The Struggle for Marxism in the United States

[p037] “The struggle for Marxism in the United States =” FROM ALMOST THE first moment of its beginnings as a colony in the 1600s the United States has had a violent, tumultuous history. Struggle against the tuling class was never absent for long in any period of United States history. But rarely was this struggle a conscious one, for there was always a deep anti- pathy towards conscious thought, towards theory of any kind in the United States. As Engels comments in a letter to his close collaborator Sorge in 1886: *, .. from good historical reasons 'the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.”! The Americans were and are the most empirical of peoples on earth. Never having to struggle against feudal institutions and ideology this American empiricism generally did not even reach the level of theoretical defence that it did in England. Empiri- cism has existed here largely as an absence of conscious coherent thought rather than as a philo- sophical body of thought fought for against meta- physical thought. Lacking a conscious and logical approach towards theory does not mean that Americans were ever free from theory. Rather it meant that, without conscious effort, Americans con- tinued to hold the most discredited mumble-jumble of old and discarded theories pasted together in an eclectic manner to fit whatever practical project was at foot. 1. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. ' Correspondence, 1846-1895 (International Publishers, New York), p. 451. BY TIMVOHLFORTH Details from frescoes by Diego Rivera: Marx addresses the xbove him), Powderly (Knights of Labor), Silvis, Engels. pioneers of American Labour against the backdrop of the 'anel above: epic scenes from the class war, featuring Debs Haymarket massacre; lower left: J. Most, Henry George centre), De Leon (book in hand), Haywood (facing bayonet). Americat radicalism A— POPULISM The major stress of American radicalism is what we call Populism. Essentially this was a struggle of the great mass of the petty bourgeoisie against the largest capitalists and against the very logic of the market economy which has always kept this group in a weakened and impoverished state. Over and over again, since the days before the American Revolution, the very same demands have been raised. The enemy 1s always ‘Big Business’ and especially ‘The Banks’ and ‘Wall Street’. The basic demand is for cheap money through one gimmick or another which will aid the debtors and hurt the creditors. As time went on more radical demands, such as the nationalization of the banks and the utilities, were also added, but these demands were intended to accomplish the same purpose. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 This populist current has had great strength during different periods and has played an enormous iole in American history. The struggle against the ratification of the Constitution after the Revolu- tionary War in reality centred around this issue. The poor farmers and small artisans rallied to the Articles of Confederation and the autonomy of the local states; they used their control of these states to print large quantities of almost worthless currency which they used to pay off their debts. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 The commercial and banking interests succeeded in establishing the Constitution with its relatively centralised government only by circumventing the real will of the overwhelming majority of the population. The great Jacksonian movement based itself on the populist ideology though it utilised this in a highly demagogic manner. Jackson was able to fuse into one movement the artisans and journey- men of the Northern cities with the small farmers of the West and South, though he administered the government basically in the interests of the ever- dominant big business and commercial capitalists of the North-east. Populism flared up again in the Greenback movement, the silver standard movement which expressed itself almost simultaneously in Populism, Bryanism and Teddy Roosevelt’s Pro- gressivism. Even after World War I this populist outlsok found partial expression in La Follette’s Progressive Party, and appeared in an almost pure form in the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, the Non-Partisan Leagues of the Dakotas, and the ‘socialist? CCF in Saskatchewan and other Western provinces of Canada. Even today some of this spirit can be found in the National Farmers Organisation of Iowa and other Midwest agricultural states. Basically, then, populism was a struggle of the petty-bourgeoisie—primarily the small farmer, and secondly the artisan of the small town and city— against the very logic of the capitalist system which pitted. one small producer against another and sub- ordinated all to the few large industrial and financial capitalist concerns, traditionally concentrated in the North-east. Being a struggle against the very logic of the market economy populism fought a battle which could not be won. This being the case, populism had of necessity to have a false ideology. The populists had a classless outlook. Theirs was the battle of the poor against the rich, the battle for an equality which was utopian under capitalism. Thus it is understandable that populism paid little attention to theory and never had any real understanding of the American economy and society. Empiricism sprinkled eclectic- ally with idealism (expressed in utopian dreams of small communist communities free from the terrible pressures of the ever-present market) was the ideolo- gical mixture of American. radicalism for over two ‘hundred years,

[p038] “The struggle for Marxist in the United States FROM ALMOST THE first moment of its beginnings as a colony in the 1600s the United States has had a violent, tumultuous history. Struggle against the ruling class was never absent for long in any period of United States history. But rarely was this struggle a conscious one, for there was always a deep anti- pathy towards conscious thought, towards theory of any kind in the United States. As Engels comments in a letter to his close collaborator Sorge in 1886: *, .. from good historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.”! The Americans were and are the most empirical of peoples on earth. Never having to struggle against feudal institutions and ideology this American empiricism generally did not even reach the level of theoretical defence that it did in England. Empiri- cism has existed here largely as an absence of conscious coherent thought rather than as a philo- sophical body of thought fought for against meta- physical thought. Lacking a conscious and logical approach towards theory does not mean _ that Americans were ever free from theory. Rather it meant that, without conscious effort, Americans con- tinued to hold the most discredited mumble-jumble of old and discarded theories pasted together in an eclectic manner to fit whatever practical project was at foot. 1. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Correspondence, 1846-1895 (International Publishers, New York), p. 451. a] te i. i" BY TINVOHLFORTH +. Details from frescoes by Diego Rivera: Marx addresses the tbove him), Powderly (Knights of Labor), Silvis, Engels. pioneers of American Labour against the backdrop of the 'anel above: epic scenes from the class war, featuring Debs Haymarket massacre; lower left: J. Most, Henry George centre), De Leon (book in hand), Haywood (facing bayonet). . Americai radicalism A— POPULISM The major stress of American radicalism is what we call Populism. Essentially this was a struggle of the great mass of the petty bourgeoisie against the largest capitalists and against the very logic of the market economy which has always kept this group in a weakened and impoverished state. Over and over again, since the days before the American Revolution, the very same demands have been raised. The enemy is always “Big Business’ and especially ‘The Banks’ and ‘Wall Street’, The basic demand is for cheap money through one gimmick or another which will aid the debtors and hurt the creditors, As time went on more radical demands, such as the nationalization of the banks and the utilities, were also added, but ‘these demands were intended to accomplish the same purpose. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 This populist current has had great strength during different periods and has played an enormous iole in American history, The struggle against the ratification of the Constitution after the Revolu- tionary War in reality centred around this issue. The poor farmers and small artisans rallied to the Articles of Confederation and the autonomy of the local states; they used their control of these states to print large quantities of almost worthless currency which they used to pay off their debts. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 The commercial and banking interests succeeded in establishing the Constitution with its relatively centralised government only by circumventing the real will of the overwhelming majority of the population. The great Jacksonian movement based itself on the populist ideology though it utilised this in a highly demagogic manner. Jackson was able to fuse into one movement the artisans and journey- men of the Northern cities with the small farmers of the West and South, though he administered the government basically in the interests of the ever- dominant big business and commercial capitalists of the North-east. Populism flared up again in the Greenback movement, the silver standard movement which expressed itself almost simultaneously in Populism, Bryanism and Teddy Roosevelt’s Pro- gressivism. Even after World War I this populist outlook found partial expression in La Follette’s Progressive Party, and appeared in an almost pure form in the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, the Non-Partisan Leagues of the Dakotas, and the ‘socialist? CCF in Saskatchewan and other Western provinces of Canada. Even today some of this spirit can be found in the National Farmers Organisation of Iowa and other Midwest agricultural states. Basically, then, populism was a struggle of the petty-bourgeoisie—primarily the small farmer, and secondly the artisan of the small town and city— against the very logic of the capitalist system which pitted one small producer against another and sub- ordinated all to the few large industrial and financial capitalist concerns, traditionally concentrated in the North-east. Being a struggle against the very lozic of the market economy populism fought a battle which could not be won. This being the case, populism had of necessity to have a false ideology. The populists had a classless outlook. Theirs was the battle of the poor against the rich, the battle for an equality which was utopian under capitalism. Thus it is understandable that populism paid little attention to theory and never had any real understanding of the American economy and society. Empiricism sprinkled eclectic- ally with idealism (expressed in utopian dreams of small communist communities free from the terrible pressures of the ever-present market) was the ideolo- gical mixture of American. radicalism for over two hundred years,

[p039] 126 B— GROPINGS TOWARD It was within this political and ideological frame- work that the American working class grew up. The history of the American working class during the nineteenth century is a history of one hopeful effort after another to assert class independence in developing the rudiments of class organisation and elementary class consciousness, only to have the whole effort swallowed up and destroyed by the latest outburst of populist fever. In the 1830s, a full decade before Marx and Engels were to write the Communist Manifesto, the workers in the North-eastern cities of the United States formed their own political parties, the Workingmen’s ‘Parties, on the (basis of an elementary class consciousness. Over one hundred years have passed since these parties were formed and still today the class as a whole has not yet reached this level of class consciousness. Of course various petty- bourgeois do-gooders sought to infuse these parties with all varieties of utopian socialist nonsense but this is not what really destroyed this first large-scale outburst of consciousness on the part of an infant class. It was destroyed by the outbreak of Jackson- ian ‘democracy’ which swept the Northern cities and absorbed these parties into the Democratic Party, ‘developing a base among urban workers which this capitalist party enjoys to this day. In the 1860s, following the Civil War, the National Labor Union, headed iby one William H. Silvis, flourished ‘briefly. This was the first great attempt of American workers to build an organisation en- compassing the class as a whole to fight for its own independent interests. The times were more auspi- cious for the class than during the 1830s, as the period following the-Civil War was one of great industrial growth and a tremendous increase in the size of the working class. But the NLU got itself involved in American political life and by 1872 ended up ibeing merged into the Greenback Party, the contemporaty expression of populism. In the 1870s and 80s, during a period marked by great strike actions of a most violent character, the Knights of Labor came into existence and thrived for a period. But by the late 1880s most of the craft unionists had left it and gone into the new non-radical American Federation of Labor; the remnants were merged into the Populist Party in 1892. The first real, clear break of any sizeable section of American workers from this petty-bourgeois populist tradition took, naturally enough, an anarcho-syndicalist form. The formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS was an extremely important turning point in the whole history of the American working class. The IWW was an indigenous organisation of revolution- ary American workers. It was the organisational expression of the great strikes of the class which had taken place in the latter part of the nineteenth century during that great period when the “Robber Barons’ were amassing their fortunes on the backs of the workers. The significance of the IWW lies in the fact that it represented the highest stage of class conscious- ness reached by the native American proletariat. Essentially it represented on a higher level that outburst of class independence which occurred earLer in the Workingmen’s Parties, the National Labor Union, and the Knights of Labor. Its essential idzas were very simple—the basic rudiments of class consciousness. “ There are basically two classes: the capitalist class which owns the means of production and runs the government, and the working class which is propertyless. The working class must band together in a common organisation and struggle uncompromisingly against the capitalist class until it brings down the whole economic and social system and builds a new society on the basis of the tule of the working class. The IWW, however, rather than adapting to populist type politics like its predecessors, rejected politics altogether, a rather natural reaction under the circumstances. The central weakness of the IWW was not this rejection of politics but its rejection of theory. On ithis score no other revolutionary working-class organisation in history anywhere in the world was to equal the WW. At least the French syndicalists defended their rejection of politics theoretically. The ITWW presented its essential ‘theory’ in a three-paragraph preamble to its Constitution. And they really never said anything more than what was in this statement. Many historians see the ARL and the TWW as polar opposites—the former the conservative ‘business unionist’ organisation of the privileged craft unionists and the latter the epitome of class-warfare radical extremism. In reality the two organisations had much in common. Both shared a rejection of theory. Both felt that the working class could solve its problems iby itself solely on the field of trade union organisation and did not need to really under- stand American and world capitalism and the long struggle internationally to build a working-class movement. One in a reformist way and the other in a revolutionary way expressed the level of the American working class at the turn of the century - FOURTH INTERNATIONAL. AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p040] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. —its consciousness of the need for class organisation ibut its rejection of the need to understand the society in which it lived. By perpetuating this empiricist outlook ‘both organisations showed the primitive 127 nature of the working class in the United States which, despite its heroic class battles, had failed as yet to break theoretically from the method and theory of its oppressors. C — THE FOREIGN-BORN We have discussed briefly two trends in American radicalism: the dominant populist rebellion of the petty-bourgeoisie and the nascent empirical groping towards class independence by the working class which was constantly being swallowed up in populism. There was a third factor in the deve- lopment of the American working class that it is difficult to over-estimate—the foreign-born worker. From the 1860s on there was a constant wave of immigration from Europe to the United States. With rare exceptions, such as the Scandinavians in the Midwest, these immigrants settled in the large cities of the North East and Great Lakes region and provided the ‘basic manpower for the growth of American industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. The most significant fact to understand about American development, anda fact least understood by historians of American labour, is that the American industrial worker was first of all a foreign-born worker who in most cases could not speak a word of the language of the country he lived in. As early as 1872 F. A. Sorge described the American working class at the Hague Conference of the First Inter- national as follows: ‘The working class in America consists 1. of Irishmen, 2. of Germans, 3. of Negroes, and only 4. of Americans.’ We must face the fact that as far as the Northern industrial working class was concerned, Sorge was speaking the truth. Engels understood the deep significance of this for the development of the American working class. This is the way he stated it in a letter to Herman Schlueter, editor of the New York Volkszeitung: Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native-born workers. Up to 1848 one could speak of a perma- nent native-born working class only as an exception. The small beginnings of one in the cities in the East still could always hope to become farmers or bourgeois. Now such a class has developed and has also organized itself on trade union lines to a great extent. But it still occupies an aristocratic position and wherever possible leaves the ordinarily badly 2. Gerth, Hans. The First International—Minutes of the Hague Congress of 1872 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), p. 197. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 paid occupations to the immigrants, only a small portion of whom enter the aristocratic trade unions. But these immigrants are divided into nationalities, which understand neither each other nor, for the most part, the language of the country. And your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian government how to play off one nationality against the other; Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish and each one against the other, so that differences in workers’ standards of living exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard of elsewhere.3 This situation had a deep distorting effect on the development of the American working class. The early working-class movements we have briefly described were organisations of the native working class and largely hostile to foreign-born workers. The NLU and Knights of Labor were openly opposed to immigration and closed the doors of their organizations to many immigrants. The IWW, while formally having a good position on this question, was deeply infected with anti-Chinese poison on the West Coast. Most important, the IWW was basically an organisation of a section of the native working class and in this respect was similar to the AFL. While the TWW organised the Western miners, the agricultural migrant workers and the lumberjacks, the AFL organised the Eastern skilled workers. Except for rare occasions which did not result in permanent organisation, both groups were incapable of organising the industrial working class which was almost entirely made up of foreign- born. The IWW, to its credit, led great strikes of foreign-born workers in Lawrence, Mass., and Patterson, N.J., in the period just before World War I, but these strikes did not lead to a permanent organisation. Much the same. can ‘be said for William Z. Foster’s AFiL-backed efforts with the steel workers in Chicago a little later. There cannot be the slightest doubt that this antagonism between native and foreign born workers was a potent force in pushing the native worker time and time again into the mire of populism—that is to seek an ally in his own petty-bourgeoisie on the basis of a petty- bourgeois programme, rather than to turn to his fellow worker with a different language and culture. 3. Marx. op. cit., pp. 496-497.

[p041] 128 STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. D— MARXISM BEFORE WORLD WAR It was in this kind of political situation which had grown up on what Trotsky called ‘the virgin, unhistorical soil of America’,4 that efforts were made from the late 1860s on to build a conscious Marxist movement in the United States. The first Marxists in the United States were German immigrants, many of whom had gone through the 1848 Revolution in Germany and had come into contact with Marxism in the old country. The leading German Marxist in the United States was F. A. Sorge, a close confidant of Marx and Engels who played an important role within the First International as a solid supporter of Marx during a difficult period. The first big crisis within the American section of the International was highly symptomatic of the problems that were to plague Marxism in the United States through the early years of the American Communist Party. A split developed between an English-speaking section led by one Victoria Wood- hull and the German-speaking section led by Sorge. The struggle between the two sections was to take up a good deal of time at the Hague Conference of the International in 1872. Mrs. Woodhull had achieved a certain notoriety in the United States as an outspoken exponent of free love. Her ‘section’ was made up almost entirely of native-born middle- class reformers active in multitudinous causes like free love, feminism, spiritualism and temperance, as well as running their private ‘businesses on the side. This section disagreed with the statement in the Communist Manifesto that ‘The emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.’ They felt it was the task of Mrs. Woodhull and friends. Sorge did not feel that Mrs. Woodhull’s views would go over very well with the Irish workers who were the people the International needed primarily to reach at that time. Needless to say the International rejected Woodhull’s group and recognised the Sorge group.5 Thus we see that the English-speaking base of the first Marxist group in the United States lacked a serious proletarian content. The solid base for the International was among the foreign-born workers, primarily Germans. But it was soon discovered that this group itself had serious weaknesses, weaknesses which were to mark virtually all foreign-born Marxist groups in the United States for the next quarter of a century. These German-speaking 4. Trotsky, Leon. Marxism in the United States (Workers Party Publication, 1947), p. 37. 5. Gerth, op. cit., p. 195-199, 263-268, Marxists were mainly interested in Europe. Their ideas, like themselves, never went beyond being European imports, But theory cannot develop inside a small group isolated from the real class struggle going on in one’s country. Thus these Marxist groups turned Marxism into a sterile dogma and refused to learn the English language and in any serious way take part in the life of the working class as a whole in the country. Engels, of course, understood this situation and wrote a number of letters to correspondents in the United States urging the Germans to break out of their isolation and to play the critical role of bringing revolutionary theory into the mass move- ment of the American working class. For instance, he writes in 1886: I think also the K of L a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh- poohed from without but to be revolutionized from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in the face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, a kind of alleinseligmachendes (necessary to salvation) dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. . . . What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory—if they undersiand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848—to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische (actual) starting points as such and work it gradu- ally up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought in the words of the Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present.6 This, I am afraid, did not take place. Rather a few native-born intellectuals joined the organisation, later called the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and themselves adapted to and developed the sectarianism of the German immigrants. In this way De Leonism was born. It is inevitable that in a country as empirical as the United States will develop both a political tendency which divorces thought from action, by devoting itself solely to action, like the IWW,. and an organisation which accomplishes the same thing by doing the exact reverse, like the SLP. Neither trend was anywhere near the real Marxist method in which theory and action are constantly and at every moment a unity, each enriching the other. - - 6. Marx. op. cit., p. 453. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p042] vo } ‘ STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. 129 E— THE SOCIALIST PARTY The Socialist Party, which grew up between 1900 and World War I, was perhaps the world’s most peculiar socialist organisation. Needless to say it has been the world’s least understood one because of its unique nature. Many seek to view the SP as an American reflection of the great social democratic parties of Europe which broke up over World War I and the Russian Revolution. Not only was the party as a whole quite different from these European parties, so too the left wing within it was very, very different from similar left wings in Europe. This is extremely important, for it was out of this left wing that the Communist Party emerged and this party, too, was quite different in critical aspects from most of the European Communist Parties. The Socialist Party was, in fact, a loose com- bination of all the trends in American radicalism which had preceded it. Had it been simply a sizeable working-class party which had become bureaucratised and conservatised like the European parties, then certainly a sizeable section of the party would have survived the war. But it was far broader, more heterogeneous and unstable than this, and there- fore virtually nothingof the SP survived World War I. The dominant ingredient in the SP during the period of its greatest strength—around the time of the 1912 election when it got almost 900,000 votes— was populism. With the collapse of the regular Populist Party many populists flooded the SP. The largest votes for the party in 1912 came from pre- dominantly agrarian Midwestern and Western states. In Oklahoma, for instance, the SP held large revival- type tent meetings throughout the rural areas and it was this kind of appeal that marked much of the work in such areas. It was the turn of the populists to other parties after 1912 that did much to con- tribute to the decline of the party. There was also a legitimate reformist working-class trend within the party led. by men like Victor Berger of Milwaukee and Morris Hillquit of New York. The primary base for this trend was an older generation of immigrant workers, like the Germans, who carried over socialist traditions from Europe but who had, by the 1900s, achieved a more privileged position within the American working class when contrasted with the new immigration from the Slavic countries and Southern Europe. One commentator has claimed, not without a certain justice, that the right wing of the SP was more working-class in composition than the left wing.7 This was certainly true when one realises that the 7. Weinstein, James. ‘Socialism’s Hidden Heritage: Scholarship Reinforces Political Mythology’, Studies on the Left (Vol. 3, No. 4, Fall 1963). FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 populist sections of the party generally supported the left wing. There was a third radical trend within the SP which represented a sort of amalgam of the sectarianism of the SLP and the syndicalism of the IWW. ‘Only in America’ could such opposite out- looks as extreme rigid sectarian Marxists and absolute opponents of all ‘politics’ get along so well. They wrote for the same journals and in many cases one and the same individual espoused both causes. The main plank they rallied around was a rather ill-defined concept taken from the Dutch ultra-lefts called ‘mass action’. Adding to the already confused situation was the influx of foreign speaking socialists into the SP especially just before and during World War I. These foreign language groups came in as separate foreign language federations with their own publica- tions and internal life. They maintained their affiliation with the Socialist Parties in their native lands and divided between left and right during the war along the lines of the divisions within the native parties in Europe. In 1917 35 per cent of the SP membership was in these foreign language federa- tions and by 1919 the figure had risen to 53 per cent.8 Sitting on top of all this was Eugene V. Debs, the great spokesman for the party. Debs was, of course, no theoretician. He had learned his rudimentary Marxism from the popularising pam- phlets of Kautsky, never reading Marx himself. Ideologically he represented the same stage of consciousness as did the IWW. His ideas were the elementary recognition of class division and his programme was the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class. But to how this could be achieved he gave little thought. There was also a strong populist element in all his speeches and in many ways all sections of the party could find something in Debs that they felt close to.9 But American Marxism was to need more than the pamphlets of Kautsky, the heroic class battles of the Wobblies, the dogmas of the De Leonists, and certainly the money schemes of the populists. What was needed was exactly what Engels called for in 1886. Real living Marxism had to be taken into the great mass movements of the American working class, foreign-born and English-speaking alike, and a conscious vanguard for the class as a whole created. This is what the Communist Party set out to accomplish. 8. Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Com- munism (Viking Press, New York, 1957), p. 137. 9. Debs, Eugene V. Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs (Hermitage Press, New York, 1948),

[p043] 130 STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. ll. The early Communist Party in the USA. Detail from a mural by Diego Rivera. Bottom row, left to right: Foster, Lovestone, Cannon, Ruthenberg, Wolfe. Top row: Stalin, Marx, Lenin, Engels, Trotsky and below them Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin A — 1919-1924 The Russian Revolution had a deep impact amcng American radicals just as it did through- out the world. October showed the empirically minded American socialists that the working class could come to power. The Russian party and its history were generally unknown to the native American radicals and its theoretical ideas were way, way beyond the comprehension of any of the radical socialists in the United States in that period. But the concrete act could be seen and in a general way understood. The challenge of October for American socialists was that, once recognising and supporting the revolutionary act and what emerged from it, would they be able to understand the theoretical development which produced the kind of party which carried through October? The American Communist Party!° was to carry over all the contradictions which had beset American working-class politics since the days of the birth of Marxism in the United States in the late 1860s. In 10. Throughout its early period the Communist move- ment in the United States went through a number of splits and reunifications appearing under a number of different names: Communist Labor Party, United Communist Party, Workers Party, etc. As this is not a party history we are simply using the term ‘Com- munist Party’ to designate the Communist Movement as a whole whatever its specific name or names may have been at the time. this sense the CP was the legitimate heir of the American radical tradition. Certainly all other pre- tenders to‘ that titlke—the TWW, the SLP and SP— soon passed into oblivion. However, as a legitimate heir of American radicalism, the evolution of the CP was significantly different from the traditional pattern in Europe and this difference is of consider- able importance in understanding the struggle for Marxism in the United States. Most European Communist parties were born out of rebellion against the degeneration of the major Marxist parties of Europe—the degeneration of the Second International as a whole. The American Socialist Party had never really been a Marxist party and, while it went through a number of crises, it would be incorrect to see its eyolution as a degenerative one. Rather it would be proper to see the Communist Party as an outgrowth of a socialist party which itself was in the throes of being created. Thus the American left wingers who formed the Communist Party lacked the all-important back- ground in struggle for Marxism against revisionism which many of the leading figures of the European parties had. The formation of the CP in 1919 was an attempt to create a Marxist party by people who had almost no knowledge of Marxism itself. Quite naturally the overwhelming bulk of the Communist Party in its early years were members of foreign-language federations, In fact these foreign- FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p044] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. language groups made up at least 90 per cent of the membership in this period.!!_ Thus, in large part, the creation of the CP was a reflection of the impact of October on foreign-born workers, many of whom came from countries directly affected like Russia, Finland, Latvia, etc. In this respect the early Com- munist Party reflected in its composition the problems of the actual composition of the industrial working class. In 1872 Sorge saw the American working class as composed primarily of Irishmen and Germans. In 1886 Engels noted that while native-born workers held the aristocratic positions in labour (some of them now second generation Irishmen and Germans) the poorer workers were new immigrants. By World War I this situation had become more severe. Now the immigrants were coming from the East European and Southern European countries by the million. While some of these immigrants had been workers in Europe and carried over to America European socialist traditions, the bulk of the immigrants by 1900 were of peasant stock, who not only had to become assimilated into a new country but into a new class position as well. This was particularly true of the Poles and Italians who entered the country in such immense numbers in this period. These language, cultural and even class differences in background of the American industrial working class were, in our opinion, the major factor in pre- venting the development of a class-conscious working class in this country for several generations to come. Only in the 1930s were these divisions overcome to the point where basic industry could be organis*d on a trade union level. It was, however, the thin strata of native-born English-speaking radicals who gave the early American Communist Party its first political ideas and who were to become the leadership of the party. Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey) contributed more than any of the early CP leaders to the ideological development of the party. Fraina in his early youth was a member of the SP. Then he spent a good period in the SLP where he received his basic education in Marxist theory (De Leon’s version thereof). By 1912 he developed strong sympathies for the IWW and this led in time to a separation from the SLP. When he rejoined the SP to become active in its left wing in 1917 his ideas were a not- so-unusual mixture of SLP dogmatism and IWW syndicalism. It was with this theoretical outlook that he sought to understand the Russian Revolution and it was within this framework that he prosely- tised for the Bolsheviks within the SP left wing. 11. Draper. op. cit., p. 190. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 131 The central theoretical doctrine of the CP at the time of its birth was Mass Action. This concept was imported from Holland where it was first formulated by such ultra-lefts as Pannekoek. Essentially this concept held that the working class spontaneously and instinctively would rise up in massive class actions, such as a general strike (but also. including in some ill-defined way ‘political mass action’) and overthrow the whole capitalist system. Considering this it was of course only proper for true revolu- tionaries to propagate the full programme of revolu- tionary overturn at every and all occasions and any emphasis on immediate demands was ‘sewer social- ism’. Parliamentary action was seen as permissible only if one utilised parliament to advocate immediate insurrection. On the trade union level reformist unions like the AFL must be destroyed as agents of the ruling class and either the [WW was to be supported or we must call for new revolutionary unions which would again reflect the mass action of the class. It was within this framework that the early Com- munists saw the Russian Revolution. Fraina dec- jared it to be a demonstration of ‘the meaning and power of ‘Mass Action’!2 The acting secretary of the IWW at the time stated: ‘Bolshevism was but the Russian name of IWW.”!3 The most important strain within. native-born American sections of the early CP were those radicals who had some experience in the Anierican class struggle. These included William Z. Foster (who joined the party a couple of years after its initial: formation), Earl Browder, and James P. Cannon. These men had a syndicalist outlook—Foster and Browder as syndicalists working within the AFL and Cannon as a leading member of the IWW. Their background typified the native American working class. Foster had bummed around the country from one end to another working here and there on this and that, though doing his most significant trade union work in Chicago. Browder and Cannon caine from Kansas which grew as many populists as it did ears of corn. They were deeply empirical practical people with no theoretical background of any kind. To the extent they held any theories at the time of their entry into the CP they were undoubtedly of the level of the views summarised earlier. They reflected the consciousness of the native American workers which had been expressed earlier in the Knights of Labor and the IWW and in the great class struggles of the past period. While these men, especially Foster, had important 12. Ibid., p. 90. 13. Ibid., p. 111.

[p045] 132 experience in seeking to organise foreign-born industrial workers, generally this native-born stratum of workers in the early CP reflected a very different America from the America of the Jewish worker in a New York garment sweat shop or a Hungarian or Bohemian worker in a Pittsburgh steel mill, or a Polish worker on an auto assembly line in Detroit. When Jim Cannon thought of his father he thought of American populism, of the great expanding American West and the struggle of the farmers and other ‘small people’ against the banking interests of the East. When a Polish worker thought of his father he thought of a downtrodden peasant living in illiterate existence in the countryside of Poland. These are two very, very different worlds. The Fosters, Cannons and Browders did not repre- sent the American working class as a whole in the 1920s. They did, however, represent a very signifi- cant section of it. The foreign-language groups, in a distorted fashion as we shall see, represented another section of it. today—the first time in American history that a more or less culturally cohesive class has emerged—is a bit different from both these trends. The footloose meanderings of the Wobblies, their corn-fed rural- based populist cultural and political background—all this is quite alien to most American industrial workers. To the younger generation the life around the Polish or Slovenian home with its good com- panionship and polkas and its old-world culture is also quite alien. The problems facing the fledgling Communist Party were immense. A party without any serious Marxist background, it needed to absorb the meaning of the whole history of the Marxist movement since Marx’s time. It was not enough to simply adhere to the Bolshevik Revolution and to call for insurrection here. What was needed was the creation in the United States of the kind of party which led the Russian workers to power. This was not a matter of mimicking the external forms of the Bolsheviks within the United States. It was rather a matter of developing a party capable of understanding Marxist theory and developing this theory in the course of the concrete struggle of the American workers—as an integral part of that struggle. The equipment available to the American CP for this task was very meagre indeed. They had almost no theoreticians of any kind and those they had were trained in the sterile school of ultra-leftism, as distant from Marxist method as those who openly opposed all theory. Not a single one of the native American Communists who had any experience in the American class struggle had any real interest in or understanding of anything but the most The American working class _ STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. rudimentary theory. Furthermore the critical section of the working class the Communists had to pene- trate—the industrial workers in basic industry—were divided into a number of conflicting nationality groups. What the early American Communists needed to do was to pull together out of all this a reasonably cohesive body of revolutionists—no matter how small—willing to learn theoretically and to begin to come to grips with the whole problem of developing a class movement in the United States both theoretic- ally and practically. To accomplish this task it was necessary for at least some of the Communist Party leaders to really ‘go to school with the Russians’— that is to learn the basic method of Marxism from the Bolsheviks and from the Communist Interna- tional as a whole. The native-born working-class elements needed to develop an understanding and appreciation of the importance of Marxist theory. The intellectuals needed to develop a deeper under- standing of the American working class by listening to those in the party who had played a role in the struggles of the class. The foreign-born workers needed first of all to learn English and ‘begin to play a role as American workers rather than simply being extensions of revolutionary movements on the Continent. Both the English-speaking trade unionists and the English-speaking intellectuals needed to learn about and reach the foreign-born worker with the aid of the foreign-born workers in the party. . The early history of the CP was a history of constant struggle, split and reunification, and the various sections which made up the organisation battled with each other for control of the organisa- tion. From the beginning the foreign-language federation leaders sought to control the organisation. They looked down upon the English-speaking party members as inferior politically and theoretically, as untrustworthy and opportunist. However, the foreign-language federation leaderships themselves were quite similar to the early German Marxist groups in the United States. Isolated from their homeland, the federations were essentially circles of radicals with their hearts elsewhere. They did little to reach even workers of their own language in industry and devoted themselves rather to main- taining their small fraternal organisations in the foreign language ghettos of the major cities. They advocated the most extreme of revolutionary theories—but they advocated these views safely within the confines of the foreign circle existence. They were, in reality, quite conservative organisa- tions which needed to be broken down if the CP was to reach foreign language workers in struggle in ‘basic industry itself. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p046] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. The native working-class leaders were as anti- theoretical as the foreign-language sections accused them of being. In the whole first period none of them showed any real signs of theoretical develop- ment. They did have a much better feel for American reality than the federation leaders and for this reason generally received the support of the Communist International in the internal disputes of the time. These were the people who led the fight to take the CP out of its self-imposed under- ground existence, to begin serious trade union work, and to develop a programme to ‘bring the basic idea of class politics to the American workers. The early Communist Party learned theoretically from the Russians. It learned certain lessons so well that American radicalism was never to be the same again. Basically the Russians were able to break the early American Communists from their sectarian ultra-left outlook. They taught them to work in the traditional organisations of the class despite their conservatism and to fight there for a class line. They taught them the importance of transitional demands such as the Farmer-Labor Party and broke them cut of the dichotomy of immediate demands as con- trasted to the full programme. They taught them, in other words, how to approach the class in develop- ment, how to represent the future within the present, as Engels had told them in the 1880s. By and large the Americans learned these things. Whatever sectarian or opportunist errors American radicals were to make in the years to come they would be within a different, more advanced frame- work. The Americans learned these things from the Russians because they could see their practical value for the effective building of an organisation in the United States. When Americans went to inter- national gatherings there was only one question any of them expressed any real interest in—the American question. The-great revolutionary developments in Germany, the internal evolution of the USSR and the beginnings of the great battles within the Bolshevik party, the struggles to create parties in Italy, France, England and to properly judge the tempo of the development of capitalism in Europe and on a worldwide basis, and in a later period the great Chinese Revolution— these events, though dutifully reported in the Communist Press, were never really understood by the Americans. The Americans played no real role in the internal theoretical life of the Communist International, The great educational experience of the first four con- FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 133 gresses of the CI, unparalleled in importance since the death of Marx, left the Americans largely un- touched. This is understandable considering the whole past of American radicals. There can ibe no doubt that the Russian leaders understood this basic weakness of the Americans and did their very best to encourage healthy theoretical development of the Americans. Theodore Draper makes a passing reference to one such example of this. In 1920 Louis Fraina came to the USSR, the first intellectual directly in the leadership of the party to make the trip. Fraina was, un- doubtedly, the most gifted theoretically of the political leaders during the first years of the party. Ruthenberg was little more than a capable admini- strator and Cannon was a mass worker with a deep disdain for intellectuals and theory. Fraina had two conversations directly with Lenin. In the fist conversation Lenin urged upon him the concept of a Labour party, which he rejected. In the second discussion Lenin interestingly shifted the area of discussion. ‘During the second interview, which took place while the Red Army was knocking on the gates of Warsaw, Lenin tried to impress Fraina with the need for philosophy in the revolutionary move- ment."!4 Sadly Fraina was soon to leave the organi- sation and whatever impact Lenin made on Fraina was not to be transmitted to the American party. This conversation was, in our opinion, an extremely important event. All Lenin needed was one conversation with Fraina on the labour party to see what was basically missing in the outlook of the leadership of the American Communist Patty. The party had not the slightest understanding of the basic method of thought of Marxism. It was one thing for the Americans to empirically apply this or that proposal of the Russians to their work in the United States. It was quite another thing tor the Americans to break with a way of thinking more deeply rooted in American consciousness than in the consciousness of any other people on the globe. But as long as the Americans borrowed a correct recipe from the Russians without really learning how to cook, they might very well end up borrowing quite a few incorrect recipes in the time to come. This is, of course, just what happened. And every leader, every faction within the early Communist Party was responsible for this outcome. 14. Ibid., p. 253.

[p047] 134 STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. B— FROM 1924 TO 1928 By 1924 the American Communist Party was still very far from being a Marxist party. It had made substantial progress with the aid of the CI. It had broken out of underground existence; it had dis- pensed with much of the ultra-left baggage inherited from the old left wing; the foreign language federa- tions were no longer the power they once were. But lacking real maturity and ‘devoid of any serious theoretical development, the party was torn asunder by a deep factional division between Ruthenberg- Lovestone on one side and Foster-Cannon on the other. This factional battle was an all-consuming project and the factionalists were concerned above all else with the progress of the faction. Meetings of the International became places primarily devoted to manoeuvres to get international support for one’s faction. - Of course there was a certain political basis for the factions. Basically the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group were the ‘politicals’ in part supported by the remnants of the foreign-language groups while ihe Foster-Cannon group were the ‘trade unionists’ having the support of the bulk of the native workers in the party. Thus in a distorted way the old dichotomies of American radicalism were perpe- ‘tuated. On concrete American issues the Foster- Cannon formation generally had a better feel of things—especially when Pepper, a footloose -inter- national meddler, called the tune in the Ruthenberg camp. The 1925 convention of the party put the Foster- Cannon faction in control of the party. But this victory was to be shortlived, for Stalin, through a personal agent Gusev, rearranged the leadership in such a way as to give a majority to Ruthenberg- Lovestone. This development was the beginning of a new chaper in the American Communist Party— the Stalinization of the party. The Stalinization of the American Communist Party was to be a much easier task than the Stalinization of the European parties. These parties, by and large, had certain Marxist traditions going back before 1919. This was certainly true of the German, Polish, and Bulgarian parties. Further- more the leaderships of these parties had played more decisive roles in the internal life of the CI before 1924, They were thus much more developed theoretically, had a much deeper understanding of Marxism, than the small American party. E. H. Carr notes this difference when he comments on the American party: ‘in the years between 1923 and 1926 it reflected with unusual precision the shifts and variations of the Comintern line’. this he attributes to ‘its remoteness from American political realities’.15 Considering that men like Foster and Cannon had a pretty good grasp of American reality in this period, it would be more proper to view this weakness of the CP in relationship to a changing CI as a reflection of the failure of the early American CP to develop theoretically. Needless to say hardly anyone in the CP under- stood in the least!© what was going on in Russia. Lovestone, who was to succeed Ruthenberg as head of that faction when Ruthenberg died, simply latched on to the current head of the CI, Bukharin, hoping in this way to maintain his control over the American CP. Foster twice sought to oppose the interference of the CI into American party affairs but his opposition was an empirically based one. Cannon broke with Foster primarily because Foster wished to oppose Comintern policy. From 1925 on, the factional strife within the CP was aggravated by the Comintern which was seeking to wear down the two opposing factions, not trusting either of them. Whatever political differences had existed between the factions prior to 1925 quickly disappeared and the overriding issue was power— and power depended on getting the nod from the Kremlin. In time Stalin was able to either break or expel the prominent leaders of the party and create a new Stalinist leadership out of the remnants of the former factions around Browder. This leadership survived solely ‘by supporting every twist and turn of international Kremlin policy. The Stalinization of the American Communist Party was not a matter simply of the degeneration of a healthy Marxist party. It was rather a process of deformation of a party at a very early stage of developing into a Marxist party. The challenge facing the few Marxists who emerged from the CP in 1928 was not to go back to the healthy days of the early CP. It was rather to begin again, on the basis of the OP’s early work, the task of creating a Marxist party, a task not yet completed in even an elementary form in the United States. 15. Carr, E. H. Socialism in One Country 1924-26, vor 3, Part 1 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London, 1964), p. 237. 16. There were, however, two minor exceptions— Ludwig Lore and Max Eastman. Lore, the editor of a German paper, was personally friendly with Trotsky and supported him in 1924. Shortly thereafter he was expelled from the party with the support of those with whom he was in a factional bloc at the time—Foster and Cannon. Eastman, a well-known intellectual figure in the United States, was the sole propagator of Trotsky’s views from 1925 until the Cannon expulsion in 1928. Eastman, however, was never a real party man and played no role at all in the CP. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p048] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. 135 C — JAMES P. CANNON It is very important for the purposes of this study that we pay special attention to one particular figure in the early CP, James P. Cannon. While the other leaders disappeared from American radical politics or played the despicable role of tools of the Kremlin, Cannon was to play an important part in the con- tinuing struggle to create a Marxist party after the Stalinization of the CP. Jim Cannon was an American-born radical from that great homeland of agrarian radicalism, Kansas. His father had been successively a supporter of the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Bryanites, and then the Socialist Party. Cannon joined the [WW and received within the IWW his basic training in the class struggle. The IWW experience taught him two basic things. First and foremost was his deep confidence in the revolutionary potentiality of the American working class. Second was an under- standing of the necessity to organise the class into an effective revolutionary instrument to battle the capitalists. This he felt at the time could be dune simply with the [WW’s ‘One Big Union’. It is easy to understand the tremendous attraction the Russian Revolution had for Cannon and why he thus became a part of the left wing in the SP which soon emerged as a Communist Party. What is more critical, however, is exactly what concretely Cannon learned from the Russian Revolution. Interestingly Cannon’s own writings in the 1950s, in which he reminisces over his own past and the past history of American radicalism, reveal the essential lessons which Cannon, as well as others. drew from the Russian experience. Cannon’s long essay on Debs shows this very clearly.!7_ In a section entitled “Debs and Lenin’ he contrasts the two leaders to show what he feels was the greatest weakness in pre-war American radicalism expressing itself even in the greatest leader of the pre-war period—Debs. Lenin, by contrast, illustrates for Cannon that essential new element which he and others learned from the Russian experience—that essential new ingredient which he added o his outlook when joining the Communist Party. Lenin’s great contribution was—the disciplined combat vanguard party, what Cannon called ‘Lenin’s theory of the party’.!8 The same essential point is made 17. Cannon, James P. The First Ten Years of American Communism (Lyle Stuart, New York, 1962) ‘Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Movement of His Time’, pp. 245 fff. 18. Ibid., p. 275. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 in his companion essay on the IWW.!9 There is, of course, no question of the extreme importance of this lesson if it is really understood. The victory of October was made possible by the kind of party Lenin struggled to create for fifteen years. But this involves far more than a ‘theory of the party. To Lenin the organisational form of the party was at every moment directly related to the theoretical development of that party. It was precisely Lenin’s great struggle for Marxist method and theory which made possible the creation of a party capable of overthrowing capitalism. Lenin’s specific theory of party organisation was but one part of his whole theoretical outlook. Cannon, and most others in the early CP as well, did not understand this. They responded empirically to the Russian experience and sought to abstract from this experience a useful implement with which to overturn capitalism in the U.S. To Cannon this implement was the disciplined combat party. So now he was equipped with three essentials—his deep understanding of the revolutionary potential of American workers, his conviction of the need to organise these workers into a fighting class organisa- tion on the economic front, and his recognition of the additional need of a disciplined party to lead the workers in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Essentially Cannon’s role in the Communist Party flowed. from this outlook. He was from the very beginning in battle for the interests of the native American section of the party as against the foreign- born federations. He played an important role in the fight to bring the party out of its self-imposed underground existence and to begin to develop serious work in the class. He joined in a common faction with Foster in a battle for a line of work in the United States which reflected existing American ‘realities and to gain control of the party apparatus for the ‘trade unionist’ elements within the party. The primary concern of Cannon’s from the moment hé joined the party until the moment he was expelled in 1928 was the American question. His task, as he saw it, was to keep the party in touch with American realities and to struggle to build the party as an organisation. Cannon never evinced any interest in the great questions of Marxist theory and politics which occupied the major attention of the Communist International in this period. The basic political positions of the movement and its international line and analysis was something to be 19. Ibid., ‘The IWW—The Great Anticipation’, pp. 277 ff.

[p049] 136 produced for the party by the CI. The task of the Americans was to accept this as given and to proceed with the practical work of building an organisation in this country. Thus the only questions upon which Cannon was to form definite opinions and fight for were the tactical questions which came out of the American situation. On these questions he had strong opinions—and by and large he was right. In 1923, at a time when the fight with Ruthenberg- Pepper-Lovestone was just beginning, Cannon made a characteristic statement of his attitude toward Marxist theory. The American movement has no _ counterpart anywhere else in the world, and any attempt to meet its problems by the simple process of finding a European analogy will not succeed. The key to the American problem can only be found in a thorough examination of the peculiar American situation. Our Marxian outlook, confirmed by the history of the movement in Europe, provides us with some general principles to go by, but there is no pattern, made to order from European experi: ence, that fits America today.20 [Emphasis ours] Of course Cannon was absolutely right in criticismg those, like Pepper, who sought to impose in a mechanical fashion a European experience on the United States. But he was dead wrong when he saw Marxism as only ‘some general principles to go by’. Marxism is essentially a scientific method of understanding reality so as to enable us to change reality—American reality as much as European feality. Marxism is neither the imposition of mechanistic formulas on an unknown reality nor is it an unconscious and empirical absorption of that reality unguided by a real understanding of theory. Virtually no one in the American party, least of all Cannon, either understood or was really interested in the great struggles going on within the CI and the ‘Bolshevik party—struggles affecting all the most important issues of revolutionary politics of the day and in fact of all time. Cannon, like the rest of them, was concerned only to the extent that these struggles affected the American party and mcst specifically the struggles of his own faction within the party. In fact William Z. Foster was to show greater resistance to the Stalinization of the CI than Cannon—though, of course, only in an empirical way. In 1925 the Foster-Cannon faction split into two factions precisely over this issue. When Stalin had manoeuvred to remove the Foster-Cannon faction from control of the CP, Foster wished to protest this. Cannon insisted that the faction accept and support the CI decision without protest, hoping 20. Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia (Viking Press, New York, 1960), p. 82. STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. to get Cl endorsement at a later date. On this issue the faction split and Cannon formed his separate faction. In 1927 when Stalin was preparing his ‘left’ turn and struggle against Bukharin, the Red Trade Union International sought to impose on the Americans a sectarian ‘dual’ trade union line. Foster once again rebelled and Cannon once again supported the International and flailed at Foster. There was, however, a cerain difference in the nature of the Foster and Cannon groups, in addition to this question of loyalty to Stalin, which it is important to note. Basically Foster and those who supported him were trade unionists first and foremost and Communists in the second place. The party, to them, was simply a vehicle to advance their trade union work, Cannon, on the other hand, had developed beyond this level in becoming a Com- munist. This lesson of the importance of the party organisation, if not understood theoretically, had been assimilated practically deep into his outlook. His supporters within the CP tended to include more organisers and party apparatus men than was the case with Foster. This, of course, explains in part his greater concern as against Foster for the decisions of the CI. All commentators, including. Cannon himself, testify to the fact that Cannon’s support to Trotsky came as a deep shock to all in the CP. In no way had the party been prepared for it. In this sense Cannon’s evolution contrasted even with that of Maurice Spector?! in the Canadian party. Spector had had doubts over the evolution of the situation in the Bolshevik party since 1923-24 and these doubts were Well known within the Canadian organisation. This was not the case with Cannon who had shown neither interest in this great dispute nor indepen- dence from the Kremlin. Shachtman, certainly not an unprejudiced judge of Cannon, claims that Cannon’s adherence to Trotskyism was purely ‘accidental’.22. This, of course, leads us nowhere—for instance, we could only conclude that Shachtman’s own adherence to Trot- skyism ‘was an accidental response. to Cannon’s accident for he had mo pre-history on this question either. Cannon’s own explanation of his conversion 21. Maurice Spector was a prominent member of the Canadian Communist Party who attended the Sixth World Congress of the CI with Cannon. He adhered to Trotskyism at the same time as Cannon and later came to the United States where he played a role in the intellectual work of the American Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. 22. Shachtman, Max. ‘Twenty-Five Years of American Trotskyism’ New International (Vol. XX, No. 1, Jan.- Feb. 1954), p. 17. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p050] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. 135 Cc — JAMES P. CANNON It is very important for the purposes of this study that we pay special attention to one particular figure in the early CP, James P. Cannon. While the other leaders disappeared from American radical politics or played the despicable role of tools of the Kremlin, Cannon was to play an important part in the con- tinuing struggle to create a ‘Marxist party after the Stalinization of the CP. Jim Cannon was an American-born radical from that great homeland of agrarian radicalism, Kansas. His father had been successively a supporter of the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Bryanites, and then the Socialist Party. Cannon joined the [WW and received within the [WW his basic training in the class struggle. The IWW experience taught him two basic things. First and foremost was his deep confidence in the revolutionary potentiality of the American working class. Second was an under- standing of the necessity to organise the class into an effective revolutionary instrument to battle the capitalists. This he felt at the time could be dune simply with the IWiW’s ‘One Big Union’. It is easy to understand the tremendous attraction the Russian Revolution had for Cannon and why he thus ‘became a part of the left wing in the SP which soon emerged as a Communist Party. What is more critical, however, is exactly what concretely Cannon learned from the Russian Revolution. Interestingly Cannon’s own writings in the 1950s, in which he reminisces over his own past and the past history of American radicalism, reveal the essential lessons which Cannon, as well as others. drew from the Russian experience. Cannon’s long essay on Debs shows this very clearly.!7_ In a section entitled ‘Debs and Lenin’ he contrasts the two leaders to show what he feels was the greatest weakness in pre-war American radicalism expressing itself even in the greatest leader of the pre-war period—Debs. Lenin, by contrast, illustrates for Cannon that essential new element which he and others learned from the Russian experience—that essential new ingredient which he added o his outlook when joining the Communist Party. Lenin’s great contribution was-——the disciplined combat vanguard party, what Cannon called ‘Lenin’s theory of the party’.!8 The same essential point is made 17. Cannon, James P. The First Ten Years of American Communism (Lyle Stuart, New York, 1962) ‘Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Movement of His Time’, pp. 245 ff. 18. Ibid., p. 275. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 in his companion essay on the lWW.!9 There is, of course, no question of the extreme importance of this lesson if it is really understood. The victory of October was made possible by the kind of party Lenin struggled to create for fifteen years. But this involves far more than a ‘theory of the party. To Lenin the organisational form of the party was at every moment directly related to the theoretical development of that party. It was precisely Lenin’s great struggle for Marxist method and theory which made possible the creation of a party capable of overthrowing capitalism. Lenin’s specific theory of party organisation was but one part of his whole theoretical outlook. Cannon, and most others in the early OP as well, did not understand this. They responded empirically to the Russian experience and sought to abstract from this experience a useful implement with which to overturn capitalism in the U.S. To Cannon this implement was the disciplined combat party. So now he was equipped with three essentials—his deep understanding of the revolutionary potential of American workers, his conviction of the need to organise these workers into a fighting class organisa- tion on the economic front, and his recognition of the additional need of a disciplined party to lead the workers in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Essentially Cannon’s role in the Communist Party flowed. from this outlook. He was from the very beginning in battle for the interests of the native American section of the party as against the foreign- born federations. He played an important role in the fight to bring the party out of its self-imposed underground existence and to begin to develop serious work in the class. He joined in a common faction with Foster in a battle for a line of work in the United States which reflected existing American ‘realities and to gain control of the party apparatus for the ‘trade unionist’ elements within the party. The primary concern of Cannon’s from the moment hé joined the party until the moment he was expelled in 1928 was the American question. His task, as he saw it, was to keep the party in touch with American realities and to struggle to build the party as an organisation. Cannon never evinced any interest in the great questions of Marxist theory and politics which occupied the major attention of the Communist International in this period. The basic political positions of the movement and its international line and analysis was something to be 19. Ibid., ‘The IWW—The Great Anticipation’, pp. 277 ff.

[p051] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. also is not totally satisfactory. Interestingly Theodore Draper, the painstaking historian of the early CP, was not overly satisfied with Cannon’s account as he probed Cannon once again on the question several years after his first discussions with him on it.?3 Cannon claimed a certain dissatisfaction with the whole trend of the International before 1928, a certain unexpressed doubt. Then, when he accident- ally saw a copy of Trotsky’s critique of the pro- gramme of the CI,24 he suddenly saw the light and agreed with every word of it and remained a con- vinced Trotskyist thereafter.? There can be no doubt that by 1927 Cannon was very much in a blind alley inside the Communist Party. Against the will of the majority of the party he and Foster had twice been denied their rightful place in the leadership of the party.’ His personal experience with Foster since 1925 had not been overly friendly and he had almost as much to fear from a party run by Foster as he had from one run by Lovestone. By 1927 it was becoming in- creasingly clear that whoever was to finally end up in control of the OP it was not to be Cannon and his group. In many ways his whole life work had come to a dead end. Instinctively he turned away from preoccupation with the factional struggle and devoted himself to mass work. Only the persistent pressure of his co-factionalists got him to attend the Sixth Congress of the CI in 1928 in the first place. So he came to ‘Moscow a disillusioned man in many respects. His struggle to create an American revolutionary movement. seemed constantly to be thwarted—and it was in ‘Moscow that the major problem always was. Cannon reports that Trotsky’s document ‘hit us like a thunderbolt’.26 But Cannon never explains exactly what in the document hit home with him. This is why his own account of his conversion raises so many questions in one’s mind. The document is a very fundamental critique of Communist strategy and tactics since the death of Lenin. A large section is devoted to the Chinese Revolution, a question Cannon is not known to have shown the slightest interest in previous to this moment. No, we can see no reason why the discovery of Stalin’s errors on China should strike Cannon, the 23. Note Cannon’s reply to a fresh request in a letter dated May 27, 1959 (Cannon op. cit., p. 224). The bulk of Cannon’s correspondence with Draper is dated 1955. Draper’s book was published in 1960. 24. Published later in full as: The Third International After Lenin (Pioneer Publishers, 1957). 25. Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1954), pp. 40-50. 26. Draper. op. cit., p. 374. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 137 American radical personified, in such a way. We feel it was that essential thesis of Trotsky’s whole analysis—the conflict between Stalin's doctrine of socialism in one country and the struggles of Communists in other lands to overthrow capitalism— which went right to the heart of Cannon’s whole being, which touched all that was fine and healthy in Cannon and in American radicalism as a whole.?7 Now he could finally understand why his own efforts to create an American revolutionary party always went aground in international seas. Why Lovestone was forced upon the American party, why policies which hindered rather than helped the party’s work in this country were supported by the CI—this all was now clear to him. Having no future within the party but having a deep conviction of the need to create a revolutionary party in the United States his siding with Trotsky is understandable. Cannon’s break with the Stalinized CP was no more prepared for by Cannon’s own theoretical development prior to 1928 than the formation of the CP in 1919 was prepared for by the prior theoretical development of the American revolu- tionists who initiated that venture. Having only four or five years of collaboration with a healthy international force the early communists were unable to create a real Marxist party in the United States. They learned much from the Russians but they did not learn that essential thing—the need to break from American empiricism and to develop a move- ment with a vital theoretical life and a real under- standing of Marxist method. Cannon’s break was to give the American communists another chance to go to school with the Russians—this time Trotsky— and to learn what they did not learn in the earlier period. It was not a matter of maintaining a lost orthodoxy from an earlier period. This time the American communists needed to make a qualitative advance over the whole past history of American radicalism by definitively breaking with empiricism— the method of thought of their own ruling class. They could have found no ‘better teacher and guide in this project than Trotsky. That funda- mentally was the real challenge facing the American Trotskyists in 1928. (To be continued) 27. Cannon himself gets closest to clarifying this point when he writes in 1954: ‘When I read Trotsky’s “Criticism of the Draft Program” at the sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, I was convinced at once and for good—that the theory of “Socialism in One Country” was basically anti-revolutionary and that Trotsky and the Russian Opposition represented the true program of the revolution—the original Marxist program.’ (Cannon, op. cit., page 27). This is the only mention he has ever made of the specific content of the book.

[p052] COMMUNICATIONS International, with all its pacifist friends in every corner of the earth’ (My emphasis) (Revolution Betrayed).