors the class-war prisoners—those brave men and women railroaded to prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—irrespective of their particular political views or affiliation. Twenty-five years ago, the PDC revived the ILD program of providing monthly stipends to class-war prisoners and additional funds for their birthdays as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. We raise money for this unique and necessary program during the holiday season. Fund-raising efforts will include benefits in Chicago on December 18, New York City on January 21 and Toronto on January 28.
The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten. In letters to the PDC before last year’s Holiday Appeal, the prisoners gave a glimpse of what the program means to them:
Hugo Pinell: “Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well. I am with you, in life and struggle.”
Janine Africa: “I want to thank everybody for yalls support all of these years. I’m not just talking about the holiday donations, I’m talking about the work yall do for the release of political prisoners from prison.”
Jaan Laaman: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
Tom Manning, Laaman’s Ohio 7 comrade: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.”
The struggle to free all class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters for the oppressed. This is given added meaning as we build for this Holiday Appeal. Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join them. The Obama administration has launched an ominous escalation of state repression, accelerating the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that will be wielded against those who propelled him to office—labor, blacks, immigrants and leftist youth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case will again be a focus of the Holiday Appeal, is threatened with the reinstitution of the death sentence (see article, page 12). Seventy-one-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart has been resentenced to ten years in prison for the “crime” of representing her client. The PDC has added Stewart to the stipend recipients. In Chicago and Minneapolis, the FBI recently raided the homes of leftists, antiwar activists and unionists under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” Among those targeted were members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, who have run afoul of Washington for their open support to leftist rebels in Colombia opposed to the U.S. puppet regime, the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
In February, Obama signed into law yet another extension of the USA Patriot Act with its provisions of indefinite detention, expansion of secret FBI searches of homes and offices and elimination of formal restrictions on domestic spying, wiretapping and Internet surveillance. The message to all who would fight against the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis, war and racist repression: This is what’s in store for you if you step out of line.
The PDC initiated the stipend program at the height of the reactionary Reagan years, defining features of which included the destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune and efforts to classify leftists and union militants as terrorists and criminals. It was an important component of fighting efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent—and it remains so today, as the “war on terror” has given the government repressive powers that Reagan could only dream of.
We have provided stipends to over 30 prisoners, including eight union militants, on three continents. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been there from nearly the beginning of our stipends program. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to make sure they die behind bars from old age or medical neglect—or in the case of Mumia, by legal lynching. In fighting for their freedom, we are dedicated to searing the injustice of these cases into the consciousness of the working masses—today and for generations to come. Regular features of the Holiday Appeal are presentations by PDC representatives to union locals in cities across the country. As Cannon noted, “The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 17 class-war prisoners described below receive monthly stipends from the PDC.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward the legal lynching of this innocent man. The Court vacated a March 2008 decision of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. The high court in essence gave marching orders to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the death penalty. A hearing was held in Philadelphia on November 9.
This December marks the 29th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with President Obama and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 66-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Last year, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and shockingly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 33rd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for zealously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. On July 15 she was resentenced to ten years—more than quadrupling her original sentence—in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now 71 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audiotape long-suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole last year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 151/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
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