The Left Opposition
In the
U.S. 1928-31
Monad Press
First Edition 1981
Edited by Fred Stanton
Writings & Speeches of James P. Cannon
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Fred Stanton’s 1981 forward to The Left Opposition in the U.S. is so relevant to the political situation today, that we will be transcribing almost the entire section. We feel this is necessary because the majority of our newer readers probably never even heard of James P. Cannon or The Left Opposition. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the movie Frieda slightly less than the same majority wouldn’t have heard of Leon Trotsky either.
Stanton’s concise introduction goes a long way in alleviating this unfortunate reality and perpetuates The Left Opposition and Trotsky’s devastating criticism of Stalinism—and this particular volume is a well-deserved memorial to James P. Cannon, a hard working and inspiring American Communist. We hope Cannon’s life’s work will serve as an inspiration for today’s socialist/communist youth—the surest hope now for the International Social Revolution.
Following the introduction, we will be examining select articles from the book.
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James Patrick Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas, on February 11, 1890, into a working class Irish family. Won to socialist ideas by his father, he joined the Socialist Party in 1908, and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911 when he was twenty-one. In the IWW Cannon worked with Vincent St. John, “Big Bill” Haywood, and Frank Little as a strike organizer and journalist. As a leader of the Socialist Party left wing after the Russian revolution, he joined the Communist Party in September 1919 and was elected to its Central Committee in 1920. One of the key leaders of the CP in its first decade, he served on the Presidium of the Communist International in Moscow (1922-23) and headed the International Labor Defense (1925-28). Won over to Trotsky’s Left Opposition at the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in 1928, he was expelled from the CP later that year for Trotskyism. With Max Shachtman and Martin Abern he was a founding leader of the Communist League of America, the first American Trotskyist organization, and served as editor of its newspaper, The Militant.
Cannon was founder of the Socialist Workers Party in January 1938 and a participant in the founding conference of the Fourth International held in France later that year, where he was elected to the International Executive Committee. Convicted with seventeen other leaders of the SWP and of the Minneapolis Teamsters union in 1941 for opposing the war policy of the American government, Cannon served thirteen months of a sixteen-month at Sandstone penitentiary in 1944-45. Cannon was the national secretary of the SWP until 1953. Thereafter he was the party’s national chairman, and later national chairman emeritus until his death on August 21, 1974.
James P. Cannon’s more than sixty years of active struggle in the cause of socialism are recorded in his many books. Published in his lifetime were Socialism on Trial (1942), The Struggle for a Proletarian Party (1943), The History of American Trotskyism (1944), America’s Road to Socialism (1953), Notebook of an Agitator (1958), The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962), Letters from Prison (1968), Speeches for Socialism (1971), and Speeches to the Party (1973). This volume is one of a posthumous series of his writings and speeches.
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At the end of the economic boom of the 1920s, just before the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was a political crisis in the Communist Party of such depth that it threatened the continuity of American Marxism. A cynical, right-wing bureaucracy had consolidated its hold over the party and was standing in the way of implementing a Leninist policy. The thousands of revolutionary workers in the party—who had come to it inspired by the example of the Russian workers and the Bolshevik leaders—had no say in the direction of the CP.
The writings and speeches in this volume were part of a five-year struggle to reform that party and rebuild the revolutionary leadership in the United States.
To understand the degeneration of the Communist Party and the issues in the fight to reform it, it is necessary to know what happened to the world Communist movement and the American working class in the preceding decade.
The political degeneration of the Communist movement was the result of powerful pressures exerted by world imperialism upon the first workers’ state and the parties of the Communist International. The Russian revolution came under direct military attack from 1918 to 1920 by tsarist White armies and invading troops from Germany, France, Britain, Japan, the United States, and other capitalist powers. The Russian people suffered famine, destruction of industry, and the loss of many of their best revolutionary fighters in this civil war. Afterward, they were forced to rebuild the economy from an extremely primitive level, with no aid from abroad and in the face of an economic blockade.
The civil war weakened the Russian working class. Many left the cities to fight in the Red Army or to return to the land, where more food was available. A layer became demoralized by so many years of hardship and became politically passive.
The Soviet leadership faced enormous political and economic difficulties in the early 1920s. How could production be increased in the factories and in agriculture? How could the revolution maintain the support of the peasantry and feed the workers in the cities? Without the ability to get modern machinery and tractors that could increase productivity and make it possible to build up large-scale enterprises and collectivized agriculture, they were forced to make concessions to the better-off peasants (kulaks) and the capitalists. They allowed peasants to sell produce on the open market within Russia, and encouraged investment in small industry and the leasing of nationalized factories. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was to be a temporary retreat that would help the revolution hang on until the workers of the West could make their own revolutions and come to the aid of the Soviets.
Under these conditions, aided by the pressure of world capitalism, the weight of the peasantry (the majority of the country), and the openings for petty trading under the NEP, the layer of petty-bourgeois bureaucrats in Soviet society began to grow. There had been a bureaucracy from the foundation of the worker’s state. Many of the officials in charge of administering the government and the economy had carried out similar functions or been managers under the old regime. The low level of literacy in the country made it necessary to utilize these bureaucrats, despite their political backwardness; few workers were prepared to carry out those tasks. The bureaucrats were given some limited benefits for doing this work as an incentive to stay on the revolutionary side, and they worked under the political direction of the Bolsheviks.
With the end of the civil war, thousands of these officials, many of them former counterrevolutionaries, began to apply to join the Communist Party, not as a matter of political conviction but as a way of advancing their careers. They were now in a position to skim more benefits for themselves and their families as they presided over the distribution of scarce goods. A layer of Old Bolsheviks in the government and party apparatuses began to adapt their political views to their new conditions of life.
A right wing began to view the NEP as a permanent policy of the government, a path to socialism instead of a holding action. They put forward such slogans as “Kulak, enrich yourself!” and “Build socialism at a snail’s pace.”
The Left Opposition, formed in 1923 and led by Leon Trotsky, sought to continue the Bolshevik policy based on revolutionary internationalism. They called for a planned industrialization and the gradual, voluntary collectivization of agriculture. They also sought to restore democracy within the party and assure the control of the rank-and-file workers over the party apparatus. Lenin had begun a fight against the bureaucracy before his final illness, and the Left Opposition carried on his struggle.
Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the party, presided over and epitomized the bureaucratization of the CP. He opened the doors to the petty-bourgeois place-seekers, led a campaign against Trotsky and the proposals of the Left Opposition, and after Lenin’s death introduced the first major revisionism of Marxism into the party’s politics: the theory of “socialism in one country.” He made an alliance with the right wing against the Left Opposition but did not adopt their perspective. He proceeded pragmatically, zigzagging from right to left with the aim of preserving the privileges and power of the officeholders. Trotsky considered this bureaucratic layer a “centrist” tendency.
The outcome of the struggle in the Russian party was decided in the last analysis on the international arena, by the defeat of revolutions in Western Europe due to the betrayals of the Socialist parties and the inexperience of the young Communist parties. By 1923, with the defeat of the German revolution, the Russian workers could see no prospect of help from abroad in the near future. The backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the revolution weighed heavily upon them. World capitalism was restabilized and the worker’s state would have to find a way to survive until the next international upsurge.
This situation favored the tendencies toward conservatism and nationalism within the Soviet Union. The bureaucracy was able to repress the Left Opposition within the party, and the left wing was unable to mobilize the workers to resist the further bureaucratization of the CP and the alteration of its program.
With the replacement of revolutionary internationalism with the schema of “socialism in one country,” the role of the Comintern changed fundamentally. In its early days, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Comintern had a collaborative relationship with its national sections. Although the Bolsheviks had earned tremendous respect as leaders of the first victorious worker’s revolution, they never gave orders to the new CP leaders in other countries. They chose to teach them by political argument rather than wielding centralized authority to decide policies for the national sections. Their aim was to build strong parties with members educated through democratic discussion, and leaders with authority of their own, based on the class struggles in each country. The Bolsheviks relied on the same process that had built their own party and won the confidence of the Russian working people.
But the Stalinists operated differently. They manipulated the national sections, changing their policies and leaderships according to the shifting needs of the Russian bureaucracy in its attempts to maintain the status quo with imperialism. Their kind of Comintern preferred appointed leaderships in the national sections, and docile, even demoralized, memberships who would go along with whatever policies were handed down—even if it meant betrayal of the workers’ struggles. World socialism was something was seen as something to be achieved only in the distant future, after the USSR became the most advanced society on earth and the capitalists just gave up. In the meantime, the role of the CPs outside Russia was to use their influence with the workers to build pressure on the capitalists to have more friendly relations with the USSR.
The change from proletarian internationalism to class collaboration did not proceed in an honest, straightforward way, but under the cover of revolutionary rhetoric and with several zigzags to the left. The predominant course of Soviet diplomacy shifted in the mid-1920s when the USSR began to participate in the bourgeois charade of disarmament proposals which disarmed nobody and were part of the buildup for the next world war. But when the capitalists were unresponsive to a diplomatic approach, Stalin put on more pressure by turning to the left.
The first left swing of the Comintern, launched in the Russian CP in 1928, was called the “third period” because of its place in the historical schema then in vogue among Stalinist theoreticians. They divided Soviet history into three periods: the first (1917-23), from the seizure of power to the end of the postwar revolutionary wave; the second (1924-27), the interlude of world capitalist stabilization and working class quiescence; and the third, a new upsurge of revolutions and the final victory of socialism,
The proclamation of the “third period” anticipated the coming world economic crisis but was not based on any workers’ upsurge. In fact it was a bureaucratic reaction to the threat of an imminent counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and a cover-up for the disastrous defeat of the Communist-led workers and peasants in China.
The kulaks began to withhold grain from the Soviet government in early 1928. After years of amassing wealth but being unable to use it as they desired because of the limited availability of consumer goods and the restrictions on foreign trade and investment imposed by the workers state, the better-off peasants used the threat of starvation as a weapon to wring more concessions for themselves. Faced with the threat of famine, the bureaucracy turned from its former right-wing policy to an ultra-left one: at first, they requisitioned the grain, and by 1929 they began to forcibly collectivize Soviet agriculture. They also announced a five-year industrialization plan that was supposed to result in “socialism.”
In China, the Comintern called for the formation of “soviets” and the immediate seizure of power, a policy that had already led to the massacre of the workers of Canton in December 1927.
The fight against the kulaks was not carried out by convincing the poorest peasants to join with the workers to collectivize the land. It was a military operation imposed upon rural Russia with such bloodiness and mismanagement that Soviet agriculture has not yet recovered. The Five Year Plan was no model of workers’ democracy either. It resulted in speedup, waste, more privileges for the bureaucrats, and continued shortages for the Russian workers. This was the time Stalin was elevated to the status of a demigod, the “master.”
The worst effect of the “third period” was the failure of the German CP to campaign for a united front with the SP against the Nazis. Both parties were supported by millions of workers—together they represented the majority. Both had armed defense groups. But by its sectarianism the CP cut off the possibility of building an effective opposition to the rise of Hitler.
Superficially the “third period” policies looked like the ultraleftism of the young Communist parties. In 1919-20 many Communists thought that revolution was on the order of the day and that united action with reformist forces was “unprincipled.” The ultralefts of the infancy of Communism were just learning their political ABC’s. Lenin taught them in those days the lesson pf the united-front policy, and most were able to overcome their ultraleft misconceptions. They were young revolutionaries with good intentions and incomplete knowledge, making a blunder that was corrected through experience and education.
The “third period” was not an infantile error. It was a conscious turn by seasoned bureaucrats. They adopted ultraleft policies that they had argued against for years, with no attempt to show either how the situation had changed or why the previous tactic had been wrong. This was ultraleftism of a senile variety, led by cynical individuals who put their bureaucratic careers ahead of the interests of the workers, including the rank-and-file workers of the Cps themselves.
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The Communist Party in the United States faced some big political problems from its foundations in 1919. Forced underground by the postwar witch-hunt and further separated from the U.S.-born workers by its predominately foreign-born composition, the new party had to find a way to participate in the struggles of its class or face stagnation and decay. A layer of the American-born workers and youth led the fight to reorient the CP, with the help of the leaders of the Comintern. One of the central figures in this fight was James P. Cannon.
Cannon had joined the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs in 1908, at the age of eighteen, and became an organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World when he was twenty-one. In the IWW he helped lead strikes of rubber workers in Akron, metal workers in Pretoria, ore dock workers on Lake Superior, and others; he was arrested several times for this activity.
It was the Russian revolution that brought him back into activity in the left wing of the Socialist Party in Kansas City, where he became a founder of the Communist Party in 1919. As CP district organizer there in 1919-20 he organized the first underground Communist groups in the coal fields of Kansas and southern Illinois. He was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the party in 1920. In that year he became founding editor of the CP’s first legal newspaper, the Toiler, which later became the Worker. He was the first national chairman of the Workers Party, the legal arm of the CP established in 1921.
Cannon was part of the CP delegation to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, where he led the faction that favored legal propaganda work and “Americanization” of the party—an orientation toward the American labor movement with its native-born majority. This minority faction was able to convince Trotsky and other Comintern leaders to favor this course, and they in turn helped the party overcome its isolated, underground, sectarian existence. It began to participate in the unions and to advocate a labor party.
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The Comintern’s influence on the American party took a turn for the worse after the arrival of John Pepper as Comintern representative in 1922. Instead of relaying information and offering advice, Pepper used the authority of the Russian revolution and his own flair for agitation and intrigue to become a central leader of the party as part of the faction led by Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone.
Pepper pulled off his first adventure in 1923, when he led the CP in the capture of a labor political convention to form a Federated Farmer-Labor Party that had no substantial support in the unions. The FFLP then gave its support to the Progressive candidate for president in 1924, Robert La Follette, until the CP pulled back from this reformist course and ran its own candidates.
Cannon collaborated with William Z. Foster, the CP trade union secretary, to fight against Pepper’s farmer-labor adventure; by 1925 they won a majority of the delegates to the party convention. However, the Comintern intervened and gave the minority led by Pepper and Lovestone the majority on the new CEC, because they were more trusted to hew the Comintern line.
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Such bureaucrats as Lovestone and Pepper were a new breed in the world radical movement. The bureaucrats in the mass Socialist parties of Europe and those in the trade unions had a base in their own organizations. But the misleaders of the national sections of the Comintern were based on the approval of the bureaucracy in Moscow. They relied on Russian authority for their support in their own parties. And if that support from Moscow was withdrawn, their national support crumbled.
The new corrupting role of the Comintern made it impossible for the CP to build a real leadership to build a real leadership of its own and correct its own errors; most often the Comintern imposed new errors. But the Comintern’s intervention was only part of the story of the degeneration of the CP. The big, objective weight that crushed the revolutionary perspective of most CP leaders was the pressure of American capitalist prosperity. They were unable to resist the bureaucratic sickness because they lost their revolutionary morale in the boom of the 1920s.
The party and the labor movement as a whole declined in membership throughout the decade. First came the blows of the postwar witch-hunt, which drove the CP underground, decimated the IWW, and defeated big labor struggles such as the 1919 steel strike. And then came the “normalcy” of capitalism in the Coolidge era.
American industry prospered in the 1920s through big increases in labor productivity brought about by improved technology and speedup. While the number of factory workers decreased 7 percent from 1919 to 1925, the output per worker increased 40 percent. Some industries boomed. Auto grew to the point where the jobs of over 4 million were directly or indirectly dependent on it. Other industries declined. The work force in manufacturing remained steady through the decade, while white-collar and service jobs increased from 11.5 million to 16.7 million.
The 40-hour week was rare. Unionized workers averaged 45 hours per week; most in the textile and garment industries worked 48 or 54 hours, with some working as many as 60.
The labor movement declined drastically as the ossified, craft-oriented AFL leadership was unable to find a strategy to counteract the legal and illegal union-busting attacks, a barrage of antiunion propaganda, runaway plants, and high unemployment, in a period of a relativity stable cost of living. From its peak of 4-5 million members in 1920 (over 19 percent of the work force), the AFL dropped to 3.6 million by 1923, and by 1930 only 10 percent of the nonagricultural workers were unionized.
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These conditions made going on strike a risky proposition. More strikes lost than won their demands. During the 1919-22 labor upsurge millions had become involved in large numbers of strikes—over three thousand per year. But the frequency of and participation in strikes fell off to only a third of that level later in the decade.
Some of the political errors of the CP in the 1920s can be traced to this lull, as inexperienced and impatient leaders tried to find ways to relate to the workers politically and were tempted into Pepperite adventures. Eventually a layer became demoralized and began to adapt to the situation politically.
Jay Lovestone developed the theory of “American exceptionalism” in 1927, projecting the capitalist prosperity and labor quiescence into the indefinite future. He thought the U.S. economy was so strong that it was immune to the coming world economic crisis and to socialist revolution for the foreseeable future.
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The Comintern’s biggest contribution to the political confusion was its suppression of the ideas of the Russian Left Opposition, which were the key to understanding the situation and finding a way to end it. Not only were Communists around the world kept ignorant of these ideas, but from 1924 on they were enlisted in a campaign against “Trotskyism” that reached into every local unit of every Communist Party, where condemnatory motions were passed unanimously and anyone who raised questions was expelled.
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James P. Cannon became the first central leader of the American CP to join the Left Opposition when he was able to read Trotsky’s criticism of the draft program of the Comintern at the Sixth World Congress, which he attended as a delegate in 1928. He saw that this document provided the overview he needed in order to understand the problems he had been grappling with in the U.S.
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Thanks to his past work as a leader of mass defense campaigns and of opposition to the Lovestone group, Cannon had a group of supporters and was able to win a layer of them to the platform of the Left Opposition before his expulsion in October 1928, when this collection of his writings and speeches begins.
The Left Opposition in the U.S. took the name Communist League of America (Opposition) and operated as an expelled faction of the party.
The CLA saw the CP as the revolutionary party in this country, and the Comintern as the revolutionary International, despite their bureaucratic leaderships. The league was oriented toward the revolutionary workers in the party, the only large group of organized workers there was. To abandon them to the bureaucrats, to turn away from the CP before exhausting all possibilities of reforming it, would have been a light-minded and sectarian act. The CLA set out to become the vanguard of the vanguard workers in the CP.
The expelled Cpers immediately launched a new newspaper. Cannon proposed calling it The Militant after the termed used in the old IWW for a “real active fighter in the movement.” Cannon was listed as editor of the paper, since he was the best known of the CLA leaders. Max Shachtman was the actual managing editor of the paper, he had formerly edited the Labor Defender.
The Militant was the main tool of the CLA in its work among Cpers. It reprinted Trotsky’s criticism of the Comintern program and other documents, polemicized against the errors of the CP leadership, and set forth the CLA’s views on the class-struggle issues of the day. Until 1932, when an internal bulletin was begun, the paper also served as the vehicle for the internal written discussions of the CLA, carrying discussion before national conferences.
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To many people, the CLA’s criticisms of the CP’s ultraleftism seemed like nit-picking. The CP-led unions organized some militant struggles. They were defeated largely due to the sectarianism and ultraleftism of the CP, and the inadequacy of the bureaucratically appointed leaders. But these defeats came during a period of defeats for the labor movement as a whole, and the CLA’s astute criticisms of them did not inspire the victims of the “third period” to join the CLA in large numbers. Most were lost to radical politics.
The workers were stunned. Not until the slight recovery of 1933-34 did workers mobilize to join the AFL unions and strike to force the employers to recognize them.
Nevertheless, the CP had a good deal of attractive power in this period. It was identified with the Russian revolution, and in those days of high unemployment American workers were impressed with the job security and other benefits Russian workers had won. The CP also carried out work in the Black communities against evictions and around the Scottsboro case, which won them a number of Black supporters. The party was large enough to build a sizeable movement of the unemployed in the early thirties too.
The CLA was excluded by the Stalinists from the new unions, the defense movements, and the Unemployed Councils. This made it necessary to work underground to reach activists in these movements—a slow process involving very few cadre. The CLA’s focus was propaganda, explaining the revolutionary program and attacking the Stalinist misleaders in the pages of The Militant. The Left Opposition found itself isolated from the main body of revolutionary workers in the United States.
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The speeches and writings in this volume reflect the main work and the most important accomplishment of the CLA—the struggle to maintain the Marxist program and rebuild the revolutionary leadership in the United States. Cannon’s role in this was key to the success of the venture. Of all the cadres of the CLA he had the broadest class-struggle experience to draw on, from the free-speech fights and strike battles of the IWW to the best days of the young Communist Party, where he had led important political fights to orient the party toward the masses of American workers and arm it with Leninist trade union program. This experience equipped him to learn the party-building lessons of the Russian revolution from Trotsky and apply them on American soil.
While Cannon was limited to a small-group existence and bogged down in factional struggles that put a premium on patience and propaganda, the spark of the agitator enlivens his writings and speeches, and the young IWW rebel shines through.
In 1928, at the age of thirty-eight, Cannon began his apprenticeship in Bolshevism in the school of the Left Opposition. Today’s revolutionaries can learn a lot from his experiences and mistakes, and take inspiration from the moral courage of those who kept alive the authentic ideas of Marxism in the “dog days” of the Left Opposition.
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Fred Stanton
May 1, 1981
[END OF INTRODUCTION]
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Updated 12/05