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Vol. 72/No. 41      October 20, 2008

 
Building a political party
on Marxist foundations
(feature article)
 
Printed below are excerpts from Letters from Prison by James P. Cannon, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in October. In 1944-45 Cannon and 17 other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minnesota truck drivers union were imprisoned for opposing Washington’s imperialist aims in World War II, after being convicted under the thought-control Smith Act. In two letters written in May 1944 as part of this prison journal, Cannon addressed the importance of educating the members and leadership of a communist party in preparation for the explosive working-class battles that would follow World War II. Copyright © 1968 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JAMES P. CANNON  
The pioneers and outstanding militants of American Communism were mainly self-educated, that is, half-educated, workers who lacked adequate formal schooling and had only as much Marxism as they had managed to pick up on the fly in all-too-infrequent hours of leisure and freedom from duties and responsibilities. There was nobody to teach them; there were no schools where they might learn what to study, and how to study systematically; and they had very little time to learn for themselves, the hard way.

They were thrust into positions of leadership and overwhelmed with responsibilities without having previously acquired the necessary theoretical training and political experience to lead the party properly. As a consequence the early Communist Party made many egregious errors, devoured its energies in factional struggles which it was unable to resolve and finally, with the exception of a small nucleus, succumbed to the Stalinist degeneration.

The pioneers of American Trotskyism, standing on the shoulders of the antecedent movement, and aided and guided by [Russian Revolution leader Leon] Trotsky, did far better, and for the first time in the United States, built a political organization on solid Marxist foundations. The work of the pioneer American Trotskyists, however, while qualitatively superior to that of their immediate predecessors, was sadly deficient in some respects.

They made Marxist politics their study and did not do badly in this field, as results have shown. They developed the Leninist concepts of party organization and of the role of the party, and it may be said, made not unimportant contributions to the Leninist theory and practice of party organization.

Marxian economic theories, in contrast, have not had their due, either in study or in application. And the philosophic method of Marxism was regarded with such indifference that neo-revisionist attacks against Marxism, marching at first under the flag of philosophy, remained unanswered over a long period of years. Prancing intellectuals and academic tinhorns, preparing their migration to the imperialist camp, held the center of the stage. The sneering renunciation and belittlement of dialectical materialism was allowed to become the fashion. The party paid for this indifference with the factional explosion of the petty-bourgeois opposition which brought the party to the brink of disruption.

Moralistic quackery, another cloak under which desertion to the class enemy was prepared, long remained unnoticed and unexposed, and was even permitted to infect our ranks. The degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Comintern had produced a great wave of disillusionment, especially in intellectualistic circles. This took the form of a flight from Marxism. Revisionism, the first stage of class renegacy, was long on the offensive on the theoretical front. It remained for Trotsky to lead the defensive struggle of Marxism, first in Their Morals and Ours and, finally, in the great anti-Burnham polemics (In Defense of Marxism).  
 
 
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