BY JAMES P. CANNON  
As our esteemed chairman reminded you, we have been away for a while. It seems, to me at least, like a long time since I have made a speech, and naturally I am a little nervous in getting started. But I hope to overcome that as I go along because all I really intend to do is to continue what I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted.

In essence, it is what we have been saying throughout our entire conscious lives; and what our predecessors, the great pioneers of socialism, have been saying since 1848.

We are approaching the one-hundredth anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, the first great document which proclaimed the coming downfall of capitalism and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Today, ninety-seven years later, it remains our program and our banner. Nothing is clearer in the world today than this: that the failure of the workers to carry out the historic mission imposed upon them by the decline of capitalism does not and cannot bring any relief or prosperity for them but only a continuation of enslavement and devastating wars which in the present period of the death agony of capitalism grow ever more monstrous in devouring mankind. . .

As the present war in Europe draws to its agonizing close and with the end of the present war in the Orient not very far away, the victors are meeting in San Francisco to prepare the next war.1 Even before they have been able to arrange the formal declaration of the finish of the five-and-a-half-year war that has cost tens of millions of human lives, they are meeting, and over the meeting of the victors is the shadow of the next war, which they don’t even any longer promise to avoid. They only express hopes that it will not come too soon. The battlefields of Europe and the Orient, the ruined cities, the devastations, the hunger, and the dead, counterposed to the opulent setting of the conference in the San Francisco Opera House seems to me to symbolize the whole present reality. [. . .]

Who are the victors in this terrible devastating war? Who won freedom? The victors, you must understand and never fail to make it clear—the victors in the first place are the Wall Street money sharks. They are the only ones who have won the war, they and their satellite imperialism in Great Britain, which in the course of the war has yielded three-fourths of its position to the Wall Street Moloch and the Stalinist satellites of Moscow.

U.S. imperialism emerges from this war as the master of the world, and it seems to those who cannot see clearly that it is all-powerful. Some of the statesmen at Washington and their representatives in Frisco, and their generals and admirals on the battlefields and the high seas, deceive themselves in the effulgence of these great victories that have been produced as a result of the terrific preponderance of the American economy. They deceive themselves.

I do not think that America is all-powerful. Let us not make that mistake. The modern Rome, the master of the world, whose light-minded statesmen dream and even talk of dominating and exploiting and policing the world for one hundred years, has a cancer at its heart. But today they are the victors.

Now, who are the vanquished in the war as it stands today, up to the present moment? The war and its consequences are by no means concluded. After the formal ending of the hostilities comes the aftermath, and the victors and the vanquished may change places then. But the vanquished as of this moment are only incidentally the rivals of American imperialism—the German imperialists, and the Italian imperialists, and the Japanese. They are only the incidental victims. They will have to sacrifice a great deal. They have to sacrifice some of their apparently all-powerful fascist politicians who have come to such an ignominious end. But fundamentally the vanquished are the people of Europe and of Asia, and, although they don’t know it yet, the people of the United States of America…

Since 1914, and ten times more since this present war, American imperialism in expanding its power and its controls over the whole earth, in becoming the exploiter of the world, thereby extends its economic base away from the sure foundation of the forty-eight states united on one continent. [. . .] And every weakness in the economy of world capitalism at any point runs a tremor throughout the foundations of American imperialism because its foundations are on that economy too. Every revolutionary disturbance—and there have been many and will be ten and one hundred times more, one after another in all parts of this agonizing world—will shake the stability of this deceptive Moloch of American capitalism which appears on the surface to be so sure and so powerful. [. . .]

In addition to all that, the modern imperialist master of the world faces its proletarian nemesis at home. One would think sometimes that the capitalists would curse Marx for this terrible thing called the contradictions of the capitalist system. But Marx didn’t make it; he only explained it.

1. The founding conference of the United Nations opened at the San Francisco Opera House on April 25, 1945. It ended with the signing of the UN Charter on June 26. The UN was conceived at the Teheran meetings in 1944 between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt to replace the defunct League of Nations. Its form, initially a congress of the victors of World War II, excluded the defeated Axis powers and most of the colonial and semicolonial nations.  
 
 
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