chapter 2 Communist League of America

Bryan Palmer

Revolutionary communism has a long history. But with the Bolshevik achieve- ment of a Soviet state in 1917, revolutionaries and radicals throughout the world looked to the victorious Russians, Lenin and Trotsky preeminent among them, for inspiration. With Lenin’s illness in 1923, culminating in his death early in 1924, and Trotsky’s inability to thwart Stalin’s adroit if ruthless consolidation of power, what would be the consequences in countries like the United States, where communism was anything but well grounded? Revolutionary communists in the us, who had struggled valiantly through- out the Red Scare of the immediate post-World War i period, breaking out of a clandestine, underground existence to create a legal party that could connect with the mass of American workers, had originally been aided by the Commun- ist International under Lenin. They were guided in all kinds of productive ways. Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev and others encouraged the Americans to adopt strategies and tactics that would facilitate making revolutionary communism a force within the wider labour movement and among other mobilising groups, such as African Americans and immigrants.1 This positive, productive, and even-handed contribution of the Communist International to the American revolutionary movement waned over the course of the mid-to-late 1920s. As a former communist turned anti-communist, Ben- jamin Gitlow, declared in 1940, ‘Lenin [had] ruled by virtue of his author- ity’. Stalin now ruled ‘by virtue of his power’. Comintern interventions, often delivered to the American Party by emissaries, backed up by cabled telegrams from Moscow, were increasingly dictatorial and ham-fisted. Gitlow recounted a joke making the rounds among United States communists in the mid-1920s: ‘Why is the Communist Party … like the Brooklyn Bridge? Because it is suspen- ded on cables’.2 Political directives and policy decisions were often mercurial, resulting in disastrous political miscues. The Workers (Communist) Party was balkanised into factional enclaves manoeuvring for favour with Moscow. As James P. Cannon, throughout the 1920s a leading figure within American com-

1 See Cannon 1962; Palmer 2007, esp. 113–65; Draper 1957. 2 Gitlow 1940, pp. 555, 187.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004356986_003 communist league of america 13 munism and a founder of the Party’s most successful united front operation, the International Labor Defense, commented bitterly and earthily to Alexan- der Bittelman, theoretician of the rival William Z. Foster group, ‘Stalin makes shit out of leaders and leaders out of shit’.3 Dissident communism in the United States was thus born of failures, frus- trations, and factional impasses. The Communist League of America (Oppos- ition), also known as the Left Opposition or cla, was formally founded in Chicago at a three-day conference, 17–19 May 1929. Conceived as an opposition oriented towards winning back the existing membership of the Communist Party of the United States (cpusa) to a revolutionary perspective, the cla could be dated to the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in the summer of 1928. Cannon and a Canadian comrade, Maurice Spector, read Trot- sky’s ‘The Draft Program of the Comintern: A Criticism of Fundamentals’. The disaffected duo agreed that Trotsky’s insights explained how the international revolutionary project had been derailed by a political movement away from the original purposes of revolutionary communism; smuggled the dissident document out of the Soviet Union; and returned to their respective countries committed to defend their critical views and convince others of the validity of their judgement. In the United States, Cannon quickly drew his partner Rose Karsner, and long-time allies in the communist movement, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, to his cause. All agreed that the sorry state of the American communist movement could be explained by Trotsky’s critique. Cannon and this immediate circle of supporters were soon targeted by the Workers (Communist) Party leadership, led by Jay Lovestone. During a series of lengthy October 1928 Political Committee hearings, attended by over 100 Party members, Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern shocked comrades by tabling their statement in support of Trotsky, ‘For the Russian Opposition! Against Opportunism and Bureaucracy in the Worker’s Communist Party of America!’ [Document 1]. The trio was promptly expelled. Their rallying cry document then appeared in the American Left Opposition’s first 15 November issue of a semi-monthly propaganda organ, emblazoned with the title, The Militant. It was not long before other communists throughout the United States were pressured to repudiate Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern. When they refused, or demanded more information, they too were turfed out of the Party. This inevitably drew recruits to the Cannon-led Left Opposition. One such group, headed by Boston’s revolutionary birth-control advocate, Dr Antoinette Koni- kow, formed the Independent Communist League (icl) and issued a Bulletin

3 Bittelman 1963, p. 510.