IWW leader William ('Big Bill') Haywood (right).
JAMES P. CANNON, founder and inspirer of American Trotskyism, died on 21 August 1974.
the Syndicalist Industrial Workers of opponent of the imperialist war, be later joined the American Socialist Party and was one of the leaders of its left-wing. He enthusiastically greeted the Russian Revolution and joined those forces in the Socialist Party that split away to help form the American Communist Party.
Cannon became one of the important leaders of the young Communist Party, and was several times a delegate to the Communist International. In 1928 he was part of the American delegation to the Sixth Congress the Congress which was to discuss the draft programme drawn up by Bukharin and Stalin.
SLIP-UP and expelied from the Russian Party put in an appeal to the Sixth Congress, altogether philantrophic"
The appeal included Trotsky's criticism of Bukharin's thesis of "Socialism in One Country', This appeal was surpressed but, by some bureaucratic slip-up, Cannon luckily got hold of a copy.
Trotsky's document-The Draft Programme of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals-revealed to Cannon the reactionary nature of the theory of socialism in one country and provided a marxist explanation of the in the USSR, the Third International and the world communist partes. He said:
*We himseif and Maurice Spector, leader of the Canadian delegation] let the cauces meetings and the Congress sessions go to the devil while we read and studied this document. Then I knew what we had to do, and so did be. It was as cleur as dayliglıt that marxist truth was on the side of Trotsky, We made a compact there and then-Spector and I-that we would come back home and begin a struggle under the banner of Trotskyism.
see until he died 46 years later aged Cannon never He was convinced about the need for, and the possibilities of, making the proleterian revolution. He dedicated all his time, energies and idea which could be sold to radicals.
as something different and more of the Third Internstional but as the Red Weekly, 29 August 1974 Page 6 Moscow, 1922: James P. Cannon (centre) with Max Eastman(left) and logical continuation of bolshevism.
MEMORY The historian Theodore Draper Cannon was born in 1890 and joined remarked on Cannon's phencenomal memory for events in the early the World-the "wobblies" -in 1911. An American Communist Party. As Draper explained:
Memoles of ex-communists vary in content, but too many of them are motivated by the desire to tell why the writer decided to break with the communist movement rather than what he did in it...
Jim Cannon wanted to remember. This portion of his life still lives for him hecause he has aot killed it within himsell."
Cannon always understood that the main enemy was the bourgeoisie.
His work in the International Labour Defence Committee during the 1920's / is an excellent example of how to fight to. build the communist movement and at the same time ally that movement in defence of all class-war prisoners and victims of the bourgeois state. He wrote: *Professional anti-communists always proceed from the premise of that man in the Bible who did not beliere that any good Meanwhile Trotsky, exiled in Alma Ata thing would come out of Nazareth...one:
of them described my motives in helping and the Communist International had IWW prisoners through the ILD as "not "My motives were not "philanthropic" at all. I really believed in the principle of solanty win all cam wat prisoners the tradition in which 1 had been brought up in the radical movement of the carter days.
To be sure, 1 was an undisguised communist and I thought and said that the honest work of solidarity practiced by the TLD wold being at least some credit to the Communist Party."
MAGNIFICENT The ILD Committee played a available in English about the interventions of Trotskyism in the mass struggle. They helped to prepare and educate that small handful of revolutionaries for the strugeles that were going to come.
VANGUARD Much of Cannon's writing about the building of the revolutionary move ment are about the time when the vanguard was organised in the tradItional organisations of the working class. organisations, of internal conflict and debate, and the emergence of leftmoving centrist currents. His emphasis on building through a process of splits, fusions and re-groupments was at that time absolutely correct.
democracy in particular, resulting in a growth of a new vanguard outside of, though influenced by, the ideolog: of social democracy, requires a new perspective of growth, lam sure that Cannon would have had some wry British left who slavishly adopt the sacred text in the form of his writing; on this, but fail to grasp the content on locating the revolutionary forces in the mainstream of revolutionary development.
It is perhaps appropriate that as I write this tribute to Cannon, antifascist forces are assembling in Leicester. They are going there on a with the other American trotskyists, who worked in the united fronts of the thirties to make sure that Father Caughlin and the fascist rabble in the USA did not get a platform to peddle their racist and anti-working class ideology.
Bob Pennington BOOKS BY J P CANNON:
The History of American Trotskyism-The First Ten Years of American Communism The Notebook of an AgitatorSpeeches to the PartyThe Struggle for a Proletarian PartySpeeches for SocialisaOrder from Red Books, 97 Caledonian Road, London N.1. Include 20p per book postage and packing This was a time of flux inside these military operations.
The organisational decline of social comments to make about those on the of his analysis which was always based Cannon would have understood and approved of that. It was he, along £1.25p (1.45p $1.45p £1,65p 11.25P L1.430