BY MIKE TABER
A number of letters and documents written by U.S. communist leader James P. Cannon in late 1928 have recently come to light.

These items appear to be part of the material stolen from Cannon's apartment during two burglaries committed in late December 1928 and mid-January 1929. Copies have turned up in the papers of Jay Lovestone, general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States at the time. Lovestone's papers, deposited at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace in Stanford, California, have recently been opened to the public.

A former organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, James P. Cannon was a founder and central leader of the Communist Party of the United States after 1919. He later was the founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party, and was the SWP's national chairman emeritus at the time of his death in 1974.

In July and August 1928, Cannon was in Moscow attending the Sixth Congress of the Communist International as a delegate from the Communist Party in the United States. He and Canadian communist leader Maurice Spector - members of the congress's program commission - were given copies of a document addressed to the congress by Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Bolshevik team that had led the Russian revolution of October 1917.

Trotsky defends Marxist course
Trotsky's work - published subsequently in the book The Third International after Lenin - was a defense of the Marxist course that guided the Communist International in its early years. The document counterposes proletarian internationalism and a scientific analysis of world developments to the views and methods of a rising privileged petty-bourgeois social layer - whose leading representative came to be Joseph Stalin - that was seeking to gain control of the Communist Party and Soviet state apparatus. Trotsky headed the fight waged by the Left Opposition to restore the CP and the Comintern to a communist course. In early 1928, he and other Opposition leaders were exiled to remote parts of Soviet Asia.

Under Lenin, the open exchange of views was a hallmark of the internal life of the Bolshevik Party. But the faction of the apparatus headed by Stalin put an end to this norm, and by 1928 the Opposition's writings were suppressed. Through an evident slipup in the bureaucratic apparatus, however, the Opposition document drafted by Trotsky was distributed to a handful of delegates, among them Cannon and Spector.

Reading Trotsky's explanation of world politics helped the two North American delegates see the political underpinnings of the sharpening factional conflicts in the communist movement in the United States. They were able to appreciate the devastating impact of the political line of the Stalin-led Comintern, bringing about defeats for workers' struggles from Germany to China.

Convinced by Trotsky's Marxist explanation, Cannon and Spector smuggled copies of the document back to North America. Passing it from hand to hand, the two communist leaders won over a nucleus of party members to the Opposition's views.

Within several weeks Cannon was bureaucratically expelled from the party for these views, together with other leading working-class cadres. Anticipating this move, the Oppositionists readied the first issue of the Militant newspaper as a vehicle to get out their views. Shortly afterward, Spector and other supporters in Canada were expelled from the Communist Party there.

In early 1929, the expelled communists from the United States and Canada joined together to form the Communist League of America as a public faction of the CP, oriented to the thousands of working-class fighters belonging to the party.

An account of these events, which gave a powerful boost to the international communist opposition, can be found in Cannon's book The History of American Trotskyism.

Cannon recounts in that book how the Stalinist leadership of the CP, led at the time by Lovestone, attempted to suppress the views of the communist fighters, up to the point of thuggery. Militant salespeople were physically attacked, and goon squads were organized to break up public and internal meetings. Communist Party members who even questioned the expulsion of Cannon and the others were themselves expelled.

Burglary of papers
One event recounted in The History of American Trotskyism was the burglary of Cannon's apartment a few weeks after his expulsion.

"One Sunday afternoon, returning from a meeting of our first New York branch," Cannon wrote, "I found the apartment ransacked from top to bottom. In our absence they had jimmied the lock on the door of my home and broken in. Everything was in disorder; all my private papers, documents, records, correspondence - anything they could lay their hands on - were strewn over the floor. Evidently we had surprised them before they could cart the plunder away. While I was on tour a few weeks later they came back and finished the job. This time they took everything."

Excerpts from some of these items were published at the time in the Daily Worker, newspaper of the Communist Party, and the Canadian CP paper The Worker.

In an article in the Militant, Cannon listed what was taken: "Our letter file, account book, receipt book, editorial material, some manuscripts, bank book, partial list of subscribers to the Militant, and some other material of this kind."

The items in the Lovestone papers match Cannon's description. They include correspondence to and from Cannon, receipts for the Militant, manuscripts of speeches, mailing list names, leaflets, and blank Militant stationery.

Also included in Lovestone's Cannon file are letters to and from members of the Communist Party who had written to Cannon for more information. Most of these individuals subsequently joined the Communist League.

Cannon-Spector correspondence
A substantial part of the material in the Lovestone file consists of correspondence between Cannon and Spector, reflecting the close collaboration between the two leaders during the early stages of the fight.

In a letter to Spector written November 5 - one week after his expulsion from the CP - Cannon told of the initial progress in winning party members to the Opposition.

"We are building a rather firm base considering the time in which we have had to work," he wrote. "There is a Hungarian group which has been maintaining a small weekly for 36 weeks on the platform of the Russian Opposition... We have a definite Italian group of eight comrades who have had a formal meeting with us and agreed to the program... A dozen or more individual comrades in New York mostly left needle trades workers, are with us and we expect to recruit many more in this field." He added, "The Minneapolis group has also wired for more information and [is] asking for advice on procedure, which is surely a favorable indication."

The method Cannon urged was simple and clear-cut: "Straight open propaganda, calling everything by its proper name."

Founding the `Militant'
In his November 5 letter Cannon informed Spector about plans to start a newspaper:

"It will be eight pages, half regular newspaper size, printed at first twice a month. We plan to call it The Militant."

"We plan to get the first number off the press this weekend. We are keeping it secret and nobody appears to suspect that we are prepared to take such a bold step. Printing a paper is a hazardous and somewhat speculative enterprise as we all know. But I have confidence that the Militant will make its way and become a weekly."

As a postscript, Cannon wrote: "By the way, if you don't like this name and can think of a better one, there is still time to change it up till Friday."

In a December 1 letter, Cannon reported to Spector on the success of the Militant's first issue:

"We printed 15,000 of the first issue altogether. This was an extravagance, but it enabled us to saturate the party and its environs. They were all distributed except about two hundred for the file. It was a very expensive operation, however, the postage alone costing over $150. This week we printed 7,500. They will all be disposed of. Bundle orders and subs are trickling in. Through them we are getting the skeleton of an organization all over the country and the project of a weekly Militant is becoming feasible."

Discussing how to meet the enormous financial challenge posed by this undertaking, Cannon wrote:

"Every feasible resource should be exhausted to raise this money by contributions or loans. Our cause and our own effectiveness for years in the movement depends on it. We are in the position of Lindberg when he ran into a storm more than halfway across the ocean. `There is nothing to do but keep on going,' he said to himself. You should impress this question very strongly upon all the comrades and see if a few hundred dollars cannot be raised in some way for these purposes. We have already raised and spent about five hundred dollars and are broke again now."

International perspective
From the beginning the expelled communists saw the fight as an international one. Among the material in the file is correspondence with leaders of communist opposition groups from France and Germany, who had also been bureaucratically expelled from the Communist parties in their country.

By 1933 it became clear to Marxists that the Communist International and its member parties could not be reformed. This fact was demonstrated beyond any doubt by the disastrous policies of the German Communist Party, which prevented organized resistance to Hitler's rise to power, and the failure of any party in the Comintern to draw the lessons of this defeat.

The international communist opposition then set a course toward building new parties. In the United States the efforts to build a new communist party led in the next few years to the founding of the Socialist Workers Party.

As for Lovestone, his reign at the top of the Communist Party was to be short-lived. He himself was expelled from the CP on Stalin's orders in 1929. After World War II Lovestone became international affairs director of the AFL-CIO and was an open supporter of Washington's cold war policies. He died in 1990.

While containing no new revelations, the Cannon documents that have come to light give a flavor of the struggle to continue building a communist movement in North America.

Other writings by James P. Cannon on this period can be found in the Pathfinder books The Left Opposition in the U.S.: Writings and Speeches 1928-31 and The First Ten Years of American Communism.  
 
 
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