James P Cannon

The Price of Isolation for the Russian Workers and their Revolution

The world is paying dearly for the isolation of the Russian Revolution, paying in blood and sweat, and tears and in car- nage and destruction such as history records nowhere else. The Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, opened up a new eporh for mankind. It contained, the promise of a life of security and peace, of abundance and brotherhood, of equality among men in a world freed of classes and class rule. What no other social upheaval before it had even dared to hope for, the Russian Revolution proclaimed boldly and confidently. Not the great French revolution, not even the Paris Commune...

Problems of Trotskyist history

Problems of Trotskyist history: introduction to Shachtman's Where is the petty-bourgeois opposition? George Santanyana’s aphorism, “Those who do not learn from history are likely to repeat it”, is not less true for having become a cliché. And those who do not know their own history cannot learn from it. Take the history of the Trotskyist movement — that is, of organised revolutionary Marxism for most of the 20th century. To an enormous extent the received history of that movement is not “history” but the all-too-often mendacious, and always tendentious, folklore generated by competing sects...

1940: Max Shachtman's reply to Leon Trotsky - A “petty bourgeois” opposition?

Where Is the Petty Bourgeois Opposition? A Repeated Challenge Remains Unanswered. In his open letter to Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Shachtman, repeating the challenge issued by the Minority since the moment it was accused of representing a petty-bourgeois tendency in the party, declared: “... it is first necessary to prove (a) that the Minority represents a deviation from the proletarian Marxian line, (b) that this deviation is typically petty-bourgeois, and (c) that it is more than an isolated deviation — it is a tendency. That is precisely what has not been proved.” Comrade Trotsky has been the...

The Marxists on oppression

The fourth part of a review article looking at the themes of John Riddell’s new book of documents from the early communist movement. The week Paul Hampton looks at how they debated women’s liberation and other issues of oppression. The early Communist International’s focus was on working class self-liberation and this was reflected in the time spent on discussions on party building, work to transform the labour movement and on the specifics of class struggle strategy. But the Bolsheviks had made their reputation as tribunes of the people, taking up any and every matter of injustice and...

Notes on James P Cannon's three "party" books

James P Cannon's books "Struggle for a Proletarian Party", "History of American Trotskyism", and "Speeches to the Party" contain much of educational value. They are skewed by political misconceptions, but it is possible and useful to separate out the valuable discussion from the misconceptions. HOW THE "STALINGRAD" BOOKS ARE SKEWED "Struggle for a Proletarian Party" was published not (as you might at first think) in 1940, just after the SWP faction fight and split, but in 1943. "History of American Trotskyism" was published in 1944, and based on a series of lectures in 1942. Cannon's two books...

London bus strike a defeat?

20,000 London bus workers win a clear-cut victory in the first London-wide bus strike since 1982. Unite’s demand was for a £500 bonus payment to compensate for the increased workload caused by the Olympics and they finally won £577. What is the response published in Solidarity ? Not to celebrate the victory — oh no! That would be too simple and waste the opportunity to attack the London leadership of Unite. So the unnamed author of the piece that Solidarity published belittles the result as “a very minor and limited victory” and even dismisses the campaign for the bonus as a “diversion.” (...

How the Bourgeois Press Moulds 'Public Opinion'

James P Cannon reviews The Big Wheel by John Brooks (in four parts) 1. The Mind Molders at Work What would people think about the larger questions of general interest and concern if they were free to make up their own minds; if they got full information and heard all points of view, and were not pressured, badgered, bulldozed and blackjacked into thinking what they are supposed to think? If the reference is to the state of affairs in the police-ruled and regimented domain of Stalinism behind the Iron Curtain, it will be recognised at once that this question is in order. When one source...

James P Cannon: 1890-1974

Click here to download pdf. A tribute and critique, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the main figure in the US Trotskyist movement for many decades by Sean Matgamna.

Ernest Mandel and post-Trotsky Trotskyism

An assessment of the leading thinker of post-Trotsky "orthodox Trotskyism", the "Fourth International". 'The leadership oriented itself without any synthesised understanding of our epoch and its inner tendencies, only by groping (Stalin) and by supplementing the fragmentary conclusions thus obtained with scholastic schemas renovated for each occasion (Bukharin). The political line as a whole, therefore, represents a chain of zigzags. The ideological line is a kaleidoscope of schemas tending to push to absurdity every segment of the Stalinist zigzags. Blind empiricism multiplied by...

Introduction: many Trotskyisms

More or less everywhere in the world now there are groups of avowed revolutionary socialists — usually, but not invariably, small or very small groups — who are “Trotskyist” or Trotskisant. They trace their political genealogy back to Leon Trotsky’s politics in the 1920s and 30s, and before that to the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky which led the Russian workers to power in 1917. The extant Trotskyist groups vary greatly in their politics and theoretical positions. In Britain, the SWP-UK, which allied for a decade with Islamic clerical fascism, and AWL, which fights clerical fascism...

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