Vol. 78/No. 35 October 6, 2014
The History of American Trotskyism 1928-1938: Report of a Participant is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. In talks given in 1942, James P. Cannon (1890-1974), a founder of the communist movement in the U.S., recounts his experiences building a proletarian revolutionary party. Cannon was national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party from 1938 to 1953 and then national chairman until 1972. In the excerpt below Cannon describes the Communist League’s fusion with the American Workers Party in 1934, forming the Workers Party, and how party members joined the Socialist Party in 1936. Both were steps by revolutionaries to join forces with workers involved in growing resistance and win them to communism. Copyright © 1944 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY JAMES CANNON
In the course of these lectures I have emphasized repeatedly that the tactics of a party are imposed upon it by political and economic factors beyond its control. The task of political leadership is to understand what is possible and necessary in a given situation, and what is not possible and not necessary. This may be said to be the gist of political leadership. The activities of a revolutionary party, that is, a Marxist Party, are conditioned by objective circumstances. These circumstances sometimes impose defeat and isolation upon the party despite anything that can be done by the leadership and the membership. In other situations the objective circumstances create possibilities for successes and advances, but at the same time limit them. The party always moves within a set of social factors not made by itself. They are features of the process of the development of society.
There are times when the best leadership cannot move the party forward by a single inch. For example, Marx and Engels, the greatest of all the teachers and leaders of our movement, remained isolated practically throughout their entire lives. They could not even create a substantial group in England where they lived and worked during the period of their maturity. This was not due to errors on their part and certainly not to incapacity, but to external factors beyond their control. The British workers were not yet ready to hear the revolutionary word.
During the long period of reaction and stagnation, which gripped the world labor movement in the first years of our existence as a Trotskyist movement in this country, namely from 1928 until 1934, we could not avoid isolation. … When the logjam in the world labor movement began to break up, especially beginning with 1934, a new movement of the masses was to be seen in this country, and all over the world. When that new situation began to reveal itself we were put to the test and given our opportunity. That was no longer the time to remain contentedly in isolation, clarifying principles. That was the time to bestir ourselves and apply those principles in action in the life of the surging class struggle. Our determination to do this, our recognition that the opportunity was before us, and our determination to grasp that opportunity, brought us into conflict with the sectarians, the ultraleftists. We had to fight them, we had to defeat them, in order to go forward. We did that. In the Minneapolis strike we took a step forward in the economic mass movement. The fusion with the American Workers Party was another important step along the road toward the development of a serious Marxist party in the United States. But these progressive actions were only steps, and we had to recognize the limitedness of the accomplishments. Political initiative and resolute actions in more complicated situations were still required of us.
The entry of our group into the Socialist Party of the United States was a still more important step along the complicated, winding, long, drawn-out path toward the creation of a party that will eventually lead the proletariat of America to victory in the socialist revolution. That step, the entry into the Socialist Party, was taken by us at just the right time. Time is always an important consideration in politics. Time does not wait. Alas for the political leader who forgets it. There is a legal expression: “Time is of the essence of the contract.” Ten times, a thousand times more does that apply in politics. …
Our entry into the Socialist Party took place against a background of great events which were in process of unfolding, both at home and on a world scale. The sit-down strikes in France, a veritable revolution, were taking place at the very moment we were arranging to join the Socialist Party. The second big upsurge of the CIO, destined to carry this tremendous movement to greater heights than the organized labor movement of America had ever known—in numerical strength, in mass militancy, and in its composition of the basic lower strata of the proletariat—this second big upsurge was in the beginning of its development at that time, in the spring of 1936. The CIO rebellion was partly influenced, undoubtedly, by the sit-down strikes in France. The Spanish civil war was about to break out in full force; and to raise once again, in the most acute manner, the prospect of a second victory of the proletarian revolution in Europe. The Spanish revolution had within it the possibility of changing the whole face of Europe if it should succeed. A few months afterwards the Moscow trials were to shake the whole world.
This great panorama of world-shaking events — and the rise of the CIO was not less important than the others in my judgment, from a world historical point of view — created the most favorable auspices for a forward march of the Marxist vanguard. There was no lack of political interest, no lack of mass activities, no lack of an adequate field for the operation of Marxist revolutionists at the time when we were conducting our activity within the framework of the Socialist Party. If we were worth our salt under such objective conditions, we were bound to gain. We would have had to be the worst kind of leadership; we would almost have had to set out consciously to defeat ourselves in order to fail to gain in such favorable circumstances as those.