BY JIM MONAGHAN
Below we reprint a review of James P. Cannon - As We Knew Him by Jack Barnes and others. It was reviewed by Jim Monaghan, and appeared in the 1996 issue of Saothar, a journal of the Irish Labour History Society.

Jack Barnes (ed), James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, (Pathfinder, New York, 1976), pp. 200 np

James P. Cannon (1890-1974) was one of the key figures in the foundation and early development of the American Communist Party (CP). He later went on to found the American Trotskyist movement. His father was born in Ireland, but emigrated young enough to have been an activist in the Knights Of Labor, one of the early trade unions in America. James P. Cannon was born in Rosebud, Kansas in 1890. As a young man he joined the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW). In the IWW Cannon was a protégé of Vincent St. John and a friend of both Big Bill Haywood and Frank Little, who was later lynched in Butte, Montana.

It is hard to visualise now, but in the period before the First World War there was explicit class warfare waged in America, as the capitalist class tried to crush the nascent workers' movement represented by the IWW and the Socialist Party. The big strikes and lockouts of Lawrence, Patterson - and Butte in 1912 and 1913 rivaled and even exceeded those of Dublin in 1913 in intensity. The employers were ruthless, in defence of their interests. When the workers lost they paid an enormous price; in some cases the entire workforce was replaced, and the militants run out of town. The state forces made no pretense of neutrality. Faced with the First World War the Left in America, as elsewhere, split. The news of the Russian Revolution galvanized many, Cannon amongst them, into an attempt to form a new party based on Marxism. In the confusion of rival groups which proliferated, Cannon supported the more Americanised group around John Reed. Eventually this group was accepted as the model for the new party rather than the main rival, which was based on federations of non English speaking national groupings.

In the CP, Cannon and William Z. Foster emerged as the leaders of the more practical wing which orientated toward the trade unions and American born workers. Cannon set up the International Labour Defence to defend class war prisoners whatever their political persuasion. These included Sacco and Vanzetti, Mooney and many others. Cannon's prestige among IWW members was a major asset to him. He worked closely with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who at this stage was outside the CP. His allies and friends included Williams F. Dunne, who had led a general strike in Butte, and Tom O'Flaherty, older brother of the novelist Liam O'Flaherty.

In 1929, at a Comintern conference, Cannon read Trotsky's critique of the direction which the USSR was taking under Stalin's influence. Reading this brought together all Cannon's reservations about the Comintern line and he became a supporter of Trotsky. On his return to America he organised a secret faction before his inevitable expulsion from the CP. Tom O'Flaherty, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern of the Party leadership followed him, as did the younger Dunne brothers. Many of Cannon's closest friends remained in the CP, where they then tried to save their own Party positions by denouncing Cannon. The CP tried to eliminate Cannon's group - which initially still regarded itself as a faction of the CP rather than as a separate organisation - through the use of goon squads and violence. Cannon, however, had friends from all parts of the left milieu who were willing to defend his democratic rights even when they disagreed with his views. Over the next decade Cannon built the most efficient Trotskyist organisation in the world. The Dunnes led the great strike in Minneapolis which ushered in the rise of the Congress Of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Their success here enabled them to merge with A. J, Muste's American Workers' Parry, a group which had led the Toledo Strike in 1934. In 1938, after a period of steady growth the Socialist Workers' Party was formed.

The movement split in 1940, essentially over the question of whether the USSR was still a worker's state to be defended by the left despite its shortcomings. Cannon and orthodox Trotskyists (including Trotsky himself) held that this was so. It is a debate which has now been overtaken by history. Cannon was gaoled with a number of his comrades in 1944 under the Smith Act which was designed for use against all those who could be described as subversives in an attempt to destroy the group's influence in the working class. The CP applauded this measure, but was less enthusiastic when the same tactic was later used against the CP in the McCarthy era.

Cannon's Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) survived the 1950's, as did the CP. The rest of the American left effectively disappeared. The SWP played a major role in the civil rights and anti-war movement during the 1960s. Cannon assisted T. Draper in his classic history of the CP, earning a reputation for honesty and accuracy in his memoirs. This prompted Draper to say that for Cannon, unlike many of the other CP leaders, the memories were still fresh, and he was not ashamed of them.

This book is a collection of anecdotes and memoirs of Cannon by friends and associates. It is, therefore, somewhat episodic. It should appeal to those with an interest in American politics and has a relevance broader than merely for those with Trotskyist sympathies. It is often forgotten that many of the inspirations of the Irish Labour movement come from the west rather than the east. Larkin and Connolly and their ideas were influenced by American experiences and debates, as was the concept of the OBU (One Big Union). Interesting in its own right, this work should also whet the appetite for the forthcoming biography of Cannon by Bryan Palmer, the Canadian Marxist historian. The books by Cannon I strongly recommend are Socialism On Trial (1942) and Notebook Of An Agitator (1958).  
 
 
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