BY JAMES P. CANNON

Reprinted below are excerpts of James P. Cannon's introduction to the first book ever produced by the forerunner of Pathfinder Press. Appearing in January 1929, the book was titled The Draft Program of the Communist International-A Criticism of Fundamentals by Leon Trotsky. It was later included as part of a larger work entitled The Third International after Lenin. A new edition of the latter book has just been published by Pathfinder.

Leon Trotsky was part of the central leadership team of the Bolshevik Party from the time of the October 1917 revolution in Russia and of the Communist International in its early years. Following the death of V.I. Lenin in 1924, Trotsky became the principal leader of the Left Opposition, formed to wage a battle against the petty-bourgeois social forces led by Joseph Stalin, and to defend the communist perspectives the Bolshevik Party had fought for.

Written from exile in Soviet Central Asia in 1928, The Third International after Lenin is a defense of the proletarian course that had guided the Communist (or Third) International in its early years. Its main component is a criticism of the draft program presented by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin to the International's Sixth World Congress, held that year in Moscow.

One of those attending the congress was James P. Cannon, a founder and central leader of the Communist Party in the United States. He subsequently was the founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party, and was its national chairman emeritus at the time of his death in 1974.

A member of the congress's program commission, Cannon was one of a handful of delegates given a copy of Trotsky's document through an evident slipup in the bureaucratic cracks. Another delegate receiving a copy was Maurice Spector, a leader of the Communist Party of Canada.

Cannon and Spector both became convinced of the correctness of Trotsky's arguments, and smuggled copies of the document back to North America. Passing it from hand to hand, the two communist leaders won over a nucleus of supporters. Within several weeks Cannon was expelled from the party, together with other leading working-class members. They then began a public fight for the communist perspective.

The Third International after Lenin is copyright Pathfinder Press. The item below is reprinted with permission.

The Communist International, which was organized in 1919, first adopted its program at the Sixth World Congress held in July-August 1928, after having previously considered drafts at the Fourth Congress in 1922 and at the Fifth Congress in 1924. The document published here is a commentary by L.D. Trotsky on the draft program drawn up by Bukharin and Stalin before the Sixth Congress and which was subsequently adopted without any important changes. The criticism of Trotsky, written before the Sixth Congress and directed at the Bukharin-Stalin project, thus applies now to the formally adopted program of the Comintern on all essential questions, and his challenge to many of its formulations and conclusions acquires thereby all the greater seriousness.

The question of the program of the Communist International, and the criticism brought against it by one of the foremost leaders of the Russian revolution and the international communist movement, confronts the communist proletariat now as a theoretical and political question of the greatest magnitude with which all practical issues of strategy and tactics are connected.

Communist theories are not abstractions but the guiding line for action. False tactics in the struggle proceed from false programmatic formulations. This axiom of Marxism has been given a fresh and tragic proof, as Trotsky points out, in the enormous blunders committed in recent years since the death of Lenin. Programmatic questions are questions of life and death for the international proletarian revolution.

Trotsky's Criticism of the Draft Program comes to grips with the principal theoretical error which sums up and motivates the opportunist tactics pursued in recent years in the internal questions of the Soviet Union as well as in the international movement: the revisionist theory of socialism in one country. Basing himself on the fundamental teachings of Marx and Lenin, Trotsky turns all his guns on this new revisionism which has been smuggled into the Communist International since Lenin died, to its great detriment. He attacks it from all sides, tearing away the covering of falsely applied quotations from Lenin and reveals its non-Leninist essence, battering down the whole structure of falsification and scholasticism upon which it is built.

Trotsky not only annihilates the new revisionism with the hammer blows of Marxism and Leninism. He also exposes down to their roots the tactical errors connected with it and points the way for their avoidance in the future. His criticism is a searchlight in the fog of official propaganda, scholasticism, and administrative decree which has been substituted for the ideological leadership of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in earlier years....

The criticism deals with the role of American imperialism and with the prospect of new revolutionary situations arising from its hegemony and growing aggression. The section on the Chinese revolution and its lessons elucidates the problems of the Chinese revolution and enables the American reader, for the first time, to glimpse the actualities of this world historical event. The theses, articles, and speeches of Trotsky and the other leaders of the Russian Opposition on the problems and tasks of the Chinese revolution, which estimated the whole course of events with the most remarkable precision, were suppressed and concealed from the parties of the entire International.

This unbelievable and absolutely unprecedented procedure becomes all the more monstrous in the light of the subsequent developments which wholly confirmed the correctness of the position of Trotsky and his colleagues and revealed the Menshevist tactics of Stalin and Bukharin as the source of the cruel defeats of the Chinese proletariat. Trotsky's Criticism of the Program draws the lessons of the period of the Chinese revolution which culminated with the Canton uprising, lays bare the errors of the leadership with all their tragic consequences and the incalculable menace for the future contained in the attempt to conceal or justify these errors in the adopted program.

In the Chinese revolution in 1926-27 the Opposition led by Trotsky proposed the slogan of soviets uniting the workers and the peasants, under the leadership of the former against the bourgeoisie. They wanted to warn the workers and peasants not to trust the leaders of the Kuomintang or of the Left Kuomintang. They wanted the workers and the vanguard of the peasants to arm themselves. They wanted complete independence for the Communist Party and in general a course toward the establishment of a democratic dictatorship through the workers and peasants soviets.

The Stalin-Bukharin leadership rejected all these proposals of the Leninist Opposition in favor of the Menshevik policy of union with the liberal bourgeoisie which in actual practice gave the hegemony to the bourgeoisie, prevented the real development of the independent Communist Party and led to the defeat of the working class. The bourgeois "allies" of the proletariat became the hangmen of the revolution just as the Opposition foretold....

The formation of "Farmer-Labor" parties-that source of such exaggerated hopes and unbounded mistakes in the American party- is reviewed at length in this volume. The underlying falsity of the whole idea of a "two-class" party is analyzed from the theoretical standpoint of Marxism and the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, and is condemned in principle-for the West as well as for the East.... It was his initiative which brought the assistance of the Communist International in 1922 to the task of liberating the Communist Party of America from the straightjacket of illegality in which it had bound itself. And now it is he, above all others, who is showing the party, and the whole Comintern, the way back to Leninism on the great world problems of the present period.  
 
 
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