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….

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….

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…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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