Printed below is the preface written by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes to the new edition of the Pathfinder book History of American Trotskyism, 1928–38: Report of a Participant. The book is being produced simultaneously in English, French, and Spanish, and will be available for sale in July. Copyright © 2002 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission

BY JACK BARNES  
In these twelve public talks given in 1942 in New York City, James P. Cannon recounts the formative--and I would add, heroic--chapter of the effort to build a communist party in the United States.

Cannon begins with three talks describing the world-shaking changes made possible in the perspectives of revolutionary-minded socialists in the United States by the victory and the example of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. He recounts the steps they took in the years after 1917 to found and season a proletarian party that aspired to emulate the Bolsheviks.

The remainder of the book concentrates on the ten years following 1928. That was the year the Workers (Communist) Party of America expelled veteran leaders and cadres who opposed the growing Stalinization of the party leadership. Organized in the Communist League of America, Cannon and the others joined Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in the international fight to continue implementing V.I. Lenin’s political course and the program for world revolution developed by the Communist International under Lenin’s guidance--the program that to this day continues to underlie the work of communists in every country.

Cannon describes how Communist League members integrated themselves into the union battles and social struggles that from the early 1930s on signaled the first stirrings of resistance by working people to the economic and social catastrophe of the Great Depression and approaching imperialist war. He records the party’s success in fusing its cadres with other vanguard workers as part of a class-struggle trade union leadership in the Upper Midwest, leading to victory some of the sharpest class battles of the 1934–38 mass labor upsurge. Cannon draws the lessons from these efforts and carries the story up to New Year’s 1938, when the communist organization in the United States takes the name Socialist Workers Party.

Two decades after he gave these talks, in The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon returned, once again from the standpoint of a leading participant, to a more detailed account of the earlier period in the history of the Marxist movement in the United States. In that 1962 book he traces the course of communists in the United States during 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.

Jim 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 was a founding leader of the communist movement in the United States.

During the seven months he spent in Soviet Russia from June 1922 to January 1923, Cannon was a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International and a member of the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow. He later served as executive secretary of the International Labor Defense in the United States, a nationwide organization that raised the proletarian banner of "an injury to one is an injury to all" and fought for the release of any class-war prisoner framed-up for militancy in the workers movement, regardless of their political affiliation. Cannon was a founding leader in 1929 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 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 conspiracy charges on which they were convicted had been brought under the newly enacted 1940 thought-control measure known as the Smith Act, a law invoked for the first time with the indictment of leaders of Local 544 and the Socialist Workers Party. Effectively overturned by the Supreme Court in 1957, that statute outlawed not only actions but advocacy of certain ideas, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s hard-won Bill of Rights, which prohibits laws abridging freedom of speech, press, or assembly.

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 and Joseph Hansen’s James P. Cannon, the Internationalist, are available from Pathfinder.
 

With the fiftieth anniversary edition of The History of American Trotskyism, published in 1995, we restored Cannon’s original subtitle "Report of a participant" as well as the original 1944 introduction by Socialist Workers Party leader Joseph Hansen. The text and index were scanned and reformatted to make the book more readable and attractive.

This fourth edition incorporates for the first time twenty-four pages of photographs that bring to life the sweeping events of world history and the roots of the powerful working-class-led social movements described by Cannon. The new edition records another landmark as well. It is published simultaneously by Pathfinder in French- and Spanish-language translations. Sixty years after the talks that make up The History of American Trotskyism were given, this contribution to an understanding of communist continuity will now be available, in the United States and around the world, to millions of revolutionary-minded working people whose first language is not English.

Cannon’s account is an essential companion not only to his own writings of the same period, but also to Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today by Jack Barnes, first published in 1983 in the magazine of Marxist politics and theory, New International. An updated edition of that contribution, with a new introduction, has also been released this year by Pathfinder Press in English, Spanish, and French.

All of these works take as their starting point the Bolshevik perspectives that guided Cannon and his comrades during the decade of 1928 to 1938 he writes about in these pages: "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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