The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 40      October 13, 2008

 

 80 Years of Communist Continuity in the United States 

Founding the Communist League of America
The fight to maintain genuine Marxist
leadership in the United States
(feature article)
 
The Socialist Workers Party is celebrating 80 years of building a communist party in the United States, from 1928 to today. Marking this milestone, it has launched an eight-week $90,000 Party Building Fund (see accompanying progress chart on the fund campaign). To promote this effort, we are running a series of articles, beginning with the one below, that will highlight key chapters in the history of this fight to forge a revolutionary working-class leadership.

BY BEN JOYCE  
On Oct. 25, 1917, workers and farmers in Russia took power out of the hands of the ruling capitalists and landlords and opened the road to the first socialist revolution in history. They were led by the Bolshevik party under the leadership of V.I. Lenin.

The October Revolution was an inspiration to the workers movement internationally, including in the United States. “Like a brilliant sunrise,” wrote Farrell Dobbs, longtime leader of the communist movement in the United States, “inspiring political light came from the East.”

A left wing had previously emerged in the U.S. Socialist Party, formed largely around opposition to that party leadership’s support for Washington’s entry into the first imperialist world war. The leaderships of most Socialist Parties around the world lined up behind their own bourgeoisies in the war, striking the death knell of the Socialist International as a revolutionary organization.

A large section of the SP left wing rallied around the Bolshevik-led victory in Russia and the revival of genuine Marxist leadership. They broke with the SP right wing in 1919 and founded the Communist Party.

These pioneer communists—including James P. Cannon, later the first national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party—set out to build the kind of party they knew was necessary to lead the coming U.S. socialist revolution. They instilled disciplined functioning among its cadres, ridding themselves of the dabblers and dilettantes that plagued the SP. They established political homogeneity in their program and took party democracy seriously. They organized serious study of programmatic documents by Bolshevik leaders. They threw themselves into trade union battles. They established the International Labor Defense to defend working-class militants under attack from the capitalist rulers.  
 
Stalinist degeneration
From 1918 to 1921 the young Soviet government mobilized working people in face of civil war and intervention by a dozen imperialist powers aimed at overthrowing workers power and restoring bourgeois property relations. Meanwhile, the defeat of revolutionary upsurges in several European countries, including in Germany in 1923, left the Russian workers state isolated. Famine persisted in much of the countryside.

These material pressures, combined with Lenin’s death in 1924, fostered the emergence of a conservative, petty-bourgeois caste within the Soviet state apparatus, whose main spokesman was Joseph Stalin. The Stalin faction took over the party apparatus and, while claiming to act in the name of Bolshevism, carried out a bloody political counterrevolution.

The rationalization of this counterrevolutionary course was Stalin’s so-called theory of “socialism in one country.” To serve the narrow national interests of the ruling layer, the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern) called on its member parties around the world to subordinate working-class struggles to support for the bureaucratic regime’s diplomatic maneuvers.

Leon Trotsky, a principal leader of the Russian Revolution, organized the Left Opposition in the party in 1923 to lead vanguard workers in Russia to oppose the Stalin-led course. In 1927 Trotsky was exiled to what is now Kazakhstan, and then to Turkey. Supporters of the Left Opposition were persecuted, jailed, and murdered.

Despite its brutal methods, the Stalin misleadership could not silence the communist opposition. Trotsky organized from exile an international movement aimed at restoring Lenin’s proletarian internationalist program in the Communist International. He analyzed the disastrous course carried out by Stalin in the Soviet Union and internationally, and put forth a course of action to advance the world socialist revolution.  
 
A fortunate slip up
The Sixth World Congress of the Communist International was organized in Moscow in 1928 to adopt a draft program bearing Stalin’s political authorship. James P. Cannon was among the delegation from the Communist Party of America and was put on the program commission. He happened to be given a copy of a document submitted by Trotsky that had made its way to the translation room at the congress. During the rest of the congress, Cannon studied the document and shared it with Maurice Spector of the Canadian CP. This slip-up in the bureaucratic machine led to a momentous opportunity for the communist movement.

The document, entitled “The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals,” was a powerful Marxist contribution. It took apart Stalin’s argument for “socialism in one country,” counterposing to it the internationalist perspective advocated by Lenin of building a world revolutionary movement.

The document answered the class-collaborationist policies of the Stalin misleadership, arguing for an internationalist course of championing socialist revolution worldwide as the only way to strengthen the workers state in the USSR.  
 
Left Opposition in the United States
Cannon was quickly won to Trotsky’s fight to maintain a Marxist leadership. He and Spector smuggled copies of the document back home and immediately began organizing for the Left Opposition. This task proved difficult, however, given the grip the Stalinized Comintern had over the party, so the opposition could not develop an open faction fight initially. Max Shachtman, Martin Abern, and Rose Karsner were some of the party leaders and cadres first won to the opposition.

After waging an uphill battle within the party for several months, the opposition was subjected to a rigged trial for “Trotskyism,” in which the dominant leadership relied on slander and suppression of facts. Unfazed, the opposition read its statement in support of Trotsky and a communist course and was then expelled. In a matter of days the fight was opened up publicly when issue number one of the Militant, dated Nov. 15, 1928, rolled off the presses.

Nearly a year after Cannon and Spector’s return from Moscow, the founding convention of the Communist League of America was held. It constituted a national organization, aiming to reconquer a Leninist course for the international communist movement and to build a party along those lines, capable of leading the socialist revolution in the United States.

$90,000 Fall 2008 SWP Party-building Fund chart

 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home