First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant

by James P. Cannon, Theodore Draper (Designed by)

An account of the early years of the U.S. communist movement, by a founding leader

Genres: United States

417 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

James P. Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas, in 1890. His father, who had originally come from Ireland, was a socialist and was a regular reader of Appeal to Reason.

At the age of 18 he joined the Socialist Party of America and became a devoted follower of Eugene Debs. His friend Tom Kerry claimed that Cannon considered Debs as "one of the greatest orators, agitators, and propagandists that the American working class radical movement had produced."

Cannon was also an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) where he worked under Frank Little, who was lynched in 1917. Cannon also got to know Vincent Saint John. He later recalled: "Despite his modesty of disposition, his freedom from personal ambition, and his lack of the arts of self-aggrandizement, his work spoke loudly and brought him widespread fame."

According to his friend Joseph Leroy Hansen: "Fundamentally, Jim was an angry person. He was angry at injustice, at inequities, at special privileges, at exploitation. He was angry at poverty, lack of opportunity, oppression, racism, and sexism."

Reviews

[Jeremy Gong · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bulk of this book by Cannon — one of the founders of first American Communism and then American Trotskysim — is focused on the ins and outs of factional wars within the US Communist Party in the 1920s, from the CP's founding to the expulsion of those opposed to Stalin's purge of Trotsky in 1928. This bulk takes the form of letters to historian Theodore Draper, who repeatedly probed Cannon regarding this history in writing his series of books on the history of the Communist Party.

You should not be misled into thinking this book offers a history of the first ten years of the CP. Instead, it mostly assumes you know the general outlines of that history already. And Cannon focuses on giving his perspective on events, filling in obscure details, and disputing the accounts of other participants (mostly his former comrades).

Therefore this book is mostly not worth reading, unless you're especially interested in the aforementioned subject, and already somewhat familiar with it. (I had a vague grasp already from reading Ottanelli's dry The Communist Party of the United States and Barrett's much more interesting William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism a while ago; I haven't read Theodore Draper's books.)

The most interesting thread running through the collection of Cannon's letters to Draper is watching the US Communist Party devolve, from a vibrant and democratically self-possessed organization into a tool controlled by Russians, namely Stalin. The most extreme example of this control is the Russians' interventions in the US party's leadership selection process, repeatedly overruling American communists' convention votes and installing a CP leadership most useful to Stalin et al's latest factional struggles in Russia. Once Stalin ultimately eliminated the opposition in Russia and completed his complete takeover there, the American party followed suit and factionalism was replaced by total dictatorship in the US party by 1929.

It's pretty remarkable to watch this process unfold, and to remember that there was nothing natural or automatic about it. It could have gone otherwise, and indeed it is surprising that so many battle-hardened labor militants and idealistic radicals submitted to Russian control so easily. Cannon's recollections include hints as to why this happened, and what was going through people's heads.

In addition to the collection of Cannon's letters responding to Draper's questions, The First Ten Years of American Communism contains several other standalone essays on American communist history and pre-history that are very much worth reading. (All of them can be found independently on google or marxists.org.) Cannon claims that each of these essays was inspired by his correspondence with Draper.

The first is Cannon's overall account of the degeneration of the American CP. Contrary to Draper's account in the histories he later published, Cannon's thesis is that it was not simply Russian meddling which twisted and undermined the American party. Instead there were homegrown factors. Here he zooms out from the factional play-by-plays which occupy most of the rest of the book, and gives a more interesting and more political perspective. Most significantly, the long economic boom of the 1920s, which reinforced capitalist hegemony and weakened the labor movement. Cannon writes that core Communist cadres were not deterred by state repression in the few years following World War I. Instead the capitalist prosperity of the following decade "sapped the confidence of the cadres in the revolutionary future. Persecution inflicted wounds on the body of the party, but the drawn out prosperity of the Twenties killed its soul." This created political and ideological conditions which were favorable to the conservative turns and cynicism of Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country", i.e. in Russia, which meant co-existence with capitalism in the US (and everywhere but Russia).

Cannon echoing Marx's "individuals make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing": "Long experience has shown that economic conditions which produce revolutionary movements in the first place and largely regulate the tempo of their growth, can also, in changed circumstances, halt their progress and push them back. Individuals on both sides of the class struggle can do only so much, for they are required to operate within this general framework."

Clearly the American CP's degeneration did not stop it from playing such an important role in the crisis years following the 1929 depression. For better or worse, the CP (thanks most of all to the lasting authority of the USSR and 1917 Russian Revolution, and despite its ultra-sectarian "Third Period" policies of the early 1930s) retained the allegiance of the vast majority of radical workers and students in the upsurge of the 1930s. But the US working class failed to break from capitalist politics in the 1930s and 40s by building a working-class political party, failed to build a more militant and democratic unionism that survived the war, and of course failed to not only achieve socialist revolution, but even match the social democratic achievements of Western Europe. Cannon includes a hypothetical account which tries to explain these shortcomings and how they could have been averted: how would history have played out differently if Stalinism had been defeated within the communist movement, if the US CP had remained democratic and revolutionary, and pushed for a course of class-struggle in the labor movement and class independence in politics?

(You can see this essay here:The Degeneration of the Communist Party and the New Beginning: An Analysis of Basic Causes)

The book also contains his excellent essays on Eugene Debs (here), the IWW (here), and "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement" (here)

The last of these, which I had never read before, makes a strong argument for the importance of Russian influence in changing — for the better —US radicals' views and practices on racism. While these changes didn't bear fruit until the 1930s (when the CP recruited thousands of black activists and supporters), the 1920s saw the US left slowly shifting from disinterest in racial discrimination, or even outright bigotry (represented by all-white AFL unions), to proactively working in black communities and joining and leading fights against racism. Cannon argues that this Russian-inspired turn played a central role in shifting views in the US on race in general, culminating with the growing Civil Rights Movement at the time he wrote the essay.

Finally this book includes reviews of two of Draper's volumes on CP history. Cannon lauds Draper's historiography, but disagrees with Draper's thesis: that the bulk of American Communism's problems and the ultimate degeneration of the party stem from their reliance on Russians. Cannon responds: sure bad things came from Russia, but so did some good things, including the inspiring example of the 1917 Revolution and the ideas of Lenin, Trotsky, and others which tried to explain the lessons from that revolution. For example, the letters in the main part of the book contain much evidence in one incident, where Lenin's 1921 pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism, decisively defeats sectarian "anti-political" syndicalism in the US movement.

Cannon: "A revolutionary party begins with ideas representing social reality, and cannot live without them. And such ideas, like money, do not grow on trees. They have to be taken where they can be found and valued for their own sake, regardless of their point of origin....Of course, it might be flattering to one's personal conceit and sense of national pride...to organize a brand new 'American' party with homegrown American ideas, new or old. But no such ideas — none that were any good, that is — were to be found in the United States when the first attempt to organize a revolutionary party in this country was made in 1919. They were not to be found when a handful of us made a new beginning in 1928. And they have not been found in the intervening 30-odd years. To be sure, there have been numerous attempts to improvise a purely American party but they all melted away like last year's snow. That's the way it had to be, for there is no American road separate and apart from the international road."

[Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it's just because these are his letters, but I feel like I've got to give Cannon his due. I dismissed him as a sectarian but I really appreciate how fair he seems to be in his appraisal of the different characters he worked with and fought inside the Communist Party in the 1920s. The book is pieced together from his correspondence with Theodore Draper. Draper was not a communist but an outside historian of the movement (and turned out to be a hostile one at that) but Cannon spent four years writing with him anyway to try to help Draper write an accurate history.

Probably not worth reading unless you're really into the trivia of the CPUSA, although I think it is most useful for giving you a sense of the dilemmas activists face inside large organizations.

[Bill Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannon's "First Ten Years of American Communism" is the companion piece to his earlier "First Ten Years of American Trotskyism," which I've not yet read. It was prompted by Cannon's relationship with Theodore Draper, a former Communist (brother of Hal) who was writing a history of the early CP, and turned to Cannon as a key participant to answer a number of questions. Most of the volume is composed of his letters to Draper, lending it a familiar (if somewhat fragmentary) quality.

Accounting for the interminable faction fights in the early CP takes up most of Cannon's attention in the text, somewhat at the expense of the Party's activity-notable exceptions come in the form of a letter about work in International Labor Defense and an article about the black question. For most of the 1920s, Cannon fought alongside William Z. Foster as a faction that had originated in the united CP to break the dominance of the foreign language federations and turn toward indigenous American organized labor.

However, after the bizarre period of personal dictatorship by the Hungarian Pepper, the Cannon-Foster group as opposed to the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group were solidified personal factions in a situation representing gang warfare that fought for approval of the Comintern. Though as a Cominternist himself during the period, Cannon gives what I think is a mostly fair account of the period and does not excuse himself for the actions he took in "Bolshevizing" the Party, which led to its death as a revolutionary organization.

Some of the parts I found most valuable were Cannon's micro-portraits of the people who led the CP along with him. He seems to have been a fine judge of character, and you get a keen sense of the motivations of people like Foster, Pepper, Ruthenberg and Lovestone during the key years of the party's formation. There are also chapters on "the predecessors," which contain interesting if somewhat limited evaluations of Gene Debs in the SP and the IWW- Cannon being an old Wobbly himself. In his account, the IWW's main contradictions emerged out of its base, which of necessity became the footloose labor of the West rather than organizing among the AFL-dominated factory workers of the East, as was its original intention. There was always a division between official cardholders and actual "Wobblies," the cadre of the organization, which made it closer to a vanguard party at times than a traditional union. Unsurprisingly Cannon blames the IWW's decline on its failure to embrace the Leninist model of organization and affiliate to the CP, which would have provided extra working-class strength to the Party which in its early years was dominated by factionalizing among a mostly intellectual cadre.

I've only very limited knowledge of the period under question and so have trouble evaluating the bias of Cannon as one of the leading protagonists. I look forward to reading Jacob Zumoff's volume from HM when it comes out in paperback to help me account better.

[Niko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the American communist movement from a participant and witness. Incredibly insightful and always gripping. Highly recommend.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When Theodore Draper set out in 1952 to write the history of the American Communist Party he didn't know what he was getting into.

"He had assumed, as he says in the introduction to the present volume, 'that the "real" history of American Communism had begun with the economic depression of the early nineteen-thirties,' and "that the first ten years could be given short shrift." 'Originally I conceived of writing the whole story in one volume, of which the opening chapter would briefly outline the party’s "pre-history’" from 1919 to 1929.' It didn’t work out that way."--James P. Cannon (quoting in parts Theodore Draper)

This book is largely a record of Cannon's correspondence with Draper, who managed to complete two very useful volumes, but never got past the first ten years. Cannon, a former IWW organizer, had been a founder and central leader of the early Communist Party, before being expelled for "Trotskyism," which meant being true to the program of Lenin. Before this book, he had written briefly about the history of the early Communist Party in The History of American Trotskyism, 1928—1938: Report of a Participant. In the course of Cannon's letters to Draper, he also wrote an article on "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement," as well as two on "the forerunners"--The IWW and the Debsian Socialist Party. Then he reviewed Draper's books.

It was all put together in this volume in 1962, with a preface by Draper. In 1973 it was published in paperback.

If you want to know where you're going, you need to know where you've been. I don't know who first said that (perhaps Lewis Carroll), but if one is to become a Marxist, it is absolutely essential knowledge.

There are other things worth reading, like Farrell Dobbs' two volumes Revolutionary Continuity Vol. 1: Marxist Leadership in the U. S., 1848-1917 and Marxist Leadership in the U.S.: Revolutionary Continuity; Birth of Communist Movement 1918-1922, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Melvyn Dubofsky's excellent history of the IWW, Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs, and Eugene V. Debs Speaks.

That's all for openers.... You're in for a lot of reading and a lot of "patiently explaining" as Lenin would put it.