Beginning with three talks summarizing the initial efforts to found a communist party that aspired to emulate the Bolsheviks in the years following the Russian revolution, Cannon concentrates in this book on the period following the expulsion from the Workers (Communist) Party of America in 1928 of those veteran communists who opposed the growing Stalinization of the party leadership and supported the fight led by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to continue V.I. Lenin's communist course. Cannon takes the story up to New Year's 1938, when the communist organization in the United States took the name Socialist Workers Party.

Two decades after he gave these talks, in The First Ten Years of American Communism Cannon returned to a more detailed account of the earlier period in the history of the Marxist movement in the United States, once again from the standpoint of a leading participant. Published in 1962, The First Ten Years of American Communism traces in greater detail the years from the Bolshevik-led revolution of 1917 until 1928. In the process, Cannon reaffirms the summary conclusions on the roots of the communist movement in the United States and the character of its pioneers first presented in these 1942 lectures.

Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas, in 1890 and joined the Socialist Party at the age of eighteen. A traveling organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World before and during World War I and a leader of the working-class left wing of the Socialist Party, he became a founding leader of the communist movement in the United States following the Russian revolution. He was a member of the presidium of the executive committee of the Communist International in Moscow and then a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International during the seven months he was in Soviet Russia from June 1922 to January 1923. He later served as executive secretary of the International Labor Defense, a committee in the United States that fought for the release of prisoners framed up for their militancy in the working-class movement. Cannon was a founding leader in 1928 of the Communist League of America, which evolved into the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. He served as SWP national secretary until 1953, when he became the party's national chairman, and then, in 1972, national chairman emeritus until the time of his death in 1974.

On December 8, 1941, just a few months before he presented these talks, Cannon and seventeen other leaders and cadres of the Socialist Workers Party and of Local 544-CIO (formerly Teamsters Local 544) had been sentenced to prison on frame-up charges in a federal court in Minneapolis, Minnesota, because of their active opposition within the U.S. labor movement to Washington's joining in the imperialist slaughter of World War II. The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the verdict and sentences in late 1943. Cannon was imprisoned for sixteen months in the federal penitentiary at Sandstone, Minnesota, and was released in early 1945. The appeals court also affirmed the convictions of the other seventeen defendants, all of whom were imprisoned for similar terms.

Readers of The History of American Trotskyism will be interested in The Left Opposition in the U.S., 1928-31 and The Communist League of America, 1932-34, which include writings and speeches by Cannon from a substantial portion of the period covered in this book. Other writings by Cannon include The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Notebook of an Agitator, Socialism on Trial, Letters from Prison, The Socialist Workers Party in World War II, Speeches to the Party, and Speeches for Socialism. All these titles, as well as The First Ten Years of American Communism, are available from Pathfinder.  
 

Cannon's account is an essential companion not only to his First Ten Years of American Communism, but also to the article "Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today," published in 1983 in the inaugural issue of the Marxist magazine New International. All three of these works take as their starting point the Bolshevik perspective Cannon stated in the opening sentences of these 1942 talks: "Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival, of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International."  
 
 
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