James P Cannon

Letter: La Follette: no glory and no analogy

In his Solidarity 696 column Eric Lee cited the La Follette presidential bid of 1924 as a model of “progressive coalition politics” relevant as “the real possibility of another Trump presidency” looms. Even with the warmest assessment of La Follette (which I don’t have: see below), I don’t see it. Who would be the La Follette of today, the slightly-left “third party” candidate whom socialists can use to get a boost? John Anderson (a liberal Republican) in 1980, Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) in 1912, or at a stretch Ralph Nader (Green, 2000), are the only possible analogues. I can’t imagine...

The IWW: the great anticipation

A pamphlet by James P Cannon, 1955 Click here for text on the Marxist Internet Archive ... The CIO became possible only after and because the IWW had championed and popularized the program of industrial unionism in word and deed. That alone – the teaching and the example in the field of unionism – would be sufficient to establish the historical significance of the IWW as the initiator, the forerunner of the modern industrial unions, and thereby to justify a thousand times over all the effort and sacrifice put into it by so many people. But the IWW was more than a union. It was also – at the...

Exploitation and how to end it

Capitalist exploitation is not a misfortune only of worse-off workers. It is the common structural situation of all wage-workers, even relatively well-paid ones. Karl Marx put it like this in his Grundrisse , an early draft for Capital . “The exchange between capital and labour... splits into two processes which are not only formally but also qualitatively different, and even contradictory: “(1) The worker sells their commodity [i.e. their labour-power, their creative capacity]... for a specific sum of money... (2) The capitalist obtains labour itself.. the productive force... which thereby...

Knowledge from the workplaces

Since 2019, and since 2020 almost weekly, Solidarity has had a “worker’s diary” column, variously from an engineer, paramedics, a trackworker, rail station staff and drivers, and a firefighter. Articles vary. Some cover what life at work is like, like an earlier series in Solidarity (2010-2012) “My life at work”. Others focus more on conflict and discussion in the workplace. The industrial and workplace bulletins produced by Workers’ Liberty carry similar snapshots of workplace life. They are almost unique on the Trotskyist left in Britain, both today and historically. No other regularly...

Permanent revolution and working-class politics

The articles reprinted here, from a dispute in the Irish Workers’ Group (IWG) in 1967-8, are important for seeing how the term “permanent revolution” has been used in certain ways to rationalise a world-view on the radical left, and how the political trend represented today by Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty dug our way out of those misuses.

Shachtman's mistakes are not our model

For more debate on US politics, see here Martin Thomas ( Solidarity 569 , 28 October 2020) states that in 1954 “the heterodox Trotskyist Independent Socialist League [ISL] decided to back trade-union candidates… in Democratic primaries; and in the general elections if they won the primaries”. He denies that this turn contributed to their political drift to the right. Instead, it was “‘Sanders campaigning’ on a small scale 60-odd years before the fact”. Similarly, Thomas Carolan, ( Solidarity 566 , 7 October 2020) wrote: “The experience of Max Shachtman moving to the right once in the...

Was Stalinism the new barbarism?

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 66 January 2001. Paul Hampton analyses the arguments used by Tony Cliff and others to rubbish the ideas developed in the 1940s by Max Shachtman and the “unorthodox” Trotskyists in the USA about the USSR. This is the second part of an article whose first part appeared in Workers’ Liberty 62. By the late forties Shachtman came to the conclusion that Stalinism was “the new barbarism”. Cliff understood that there were two meanings of the term “barbarism’; the first sense meant a description of the period since 1917, given the belatedness of the socialist...

Stalinism in theory and history

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 62 March 2000 In theories of Stalinism, as Haberkern comments in his review of The Fate of the Russian Revolution (WL59-60), plainly there are many nuances, and valuable contributions from the likes of Burnham, Carter and Draper which ought to be more widely known. But the book, criticised by Ernie for its failure to include more such texts, was not intended as a compilation of theories of bureaucratic collectivism. It is rather a critique of the ideas of latter-day Trotskyism, from the premises of Trotsky and by his most ardent followers. Many...

The dynamics of bureaucratism

Left Oppositionists in Siberian exile, late 1920s Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No.59/60 December 1999 / January 2000 The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One is a significant contribution to the literature of the anti-Stalinist left. Long buried in the archives the polemics and analyses of those socialists who refused to accept the definition of Stalin’s barbaric regime as a “workers’ state” simply because property was nationalised and private property, large and small, was obliterated, deserve to see the light. My criticism of this anthology...

Penetrating but unsound

Statue of Stalin toppled in the 1956 Hungarian revolution Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No. 53 February 1999 I welcome the publication of The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One a sort of library in itself. It is a handy compendium of the sweep of Max Shachtman's journalism, and of his co-thinkers. Always penetrating, often witty, and never without interest, Shachtman was a very gifted revolutionary journalist. But he was no theoretician. This puts him well ahead of James P Cannon, who was neither, but journalism is what it is, and not theory. The...

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