Printed below is an excerpt from The Left Opposition in the U.S. 1928–31 by James P. Cannon. Along with several other leaders of the Communist Party in the United States, Cannon was expelled from the party in 1928 for his defense of the policies of the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern in its early years against the counterrevolutionary course of the Stalin-led regime in Moscow. Within days these working-class leaders published the first issue of the Militant, containing their statement to the Political Committee of the CP on the fundamental questions in dispute. The document also expressed their determination to fight their expulsion from the party.

The item quoted is titled "Platform of the Communist Opposition." It was presented to the Sixth National Convention of the Workers (Communist) Party by Cannon, Arne Swabeck, Martin Abern, and Max Shachtman, and published in the Feb. 15 and Feb. 22, 1929, issues of the Militant. Copyright © 1981 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
 

Just as the revolutionary communist movement all over the world was molded and hardened in estimating the significance of the events of 1914–17, marked by the collapse of the Second International and the rise of the Bolshevik revolution, so world Bolshevism, its maintenance and growth, is conditioned upon the estimation of the course of events in the Soviet Union and the Communist International in the period of the last four to five years. All other questions are subordinated to this and flow from it.

The collapse of the Russian revolution as the dictatorship of the proletariat would signify the retardation for decades of the revolutionary movement in Europe and America and the uprisings of the colonial peoples, whose main point of support today is the victory of the Russian October. A collapse would be followed by an unequaled reign of reaction throughout the world and would entail a restoration of world imperialist rule without precedent in the last two or three decades.

Our primary concern is therefore with the fate of the Russian revolution, which directly affects the fate of all the Communist parties. The defense of the Russian revolution against external attacks and internal dangers is therefore the first and foremost task of all communists and every conscious worker. We are defenders of the Russian revolution since 1917. There is no break in the continuity of our position, for our present fight is directly connected with and follows from our whole previous line.

The attitude of official optimism and light-minded equanimity which finds that all is as it should be, without inquiry as to the actual facts and the basic trends of development--and seeks to prohibit such inquiry--is the worst kind of "support" that can be given the revolution. This attitude is actually one of criminal neglect, and results in disarming the proletariat before its enemies and deluding it before difficulties. To base oneself only on faith and precedent is to drug oneself into impotence. Communists must give conscious and understanding help.

The origin of the present crisis in the Soviet Union lies in the contradiction between the existence of a Soviet regime in a country with a predominantly peasant economy, and the pressure of the capitalist encirclement. This crisis has been sharpened and aggravated by the false policies of the leadership. These policies are rooted, further, in the overestimation by the present leadership of the duration and depth of the temporary stabilization of capitalism, which began after the defeat of the German and Bulgarian proletariat in 1923.¹

Our entire epoch is one of capitalism in dissolution, of imperialist wars, and of the socialist revolution of the proletariat. Imperialism is the final stage of capitalism, of the domination of finance capital, monopolies, and international trusts, of the division and redivision of the world among the imperialist powers, wherein the only method of "remedying" the disproportion between productive development and capital accumulation on the one hand and the division of markets, colonies, and spheres of influence on the other, is the resort to imperialist war.

In sharpening the contradictions between the productive forces of world economy and national state barriers, imperialism evoked the last war and is preparing the next. This does not exclude, within the period of decline of capitalism, the possibility of a partial economic revival or even the development of productive forces. Lenin, at the Second Congress of the Communist International, rightly pointed out that there was "no absolutely hopeless situation."

The state of preparedness of the proletariat to wage a revolutionary struggle for power is a determining factor in the destruction of capitalism. Thanks to the treachery of the reformist Social Democracy, to the strategic though temporary postwar concessions of the bourgeoisie, and to the weakness or bad leadership of the Communist parties, the bourgeoisie has been able to achieve the present relative stabilization of capitalism.

But this estimate of the current stabilization differs radically from that implied in the Stalinist, revisionist "theory" of socialism in one country, that is, a stabilization for decades, for a whole epoch....  
 
The smoke screen of ‘Trotskyism’
To conceal the essence of its right-wing deviations and bureaucratic misdeeds, the Stalin regime invented the myth of "Trotskyism," which it represents as the real danger to Leninism. Trotsky’s differences of political line with Lenin were liquidated in 1917, on L.D. Trotsky’s acceptance of the April Theses of Lenin and his entrance into the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party on the basis of his agreement with the tenets of Bolshevism. But even those prerevolutionary differences were never as great as the differences of the Stalin-Bukharin regime now with the principles of Leninism. Differences between Lenin and Trotsky after 1917 rose out of the efforts of the two leaders of the revolution to solve concrete problems on the basis of the same theoretical program, and were never so great as the differences between the present ruling faction and Lenin. The Opposition will fight against the falsification of the history of the party and the revolution for factional ends, which has assumed such monstrous proportions in the demagogic campaign against L.D. Trotsky, in whom we recognize Lenin’s chief collaborator in the leadership of the Russian revolution and today the foremost representative of Leninism in the world.

The Opposition is not conducting a war for "Trotskyism"; such a political tendency does not exist. It is fighting for the principles of Leninism. In the Soviet Union, under the rain of calumny and repression, the Leninist Opposition, led by its inspiring leader Comrade Trotsky, has fought persistently against all forms of revisionism and opportunism and for Bolshevism.

The Opposition has sounded the alarm against the Thermidorian danger and proposed a correct policy to combat it in favor of the further socialist development of the country--in the period of retarded world revolution--through a correct policy of the distribution of the national income, through taxation of the nepman and the kulak to accelerate the process of industrialization and to improve the conditions of the workers, through credits and other cooperative assistance to the poor peasantry, through a correct price policy, and so forth.

The Leninist Opposition is organizing the workers for the defense of the Russian revolution on two fronts of essentially the same enemy: against imperialist intervention from without and against the danger of Thermidor from within. Such a real defense, based on a correct class policy, can be accomplished only if the deep-going reforms proposed by the Opposition are adopted and an end is made to the splitting of the Communist Party and the imprisonment and exile of thousands of the best Bolsheviks. The leadership which organized the defense of the Soviet Union under the direction of Lenin is still best able to carry it out today.

¹In 1923 a strong protest movement of the German proletariat developed, fueled by a severe economic crisis and sparked by the French occupation of the Ruhr. The Communist Party of Germany grew rapidly and won the leadership of the movement. A prerevolutionary situation developed, and a decision was made to carry out a revolution in October, beginning in Saxony, where the CP was strong and was in a united front with the Social Democrats, who controlled the state government. At the last minute the CP leadership cancelled the rising. As a result of this vacillation, the capitalists were able to recover.

Heinrich Brandler, a German CP leader, became the scapegoat for this defeat, but the Kremlin’s responsibility for it was one of the issues that led to the formation of the Russian Left Opposition. In June 1923 the Bulgarian government of the peasant leader Stambulisky was overthrown by reactionary forces. The CP remained neutral in the ensuing civil war, but the white terror against them forced the party underground. Claiming that the workers were not defeated by the civil war, which they saw as a fight between two bourgeois cliques, the CP attempted a putsch in September, which was doomed to defeat.  
 
 
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