James
Cannon,
the first chairman of the American Communist Party, attended the Sixth
Congress of the Comintern
in 1928. While in the Soviet Union he was
given a document written by Leon Trotsky
on the rule of Joseph Stalin. Convinced
by what he read, when he returned to the United
States he criticized the Soviet government. As a result of his
actions, Cannon and his followers were expelled from the party.
James
Cannon
and Max
Shachtman
now joined with other Trotskyists to form the Communist League of
America. The party also published the journal,
The Militant. In 1938 the party changed its name to the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
James
Cannon
was arrested under the Alien
Registration Act in
1941. He was detained in Sandstone Prison and was not released until
1945. Cannon remained as national secretary of the Socialist Workers
Party until replaced by Farrell Dobbs
in 1953. Dobbs
was the SWP's presidential candidate in 1960 but received only 60,166
votes. He retired as the SWP's national secretary in 1972.
(1)
In a letter to Theodore Draper written on 27th May 1959, James
Cannon explained why he decided to
support Leon Trotsky in 1928.
In the summer of 1928 in Moscow, in addition to the theoretical and
political revelation that came to me when I read Trotsky's Criticism
of the Draft Program of the Comintern, there was another consideration
that hit me where I live. That was the fact that Trotsky had been
expelled and deported to far away Alma Ata; that his friends and supporters
had been slandered and expelled and imprisoned; and that the whole
damned thing was a frame-up!
Had I set
out as a boy to fight for justice for Moyer and Haywood in order to
betray the cause of justice when it was put squarely up to me in a
case of transcendent importance to the whole future of the human race?
A copybook moralist could easily answer that question by saying: "Of
course not. The rule is plain. You do what you have to do, even if
it costs you your head." But it wasn't so simple for me in the
summer of 1928. I was not a copybook moralist. I was a party politician
and factionalist who had learned how to cut corners. I knew that at
the time, and the self-knowledge made me uneasy.
I had been
gradually settling down into an assured position as a party official
with an office and staff, a position that I could easily maintain
- as long as I kept within definite limits and rules which I knew
all about, and conducted myself with the facility and skill which
had become almost second nature to me in the long drawn out factional
fights.
I knew
that. And I knew something else that I never told anybody about, but
which I had to tell myself for the first time in Moscow in the summer
of 1928. The footloose Wobbly rebel that I used to be had imperceptibly
begun to fit comfortably into a swivel chair, protecting himself in
his seat by small maneuvers and evasions, and even permitting himself
a certain conceit about his adroit accommodation to this shabby game.
I saw myself for the first time then as another person, as a revolutionist
who was on the road to becoming a bureaucrat. The image was hideous,
and I turned away from it in disgust.
I never
deceived myself for a moment about the most probable consequences
of my decision to support Trotsky in the summer of 1928. I knew it
was going to cost me my head and also my swivel chair, but I thought:
What the hell - better men than I have risked their heads and their
swivel chairs for truth and justice. Trotsky and his associates were
doing it at that very moment in the exile camps and prisons of the
Soviet Union. It was no more than right that one man, however limited
his qualifications, should remember what he started out in his youth
to fight for, and speak out for their cause and try to make the world
hear, or at least to let the exiled and imprisoned Russian Oppositionists
know that they had found a new friend and supporter.
(2)
James
Cannon, The
Militant (January 1, 1929)
In
the period that has intervened since our expulsion on October 25,
we have continued to regard ourselves as party members and have conducted
ourselves as Communists, as we have done since the foundation of the
party, and even for years before that. Every step we have taken has
been guided by this conception. Those acts which went beyond the bounds
of ordinary party procedure in bringing our views before the party
were imposed upon us by the action of the party leadership in denying
us the right and opportunity to defend our views within the party
by normal means. Our views relate to principled questions, and therefore
it is our duty openly to defend them in spite of all attempts to suppress
them.
We are
bound to do this also in the future under all circumstances. However,
we said on October 25, and we repeat now, that we are unconditionally
willing to confine our activity to regular party channels and to discontinue
all extraordinary methods the moment our party rights are restored
and we are permitted to defend our views in the party press and at
party meetings. The decision and the responsibility rest wholly with
the majority of the Central Executive Committee.
Events
since our expulsion have only served to confirm more surely the correctness
of the views of the Russian Opposition, which we support. The momentous
developments in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and throughout
the Comintern have that meaning and no other. Life itself is proving
the validity of their platform. Even those who fought that platform,
who misrepresented it and hid it from the party and the Comintern,
are today compelled, under the pressure of events and forces which
overwhelm them, to give lip service to it, to pretend to adopt it.
Many of the statements and proposals of the Opposition which were
branded "counterrevolutionary" a year ago are today solemnly
repeated, almost word for word, as the quintessence of Bolshevism.
Meanwhile
their sponsors - the true leaders and defenders of the Russian Revolution
- remain in exile, and there is no guarantee whatever that the presently
advertised "left course" will mean anything more than a
cover for further concessions to the right wing, whose policy directly
undermines the dictatorship. The victorious fight of the party masses
in Russia and throughout the Comintern against this disgraceful and
dangerous course cannot be much longer postponed.
Bureaucratic
suppression has its own logic. It begins with the expulsion of individuals
and ends with the disruption of the movement. Yesterday we saw the
attempt to suppress the views of the Oppositionists who fight the
party regime on principled grounds. Today already, in spired resolutions
from the party units are making the same demand against the limited
criticisms of the Foster group, with the threat of organizational
measures after the packed and gerrymandered convention has "endorsed"
the regime. Bureaucratism is alien to the proletarian Communist movement.
Bureaucratism cannot stand criticism. It cannot stand discussion.
Bureaucratism, which is an expression of bourgeois influence, and
Lenin's proletarian doctrine cannot live together.
The regime
of bureaucratic strangulation, which expels its outspoken opponents
and bludgeons the party into silence, has become an international
phenomenon of the period. This is the only key to an understanding
of its absolutely unprecedented excesses. A real struggle against
it cannot be made without an understanding of its international scope.
On this, as well as on the other principled questions, the fight of
the proletarian Communist elements in all parties unites with the
Bolshevik fight of the Russian Opposition under the leadership of
Trotsky.
At the
Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin
issued a warning against the course he later adopted, and predicted
its disruptive consequences. He defended there the refusal to expel
Trotsky from the Political Bureau and said: "We are against the
policy of lopping off, of bloodletting (it was blood they wanted).
It is a dangerous thing. One day you lop off this limb. Tomorrow another,
and the next day a third. And after a while, what becomes of the party?"
Stalin
forgot these words so full of prophetic significance. He formed a
factional combination with the right wing to suppress and expel the
left, the Opposition. He gave the signal for the same line in all
the parties of the Comintern. As a result, in the recent years we
have seen everywhere a strengthening of the opportunist elements,
an enormous development and entrenchment of bureaucratism, and wholesale
expulsions of the proletarian left - the core of the workers' vanguard.
All the little Stalins in all the parties are bolstering themselves
up by these means.
(3)
James
Cannon, History
of American Trotskyism (1944)
The movement which then began in America brought repercussions throughout
the entire world; overnight the whole picture, the whole perspective
of the struggle changed. Trotskyism, officially pronounced dead, was
resurrected on the international arena and inspired with new hope,
new enthusiasm, new energy. Denunciations against us were carried
in the American press of the party and reprinted throughout the whole
world, including Pravda. Russian Oppositionists in prison and
exile, where sooner or later copies of Pravda reached them,
were notified of our action, our revolt in America. In the darkest
hour of the Opposition's struggle, they learned that fresh reinforcements
had taken the field across the ocean in the United States, which by
virtue of the power and weight of the country itself, gave importance
and weight to the things done by the American communists.
Leon Trotsky,
as I remarked, was isolated in the little Asiatic village of Alma
Ata. The world movement outside Russia was in decline, leaderless,
suppressed, isolated, practically non-existent. With this inspiring
news of a new detachment in faraway America, the little papers and
bulletins of the Opposition groups flared into life again. Most inspiring
of all to us was the assurance that our hard-pressed Russian comrades
had heard our voice. I have always thought of this as one of the most
gratifying aspects of the historic fight we undertook in 1928 - that
the news of our fight reached the Russian comrades in all corners
of the prisons and exile camps, inspiring them with new hope and new
energy to persevere in the struggle.
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