| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Prometheus Research Library Staff, Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931–1933 (New York: Spartacist Publishing Company 2002)

WHAT IS LEFT of the Left has lost its stomach for debating finer points of revolutionary program. This is one reason, among many, that recent much-heralded and undoubtedly sincere attempts in Canada to "Rebuild the Left" were destined to derail — which they have. It is all well and good to decry finger-pointing and desire to overcome splits and lack of unity, but these realities of fragmentation do indeed have histories. They are rooted in actual political clashes about significant matters. All of this will not be overcome by the suppression of ideas and the insistence that political practice build unity on a foundation of divergent beliefs.

If the Left responds to its current and undoubtedly temporary fractured inconsequentiality by denying the importance of programmatic clarity, the "progressive" academic milieu is much worse. It decries the Left's failures, and abandons the politics of building the Left for the attractions of subjectivity and the strokings of the self, making an intellectual and theoretical virtue, as well as a canvass of study, out of its own narcissism. The result, within the discipline of history, is a turn toward "fashionable" subjects as depoliticized as they are generally championed to be political.

There remain, thankfully, some on the Left for whom the meaning and clarification of a revolutionary political program is of paramount concern. This is of course a historical question, for the Left distills and refines its conception of direction and the critical tasks of the age within history, through a constant testing of ideas and practices in the crucible of activity that is always situated contextually. This is precisely why, within the Left, no tendency is perhaps more prone to factional debate, and more attuned to its significance, than Trotskyism. For the historic Left Opposition was born in the factional formations within the Soviet Union and the Communist International that chose to consciously resist the programmatic degenerations of Stalinism.

Among United States Trotskyists, organized in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1938 on, and who were for much of the pivotal years of the 1930s and 1940s the leading section of the Fourth International, the decisive faction fight, pitting two of the original founders of the movement, James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, against one another, was the 1940 discussion over the nature of the Soviet Union. Cannon, whose supporters included many of the old guard trade-union stalwarts of American Trotskyism, argued that the Soviet Union, for all of its degenerations, remained a workers' state and thus had to be defended unconditionally against imperialist aggression. In contrast, Shachtman, his commitment to this orthodox Trotskyist stand broken with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Red Army invasion of Finland, insisted that the Soviet Union had become something other than a workers' state. He later labelled this new and contradictory social formation "bureaucratic collectivism." If, under certain conditions, this new state, however defined, might be defended, it was also possible, in the shifting Shachtman set of understandings over the 1940s, to refuse it support. This entailed pursuing a politics of 'class struggle' that risked the destruction of Soviet society, its replacement by capitalism, and a consequent strengthening of imperialism. No "unity" could prevail, especially in a context of World War, with these differences separating Cannon, Shachtman, and their respective followers; indeed, it was not long before Shachtman and his minority (which included a substantial section of the Trotskyist youth) split from the SWP to form the short-lived Workers Party (WP). Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s Shachtman drifted to the right, and eventually his 'Third Camp' politics, which soon came to regard both Stalinism and capitalism as equally pernicious enemies of socialism, led to his failure to condemn even American imperialism's Bay of Pigs invasion of the Cuban deformed workers' state.

The 1940 Cannon-Shachtman faction fight is thus a defining moment in what some have called the "two souls of Trotskyism." Next to the 1928 expulsion of Cannon, Shachtman, and others, including, in Canada, Maurice Spector, from the Communist International, the 1940 factional split is the most important act of political differentiation within the revolutionary Left in the 20th century. Its meanings penetrated the fissures of the Left for generations, as disagreement over the nature of the Soviet Union continued to exercise an importance for orthodox Trotskyists and various Third Camp formations into the 1980s. Why, for instance, if Stalinism and capitalism were equal enemies of the revolutionary workers' movement, could Third Campers refuse unconditional military defence to Korean Stalinists in the early 1950s but call for military victory of Vietnamese Stalinists in the 1960s? How could a Stalinism that was already capitalism's bureaucratic collectivist equal by the 1970s have such profound consequences when it collapsed politically in 1989 and ushered into being an unambiguous project of barbarous capitalist restoration in Russia? (Does not the final descent into capitalist restoration suggest there was something worth defending critically within the Soviet Union even as late as the 1980s?)

Within Trotskyism, there has always been an almost underground mythology of a pre-1940 factionalism, pitting Cannon and Shachtman against one another in the early days of the SWP's predecessor, the Communist League of America (Opposition), or CLA. But no actual writing on this early 1930s factionalism has ever sustained an argument of substance about this schism, including a discussion of the actual politics animating the clash. Indeed, because a part of this factional rift supposedly turned on Shachtman's and others' personal pique at Cannon ducking his leadership responsibilities and failing to live up to his role as the preeminent leader of the small US Trotskyist forces, the tendency has been to brush this factional period aside as a momentary falling out of key figures in the movement, men who would later come together in the Minneapolis truckers' strike of 1934 and go on to build Trotskyism and found the SWP.

Animated by a gnawing suspicion that more was at stake in this original factionalism, the Prometheus Research Library (PRL), which has previously published an invaluable collection of James P. Cannon's communist writings of the 1920s, began the arduous research task of piecing together the Cannon/Shachtman rift in the CLA over the years 1931-1933. The task was not easy. These were the "dog days" of North American Trotskyism. The movement commanded a scattered army of little more than 200 anti-Stalinist stalwarts, had access to no Moscow gold, and faced the destitution and demoralization of the first years of the Great Depression in the worst imaginable material and political circumstances. Oral recollections of the events, which the PRL attempted to secure, proved of little use, for participants generally claimed that no substantive politics lay behind the Cannon-Shachtman clash, and that the factionalism of these years had little lasting impact. Almost no published writing existed that shed much light on the issues, although one factional lieutenant of Shachtman, Albert Glotzer, published a 1945 tirade reviewing Cannon's History of American Trotskyism (1944) in the WP's theoretical journal, The New International, which hinted at important continuities. But by meticulously going through CLA bulletins, minutes, and correspondence, as well as seeking out the international context and correspondence of Trotsky that addressed issues far from US shores, the PRL eventually unearthed an amazing 600 documents relating to the contentions in the CLA, 118 of which appear in this volume, which also contains a lengthy and informative introduction, a highly useful glossary, and a thorough and indispensable index. The choice of documents to include was in part made on the basis of what was available in other collections (such as the Monad Press volumes on Cannon's writings and speeches in this period, published originally in the early 1980s). But there will inevitably be eyebrows raised about what is reprinted here and what is not. That, to my mind, is not a primary concern, for enough has been included to make this a volume of unrivaled utility.

This quest to reconstruct a history that appeared to have been almost consciously buried by all participants is thus a model of traditional historical method, and one that should not be lost sight of in our age of postmodern textualism, in which researchers latch on to a rhetorical source and run with its meaning in playful circles of self-indulgence and intellectual licence. For what the PRL did was search out the uncollected, scattered, and subconsciously repressed archive of evidence necessary to build an understanding of what actually was happening in 1931-1933. Refusing to see only what was before their focused eyes, the PRL researchers insisted, and fruitfully so, on casting their inquisitive net widely, drawing into it the overlapping evidence that would finally bring together inferential links that clarified the politics of the moment as reaching past the personal and into issues of substance, especially in terms of international questions relating to how the Trotskyist movement was to be built.

What the PRL found was intriguing. To be sure, some of the documentation is personalized carping against Cannon. That Cannon himself bore some responsibility for this is undeniable, given that he was too often absent from his post or desultory in providing reports and carrying through on necessary journalistic assignments, as even supporters such as Arne Swabeck, or his lover and comrade Rose Karsner, made abundantly clear. If there is a "personal" history in these documents that needs addressing, however, it is how insensitive Shachtman and his young allies, such as Martin Abern and Albert Glotzer, were to the pressures of poverty and family responsibility (Karsner was not physically well, and she and Cannon had the care of three children) that plagued Cannon in this period and contributed, along with the sour political climate, to his mood of pessimism and withdrawal. Without children, and sustained by working wives, the Shachtman contingent had the insensitivity and arrogance of youth stamped all over its attacks on Cannon who, to be sure, handed them his head on a platter and then spit nails when his opponents demanded this "prize."

More critically, and this is the overwhelming contribution of this documentary collection, the evidence amassed by the PRL offers the first suggestion that the faction fight of 1931-1933 was about much more than a critique of the deficiencies of the Cannon "regime" and that it ultimately threatened the very life of early US Trotskyism. The dispute was not unrelated to Shachtman's role internationally, where he was the key link between the US Trotskyists and the European International Left Opposition. Trotsky found Shachtman too cozy with unprincipled maneuverings and cliquist formations and insufficiently forthright in his reports and interactions, and the documents presented establish that without question. If there is a flaw in this segment of the collection, it is that the PRL's argument about Cannon's opposition to Shachtman and, in particular, Cannon's attack on trade union opportunism in the French section, is underdeveloped. For instance, in the first section, "Shachtman in the International," not a single Cannon item appears, the Cannon group represented by a solitary Swabeck statement among 23 documents.

In the next section on "The Fight" itself, the disputed questions of the period are revealed, including: Leninist methods of party organization; the role of the Red Army as a potential proletarian agent in resisting Hitler's rise to power; and the nature of Trotskyist work in the US trade unions, particularly among the miners of southern Illinois. Cannon is very much at the centre of things, running headlong into oppositions from Shachtman and his factional allies. All of this brought the nascent American Trotskyist movement to the point of a debilitating split, and documents in the third section show how Trotsky and the International intervened decisively in early 1933 to convince the US comrades to stop the blood-letting. Because there were no clear-cut programmatic issues involved in the ongoing differences in the CLA, this final "settlement" was necessary and laid the basis for six years of collaboration between Shachtman and Cannon. This 700-page anthology suggests that the seeds of political differentiation had been laid, however, and their bitter fruit would eventually ripen into the historic schism of 1940. But the jury must remain out on that particular verdict. The Cannon-Shachtman difference over the potential role of the Red Army in contributing to the European challenge to Hitler's rise to power is, however, suggestive, with Cannon opting for the possibility of a more offensive role outside Soviet borders and Shachtman backing away from this stand.

This volume is a reminder of what historical research can uncover. And it conveys richly what early Trotskyism contributed to the discourse and practice of the revolutionary Left. For its politics were about what mattered: programmatic direction and principled practice. When disagreement arose among those committed to the revolutionary transformation of society, positions were developed and differences were fought out with vigor. Suppression of principles and bureaucratic dictate did not win the day in all circles of the Left, as it had among the Stalinists, and the cult of personality and the unquestioned authority of leaders, even Trotsky, as these documents show, was anything but dominant in this factional contest. Internationalism, in combination with airing of differences (at times, admittedly, far too personalized) within a national section, and their eventual principled resolution, brought US Trotskyism out of its internecine fights and dog days and into the struggle for a proletarian party and an influence within the working class.


Bryan D. Palmer Trent University

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