Maybe all revolutionaries should aim —
like the hero of Irish mythology,
Cuculiain — to die young and leave a
great name behind them.
James P Cannon, whose centenary falls
this year, lived 30 years longer than Lenin
and a quarter century longer than Trotsky.
He lived so long that when he died In
August 1974 he was a contemporary of his
own epigones, and Indeed appeared to be one
of his own epigones himself.
He died a member of the epigones' party.
At Socialist Workers' Party USA, the party
which he, together with Shachtman, Abern,
Swabeck and others, had founded almost half
a century earlier. He appeared to be at one
with his own unworthy successors, who had
already moved a long way from the politics.
Cannon had shared with Trotsky In the '30s.
They were to move a long way further, to the
openly StallnlstEc politics they have had for a
decade now.
Cannon did, as I will argue, agree with the
SWP leaders on certain of the things which
propelled and shaped their subsequent
development, and he does bear much respon-
sibility (or the depressing degeneration of the
party he founded into the grotesque and
repulsive Castroite sect it is today. But there
is more to the story than that.
Two things placed Cannon at the very cen-
tre of post-Trotsky Trotskyism In the decade
when it reformulated and reconstituted itself
— the death of Trotsky In August 194U, and
the collapse as an organisation of the very
weak Fourth International at the beginning of
World War 2.
When the Fourth International was
constituted at the war's end, It was largely
-Oder the SWP's Influence. But It needed to
be reconstituted politically, too.
Stalinism could no longer be seen as only a
phenomenon of the decay of the Russian
workers' state. It had survived the war and
expanded enormously, and looked as If It
would continue expanding.
Capitalism too had survived the war, and
had begun to rebuild itself. The future would
be determined by the competition of those
two systems, In neither of which the working
class ruled.
The goals, aspirations, and doctrines of
revolutionary socialism had to be refor-
mulated for this world. It was a task the
Trotskylst movement never did adequately.
All its conclusions and codifications were
piecemeal and unstable.
By the end of the '40s the Trotskylsts had
grudgingly come to the conclusion that we
were living through a deformed world revolu-
tlon. The vanguard, for now, of that revolu-
tion was the Stalinist movement, which at
one and the same time must be opposed,
hated and fought, and supported and cham-
pioned against capitalism and imperialism.
On the basis of the general ideas codified
at the Third World Congress in mid 1951,
calling the Stalinist systems degenerated and
deformed workers' states, it was possible to
develop various radically different policies.
You could maintain a hard working-class at-
titude, the same attitude to Stalinist regimes
as pre-1940 Trotskyism, advocating a so-
named "political revolution" that was in fact
full-scale social revolution and In practice
treating the Stalinist bureaucracies as the
fully-fledged ruling-class enemy they In fact
were1. You could be against the military ex-
pansion of the Soviet Union and for its
withdrawal from Eastern Europe, even while
refusing to label the Soviet Union as Im-
perialism, and "defending" It against Im-
perialism.
But you could also go completely "soft"
on the bureaucracies, recognising them as the
"leadership" of this or that revolution — as
Indeed the Maoist bureaucracy, for example,
was the leadership of the Chinese revolution.
You could look with hope to the taking over
of new areas by Stalin's "Red" Army.
Or you could do both, oscillating.
Cannon supported the ideas of
"reconstituted" 1951 Trotskyism. His tenden-
cy gave them a "hard working-class" inter-
pretation. Others took the opposite fork from
the bivouac at that 1951 crossroads. Many
zlg-zagged back and forth.
Cannon split the world organisation In
1953, denouncing others — Pablo and
\1u ridel — for not supporting the East Berlin
workers' uprising. In the '60s the SWP would
give scarcely critical support to the
Castroites; by the end of the '70s they sup-
ported the Russian invasion of Afghanistan
and rediscovered a fervent enthusiasm for
Castro, now a Stalinist even among Stalinists.
From Cannon to Barnes (the present SWP
leader) there is a steep and continuous
decline. The generation after Cannon, Dobbs
and Hansen, were Trolskyists disintegrating
politically; the present leaders of tbe SWP are
visibly a bunch of Ignorant dim-wits with neither
socialist principles nor working-class loyalties
They have evolved Into a different species.
Cannon always remained superior to the
people who were to ruin the SWP USA. As
an old man, he spent a long period In retire-
ment and semi-retirement, during which he
more than once came out against them.
Indeed, the story of Cannon's last 30 years
could be told as a story of his attempts to in-
tervene against or moderate the "excesses" of
his followers, not only In the SWP but inter-
nationally. He was trying to undo, reverse,
limit — or sometimes deny, by way of world-
play and 'ideological' self-deception — the
consequences of the fundamental political
decisions he had taken or licensed in the late
'40s and early '50s.
He was always dragged down by the
magnetic pull on post-Trotsky Trotskyism of
the seemingly successful revolutionary
Stalinist movements. His efforts were never
effective. They were like the efforts of so-
meone trying to lift himself up against the
power of gravity inhering in the terrain he
had chosen to stand on.They became increas-
ingly feeble and tragic as his force and
strength declined.
In 1953 he could shatter the Fourth Inter-
national in a panic-stricken and emotional
leap away from the policies which the majori-
ty leaders of the organisation had built on the
basis of the Third World Congress decisions.
A dozen years later he could not dissuade the
SWP leaders from taking a series of organisa-
tional decisions which he knew risked
"strangling” the party.
In his last published article, printed In an
official "United Secretariat of the Fourth In-
ternational" volume (Fifty Years of World
Revolution) along with all sorts of Castrolte
and semi-Maoist rubbish, Cannon took issue
with some of the woollier enthusiasms of his
comrades. *' 'The weakness of the enemy in
the backward countries has opened the
possibility of coming to power with a blunted
instrument1. However, this factual observa-
tion does not dispose of the entire question,
or even touch its most important aspects. The
deformations of the regimes emanating from
the revolutionary movements headed by the
Stalinised parties, and the opportunism and
sectarianism exhibited by their leaderships...
demonstrate that the need for organising ge-
rtutne Marxist parties is not ended..."
In effect be publicly reprimanded his Inter-
national tendency (the "USFI"); but even in
doing so he criticised the ruling Stalinist
bureaucracies In poiitical terms, as a poor
political leadership in a common struggle, not
as a hostile social force.
For Cannon, that attitude to the Stalinist
bureaucracy was unusual; for some of his co-
thinkers, the norm. They were closer to the
Brandlerlte "Right Communists" (or critical
Stalinists) of the '30s than to the genuine
politics of Leon Trotsky.
When Cannon died in 1974 I wrote an
obituary which said this: "Cannon and the
post-Trotsky Trotskylsts leave us with many
problems to solve. But the very possibility of
repairing the ravages of the last decades and
developing an adequate Marxist outlook is
real only because of the work of the Trot'
skylst movement, only because It represented
the link with the heroic age of communism
and Its Marxist renaissance which flowered,
however briefly, In the Comintern under
Lenin and Trotsky.
To Cannon we owe a great deal for this
possibility. He passes on to us a priceless
heritage and a great example. I In the Com-
munist International) a whole army set out to
change the world — and fell victim to the
virus of Stalinism, or to ruling class repres-
sion.
When almost all of them had sunk Into
renegacy, taken up the trade of power
brokerage for Stalin, or become ministers In
bourgeois or Stalinist governments — when
the army of revolutionary heroes had sunk
and shrunk into phlllstlne power-worship —
Cannon was the last outstanding leader of
Lenin's Comintern to remain unbowed and
unchanged, uncorrupted and unrepentant".
Sixteen years later the "problems'* can be
seen to be far deeper and bigger than we
thought, and the condition of what Cannon
left behind far worse. Cannon did the best he
could In very hard and unfavourable cir-
cumstances. I see no reason to change the
judgment 1 made when comrade Cannon
died.
That was the political character or the self-proclaimedly
"Cannonite" Workers Fight group, all through its history
as a "workers' state"-ist tendency.
Workers Liberty, July 1990