Bryan D. Palmer

Maurice Spector, James P. Cannon, and the Origins of Canadian Trotskyism

A Revived & Fractured International Historiography

THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM has recently been reborn. New sources available from Russian archives and a post-1989 shift in the political climate have changed both the empirical foundations of writing in the field as well as the varied and contested meanings of scholarly engagement.¹ National peculiarities abound.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, a war of position in communist historiography now divides established camps. One side claims that communism must be studied as a movement of national initiative, in which the significant role of the Communist International and its bureaucratization and Stalinization over the course of the mid-to-late 1920s is secondary to the sociopolitical influence of indigenous leaderships, rank-and-file activism, layered complexities of motivation and experience, and local conditions in specific unions and other settings.² An opposing contingent accents Russian dominance, harkening back to the writings of Henry Pelling, but does so with a marked attachment to the critique of 'the revolution betrayed'.³ In this twisting of interpretive arms, the relative international strength of British communism and the weakness of American-style New Left-inspired scholarship within the United Kingdom has cast a particular shadow across recent writing on the British revolutionary left. For while both sides pay lip service to the importance of a 'social history from below', those who defend the communist record most aggressively and insist that it was much more than a 'made in Moscow' affair seem to congeal Stalinist, New Left, and even liberal positions. Their critics, in contrast, assimilate certain strains of older liberal anti-communism (Russian domination and a reification of democracy) with aspects of a programmatic Trotskyism that have never rested easily with a brusque repudiation of democratic centralism, the rejection of the primacy of the vanguard party, and skirting the significance of tested international leadership.⁴

United States communist scholarship has taken a slightly different trajectory.⁵ From the late 1970s, American communist historiography has pitted a traditionalist liberal anti-communism, stressing 'foreign domination', espionage, 'Moscow gold', undermining of 'national interest', the inflexible rule of Comintern dictate, and institutional and political concerns,⁶ against a rank-and-file-oriented social history of native American radicalism, much of which skirts rather lightly not only the international context of US communism and its birth, but also the entire question of Stalinism.⁷ Yet, ironically, Theodore Draper's founding traditionalist texts of the late 1950s and early 1960s, on which so much liberal anti-communist scholarship as well as New Left writing builds, remain unsurpassed as sources on the origins of United States communism and are among the most accomplished studies of the revolutionary left in the 1920s, regardless of national setting. The current impasse in United States communist historiography sets the followers of Draper, led by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, against a fragmenting body of New Left-influenced scholars. If Klehr and Haynes are too easily assimilated to a politics of right-wing revival, even to the point of being miscast as defenders of McCarthyite repression,⁸ there is no doubt that some former New Leftists have abandoned what they perceive to be the sinking ship of revolutionary Marxism.⁹ Others hold fast to a committed defence of the communist ranks and certain leaders, claiming for local communists a capacity to 'negotiate' their own politics of dissidence, seemingly autonomous from Moscow's authority.¹⁰

To work our way out of this intellectual and political log-jam is not going to be easy, for evidence can be read differently, and the premises of interpretation are, inevitably, often seriously counterposed. There is no history, arguably, where political readings of difference are more pronounced than that of communism. Nevertheless, if the history of international communism is to advance, one route of exploration that demands scrutiny is the thought and practice of dissident streams within the Bolshevik tradition.¹¹ Exploring these brings to the fore the possibility of a revolutionary left that both learned from the Soviet revolution and its leaders and remained alive to the need to cultivate creatively transformative social movements rooted in the realities of non-Russian conditions and societies. Alternatives to Comintern bureaucratism and Stalinization¹² germinated slowly and unevenly in the mid-to-late 1920s, revealing certain revolutionary continuities with the engagements of 1917 and the pioneering lessons many radicals saw in the Russian Revolution and the world's first workers' state. They also open out in understandings related to the peculiarities of specific national settings.

Canadian Communism: Ripe for Reinterpretation

Canadian communism is perhaps fertile ground for such an approach. The study of Canadian revolutionaries, communist and other, has not been particularly prominent of late, and the contentious historiographic debates of some other countries have hardly developed in Canada. Older scholarship on Canadian communism in the 1920s, such as William Rodney's 1968 Soldiers of the International, has not really been revisited since Ian Angus offered a stimulating Left Opposition reading of Tim Buck and Canada's Party of socialism, in 1981.¹³ A major biographical study of Canadian communism's leading trade union figure, the Nova Scotia coal miner militant, J.B. McLachlan, has many strengths, but grappling with Stalinism is not among its distinguished features, just as it figures inadequately in overviews of the Party's history, even in recent noteworthy 'red diaper baby' memoirs.¹⁴ The exception that proves the rule of conventional scholarship is Andrée Lévesque's marvellously evocative life and times of the communist militant, Jeanne Corbin, which combines an empathy with the struggles of revolutionaries aligned with Moscow and an appreciation of Comintern constraints.¹⁵ There is of course much in the journal literature, including John Manley's important particularistic studies, but we still await his overall interpretation in published book form.¹⁶ Most recently, a fruitful resurrection of perhaps the leading theoretical figure in early Canadian communism, Maurice Spector, has been undertaken by Ian McKay. But McKay's Spector is cast very much as a man of ideas, rather than a political figure in the making of dissident communism, which was always an undertaking as much organizational as it was intellectual.¹⁷

In this article, I explore the ideas and organizational initiatives of James P. Cannon, a major figure in US communism in the 1920s,¹⁸ and Spector, in breaking from Stalinism and their respective Communist International affiliated parties. My purpose is neither to detail extensively two biographies nor to provide a full-blown history of Cannon and Spector embracing the Left Opposition and the richness of the thought and activity associated with this current. Rather, I utilize some of the new source material and draw on older studies to present a fuller, and hopefully more nuanced and balanced, discussion of the beginnings of Canadian Trotskyism than has heretofore existed. I further suggest how this first chapter in the history of Canada's Left Opposition was simultaneously an important breakthrough in ideas and thought that was nevertheless stalemated for a time by the limitations of organizational possibility. By way of a conclusion, I offer some admittedly tentative and speculative comment on the coming together of subjective failure on the part of Spector and objective constraint imposed upon him by Canadian conditions and decisions taken within the concentrated forces of international Trotskyism. However open to debate and discussion such conclusions certainly are, there is no denying that a comparison of Cannon, Spector, and the beginnings of Trotskyism in their respective countries highlight the importance of personality and subjectivity in the interpretation of communism and its historical development.

Biographical Background: Cannon, Class Struggle, and Party Building

By the mid-1920s Cannon and Spector were established, if different, figures in their particular communist parties. Cannon (1890–1973), eight years Spector's senior, had the richer and deeper experience as a figure on the labour left, but lacked the acute theoretical inclinations and analytic subtlety of his Canadian comrade. Born into a poor household of first-generation Irish American immigrants, who settled in the midwestern working-class enclave of Rosedale, Kansas, Cannon was the offspring of a devout Catholic mother and a socialist 'charmer', who graduated from marginal proletarian pursuits to making his living with his tongue via the real estate and insurance markets. By the age of 16, Cannon was working on major labour defence mobilizations. Two years later, in 1908, he joined the Socialist Party of America. He soon became an Industrial Worker of the World, and was eventually one of a select few hand-picked cadre chosen by Vincent St. John to proselytize among unorganized workers, from Akron, Ohio and Peoria, Illinois to Duluth, Minnesota. Thwarted by poverty from completing high school and going to college, Cannon's career as a hobo rebel was terminated as he became a Wobbly homeguard, settling in Kansas City after marrying his teacher, the free-thinking Scandinavian Lista Makimson, with whom he had two children during the difficult years of World War I.

James P. Cannon, mid-1920s, Workers Monthly.

Galvanized by the Russian Revolution, Cannon rejoined the Socialist Party [SP], was part of its Left-Wing mobilization and schisms, and came to play a forceful role in the emerging communist underground. One of the few communists arrested during the Palmer Raids for direct industrial agitation, Cannon emerged as a figure of significance, marked by his experience in class struggle and his capacity to intersect the American working class (barely 10 per cent of the ranks of the Left-Wing were English-speaking Americans, the vast majority of the US revolutionary forces being drawn from the 'foreign language federations' of immigrant radicals). A leading figure in the Communist Labor Party [CLP], Cannon was the founding Chair of the original Workers Party, and he championed an organization that would break out of the clandestine existence of the underground, appealing to the broad masses of the United States working class. Over the course of the 1920s, he was, alongside Charles Emil Ruthenberg, Jay Lovestone, and William Z. Foster, a leading public spokesman within United States communism.

Known as a stunning orator, a political party leader with a keen appreciation of the trade union question, extensive editorial experience within the revolutionary press, and a builder of coalitions that crossed the fragmenting lines of language groups and bridged seeming political difference, Cannon came to be a prominent leader of a faction that included his second wife and longstanding revolutionary, Rose Karsner, the irrepressible youth figures Max Shachtman, Martin Abern, and Albert Glotzer, the steeled proletarian elements of Minneapolis (including Bill Dunne and his brothers), and the Swedish veteran of the Seattle General Strike, Arne Swabeck. Aligned at times with his old Kansas City counterpart, Earl Browder, as well as with the youthful Lovestone, the Jewish Socialist Federation Left-Wing theoretician, Alexander Bittelman (who had gravitated to the other organized contingent of the underground, the Communist Party) and Foster, the most prominent proletarian communist in the US by the mid-1920s, and founder of the Trade Union Educational League, Cannon also led the International Labor Defense organization. It was undoubtedly communism's most successful 'united front' organization, a body that gained credibility and widespread exposure through its involvement in prominent cases such as the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign and that opposed lynch law and racist terror throughout the 1920s.¹⁹

Cannon read the revolutionary classics, of course, and was a highly effective journalist of the agitational school, founding and editing newspapers such as Kansas City's Workers' World and Cleveland's The Toiler. But his baptism as a Marxist was not via the word, but through the deed, and very definitely within the maelstrom of factional organizational differentiation. In the intensely divided United States Party, Cannon's mettle as a Marxist was tested as much organizationally and politically as it was theoretically, where, in any case, the Kansas revolutionary was always willing to turn to precocious thinkers such as Shachtman.

Biographical Background: Spector and the Uneven Development of a Bolshevik Intellectual

Not so with Spector (1898–1968), a Ukrainian-born Jewish socialist, whose life in Toronto's archetypal immigrant ward was anything but privileged. Spector nevertheless graduated from high school and secured admission to the prestigious University College of the University of Toronto. Much of Spector's early adult life was spent living with his father, a less than highly successful hardware merchant, and his housewife mother on Palmerston Avenue. If he was largely self-educated in his Marxism, his revolutionary experience was definitely more bookish than Cannon's. Won to communism by the sheer revolutionary logic of pamphlets and texts, by 1920 Spector, who largely lacked Cannon's peripatetic agitational experience (an April 1923 speaking tour that took Spector from Sudbury to Edmonton, with seven public talks in ten days, was something of a baptism by fire for the young leftist²⁰), had helped to found Toronto bodies such as the Plebs League and the Ontario Labour College, establishing working relationships with nascent communists Florence Custance and Tom Bell. It would be this trio of Spector, Custance, and Bell that would be charged with drafting the first program of a Canadian communist party. Spector early clashed with the more proletarian Scots-Canadian Jack MacDonald, who was quicker to declare himself a communist, and with whom his relations would be uneasy throughout the 1920s. Both men nevertheless figured in the 23 May 1921 meeting at Fred Farley's farm on the outskirts of Guelph, Ontario, where the Communist Party of Canada, later to be renamed the Workers Party, was formed. Spector, a mere youth of 23, and then a university student, was, like Cannon, named the Party's Chairman. Tim Buck would later describe Spector as "brilliant," but distanced from "working-class organization" and practical activity. For the next few years Spector would edit Canada's major communist publication, The Worker, authoring dozens of feature articles and countless editorial and other statements, occupying an influential place in the left-wing movement, where he was a significant voice in elaborating the program and practice of the Workers Party. Ultimately Spector was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International [ECCI] in 1928, a rare honour for a North American revolutionary.²¹

Maurice Spector with leading Canadian communists, left to right William Moriarty, Tim Buck, and Jack MacDonald, mid-1920s, Vanguard Press.

The Canadian Party no doubt experienced divisions and difficulties with the Comintern, but it was spared somewhat the hothouse atmosphere of factionalism that prevailed in the New York-Chicago-dominated American vanguard. It would never deal in quite the same ways with the awkwardly disruptive legacies of undergroundism and ultra-leftism associated with elements of the US foreign language federations and, later, the Goose Caucus, that came close to tearing the nascent United States Party apart in the 1920–1922 years. No Comintern 'rep' would be sent into its midst who could compare to Joseph Pogany/John Pepper, who would exercise such a nefarious influence among American revolutionary ranks. Differentiations of leadership elements, reflective of sociopolitical division, would not be as great in Canada as they were in the United States. Had Spector and the Canadian Party faced the situation Cannon confronted in the 1920s, it is unlikely that, as a student whose experience was bounded by Toronto, the Ukrainian Canadian revolutionary, whatever his talents, would have assumed the Chairmanship of the early communist party and the editorship of its press.

For while Spector was undoubtedly Canadian communism's leading theoretical light in the mid-1920s, he was nevertheless barely 25 years of age, and was most surely still learning his way in the vocation of professional revolutionary. If he would later develop into what one close comrade referred to as an orator of "considerable ability,"²² Spector was apparently little better than a mediocre public speaker in his youth. Royal Canadian Mounted Police [RCMP] agents repeatedly described Spector as "the poorest paid agitator I have ever met," prone to being "rattled" by hostile questioning or heckling, "a little green at the tub-thumping game," and so on. The inside Party critique of Spector was that he was somewhat lazy, a judgement that may well have mistaken dips into personal and incapacitating depressions for a tendency to avoid the taxing labours of the professional revolutionary. Dissatisfaction with Spector's initial editorial management of the communist press was ostensibly rife within the revolutionary ranks. There were those on the pro-Soviet left who, early in the history of the Canadian communist movement, considered Spector less of an agitator than an "intellectual," even, perhaps, a "coward, and afraid of the police."²³ A close comrade, entirely sympathetic to Spector, would later comment, "he wasn't made out of iron."²⁴

Nevertheless, few in Canadian communist ranks could match Spector's incisive intelligence and his cosmopolitan reach, which the young revolutionary cultivated with a keen interest in the European revolutionary movement, especially relating to Germany and the failed uprising of 1918–1919, a topic on which Spector often spoke in public meetings. The Ukrainian Canadian leftist not surprisingly distinguished himself with an insightful, if truncated, analysis of the German debacle of 1923, having been in Europe at the time, observing first-hand the ruthless suppression of communists and workers who had come to the brink of revolutionary insurrection, before travelling to Moscow to attend the Thirteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He parted company with Zinoviev's rationalizations and obfuscations in the Comintern apparatus, at least partially, in an unpublished report to the Central Executive Committee of the Canadian Party. The seeds of a sympathetic approach to Trotskyism lay in that encounter, although Spector did not embrace a Left Opposition analysis on his own. Indeed, he downplayed somewhat early dissident positions that would later surface in Trotsky's insistence on the responsibility for the tragic failure of the 1923 Revolution being placed squarely on the shoulders of the Communist International [CI/Comintern] and the German Party [KPD]. Spector's political reading of the German Revolution's failure could be described as incorporating features of the mainstream Comintern position, but backtracking into areas of critique that would later be developed by Trotsky. Spector's more public journalism in The Worker, and agitational speeches such as a Montreal talk before an audience of 300 in May 1924, were perhaps even less forthright, however analytically powerful they were in comparison to the lack of critical commentary developing in communist circles.²⁵

A Meeting of Hesitant Minds

Spector would certainly have been aware of Cannon early in the 1920s, and possibly in 1921, when, as a member of the Canadian wing of the United Communist Party, he participated in the UCP/CLP fusion orchestrated by Cannon's comrade, Caleb Harrison. Whether Cannon knew anything of Spector at this early date is less likely, although it is possible there was a connection through Charlie Scott, who had met with Spector, Buck, and others in the autumn of 1921. Scott was one of a number of "all-out Lettish Bolsheviks" that Cannon befriended in his earliest days in the New York movement, people he personally liked and "felt a kinship with." The paths of Cannon and Spector certainly crossed, if only lightly, in Moscow in 1922, at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. Spector, along with Custance and MacDonald, attended the 1 December 1922 assembly devoted to a discussion of legalization of the United States Party, where Cannon (alias Cook) led the successful move to secure Comintern endorsement of an open, above-ground American communist party. MacDonald spoke in favour of the Cannon position, and indeed the Canadian Party had been functioning as a legal entity for some time, pursuing a course very much like that advocated for the US by Cannon. By all accounts Cannon's performance was riveting, and a young Maurice Spector would almost certainly have been impressed by the Rosedale native's political acumen. Spector returned to Canada convinced of the necessity of continuing the work of the above-ground legal communist party and dispensing with the underground apparatus as soon as it was possible to do so, a position diametrically opposed to views he had ostensibly held two years previously, in March 1921.²⁶

Throughout the early-to-mid-1920s there is little indication that Cannon and Spector had any direct contact. Yet the two North American leaders endorsed parallel understandings of "collective leadership" within communist movements, international and domestic, where no single individual could command ultimate authority and the leading cadre were divided by programmatic difference and factional identification.²⁷ Spector almost certainly had a better appreciation of Trotsky's political critique of the Communist International's errors, with Cannon facing more acute pressures to be aboard the anti-Left Opposition bandwagon. If he did not jump on the steamroller of assault, he did participate in the witch hunt. Spector was more able — because of his considerable prestige, because his rival Jack MacDonald did not think the Canadian Party should concern itself with the CI's anti-Trotsky diatribes, and because the Canadian Party was not as intensely differentiated by factionalism as its US counterpart and seemingly of less significance than parties in countries like the United States — to deflect Moscow's directives to issue statements against the Russian Oppositionists.

Indeed, the leadership of the Canadian Party in the mid-1920s offered rare refusals to knuckle under to the growing Comintern demand to repudiate Trotsky and all Left Oppositionist dissidents. A 1925 Spector-drafted (but also undoubtedly influenced by Jack MacDonald, and acquiesced to by Tim Buck) rejoinder was somewhat unique in Communist International circles in its reasoned rejection of the Moscow demand to side unequivocally with the rising tide of anti-Trotskyism:

The Executive Committee is not convinced on the basis of evidence obtained, that the Com-intern is actually menaced and confronted with a system constituting Trotskyism. Notwithstanding Trotsky's mistakes prior to 1917 and during the course of the revolution, we are unconvinced that the implications of the 'permanent revolution' theory attributed to him are actually entertained by Trotsky and that he contemplates revision of Leninism. We are of the opinion that the prestige of the Comintern has not been enhanced here by the bitterness of the anti-Trotsky attack. No request from leading elements or party membership for discussion in the Party press.

This earned the Canadian Party a stiff Comintern rebuke, and the material censure of its Organizational Bureau head, O.A. Piatnitsky, who withheld funds from the Canadian Party. Canada's communists were thought to be plagued by "considerable ideological confusion," condemned by the Executive Committee of the Communist International for their favouring of Trotskyism, which supposedly left them isolated from the world revolutionary movement.²⁸ But the fallout from this Canadian refusal to be whipped into line by the Comintern would actually prove to be surprisingly moderate, in part, perhaps, because Spector, MacDonald, Buck, and others in the leadership kept the matter isolated among themselves, confined to Central Committee discussions.²⁹ Maurice Quarter, later a convert to Trotskyism, joined the Young Communist League [YCL] around 1927, and he recalled, from the distance of the mid-1970s, that the Canadian communist ranks knew next to nothing about Comintern controversies involving Trotsky and Stalin. Well connected to the powerful Finnish and Ukrainian sections of the Party, Quarter did not "remember any protesting against the suppression of Trotsky." He first learned of "the problem" when, on a visit to the United States, he read Max Eastman's The Real Situation in Russia. "That was the first disclosure we ... had of the fight that was going on inside the Communist Party," Quarter stressed, concluding, "Actually Canada was more or less a backwash."³⁰

If Spector managed to maintain a semblance of 'neutrality' on the question of Trotskyism within the leadership ranks of the Canadian communist movement over the next few years, he was nevertheless increasingly forced into particular corners as figures such as Tim Buck, Bill Moriarty, and others accommodated to the Com-intern and Jack MacDonald retreated into something of an agitational shell, in which the struggles in Canada were represented as increasingly paramount. In later years, there was suggestion that as Buck placed the Canadian section on record as standing against Trotskyism and the Russian Opposition at the 1927 Seventh Plenum of the Comintern, Spector offered his resignation as Party Chairman and editor of The Worker, only to be urged by MacDonald, the National Secretary, to reconsider, which he did. At this time, a mere twelve months before the Sixth Congress, Spector was still the most supported of the Canadian Central Executive Committee leaders, more ballots being cast for him than for any one of the other eight nominees.

The Canadian section within which Spector functioned actually proved highly uneven in its response to the Left Opposition. On the one hand, the divided leadership of the Canadian communist movement seemed to have little political heart, in the mid-1920s, for an all-out factional contest. On the other, at the Lenin School in this same period, an induction course in "The Errors of Trotskyism" was being taught by the Canadian Stewart Smith, the 18-year-old son of the Reverend A.E. Smith, a young man who took to Stalinism with the evangelical fervour of his familial background. Smith, not Spector, would unfortunately be elevated to the stature of a major figure in Canada in the later 1920s, consolidating a Buck-Smith leadership pole that would eventually assail Spector and marginalize crucial figures such as Jack MacDonald and Florence Custance who, unlike Spector, could not immediately be assailed as Trotskyists. All would eventually be repudiated by the Party they founded. Smith played the decisive role in supposedly vanquishing 'the counter revolutionary' Trotsky and his Left Opposition followers; the so-called Right Opposition would go soon thereafter. As the Communist Party of Canada moved into its ultraleft sectarian 'Third Period' in the early 1930s, Smith not surprisingly distinguished himself as one of Canada's most rabid opponents of 'social fascism'.³¹

By 1927–1928, then, there was little hiding from the Stalinist assault on Trotskyism and the increasing drift of the Comintern into a programmatic repudiation of the Bolsheviks' original platform, world revolution, via the rerouting of the forces of proletarian internationalism on to the narrower ground of 'socialism in one country'. Spector attended the US Workers (Communist) Party's Central Executive Committee Plenum of 4–7 February 1928.³² By this time, with Ruthenberg dead and Jay Lovestone at the helm, United States communists were blasting at Trotskyism full force. Cannon's ongoing project of forging a collective leadership within the American Party had been stalemated, the organizational apparatus was being ruled with an iron hand guiding it inexorably to the right, and relations between the Foster and Cannon camps had soured over differences around trade union policy. As Lovestone's lieutenant, Bertram D. Wolfe, offered up a particularly shrill Plenum attack on the Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Cannon sat glum in the audience, and refused a push from Bill Dunne to line up against the Russian dissidents the better to secure the Cannon faction's future within the Comintern. Alone in the back of the hall, "disgruntled, bitter, and confused," Cannon either sensed Spector's disillusionment or the Canadian caught the American leader's depressed eye.

James P. Cannon in Moscow with, left to right, Bill Dunne, Tom O'Flaherty, and Bill Haywood, 1925, Labor Defender.

The two spent the evening together, commiserating over the recent expulsions of Trotsky and Zinoviev, discussing at length the contrived nature of the anti-Opposition denunciations. Aside from a smattering of acquaintance with some Russian documents critical of the Anglo-American Russian Committee's thwarting of independent activity in Britain during the 1926 General Strike, Cannon confessed to having no fundamental grasp of what was at stake, programmatically, in the 1927–1928 battle inside the Soviet Communist Party. Spector seemed of the same critical, but hesitant, mind. And so Cannon stayed reluctantly quiet on the question, he and Spector apparently agreeing that neither of them "had any idea of what we could do about" the issue of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and made "no plans ... at the time." Spector may well have hedged his bets, feeling Cannon out, but there is no basis for thinking that he was a truly convinced Trotskyist in the winter of 1928, nor that he had 'theoretical' answers to any of the perplexing questions the growing, and increasingly more obvious, degeneration of the Russian revolution posed. But a kind of cagey political connection had been forged by two of the leading figures of North American communism.³³

The Sixth World Congress: Stalinization and the Birth of the Cannon-Spector Alliance

Spector and Cannon were both delegates to the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, convened in Moscow 17 July through 1 September 1928. It was the first time the CI had assembled in four years, the delay running over schedule by some 24 months. The internal situation in the Soviet Union was largely hidden from the revolutionary ranks who descended on the first workers' state from all corners of the globe. But had they seen conditions as they actually were, it would not have been reassuring to the visiting delegates, some 515 in number, representing 58 national sections of the international communist movement. Unemployment was now a recognized reality in the workers' republic. A bread crisis threatened urban centres with famine. Once revered figures were now banished from power, driven from Moscow to remote corners of the Soviet Union. The Left Opposition had been expelled from the Communist Party, and arrests of its advocates had begun.

Historically, the Sixth Congress proved a major step toward subordinating the world communist movement, with its diversity of struggles and needs, to the dominance of the Soviet Union, and, in hindsight, to the consolidation of Stalin's unquestioned rule and elevation to a theoretical maxim of the contradictory notion of 'socialism in one country'. But none of this registered decisively at the time. Rather, sad disillusionment reigned. Discerning delegates found the proceedings dispiriting. The communist climate seemed barely recognizable when compared to the early 1920s. Passionate debate and committed revolutionary leadership had then, it was generally agreed, characterized Comintern meetings. Instead, international figures shook their heads in despair at the arrogance of the Russian leaders, who obviously demanded and received "dull and sad parades of loyalty." It made the Italian Marxist Togliatti feel like "hanging oneself," while the French communist, Thorez, thought the mood of the Congress one of "uneasiness, discontent, and skepticism."³⁴

Spector, whose arrival in the Soviet Union preceded Cannon's, quickly lined up with his American counterpart's factional allies, his intelligence and cosmopolitan reach appreciated as strengths. For his part, Cannon would have been aware that Spector's role within the Canadian section had been to soften anti-Trotskyism since approximately 1925, and the dissident pair had established the beginnings of political trust in February 1928. Beyond this, there remained the challenging project of making an alliance, and finding a programmatic path. None of this was evident as Cannon and Spector first met in Moscow during the early summer of 1928. Draper thus overstates the case of Spector's programmatic certainty dramatically, declaring that on the eve of the World Congress Spector was the only actual Trotskyist in the entire Western hemisphere. Spector's journalism in The Worker and his subsequent response to understanding and implementing the programmatic meaning of anti-Stalinism establish clearly that whatever the Canadian communist's attraction to Trotskyist ideas, he was no conscious Left Oppositionist prior to the Sixth Congress. Cannon, less likely to have aired his programmatic perspectives journalistically, shared with Spector an unease and a disillusionment, but needed, as well, to come to grips with the contradictory meanings of 'world revolution' versus 'socialism in one country'. It was at this point that a document surfaced that clarified for both Cannon and Spector what was wrong within the Communist International, and what must be done to put things right.

Had things worked on the Program Commission the way they were supposed to, it is possible that Cannon and Spector would have had little to do, the decisions about the Comintern program having already been predetermined by the established Stalinist functionaries. But in this period of the late 1920s the bureaucratic machineries of the Soviet state and the Comintern were perhaps not as forcefully mechanical and as repressively efficient as they would be in later decades. Or, alternatively, they may have been in perfectly machiavellian order.

Trotsky and the Left Opposition, largely driven into exile, faced a series of awkward dilemmas as they found themselves manoeuvred into various political cul-de-sacs by Stalin's left lurch and anti-rightist move against Bukharin. They nevertheless appealed to the Sixth Congress with a number of short documents detailing the theoretical degeneration of the Soviet Union's revolutionary leadership and outlining the repression that had been visited upon the heads of communist dissidents.³⁵ But the critical statement was Trotsky's The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals. The document, a withering assault on the draft of a Comintern program pieced together by Bukharin, Stalin, and his various hangers-on, was submitted to the Sixth Congress and found its way, erringly according to Cannon, into the translation department, where a dozen or so stenographers and language experts had little enough to do that they put two of the three sections of the document into readable form for foreign delegates and distributed a limited number of poorly translated copies to heads of the convening communist sections and members of the Program Committee. "So, lo and behold, it was laid in my lap," Cannon later exclaimed, "translated into English!"³⁶ Spector, too, would have received a copy. Claiming that the Draft Program was in fact buried in a special committee, where its closely monitored and numbered/labelled copies were leaked surreptitiously to various quarters, Manuel Gomez [Charles Shipman] perhaps adds substance to the apparently common Comintern rumours that Stalin may well have allowed the Trotskyist document some circulation the better to best Bukharin from the left. William Z. Foster, apparently, saw the document and considered it a masterful critique of Comintern practice.³⁷

As much as the Sixth Congress politics and personal alignments within the American section seemed in flux in July and August 1928, Cannon and Spector soon came together, rightly grasping that serious scrutiny of Trotsky's Draft Program demanded the close quarters of individual attention among those who could be trusted to bide their time and work for the creation of a Left Opposition in North America. Their first task was to pour over the roughly and incompletely translated document.

Trotsky correctly identified the foundational issue as the programmatic divide separating international revolution and socialism in one country. He insisted in a short, preface-like statement that "the fate of the Communist International" was now bound up in evaluating the last five years of the Comintern's political practice, so "rich in events and mistakes," demanding nothing less than a strict Marxist analytic accounting. Finding the Bukharin-Stalin draft severely wanting in this regard, Trotsky commenced his statement with due attention to the forces of world capitalism that any program advocating international revolution would necessarily have to address. In what must have registered immediately with Cannon and Spector, Trotsky laid great emphasis on the hegemony of North American capital, arguing that its inevitable forthcoming crisis would seek resolution at the expense of Europe. Trotsky insisted that prior to 1925 all theoretical traditions in the Communist International adhered to basic Leninist premises. It had long been understood that capitalism's uneven, sporadic development scripted the uneven and sporadic nature of the socialist revolution, and that, moreover, the interdevelopment of national political economies in the epoch of global capital and imperialism structured not only the political but also the economic impossibility of building socialism in one country. Abandoning such premises led to programmatic error, evident in the official draft program of the Sixth Congress.

Among the mistakes Trotsky singled out four: the exaggeration of the level of productive forces in the Soviet Union; blindness to the uneven development of various branches of industry; a basic ignorance of the international division of labour; and a critical slighting in the imperialist epoch of the contradiction inherent in the expanding productive forces and the boundaries of nation-states. At issue, of course, in all such comment, was the need to prepare for and oppose the imperialist war drive, a point Spector raised in his Congress speeches, as well as the extension of revolutionary class struggle internationally. This Trotsky saw as fundamentally compromised by Stalin's notion of socialism in one country, rooted in the thoroughly mistaken view that the internal contradictions of Soviet socialism could be overcome within the boundaries of the first workers' state, rather than through world proletarian revolution. Programmatically this reduced the Communist International to a merely auxiliary body, a guardian of Soviet well-being, rather than an arm of revolutionary internationalism. National reformism was born at the interface of such theory and its programmatic logics. This was the seedbed of social patriotic blunders, such as the unfortunately rigid application of Comintern positions in the Chinese Revolution of 1926–1927, when the forces of world revolution proved incapable of adapting to Chinese communists' growing awareness of the costs associated with aligning with their own bourgeoisie, on the grounds that the 'national' revolt against imperialism led by Chiang Kai-Shek was the critical cutting edge of social transformation. As the Chinese revolutionary forces discovered in bloody defeat, the necessity to wage bourgeois revolution in the East depended on the proletariat's capacity to open the eyes of the oppressed people to the treachery of the bourgeoisie, and to undertake its own struggle for power. When, under Stalin, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, the Comintern failed to advance the Third International's programmatic position in this direction, as Trotsky would ultimately do with the elaboration of his views on permanent revolution, it compromised severely the World Revolution, in China, to be sure, but also in Russia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.³⁸

Spector's journalistic contributions to The Worker had addressed the development of revolutionary possibilities in China in ways that opened out into Trotsky's later criticisms,³⁹ but for both Spector and Cannon Trotsky's critique was so powerful because it brought together a forceful synthesis of what was wrong, programmatically, in the policies of the Communist International. From the German debacle of 1923 to the China defeats of 1926–1927, there was now an analytic umbrella under which the mistakes of five years of the Communist International could be explained, and the Soviet domestic downturn and narrowing of political agendas interpreted sensitively. Trotsky's Draft Program was thus a document much larger in the sum of its parts than in its particulars, associated with specific events. For Cannon, it forced some difficult personal reassessment:

The foot-loose Wobbly rebel that I used to be had imperceptibly begun to fit comfortably into a swivel chair, protecting himself in his seat by small maneuvers and evasions, and even permitting himself a certain conceit about his adroit accommodation to this shabby game. I saw myself for the first time as another person, as a revolutionist who was on the road to becoming a bureaucrat. The image was hideous ...

The question remained what to do. Both Cannon and Spector were, however, products of their environment: "the politics of the Comintern had become a school of maneuverism, and we ourselves had been affected by it," Cannon confessed. He and Spector initially discussed following unprincipled subterfuges of their own, the better of course to achieve their desired ends. "Trotsky's document on the Draft Program was a great revelation of the meaning of principled politics," Cannon would later acknowledge, "[b]ut for us at the time it was a new revelation [and] ... we were only beginning to assimilate its full significance." In the end, Cannon and Spector decided to take the high road, to keep relatively to themselves, and talked to very few comrades about the unsettling programmatic meaning of Trotsky's criticism of Comintern fundamentals. In Cannon's words, he and Spector "let the caucus meetings and the Congress sessions go to the devil while we read and studied this document." Cannon's appetite for group jostling within the American Workers (Communist) Party was waning fast: "I began to slow down and lose interest in the faction fight altogether."⁴⁰

Such recollections feed the view that Cannon was an almost absent presence during the 1928 July-August Comintern meetings.⁴¹ This is not entirely correct. To be sure, Cannon began to recede from view in the delegation gatherings as early as 21 July 1928. He missed a number of caucus and official meetings, and two key allies in the combined opposition, William Dunne and Jack Johnstone (Foster's lieutenant in the Chicago Federation of Labor), objected to refusals to allow Cannon a proxy vote on a Foster motion within one Congress function at which Cannon was supposedly "unavoidably absent." Even when present, Cannon often abstained on specific votes, including a number of defeated motions put forward by his closest allies, Dunne and Gomez/Shipman.⁴²

But, that said, Cannon, while keeping his political cards rather close to his chest, did undoubtedly engage in discussions with his most trusted factional allies, trying to feel them out on the questions he now knew were central. Gomez, for instance, suggested in an interview with Draper in 1964, that Cannon "talked a great deal about Trotsky without supporting Trotsky and without opposing Stalin — but raised questions in a very ambiguous way that made one ask himself, 'Why is he talking like that anyway? There is something peculiar going on here'." Cannon almost certainly mishandled what must have been some kind of attempt to open a dialogue on Trotsky with Bill Dunne. While he would later come to see his old trade union counterpart and close comrade Clarence Hathaway in an extremely critical light, he was at the beginning of the Comintern meeting an ally of longstanding duration with whom Cannon was most likely to have attempted some political discussion, however guarded. Hathaway had been through what Cannon eventually regarded as the "misnamed" Lenin School, where he had "been trained to scent the wind in the Russian party, and he was a fully indoctrinated Stalininst." But upon his arrival at the Sixth Congress, Cannon probably did not look upon the experienced labour leftist with such a jaundiced eye. He saw Hathaway as something other than a mere 'hanger-on' "serving his own interests," and he may have revealed himself to his Minnesota ally, who now had a developed nose in how to sniff out the less-than-loyal. Hathaway would have been a perfect conduit through which information about Cannon's 'wavering' on Trotskyism could have been passed to Stalinist authorities. One Lovestone supporter, the persistently demagogic Harry M. Wicks, attacked Cannon openly for using Trotsky's document as unattributed ammunition in his polemical shots against the notorious John Pepper. In any case, the Russian secret police, the GPU, were sufficiently aware of Cannon's "monkeying" with Trotskyism that they supposedly compiled a file on the American delegate during his Comintern stay in Moscow.

As for Spector, the adaptable German communist, Heinz Neumann, warned the Canadian of "rumors that he was meeting with the wrong people." Whether acting on his own or as an agent of other forces, Neumann clearly had a bead on something. The gregarious, affable, and well-liked German, who travelled in the Bukharin circle for a time only to abandon it as Stalin threw a noose around its collective neck, would later be executed in one of the purges of the 1930s. In 1928, he was playing a particular game, and offered to arrange a Stalin interview for Spector. (Similar consultations would be orchestrated for Foster and Lovestone — separately, of course — with Stalin, and for Bittelman and Gomez with Stalin's alter ego, V.M. Molotov.) When the Toronto Marxist turned down the visitation, he found himself interrogated by the GPU. As circumspect as they thought they were, Cannon and Spector were indeed putting out signals.⁴³ Nor was Cannon entirely silent, for all his preoccupation with Trotsky's Draft Program, in the public discussions of the Comintern. He spoke decisively, for instance, in a major speech before the Comintern on 28 July 1928. He pilloried the record of the Lovestone leadership and extended the Minority Opposition's attack through discussion of various opportunistic errors of the Workers (Communist) Party, particularly as they related to the Socialist Party, the trade unions, women's work, and the cooperative sector.⁴⁴

In the enlarged Anglo-American Secretariat, Cannon locked horns in August with the presiding Soviet official, the former Ukrainian Menshevik turned diehard Stalinist, G. Petrovsky, demanding the floor to air some differences that he had with Bittelman, who had spoken for the anti-Lovestone forces within the US Party. The closet American Left Oppositionist was unequivocal in his support of the platform of "The Right Danger in the American Party," which he had signed along with Bittelman and many other US opponents of the Lovestone leadership. But he continued to press the task of forming a "collective leadership." It was a fine point to be making, at the time, but it drew on Cannon's growing separation from many in the combined opposition, including those of his own faction, who had been too easily swept up in Stalinist manoeuvring that cavalierly castigated specific tendencies and positions as 'left' and 'right'. Bittelman had undoubtedly gravitated to the factional possibilities inherent in this process, claiming for his cofactionalists the historical status of the "Left group in the" Workers (Communist) Party. Cannon insisted on correcting the characterization, stressing that the combined Cannon-Foster group had developed "along a zigzag line." Lovestone, Cannon claimed, had historically harboured ultra-left tendencies, but upon assuming the leadership of the American Party he had invariably tacked right. Such positions, couched in language that betrayed no hint of Cannon's emerging Trotskyism, must have seemed rather beside the point to many in the public US Opposition group, for whom it was a political convenience to label Lovestone a rightist. They nonetheless meshed well with a reading of Trotsky's Draft Program and separated Cannon out from the cynical adoption of 'left'/''right' phraseology that, by August, had overtaken the Sixth Congress vocabulary.⁴⁵ If these and other lessons were to be implemented programmatically, however, Cannon and Spector had to return to North America, their positions in the communist movement intact. And they had to retain possession of their copies of Trotsky's precious draft program, using them to recruit dissidents at home.

Reconfiguration

The American delegation departed the Sixth Congress in September 1928. They left more divided, and more precariously perched, vis-à-vis the Communist International, than when they arrived. All seemed uncertain. Jay Lovestone and Company remained at the helm, but this faction had overreached itself in siding with Bukharin, not so much out of principle as, in Cannon's words, 'guessing wrong'. When it came time, later in 1929, to call for Bukharin's head in order to placate Stalin and retain its hold on the American communist apparatus, the Lovestone group was quick to jump on the bandwagon of denunciation. But such mending of fences was not enough. Lovestone and Wolfe, in particular, had overstepped the bounds of Stalinist subservience at the Sixth Conference in rudely censorious dismissals of Lozovsky, then much favoured by Stalin, and through demanding a measure of financial independence from the Comintern. More ominously, Lovestone had brazenly challenged Stalin directly in the Senioren Konvent, asking for clarification of the undercover Stalin-Bukharin fight, suggesting that the Russian Party's dirty linen be aired before a Comintern subcommittee. Lovestone, and by implication his entire faction, was now marked by Stalin for future demise. The Foster-Cannon group, which had mended some fences en route to the Sixth Congress in the hopes of uniting to defeat Lovestone was, however, finished, torn asunder by internal lack of agreement, its forces dispersed by Comintern appointment (Dunne and Earl Browder were dispatched to the Far East), its key factional leaders now isolated from their former followers, and tarnished by a failure to line up unambiguously behind Comintern dictate. Stalin, through interviews with both Lovestone and Foster, managed to keep both figures off their political balance, feeding them sweet nothings as to what was coming next. He danced them into political corners out of which they would never truly reappear, or in which they remained, wallflower-like, for years. Only the opportunistic Browder left the Sixth Congress in good graces, his strategic plague on all houses and orchestrated oscillations of outburst and occlusion an astutely calculated gamble on future dividends to be garnered in the quest for power within the now renamed Communist Party, USA.

Over the course of the summer, most of its leaders embroiled in the Sixth Congress factional fisticuffs, the American Party had itself been the site of increasing domestic hostilities, with Cannon group figures such as Tom O'Flaherty and Manuel Gomez facing disciplinary charges for financial and other improprieties. Leading the attack was the Lovestone hatchet-man, Jack Stachel; point man on the Cannon defence team was Martin Abern. These crudely factional assaults rankled because, while it faced such denigration within major Party committees, the Cannon faction had been carrying the bulk of communist mass work throughout the summer of 1928. Labour defence campaigns continued in the International Labor Defense, as did anti-imperialist work, and Arne Swabeck and others had been promoting a new and militant unionism among Illinois miners and textile workers. Coming home was clearly going to be no political picnic.⁴⁶

Having decided not to fight the battle for a Trotskyist program within the Sixth Congress itself, but to return to their native United States and Canada to build up the ranks of an effective Left Opposition, Cannon and Spector faced a difficult situation. They both knew that it was mandatory to 'smuggle' Trotsky's Draft Program out of the Soviet Union so that they could use the document to propagate the ideas of the Left Opposition among potential United States and Canadian converts. No doubt Cannon and Spector discussed loosely how they should proceed, but beyond this, it is not clear that either man had a well-thought-out understanding of what they would be doing, especially as to specific details. Each copy of the Trotsky draft was stamped "Read and Return to the Secretariat" and the numbering certainly suggested that Soviet officialdom was monitoring these Left Opposition pages relatively closely. Cannon and Spector had no way of knowing how rigorous a tally of the Trotskyist critique of Comintern fundamentals was being kept, but they had reason to suspect that leaving the Soviet Union without returning the official document to the Secretariat was going to be difficult. Both men, in the end, smuggled Trotsky's Draft Program out of Russia in September 1928, Spector carrying it with him to Europe as he attempted to build bridges to Opposition groups in France and Germany before returning to Toronto in the second week of October. Cannon, some 30 years later, did not remember that Spector had surreptitiously taken the marked translation of Trotsky with him, but trusted that Spector's claims to have done so, recounted to Draper in various communications/interviews in 1957–1959, should be accepted "without question." For his part, Cannon apparently relied on the aid of George Weston, a Trotskyist-leaning British delegate known as the "Mad Irishman" for his free talk of Left Opposition ideas at the Sixth Congress, in 'liberating' the Draft Program from its Stalinist incarceration. Rumour later had it that Weston, whose base of operations within the Comintern was labour-defence work in the International Red Aid (making him a logical candidate for collaboration with Cannon), managed to get hold of another numbered document, possibly pilfered from an Australian delegate, allowing Cannon to return his copy. Weston's wife, Mary Morris, then removed the insides of her son's teddy bear, placed Trotsky's writings within the re-stuffed animal, and passed the pamphlet back to Cannon at a pre-arranged meeting in Berlin, from which Cannon departed for the United States, arriving home 23 September 1928. There would later be anguished cries from Comintern quarters of the "illegal means" undertaken to circulate Trotsky's draft, "thereby endangering the proletarian dictatorship."⁴⁷

Cannon: Converting Comrades

Such shots across the polemical bow paled in comparison to what was in store for Cannon and Spector in their respective Communist Parties. Cannon first shared Trotsky's Draft Program with his lover, Rose Karsner. Rose, who modestly stated that she did "not grasp its full implications," nevertheless quickly assimilated "the essence"; to her it was as if "at last light [had] been thrown on the troubles" the American section had lived through with the Comintern. According to Jim, Rose "never faltered from that day" until her death in the 1960s. With only a solitary copy of the document, no way of duplicating it, and conscious of the dangers of exposing themselves prematurely to a full-scale Party attack, Cannon and Karsner proceeded cautiously: "The only way we could operate was to get hold of carefully selected individuals, arouse enough interest, and then persuade them to come to the house and read the document.... We got a few people together and they helped us to spread the gospel to wider circles." It was, in Cannon's words, "A long and toilsome process."

Cannon's and Karsner's quarters at this time, a flat in New York's Second Avenue and 19th Street district, were modest to the point of spartan, and one by one, a few trusted comrades from the Cannon faction were brought to the apartment and sat down with Trotsky's Draft Program. The first were Cannon's closest co-workers in the International Labor Defense, the youthful, but seasoned communist factionalists, Shachtman and Martin Abern. This duo was later expanded to include the long-time Cannon ally and former editor of the Daily Worker and the Labor Defender, Chicago-based and increasingly disaffected, Tom O'Flaherty. Shachtman later recalled "the absolutely shattering effect upon my inexcusable indifference to the fight in the Russian Party, upon my smug ignorance about the issues involved, upon my sense of shame, that was produced by the first reading of Trotsky's classic, Critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern." Leaving aside the hyperbole of a language of 'shock' and an exaggerated and distorting assertion of ignorance on important issues, born of a disingenuous later attempt to paint the Cannon faction in its entirety as programatically obtuse (Shachtman himself had been an architect of the group's assimilation to the Stalinist smokescreens around the Chinese Revolution), this remembrance rightly accents the political impact of finally being confronted with a critique of communist practice premised on fundamentals of Marxist analysis. The air within the Cannon-Karsner household, and possibly in selected neighbourhood cafés and restaurants, was now alive with animated conversation among the small group for whom Trotsky's writing opened up an appreciation of how a Comintern theoretical degeneration into the limitations of 'socialism in one country' might explain, coincident with the conservatizing pressures of the United States context, the sorry capitulations, compromises, and ultimate collapse of American communism as a revolutionary force. "Never has a movement of social idealism suffered such a moral catastrophe, such a rotting away of its human material," Cannon wrote with some bitterness in the fall of 1954. Within three or four days after his arrival in New York from the Soviet Union, Cannon, Karsner, Shachtman, and Abern had an agreement to "start the fight" for a Left Opposition within the Communist Party. It was not destined to go more than a round or two.⁴⁸

But in a matter of weeks, Cannon and his small band of clandestine Oppositionists had made pivotal strides forward, securing Party mailing lists, connecting with isolated dissidents such as Boston's Antoinette Konikow, reaching into enclaves in the midwest in Chicago and Minneapolis, cultivating some small pockets of support in the foreign language sections, and securing modest financial aid from Cannon's old friend, Max Eastman, who donated royalties from his collection of Trotskyist documents, The Real Situation in Russia (1928), to the publication program of the American Left Opposition. In Canada, Spector was able to make less headway.

Spector: Assembling an Analysis

Spector returned to Toronto on 9 October 1928. His later arrival meant that he had less time to build support than Cannon, and the days lost were clearly pivotal. Once the Left Opposition cat was out of the political bag, both Spector and Cannon knew the established Party leaderships would move against them decisively. Cannon detailed his minor successes in a letter to Spector. The Canadian revolutionary was steeled by reading Eastman's translation of the correspondence between Trotsky and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU], published as "Stalin Falsifies History," suggesting the importance of republishing the documents appearing in The Real Situation in Russia in cheap and popular editions, as had been done in France and Germany. Translation into Yiddish and other languages he thought "would be very effective in rallying support to us." Full of "cheerful surprise" that Cannon had managed to win four critical comrades to the cause, Spector promised to "send a complete list of the literature" he had obtained in Europe, and to begin the job of translating material from French and German. Now in possession of various bulletins, statements, platforms, and files, assembling dissident communist material produced by an array of figures and incipient movements, including France's Boris Souvarine and Germany's Hugo Urbahns, early proponents that the USSR had become a "state capitalist" society, the Belgian and Russian Oppositions, and the Italian Bordigists, Spector's quest for the documents of European debate had yielded much to digest. The Canadian Marxist had obviously grabbed whatever he could, indiscriminately, in what was a quick canvassing of the situation. Assimilating the lessons of this cache of literature would come later. Spector's brief sojourn in Europe also allowed him to establish cursory contact with Urbahns, a leader of the German left-wing along with Arkadi Maslow and Ruth Fisher, and spend a day in Paris, scouting out a highly fractured set of Oppositional forces. All of this simply reinforced his appreciation of "the crisis in the International." The pivotal German Party he thought split into four factions, corrupt and spent, and, "Anybody who dares discuss or criticize except in the official channels, is driven out of the Party." Spector was now more convinced than ever that Cannon's "decision to come out with the fundamental program is, I believe, correct." Having thought the matter over in Europe, the Canadian Left Oppositionist could not "see any reality in a fight on a limited program."

But as would be apparent in the next weeks, Spector was unable to move past these critical beginnings to reproduce Cannon's modest organizational achievements in New York. He had no Eastman to draw on for funds, and while committing himself to a pledge of $1,000, Spector was "absolutely broke at the moment," could not see getting to New York for a meeting in the near future, and expected to be fired from his Party post at any time. Unlike Cannon Spector had, after a few weeks back in Canada, failed to win pivotal recruits, and could not manage to pry from the Communist Party of Canada [CPC] any mailing lists of significance, as they were "kept under lock and key all the time I have been in the city." November correspondence from Cannon or Shachtman expressed uneasiness that Spector had not responded to previous admonitions to get his hands on such addresses, which were a practical preparation of immense importance. The slightly more than two weeks that Cannon preceded Spector in his return to North America seemed a critical breathing space for activity that allowed Cannon to take steps that Spector simply could not, or perhaps neglected to treat with the proper regard.⁴⁹

Reaction & Recruitment in the United States

In the interval the forces resistant to the Left Opposition were beginning to appreciate that a revolt needed to be nipped in the bud. Just how to do this, however, in the factional context of the United States Party, with Lovestone cognizant of the political capital to be gained by painting Foster and his faction as in cahoots with a renegade Trotskyist such as Cannon, complicated the situation greatly. As a result the fait accompli of the expulsion of Cannon and his supporters was delayed. Eventually, after a set of mid-October 1928 'hearings', Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern were given the bounce. As Cannon recalled, "We were expelled and out of there a few minutes later. The 'jury' didn't bother to leave the box." The next day the small nucleus of Trotskyists had a mimeographed "statement circulating throughout the party."⁵⁰

A national mass mailing of their programmatic statement was accompanied by a 28 October open letter from Cannon to all Party Members. In it Cannon explained that he, Shachtman, and Abern had endorsed the platform of the Russian Opposition, that they had been expelled by the Political Committee, which refused to publish their documents of dissidence. Adamant that, as communists, they were bound to the Communist Party even as its leading body had expelled them, Cannon committed himself, Shachtman, and Abern to fight for the ideas of Trotskyism and reinstatement to the Communist Party, asking for support from all who shared their views. In a key passage, Cannon linked the suppression of the struggle for thought and program in the Party to its bureaucratic degeneration:

These methods tend to transform the Party from a living body of revolutionaries into an institution which makes thought unlawful.... That is the meaning of the atmosphere created in the unscrupulous and demagogic struggle against Trotsky and the Russian Opposition during the past five years. The proletarian masses of the Party must awaken to this danger and take up the fight against it. They must break through the bureaucratic crust that has formed itself on top of the Party. They must demand full information on all sides of the question so that they can decide for themselves intelligently and not merely from wrong and non-Leninist conceptions of formal discipline.

Emphasizing "from the very beginning that [the central issue was] not simply a question of democracy," the Cannon Opposition stressed "the program of Marx-ism." Utilizing the discontent around the lack of inner Party democracy that the Konikow forces in Boston had accented, Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern consciously strove to "get a sympathetic hearing and then immediately began pounding away on the rightness of Trotskyism on all the political questions."⁵¹

By the time the full and conflicting accounts of the expulsion appeared in newsprint, statements being published in both the Daily Worker and the new Trotskyist propaganda organ, The Militant, in mid-November, a new chapter in the history of the American revolutionary left had commenced. Lovestone's lieutenant, Bertram Wolfe, dubbed Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern the "three Generals without an Army." The characterization was not all that far off the mark, although its condescending male chauvinism, characteristic of the 'hearings' and expulsions as a whole, wrote one crucial player, Rose Karsner, entirely out of the political war. Cannon recalled that he, Shachtman, and Abern "felt pretty lonely" as they departed, for the last time, the Political Committee meeting of 27 October 1928. But the slightly-more-than-two-week interval separating the technical expulsion of Cannon and his comrades from the public announcement to the Party ranks was something of a lull before the ugly storm that would eventually overwhelm the Trotskyist effort to create a Left Opposition appealing to the Communist Party's membership. In these weeks, The Militant was launched, funded by Eastman and some Chicago comrades, printed by an old Italian Wobbly, Joe Cannata, who both suggested the name and was generous in extending credit to the dissident communists. Orienting toward rank-and-file communists, the Trotskyist opposition flogged leaflets and the first issue of The Militant, which appeared before its publication date of 15 November 1928, outside Communist Party headquarters, where they met with a mixed, but non-violent, reception. Shachtman recalled that the original response was anything but virulent: old friends and comrades would talk about issues of political program; while some were hostile, there appeared to be openings to discuss Trotskyist criticisms, and it was possible to sell papers to Party members.⁵²

As the word spread of the existence of the Cannon-Shachtman-Abern-Karsner endorsement of Trotsky, recruits came their way, largely by ones and twos, occasionally in small groups. Cannon thought them a veritable army when they declared their adherence to the program of the Left Opposition. This modest recruitment proceeded in the first week of November, with documents being sent to contacts in the midwest strongholds of Minneapolis and Chicago, and the mining milieu, where Cannon had decade-old contacts among local militants. Some of it elicited positive responses, a miner long associated with opposition to the John L. Lewis trade union bureaucracy writing: "It shows once more the necessity of rank and file rule instead of a few leaders whom can utilize their positions for personal advantage and machine rule.... The slogans must be as in the old UMW: — 'Save the Party!' 'Lovestoneism must go!' 'For a Communist Party of the Workers!'"⁵³

With Cannon and the Left Opposition appearing to gain ground, Lovestone moved off the stand of relative moderation he had found useful to occupy, for anti-Foster factional purposes, during the Political Committee 'hearings' reviewing the charges against Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern. Pepper, writing under the name of Swift, called for "the complete liquidation of Trotskyism in the Party," likening the Left Opposition to "an openly counter-revolutionary Social Democratic ideology." The Comintern official continued: "The Trotskyist group around Cannon, Lore, and Eastman is an open ally of the capitalists, the Government, the Socialist Party, the A.F. of L., in their attempts to destroy the Communist Party." Cannon and Company were now "renegades," a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, and it was necessary to cut off all relations with them. Philadelphia communist, Herbert Benjamin, described the worsening climate of late 1928: "All friendships were completely ended, terminated, broken up, and so on, and there was no talking. And finally there were violent attacks upon the Trotskyists ... attempts to prevent them from holding meetings of any kind, of seizing their records, seizing any properties.... It was the most ruthless and unethical kind of action, and was considered tolerable, permissible, in your relations with opponents." Shachtman later expressed his incredulity at how quickly the Lovestone machine orchestrated a campaign of violence, meant to create an atmosphere in which the Trotskyists were ostracized as a diseased contingent, contact with which was prohibited for all rank-and-file communists. Most disturbing were the organized groups of New York Party members, often wielding furriers' knives, forming vigilante squads that would jostle and threaten the expelled Oppositionists on public streets as they distributed literature and hawked the Trotskyist press. Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern now faced resistance and resentment that crossed over into the territory of violence and physical intimidation.⁵⁴

Spector's Stand

Lovestone's determined campaign to rid the United States Communist Party of Trotskyists reached into Canada, where, predictably enough, it caught up with Maurice Spector. Upon his return from the Comintern's Sixth Congress, Spector had pursued a course similar to that of Cannon, albeit in more acute isolation. Rather than reveal himself fully to those all too ready to pounce, he opted for evasions and said little that would paint him into the uncomfortable corner of Trotskyism. But he was not about to offer endorsement of anti-Trotskyism either, or falsify his judgements about the political situation in the Soviet Union. Spector initiated "tentative conversations and discussions with the comrades who have been looking to me for leadership against the present incompetent and centrist regime in the party," a youthful cohort disaffected with Jack MacDonald, and centred in the energetic trio of Beckie Buhay, Oscar Ryan, and Charlie Marriot, all of whom would eventually gravitate to Tim Buck. Marriot, regarded as a leading literary figure in the YCL, had been present in Moscow during the Sixth Congress, and was known to both Cannon and Spector as someone who leaned favourably toward the possibility of a Left Opposition. But no Trotskyist nucleus would be forged out of such "friends." For by mid-to-late October, no more than two-and-a-half weeks after his return from Europe, Spector concluded with disappointment that while such comrades were reluctantly willing to read the materials of the Opposition, they were to a person unreceptive to Spector's having introduced "this international complication." Their dissidence was, in short, largely understood as a domestic discontent. Buhay, Ryan, and Marriot apparently thought the best political chance for a fight lay on the ground of national struggle, where the Party's morale was low, rank-and-file appreciation of issues was appallingly underdeveloped, personalized fractions existed in every city, expulsions of branches and individuals had curtailed Party activity, and bitterness had overtaken entire sections, such as the powerful Ukrainian group. Spector saw little hope of such material ever jelling into a true Left Opposition. He warned Cannon not to expect much from those he had around him. They were apparently of a different cast than Shachtman and Abern: "Even when they admitted the dark side of the present CI regime, they tended to consider 'Russian Questions' as too delicate and involved for any but the Russian Party to resolve." Those comrades prepared to work with Spector, then, were fixated on "Canadian problems" to the detriment of a larger political analysis, "mortally afraid of being labelled 'Trotskyists'." The only individual who had actually previously expressed positive and open views on the Left Opposition while in Russia, Charlie Marriot, quickly "sobered up" upon his return to Canada, castigating the struggle for Trotskyism as futile, and clamming up on all serious discussion with Spector; he would later leave the lies about his older comrade, circulated as the Party hierarchy attacked Spector, unrefuted.⁵⁵

At an Enlarged Executive Committee meeting of the Workers Party, 20–22 October 1928, which involved all of the leading Party cadre, Secretary Jack MacDonald, almost certainly by then in contact with Jay Lovestone, delivered a five-hour address endorsing each and every one of the recent Sixth Congress Comintern decisions. Spector, by this time, had come to regard MacDonald as a reflection of what was wrong with Canadian communism, dubbing him "a barnacle on the ship" of revolution, little more than a "trade-union I.L.P.er with the most meagre equipment of Marxism imaginable." The two Party leaders barely spoke. MacDonald concluded his address to the assemblage coyly and provocatively, perhaps fixing his eye on Spector. "Is there any Trotskyism in the Canadian Party," he asked rhetorically, adding for measure, "it would be a funny party that had no Trotskyism in it." Spector dodged a number of bullets that could well have had his name on them, putting in what he wrote to Cannon were "some bad moments nevertheless." He managed to evade one resolution that included the usual cant on Trotskyism, and when his silence on the Russian and international questions proved deafening, he was obliged, given the pleadings of one "friendly delegate," to offer a few "guarded comments on the Chinese Revolution and grain crisis and the situation on the parties of the CI." But Spector avoided all mention of the Russian Opposition and kept his political irons in the live fires of the Canadian Party.⁵⁶

The first smoking out of the ECCI representative and Chairman of the Party occurred a few days later, however, at a 25 October public meeting in Toronto's Alhambra Hall, with Spector designated as the featured speaker, addressing "The Soviet Union and the War Danger." Chaired by Tim Buck, the forum drew a largely Jewish audience, not uncommon when Spector was speaking, and Jack MacDonald also offered some words on the subject. According to the 'secret report' of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, nothing untoward happened at Alhambra Hall, although, to be sure, the spy might not have caught the nuances of difference that now separated the public statements of clandestine Trotskyists and aspiring Stalinists. But it is noteworthy that the police account stresses that Buck, MacDonald, and Spector were largely on the same wavelength, particularly with respect to the war danger and the need to defend the Soviet Union. The report also confirms Spector's later version of what he actually said. He apparently talked for about an hour, presenting a view of the successes of the Soviet Union as well as a "sober economic analysis" of the agricultural crisis and the menacing problem of class differentiation in the countryside. Buck and official Party mythology in Canada would eventually come to construct this meeting as Spector's 'coming out' endorsement of Trotskyism, and reconfigure various individual roles in the mythic exposure of this political 'fact', but in actuality both Spector's speech and the response of future Canadian Stalinists was much less than this. In the closet Trotskyist's view, he had merely given those who had "come chiefly to cheer" something to go away and think about.

Thinking was not what was on other minds, however. Whether there was a sense that Spector's speech had not cheered enough, and that was grounds for suspicion, or whether, as a police report based on access to inner circles of the Communist Party of Canada would claim, in mid-November 1928, that Spector's recent movements in Germany had been monitored by the 'Soviet espionage system', which reported to Canadian communist leaders that Spector "was followed and traced to a meeting place where friends of Trotsky met," the result was that Spector was now operating on borrowed time. Buhay, Ryan, and Marriot, intent on skewering MacDonald, now saw Spector as a liability. They "cut Spector dead" and began to cuddle up to Buck, who raised the nature of the Alhambra Hall speech at a meeting of the Secretariat a few days later. Complaining quietly (he explicitly asked that his remarks not go in the record), he expressed discomfort with the "disproportionate amount of space" Spector had devoted to what Buck nebulously called "the Difficulties." By the end of the month Spector had received a letter from the Toronto City Committee of the Party, signed by Beckie Buhay, disapproving of his talk, which had not been reported on in The Worker, and assigning him to a November Party speech in which he would be expected to carry a different tune.⁵⁷

Things were now moving extremely fast, and they would scuttle a Cannon plan to have Spector utilize his ECCI post to write a letter of protest against the New York explusions and then come out openly for a Trotskyist Left Opposition and align with those putting out The Militant. On 1 November MacDonald received a cable from Lovestone calling on the Canadian Workers Party to endorse the expulsions of Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern. Spector sought Cannon's advice on what to do when faced with the inevitable resolution: "Advise evasion if necessary abstention but under no circumstances endorse expulsion," Cannon scrawled. Spector knew his days as a Party leader were now numbered: "From the little that Buck has said," he wrote to Cannon on Halloween Eve, "I believe that abstention will be considered tantamount to opposition. The consequences are obvious." The regular Monday Political Committee meeting convened on 5 November 1928, with the issue of Spector a prime consideration.

Spector was thoroughly isolated, and the inner Party dynamics were very different than those confronted by Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern in the United States. Little history of organized factionalism had been evident in the Canadian Workers Party up to this point (at least when compared to the situation in the United States), and while MacDonald, Buck, and others had their particular axes to grind, Spector thought they had little enthusiasm for removing him, knowing that a Party as weak at the political centre as was the Canadian Party needed the particular talents Spector brought to his posts, especially his editorial work with the Party press. But "the little Lenin-School apparatchik [Stewart] Smith" was now back in Can-ada, having been briefed in New York by Lovestone, and was making much noise about waging "an aggressive campaign against Trotskyism" and singing "a big song about my being in possession of certain confidential documents." Indeed, Canadian communism late in 1928 came remarkably close to confirming the sorry prediction attributed to the Italian Marxist, Palmiro Togliatti, at roughly the same time: "If we don't give in, Moscow won't hesitate to fix up a left leadership with some kid out of the Lenin School." Judgements of what constituted 'left' leadership aside, the Canadian situation in November 1928 was thus not amenable to much that Spector and his New York allies could look forward to, with the former assuring the latter that there was no political material to be had among the Polcom and the CEC, and his failure to secure recruits should not be "put down necessarily to lack of organizing ability on [his] part," as Spector anticipated Cannon "possibly may." At the actual 5 November resolution ramming, Spector held on for an entire day. Communications from Lovestone were discussed, including the decision to expel the New York Trotskyists, and the Cannon, Shachtman, Abern declaration in support of the Russian Opposition was passed around. Then came the lining up, with Spector pressured to declare himself:

Mac & Co were insistent on a showdown. My past silences, abstentions from voting and half-hearted affirmations of Trotskyism, were all gone over and it was pointed out in the best inquisitorial fashion, that I must say, yea or nay to a series of questions that were drawn up....
Was I prepared to condemn the ideological line of Trotskyism and wage an aggressive campaign against 'it'? Was I prepared to wage a campaign against the disruptive actions of Cannon, Schachtman [sic], and Abern and more like these. I refused to answer by a yes or a no and after haggling all afternoon, I proposed and it was agreed to over the objections of MacDonald, that I be permitted to make a statement the next day.⁵⁸

Spector tabled a nine-page typewritten statement, addressed to the Political Committee of the Communist Party of Canada, on 6 November 1928. He committed himself to wage a resolute campaign for Leninism, provided an elaborate critique of Comintern policy that reached from the 1923 German crisis, through the thwarted Chinese Revolution and British General Strike of 1925–1927, into agrarian questions in Russia and the suppression of the Opposition. Of all the documents generated by the expulsion of avowed North American Trotskyists in October and November 1928, Spector's letter was perhaps the most detailed and coherent articulation of the politics of the Left Opposition. Condemning the Comintern's consistent opportunism, which was invariably based on "maneuvers with the Reformists at the top instead of regard for the unleashing of the mass movement below," Spector located the social basis of such deviation from programmatic principle in:

the retardation of the World Revolution, the relative stabilization of Capitalism, the defeats in China, Germany, Great Britain, Bulgaria, etc., and the difficulties of socialist construction in the USSR [which] have exercized their telling influence, and have provoked a desire upon the part of certain elements in the RCP to follow the line of lesser resistance, to solve the difficulties, National and International, not by the harder road of hewing to Leninism, but by the apparently easier theory of 'socialism in one country'.... From the economic point of view it is a Utopian mirage for which neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin are responsible, and the program of the Comintern will never be a completely correct guide to the revolutionary movement unless it breaks from this theory.

Entirely clear that his struggle was with the Revolutionary Communist movement and through the Communist International and its sections, Spector signed what was in effect his inevitable expulsion order with the words, "Long Live the Proletarian Revolution!" He was immediately removed from all Party assignments and suspended from the Communist Party of Canada pending a further review.

At the 11 November 1928 Central Executive Committee meeting the neophyte Stewart Smith led the attack, castigating Spector's class mettle, denigrating his Marxism. Like Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern, Spector was now expelled. The dubious icing was put on this cajoling cake on 22 December 1928 as the Anglo-American Secretariat, led by the British Canadian Tom Bell and Lovestone appointment Louis Engdahl, reported on the expulsion and formally stripped Spector of the ECCI seat that was already long gone. Across Canada, in late November and throughout December, the labour world was abuzz with word of Spector being drubbed out of the CPC. The Party took great offence at Spector's expulsion receiving coverage in The Globe, it being claimed the Left Oppositionist had turned to the voice of bourgeois power in Canada. Over the course of the next month, as had happened in the United States, communist officialdom's attempts to put the screws to potential Spector allies drove a few brave souls, who refused to endorse his expulsion and demanded instead Party reinstatement, into the Left Opposition camp. By mid-December a dozen Canadian comrades had been turfed. They were joined by a handful of other non-Party members who were willing to subscribe to The Militant, including a radical young lawyer, J.L. Cohen, who would figure prominently in the legal struggles of communists and workers over the course of the next two decades. Spector thought a group of 25–30 might crystallize in Toronto, and Cannon was soon reporting to American comrades that "Spector is making headway and already has a solid group with him."⁵⁹

Trotskyism in Canada, 1929–1937: A Sober Assessment

This was the cart of revolutionary optimism running ahead of the horse of sober pessimism of intellect and organizational judgement. For in actuality, Spector's attempts to recruit committed Canadian revolutionaries to the programmatic cause of the international Left Opposition stalled and, compared to the admittedly meagre accomplishments of Cannon in the same endeavour in the United States, sputtered. Having failed to win Buhay, Ryan, and Marriot to his positions, Spector's expulsion saw very little in the way of an exodus of critical cadre from the Canadian Party. Barely a baker's half dozen were initially expelled along with the Party's leading intellectual.⁶⁰ Experienced comrades, such as Annie Buller, who had long-established working relations with Spector and often expressed admiration for his talents, were quickly assimilated to a Party loyalism that broached no questioning of the programmatic issues at stake in what was now a titanic struggle pitting entrenched Stalinism against the upstart Trotskyist forces of 'counter-revolution'. Buller wrote to the Communist poet, Joe Wallace, early in 1929: "we all got a shock about Spector. He is lost to our cause. So much for M."⁶¹ As expulsions escalated into January 1929, it nevertheless remained the case that a number of those driven from the ranks of Canadian communism in the Trotskyist witch hunt did not gravitate to Spector and the program of the Left Opposition.⁶²

There is evidence, from two divergent streams within the early Canadian Trotskyist movement, that Spector dropped a pivotal organizational ball, failing to capitalize on a significant momentum toward the Left Opposition on the part of a large contingent of disaffected Jewish youth in the Young Communist League. Maurice Quarter, later a Spector factional ally and loyalist, claimed that immediately following Spector's expulsion in late 1928, a caucus of the YCL approached the former Party leader to come to a meeting and explain the politics behind the Trotsky-Stalin fight. According to Quarter, 40–50 people took the brave step of convening, knowing that they could well face expulsion as a consequence. The Canadian Party leadership dispatched Harvey Murphy and Norman Freed, who brought with them "an organized group with knives," to break up the meeting. In the end, the meeting did not continue, the dissident James Blugerman convincing the two groups ready to "fight it out" that the bourgeois press would have a field day in reporting on what was shaping up to be an extremely ugly, physical confrontation. So the fractured communist ranks melted into the night, going their separate ways. Later, some of the precocious Jewish youth refused in an open meeting to placate the Party hierarchy, and were shown the door out of the CPC for their defiance. Yet Spector won few of these dissidents to Trotskyism. It is surprising that the expelled ECCI member was unable to make more out of what was clearly a major recruitment possibility for the Left Opposition in Canada.⁶³

Indeed, in a later factional impasse in the Communist League of America (Opposition) Toronto branch in 1932, William Krehm, a student and future leader of the Canadian allies of disaffected Trotskyist B.J. Field, led an assault on Spector's record as a leader of the Canadian Trotskyist movement. Scurrilous and personalized, this one-sided repudiation of Spector harkened back to the disaffected Jewish branch of the YCL. According to Krehm and his supporters, in the interval between Spector's return from the Sixth Congress and his exit from the Canadian Party, one of North America's leading Left Oppositionists did little to develop an admittedly incoherent oppositional current within the Canadian communist movement and, indeed, aligned with Stalinist bureaucrats such as Sam Carr to expel the hard-to-handle Jewish youth. The dissident Jewish component of the Canadian communist youth section was ostensibly fixated on "a question of Party regime."

Barely touched upon in writings on Canadian communism, it is nevertheless likely that the Jewish communist youth articulating discontent in 1928–1929 were a mixed lot: expelled from the Party, some were subsequently readmitted, while others formed the substantive core of a contingent of nascent Trotskyists, led by a figure named Roth, who soon gravitated to Krehm. The latter found much to chastise in Spector's behaviour and, along with his co-factionalists, was merciless, and brutally overstated, in pilloring the founding figure in the Canadian Left Opposition. Spector, it was claimed, was entirely responsible for the disoriented state of Canadian Trotskyism: "We have then before us the edifying spectacle of the future leader of the L.O. returning from Moscow in possession of Trotsky's writings on the question of bureaucracy who takes part in the suppression of a rank and file revolt against the Stalinist bureaucrats!" The expelled Jewish branch of the YCL later supposedly approached Spector and joined with him, but the initiative was theirs not Spector's. The situation did not improve with time, and Krehm and Company lambasted Spector's pursuit of a law career at the expense of contributing to the building of a revolutionary organization: "the whole activity of the Toronto branch was subordinated to the exigencies of Spector's legal studies. Group meetings were postponed or not called at all in order to accommodate [him] ... there was really no organized group." Spector, in this exaggerated repudiation, was not so much the builder of Canadian Trotskyism, as a subjective force holding it back.⁶⁴

Police reports on the nascent Trotskyist movement in Canada present a parallel statement, and convey a picture of a Left Opposition that was hardly threatening to either the bourgeois state or its Stalinist rivals. Those who aligned with the expelled Spector were almost entirely Jews, some of whom undoubtedly spoke little English, and as late as 1932 Spector and "what Trotsky faction there is in Canada" were judged relatively inconsequential. Little presence existed outside of Toronto, and in Montreal, again, "the Trotsky supporters ... [were] Russian Jews for the most part." Agents of the state judged a February 1932 report in Der Kamf that referred to the "1 1/4 Trotskyists in Montreal" as "naturally an under-estimation," but they spent little time worrying about Spector and his comrades, whose numbers were few, and who lacked an "organized group and regular meetings." They seemed of little concern to the much larger and seemingly more threatening Communist Party of Canada.⁶⁵ Some of Spector's initial supporters, including the father of prominent Left Oppositionist Maurice Quarter, found it next to impossible to face the isolating Stalinist antagonism on a day-to-day basis. Being part of a Trotskyist current that swam against the stream was not something they were apparently cut out for, and they found a way back to the Communist Party, their political spirit broken but their sociability networks reestablished. Thus James Blugerman, expelled with Spector in 1929, chaired an early Toronto meeting in which the views of the Left Opposition were aired. Five years later, when Spector addressed a United Front assembly of dissidents in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation's Labour Section, Blugerman no longer shared a Trotskyist podium. Instead, he was in the crowd, heckling Spector's attacks on Stalinist betrayals. "You stand alone," shouted his former ally, to which Spector replied, "Yes, that is why I am a Trotskyite. Lenin stood alone."⁶⁶

To be sure, there were some bright spots in the early history of Canadian Trotskyism, not the least being Jack MacDonald's joining the movement of Left Opposition after his expulsion from the Communist Party, a complicated affair that unfolded throughout late 1930-early 1931. Other significant cadre included Maurice Quarter and Joe Silver, and these and others helped Trotskyism establish itself in Toronto's needle trades unions. MacDonald and Spector, however, had a history of personal clashes within the communist movement of the 1920s, and while MacDonald was hardly the worst of Spector's antagonists in 1928, he had assumed his own kind of role in drumming Canada's first Trotskyist out of the Party Spector had helped to build. If MacDonald, a mass leader with years of experience as a trade union cadre and agitational speaker, did not gravitate to the shrill anti-Trotskyism of Stewart Smith in the rough musicking of Spector in 1929, it may well have simply confirmed Spector in his judgements of MacDonald as programmatically underdeveloped. That Spector and MacDonald were the mainstay of Canadian Trotskyism in the mid-1930s and the chief contributors to the movement's publication, The Vanguard (1932–1937), was an indication that the Left Opposition's house north of the 49th parallel rested on a precarious foundation. Moreover, MacDonald's capacity to contribute to Canadian Trotskyism in the 1930s was limited by health problems, and while he would end his days a confirmed Marxist, his premature death in 1941 was preceded by five years of relative political inactivity.⁶⁷

Spector, Cannon, and Trotskyism's 'Dog Days'

It is difficult not to see the tragedy of Canadian Trotskyism's inability to secure itself a footing in the Canada of the 1930s as very much bound up with "the subjective factor" that Spector placed an accent on in some of his 1920s journ