By James P. Cannon
The party that we represent here had its origin 38 years ago next month when
I and Martin Abern and Max Shachtman, all members of the National Committee of
the Communist Party, were expelled because we insisted upon supporting Trotsky
and the Russian Opposition in the international discussion. It seems remarkable,
in view of the death rate of organizations that we have noted over the years,
that this party still shows signs of youth. That is the hallmark of a living
movement:, its capacity to attract the young. Many attempts at creating
different kinds of radical organizations have foundered, withered away, over
that problem. The old-timers stuck around but new blood didn’t come in. The
organizations, one by one, either died or just withered away on the vine (which
is probably a worse fate than death).
In my opinion, there are certain reasons for the survival of our movement and
for the indications of a new surge of vitality in it. I’ll enumerate some of
the more important reasons which account for this.
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SWP
First of all, and above all, we recognized 38 years ago that in the modern
world it is impossible to organize a revolutionary party in one country. All the
problems of the different nations of the world are so intertwined today that
they cannot be solved with a national policy alonc. The latest to experience the
truth of that dictum is Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s trying to solve the problems
of American foreign policy with Texas-style arm-twisting politics. It does not
work. We decided we would be internationalists first, last, and all the time,
and that we would not try to build a purely American party with American
ideas—because American ideas are very scarce in the realm of creative
politics. By becoming part of an international movement, and thereby
participating in international collaboration, and getting the benefit of the
ideas and experiences of others in other countries—as well as contributing our
ideas to them—that we would have a better chance to create a viable
revolutionary movement in this country.
I think that holds true today more than ever. A party that is not
internationalist is out of date very sadly and is doomed utterly. I don’t know
if our younger comrades have fully assimilated that basic, fundamental first
idea or not. I have the impression at times that they understand it rather
perfunctorily, take it for granted, rather than understand it in its essence:
that internationalism means, above all, international collaboration. The
affairs, the difficulties, the disputes of every party in the Fourth
International must be our concern—as our problems must be their concern.
It’s not only our right but our duty to participate in all the discussions
that arise throughout the International, as well as it is their right and their
duty to take part in our discussions and disputes.
OUR REVOLUTIONARY CONTINUITY
The second reason that I would give for the durability of this party of ours
is the fact that we did not pretend to have a new revelation. We were not these
“men from nowhere” whom you see, running around the campuses and other
places today saying, “We’ve got to start from scratch. Everything that
happened in the past is out the window.” On the contrary, we solemnly based
ourselves on the continuity of the revolutionary movement. On being expelled
from the Communist Party, we did not become anticommunist. On the contrary, we
said we are the true representatives of the best traditions of the Communist
Party. If you read current literature, you’ll see that we are the only ones
who defend the first ten years of American communism. The official leaders of
the Communist Party don’t want to talk about it at all. Yet those were ten
rich and fruitful years which we had behind us when we started the Trotskyist
movement in this country. Before that, some of us had about ten years of
experience in the IWW and Socialist Party, and in various class struggle
activities around the country. We said that we were the heirs of the IWW and the
Socialist Party—all that was good and valid and revolutionary in them. We
honor the Knights of Labor and the Haymarket martyrs. We’re not Johnny-come-latelys
at all. We’re continuators.
We even go back further than that. We go back to the “Communist
Manifesto” of 1848, and to Marx and Engels, the authors of that document, and
their other writings. We go back to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian
Revolution of 1917. We go back to Lenin and Trotsky, and to the struggle of the
Left Opposition in the Russian Soviet party and in the Comintern.
We said, “We are the continuators.” And we really were. We were in dead
earnest about it and we were very active from the very beginning. This is one of
the marks of a group, however small, that has confidence in itself. We engaged
in polemics against all other pretenders to leadership of the American working
class: first of all the Stalinists, and the reformist Social Democrats, and the
labor skates, and anybody else who had some quack medicine to cure the troubles
of working people. Polemics are the mark of a revolutionary party. A party that
is “too nice” to engage in what some call “bickering,”
“criticizing,” is too damn nice to live very long in the whirlpool of
politics.
Politics is even worse than baseball, in that respect. Leo Durocher, who had
a bad reputation but who carried the New York Giants to a championship of the
National League and then to the world championship over the Cleveland Indians,
explained this fact in the title of an article he wrote, “Nice Guys Finish
Last.” That’s true in politics as well as in baseball.
If we disagree with other people, we have to say so! We have to make it clear
why we disagree so that inquiring young people, looking for an organization to
represent their aspirations and ideals, will know the difference between one
party and another. Nothing is worse than muddying up differences when they
concern fundamental questions.
WORKING CLASS ORIENTATION
Another reason for the survival of our movement through the early hard period
was our orientation. Being Marxists, our orientation was always toward the
working class and to the working class organizations. It never entered our minds
in those days to think you could overthrow capitalism over the head of the
working class. Marxism had taught us that the great service capitalism has
rendered to humanity has been to increase the productivity of society and, at
the same time, to create a working class which would have the interest and the
power to overthrow capitalism. In creating this million-headed wage-working
class, Marx said: capitalism has created its own gravediggers. We saw it as the
task of revolutionists to orient our activity, our agitation, and our propaganda
to the working class of this country.
PUTTING THEORY INTO ACTION
Another reason for our exceptional durability was that we did not merely
study the books and learn the formulas. Many people have done that—and
that’s all they’ve done, and they might as well have stayed home. Trotsky
remarked more than once, in the early days, about some people who play with
ideas in our international movement.
He said: they have understood all the formulas and they can repeat them by
rote, but they haven’t got them in their flesh and blood, so it doesn’t
count. When you get the formulas of Marxism in your flesh and blood that means
you have an irresistible impulse and drive to put theory into aciion.
As Engels said to the sectarian socialists in the United States in the
nineteenth century: our theory is not a dogma but a guide to action. One who
studies the theory of Marxism and doesn’t do anything to try to put it into
action among the working class might as well have stayed in bed. We were not
that type. We came out of the experiences of the past, but we were activists as
well as students of Marxism.
THE CAPACITY TO LEARN
One more reason for our survival: one factor working in our favor was our
modesty. Modesty is the precondition for learning. If you know it all to start
with, you can’t learn any more. We were brought to the painful realization in
1928 that there were a lot of things we didn’t know—after all of our
experiences and study. New problems and new complications which had arisen in
the Soviet Union and in the international movement required that we go to school
again. And to go to school with the best teachers: the leaders of the Russian
Revolution. After twenty years of experience in the American movement and in the
Comintern, we put ourselves to school and tried to learn from the great leaders
who had made the only successful revolution in the history of the working class.
We had to learn, also, how to think—and to take time to think. We believed
in a party of disciplined action but disciplined activity alone does not
characterize only the revolutionist. Other groups, such as the fascists, have
that quality. The Stalinists have disciplined action. Disciplined action
directed by clear thinking distinguishes the revolutionary Marxist party.
Thinking is a form of action. In the early days of our movement we had a great
deal of discussion—not all of it pleasant to hear, but out of which came some
clarification. We had to learn to be patient and listen and, out of the
discussion, to formulate our policy and our program.
Those were the qualities of our movement in the first years of our almost
total isolation that enabled us to survive. We had confidence in the American
working class and we oriented toward it. When the American working class began
to move in the mid-thirties, we had formulated our program of action, and we
were in the midst of the class, and we began to grow—in some years, we grew
rather rapidly.
INTERNAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN THE SWP
Not the least of our reasons for remaining alive for 38 years, and growing a
little, and now being in a position to capitalize on new opportunities, was the
flexible democracy of our party. We never tried to settle differences of opinion
by suppression. Free discussion—not every day in the week but at stated
regular times, with full guarantees for the minority—is a necessary condition
for the health and strength of an organization such as ours.
There’s no guarantee that factionalism won’t get out of hand. I don’t
want to be an advocate of factionalism—unless anybody picks on me and runs the
party the wrong way and doesn’t want to give me a chance to protest about it!
The general experience of the international movement has shown that excesses of
factionalism can be very dangerous and destructive to a party. In my book, The
First Ten Years of American Communism, I put all the necessary emphasis on the
negative side of the factional struggles which became unprincipled. But on the
other hand, if a party can live year after year without any factional
disturbances, it may not be a sign of health—it may be a sign that the
party’s asleep; that it’s not a real live party. In a live party, you have
differences, differences of appraisal, and so on. But that’s a sign of life.
THE NEW LEFT OF THE 1960s
You have now a new phenomenon in the American radical movement which I hear
is called “The New Left”. This is a broad title given to an assemblage of
people who state they don’t like the situation the way it is and something
ought to be done about it—but we musn’t take anything from the experiences
of the past; nothing from the “Old Left” or any of its ideas or traditions
are any good. What’s the future going to be? “Well, that’s not so clear
either. Let’s think about that.” What do you do now? “I don’t know.
Something ought to be done.” That’s a fair description of this amorphous New
Left which is written about so much and with which we have to contend.
We know where we come from. We intend to maintain our continuity. We know
that we are part of the world, and that we have to belong to an international
movement and get the benefits of association and discussion with cothinkers
throughout the world. We have a definite orientation whereas the New Left says
the working class is dead. The working class was crossed off by the wiseacres in
the twenties. There was a long boom in the 1920s. The workers not only didn’t
gain any victories, they lost ground. The trade unions actually declined in
number. In all the basic industries, where you now see great flourishing
industrial unions—the auto workers, aircraft, steel, rubber, electrical,
transportation, maritime—the unions did not exist, just a scattering here and
there. There were company unions in all these big basic industries, run by the
bosses’ stooges. The workers were entitled to belong to these company unions
as long as they did what the stooges told them to do. It took a
semi-revolutionary uprising in the mid-thirties to break that up and install
real unions.
There were a lot of wiseacres who crossed off the American working class and
said, “That’s Marx’s fundamental mistake. He thinks the working class can
make a revolution and emancipate itself. And he’s dead wrong! Just look at
them!” They didn’t say who would make the revolution if the workers didn’t
do it—just like the New Leftists today don’t give us any precise description
of what power will transform society.
People who said such things in the 1920s were proved to be wrong, and those
who say the same things about the working class today will be proved to be
wrong. We will maintain our orientation toward the working class and to its
organized section in particular. I hope that our party and our youth movement
will not only continue but will intensify and develop its capacity for polemics
against all pretenders to leadership of the coming radicalization of the
American workers.
Above all, I hope our party and our youth movement will continue to learn and
to grow. That’s the condition for survival as a revolutionary party. I don’t
merely get impatient with Johnny-come-latelys who just arrived from nowhere and
announce that they know it all, I get impatient even with old-timers who think
they have nothing more to leam. The world is changing. New problems arise, new
complexities, new complications confront the revolutionary movement at every
step. The condition for effective political leadership is that the leaders
themselves continue to learn and to grow. That means: not to lose their modesty
altogether.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL
I’d like to add one more point. The question is raised very often, “What
can one person do?” The urgency of the situation in the world is pretty widely
recognized outside of our ranks. The urgency of the whole social problem has
been magnified a million times by the development of nuclear weapons, and by the
capacity of these inventions and discoveries to destroy all life on earth. Not
merely a single city like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but capable of destroying all
life on earth. And it’s in the hands of reckless and irresponsible people.
It’s got to be taken away from them, and it cannot be done otherwise except by
revolution.
What can one single person do in this terribly urgent situation? I heard a
program on television a short while ago: an interview with Bertrand Russell, the
British philosopher, former pacifist, fighter against nuclear war. He’s not a
revolutionary Marxist but is an absolutely dedicated opponent of nuclear war and
a prophet of the calamity such a war will bring. He was asked, “What are the
chances, in your opinion, of preventing a nuclear war that might destroy all
life on earth?” He said, “The odds are four-to-six against us.” He was
then asked, “How would you raise the odds of being able to prevent a nuclear
war?” He answered, “I don’t know anything to do except keep on fighting to
try to change the odds.”
