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"James P. Cannon and the Origins of the
American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928," by Bryan D. Palmer,
University of Illinois Press, 2007, $50
hardcover.
With the first volume of his new biography of James P.
Cannon, Bryan Palmer, a professor at Trent University in Canada and
editor of Labour/Le Travail, has provided a valuable reminder of the
importance of the first decade of the U.S. Communist Party, as well as
the key role played in it by Cannon.
Cannon himself explained why this history matters:
"The first six years of American communism—1918-1923—represent a
heroic period from which all future revolutionary movements in this
country will be the lineal descendants."
Cannon, born in Rosedale, Kansas, in 1890, joined the
Socialist Party in 1906. He left it in 1911 for the Industrial Workers of
the World (the IWW, or Wobblies), making a conscious choice to become a
revolutionist.
Palmer provides much new detail on Cannon's Wobbly
years. From the strikes Cannon helped lead he learned valuable lessons
about the power of the U.S.
working class, as well as the political and social factors shaping its
consciousness.
Cannon had been put off by the SP's reformist
politics. But with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he and other
Wobblies saw the possibility of revolutionary politics, put into practice
by disciplined, professional revolutionists (in contrast to the SP, whose
middle-class leaders lectured about socialism on Sundays).
Cannon later rejoined the SP to hook up with a growing
left wing opposing the leadership's reformism. In 1919 the SP Left split
away and created two Communist parties—two because of minor tactical
differences. The Communist Labor Party, which Cannon joined, had a few
more native-born workers and a few less sectarian ideas than its rival,
the Communist Party.
Cannon realized how unprepared theoretically were most
native-born U.S. revolutionists, and eagerly read works by and about the
Bolsheviks.
Most members of both parties belonged to their
foreign-language federations carried over from the old SP (Russians and
other Eastern Europeans being the biggest components). While more
theoretically advanced, many of these immigrant members were divorced
from American reality and inactive in union or other struggles. Instead,
they agitated for the immediate formation of soviets and the armed
overthrow of the government, to be led by an underground party.
Cannon and others, in contrast, wanted to apply the
new ideas to concrete American conditions. Several leaders, including the
best known, Charles E. Ruthenberg of the CP, were in jail. Cannon saw
that those left in office were "one-sided products of a primitive
movement."
He knew he himself was still learning, but concluded:
"I knew then that I had to fight for the leadership." Yet he
wanted even those he was battling to be part of a unified leadership. All
the potential leaders, he said, "needed and complemented each other
in various ways."
The year the two rival parties were founded, 1919, was
one of working-class upsurge in the U.S. and Europe and of anti-colonial
revolt. Militant strikes were met by massive repression, including raids
in which thousands of Communists were arrested and many deported.
Yet the CP and the CLP abstained from this upsurge. At
a 1920 convention that merged the less sectarian Ruthenberg wing of the
CP with the CLP into the United Communist Party, Cannon delivered a
speech arguing for work both inside and outside the AFL as appropriate.
Recognized within the party as its foremost authority
on unions (William Z. Foster, leader of steel and packinghouse strikes,
would not join until 1921), Cannon was elected to the Central Committee
and appointed organizer for the St. Louis/Southern Illinois Coal District.
Recognition of Cannon's having drawn militant workers around the party
through his editing and writing for the Cleveland-based Toiler led to the
paper and its editor being relocated to UCP headquarters in New York.
CP
emerges from underground
Soon after the UCP and the CP were united in 1921
(keeping the latter name), at the insistence of the Communist
International, Cannon and his allies were able to win grudging internal
acceptance for an aboveground version of the CP, the Workers Party (WP).
They got aid in this from Lettish and Jewish groups,
who understood the need to sink roots in the broader working class.
Cannon paid tribute to the influence of Lenin's "Left-Wing
Communism: An Infantile Disorder" in wiping out "that hodgepodge
of ultra-radicalism."
Another aid was the promotion by the Comintern of the
united front, an alliance of working-class forces in action around
specific demands, a concept forged in the fight against ultraleft trends
in Comintern affiliates. In his speech to the WP's founding convention,
says Palmer, "Cannon placed central importance on the need to build
a class-struggle leadership in the demoralized trade unions," and
deplored the failure of the CP to mount a campaign to free class-war
prisoners.
Cannon was the WP's first chairman and its major
spokesperson. Says Palmer, "for the next seven years, few
individuals rivaled Cannon in significance within the party."
Cannon later told historian Theodore Draper, referring to the battles for
unification and legalization and against ultraleftism, "the
political cooperation between me and [Ruthenberg protégé Jay] Lovestone
was the main driving force," paying tribute as well to Alexander
Bittelman and William Weinstone, all of whom "worked quite
effectively as a team," despite their lack of leadership experience
and differences on other issues.
"The overriding political consideration—the
imperative need to legalize party activity—proved stronger than
differences of background and temperament which played a part in later
conflict."
In keeping with his goal of an inclusive leadership,
Cannon proposed that Ruthenberg, now out of jail, become Executive
Secretary, and soon yielded the chairmanship to Foster. But ultraleftism
still plagued the movement.
Upon arrival at the 1922 Comintern Congress in Moscow,
Cannon sensed that Russian members of the American Commission were
against dropping the underground party, drawing inaccurate parallels with
their own experience. But Lenin saw the difference, writing in the
margins of a copy of the underground party's paper, "Stop this
nonsense."
Cannon and allies met with Trotsky and stressed the
need for legal propaganda to educate workers; the possibilities for open
functioning; supporting formation of a union-based labor party; and the
need to foster an indigenous leadership. Trotsky pledged his support, and
in the end the American Commission sided with Cannon's group.
Cannon later stressed, "the issues of internal
controversy were not matters of principle—since all factions supported
the program of Bolshevism and all acknowledged allegiance to the
Comintern—but of tactics."
Cannon stayed in Moscow for several months, getting to
know and admire figures such as Gregory Zinoviev, who treated comrades
from around the world as equals and gave them advice, not orders, as
would later be Comintern practice.
One of the beneficiaries of Cannon's work was Foster,
head of the Trade Union Educational League, a group that had organized
significant support within the AFL for the goals of amalgamating craft
unions into industry-wide unions and for a labor party. In this work
Foster drew on alliances forged during strikes he had led with such
figures as Chicago Federation of Labor head John Fitzpatrick.
The
farmer-labor party fiasco
But soon fights broke out on another front, led by
Hungarian emigre József Pogány. Known as John Pepper, he had been a
target of Lenin and Trotsky in their campaign against ultraleftists and
was now in the U.S. pretending to be an official Comintern
representative.
Pepper forged a bloc with Ruthenberg and Lovestone,
and launched the party on a series of adventurist and opportunist
schemes. These schemes mirrored those being promoted in an increasingly
bureaucratic International.
By this time Lenin was dying and Zinoviev headed the
International. But Zinoviev was merely reflecting the despair occasioned
by the failed German revolution of 1923, which reinforced the Soviet
Union's isolation, moods reinforced by the receding of postwar radicalism
and a seemingly crisis-free capitalism.
Pepper's first piece of mischief came during the
struggle to form a labor party in 1923. CFL head Fitzpatrick had broken
with the Conference for Progressive Political Action, formed by heads of
the railroad unions, over its refusal to launch an independent party. He
turned to his CP allies for help, including not only Foster but also CP
leaders of the CFL such as Arne
Swabeck.
But soon Fitzpatrick was feeling political and
financial heat from the AFL. Ironically, the Chicago CPers had seen
before Fitzpatrick the danger of such attacks, and had warned him not to
move ahead without sufficient mass support. Now Fitzpatrick saw the
danger—but the local CPers' caution was overruled by Ruthenberg,
Lovestone, and Pepper.
The Chicago CPers could see that Pepper et al. were
planning to pack with CP delegates the July 1923 conference that would
found the party. Cannon wrote a letter to the center warning that this
would isolate the CP from allies and doom the chances of a new labor
party's survival. But Pepper and allies forged ahead, provoking
Fitzpatrick into leaving the convention, after which the new Federated
Farmer-Labor Party was declared.
But in capturing the F-FLP the CP had captured only
itself. Soon after, Foster told Cannon how he and other CPers had lost
their heads at the convention, and their behavior would "fritter
away all the gains of our trade-union work."
Palmer astutely points out that Cannon went beyond
Foster's recognition of pragmatic difficulties. He realized "that Pepper's politics was all
of one piece." It was not yet clear to Cannon, however, that
Pepper's adventurism mirrored that of the Comintern leadership, and
Cannon was still appreciative of the comradely aid Zinoviev and others
had given.
Cannon forged a bloc with Foster to drive Pepper from
power. In response to articles by Cannon warning that the Party was
"organizing our enemies faster than we are organizing our
friends," Pepper announced a bizarre new perspective.
There was much talk in the International of
revolutions jointly led by peasants and workers, revolutions with a
confused program. Pepper's U.S. variant was a "La Follette
Revolution," to be led by forces behind former Republican Senator
and 1924 Progressive Party presidential candidate Robert La Follette.
Comprised of farmers, small businessmen and workers,
it would contain "elements of the French Revolution, and the Russian
Kerensky Revolution. In its ideology it will have elements of
Jeffersonianism, Danish cooperatives, Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism. The Proletariat as a class
will not play an independent role."
Agrarian populists and former labor party advocates
were backing La Follette, but so too were opponents of a labor party such
as the AFL and the CPPA.
During these events Trotsky launched a counterattack
against the International's floundering politics and increasing
bureaucratism, and used the La Follette episode as an example: "For
a young and weak Communist Party, lacking in revolutionary temper, to
play the role of gatherer of
'progressive voters' for La Follette is to head toward the
dissolution of the party in the petty bourgeoisie. ... Opportunism
expresses itself not only in moods of gradualism but also in impatience.
...
The inspirers of this monstrous opportunism,
thoroughly imbued with skepticism concerning the American proletariat,
are impatiently seeking to transfer the
party's center of gravity into a farmer milieu. ... By
underwriting ... the worst
illusions of the petty bourgeoisie, it is not at all difficult to create
for oneself the illusion of wielding influence over the petty
bourgeoisie."
Fortunately, Trotsky still wielded enough influence to
convince the Comintern to urge its U.S. affiliate to end support for La
Follette. Meanwhile, the Foster-Cannon bloc had gathered enough support
to get Pepper recalled to Moscow. Yet despite the bloc's majority in the
leadership, Cannon insisted that former Pepper allies Ruthenberg and
Lovestone remain as central leaders.
In late 1924 and early 1925 Cannon explained that
formation of a real labor party was precluded in the near future, and
that the F-FLP was doomed not just by CP sectarianism, but more
fundamentally because at that point "The masses ... wanted a petty
bourgeois third party movement."
To battle the hold of petty bourgeois ideology over
the workers, said Cannon, the party needed to step up recruit1ment, not
work in parties with an unclear class basis. Workers disillusioned with
La Folletteism would also come under Party influence through united
fronts engaged in struggle on concrete issues.
The party had proven it could initiate successful
united fronts, such as its 1923 campaign for "protection for
foreign-born workers." Similar campaigns, he urged, should be set up
around unemployment, wage cuts, limits on strikers' rights, imperialism,
political prisoners,
amalgamation, defense of African-American workers, etc.
But he also urged work in bodies initiated and/or
dominated by other political forces: "Communists must penetrate all
the mass organizations of the workers, participate in all their
struggles, and there fight for WP slogans."
Cannon acknowledged the difficulties in working in
unions that had shrunk in size and were tightly run by conservative
officials. But the solution was to dig ever deeper into the unions and
build Communist fractions—as well as building a left wing in the AFL
broader than the TUEL, which had been turned into a narrow front.
Yet at the same time Cannon urged calling of a
national miners' conference to lay the basis for a new, independent
union, reflecting his continued opposition to Foster's policy of only
working within the AFL.
International
Labor Defense
Soon Cannon proved the possibilities for broad labor
work through his leadership of the International Labor Defense. The idea
was worked out in talks with Big Bill Haywood and Rose Karsner (who would
become its administrative lynchpin). Devoted to defending working-class
prisoners, it built on previous work done by the IWW and the SP.
The ILD's most prominent cases were defense of textile
strikers in 1926 in Passaic, N.J., and the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.
It defended workers regardless of party affiliation through joint work
with Wobblies, ex-Wobblies, and other independents. By the end of 1926
the ILD had 156 branches with 20,000 members and the endorsement of
unions and other groups with a combined membership of 75,000.
But the ILD and other mass work would soon fall victim
to even more dangerous trends in the Party and the International as
Stalin gained power. While the influence of battles within the Russian CP
on other parties was still obscured by the lies and distortions that were
replacing open and honest debate, it was clear that the U.S. CP was
descending into unprincipled factional warfare.
Factionalism, Cannon later wrote, had gone from being
a means to an end to an end in itself. Yet again Cannon stepped forward,
forming a "faction against factions," even though it meant
breaking with Foster and giving up a chance of winning a majority on
leadership bodies.
Cannon was drawing new lessons about principled
party-building methods: "I was already groping my way to the
conception, which later became a governing principle, that a correct
political line is more important than any organizational question,
including the question of party control."
Cannon urged his supporters to make decisions on the
issues, "regardless of who is for or against." The roots of the
new factionalism, said Cannon, were "the deadening conservatism of
American life, induced by the unprecedented boom of post-war American
capitalism, coinciding with the reactionary swing in Russia. ... It was difficult to be a
revolutionist in America in those days, to sustain agitation that brought
no response, to repeat slogans which found no echo."
What's more, "the American boom of that period,
carrying European capitalism with it to a new stabilization ... was the
prime influence generating the retreat to national reformism, and
therewith the rise of Stalinism.
"It was time for the party to re-examine its
prospects in the light of basic doctrine and to settle down for a siege;
to recognize the new, unfavorable situation, but not to mistake it for
permanence. The party needed a serious theoretical schooling, and a
historical perspective upon which to base a confident and patient work of
preparation for the future. But that was precisely what was
lacking."
Cannon was determined to remain true to his ideals,
and so was more aware of, if not immune to, those pressures. He looked at
himself and saw a former "footloose rebel" turning into a
comfortable occupant of a swivel chair. The picture disgusted him and
inspired a search for deeper answers. He found them in Trotsky's 1928
criticism of the Comintern's new draft program, which for the first time
provided a context for the American party's problems.
Efforts to spread Trotsky's ideas led to the expulsion
of Cannon and a handful of allies. This is the point at which Palmer ends
his first volume, and he has promised to pick up the tale in a second. We
look forward to it eagerly, for Palmer has told the story so far in a
manner fully and appropriately appreciative of his subject.
Speaking of those who survived unscathed from the
battles of these years, Cannon wrote of the "historical
exceptions" who remain faithful to the ideas of Marxism, which
"are continuous in their application and have been for a hundred
years."
The task "has never been to proclaim a new
revelation—there has been no lack of such Messiahs, and they have all
been lost in the shuffle—but to reinstate the old program and bring it up
to date."
Our task is to "keep the historical perspective
clear. This perspective reads: The stability of American capitalism is
only the transient appearance of things; the revolution of the American
workers is the true reality." That is the reality that Socialist
Action orients toward and the reason we carry on Cannon's legacy proudly.
Palmer's book is an important tool in preserving that legacy.
Other sources on Cannon in the years covered by
Palmer: Cannon's book, "The First Ten Years of American
Communism"; articles from which it was drawn are at www.marxists.org
/archive/cannon/works/ltrindex.htm; Cannon's "History of American
Trotskyism"; "James P. Cannon As We Knew Him," Pathfinder
Press; "James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American
Communism," Prometheus Research Library, at
www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/earlyyears/earlytoc.htm;
Cannon's article, "The Degeneration of the Communist Party," at
www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1954/ fych01.htm.
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