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	Spartacist Canada No. 161	Summer 2009

Marxist Leadership and Class Struggle

quote of the issue

We print below an excerpt from a 1953 letter by James P. Cannon, founding leader of the then-Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party, to Hildegarde Swabek of the SWP’s Chicago branch. At the time, Cannon was heading a factional struggle against an SWP minority which was retreating from the fight for revolutionary proletarian leadership in the face of the difficulties of Cold War reaction in the U.S. These included a sharp decline in union struggle and the anti-Communist purges that had driven the best militants out of the unions.

Cannon’s letter centers on the indispensability of the struggle for a programmatically clear Marxist leadership if the workers are to be liberated from capitalist exploitation. These points are wholly pertinent today, as the pro-capitalist misleaders of the labour movement in the U.S. and Canada surrender massive givebacks to the capitalists amid the global economic crisis.

The world knows Marx as the author of Capital. But we, his disciples, also know him as the founder and leader of the First International, and the theoretical inspirer of the socialist labor movement which grew up in his lifetime. The struggle of Marx and Engels during the period of the First International, and in the regroupment of the labor movement afterward, to the end of their lives, was a two-fold struggle. On the one hand, they fought for the unity of the working class, summed up in the great slogan of the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the World, Unite!” On the other hand, they fought for clarity of program which alone could make this unity conscious and effective, and in the end victorious. This struggle for clarity of program, which they never relaxed, involved them in unceasing controversies and polemics, which they never sought to avoid. On the contrary, they openly fought against all attempts to smuggle bourgeois ideology into the labor movement under the various guises of anarchism and opportunism.

The great battles of Marx and Engels against the Bakuninite anarchists; against the Lassalleans; against conciliation with confusion in the name of unity, which called forth the classic commentary on the Gotha Program—all this from beginning to end was a factional struggle. Without it the revolutionary political movement could not have been constituted and maintained; the line of continuity of Marx’s thought could not have been kept unbroken by successors; and we and our party would not be here today. We owe our political existence to the valiant faction battles waged by the founders of scientific socialism and the two great disciples who came after them.

The main weight of the struggle for the socialist transformation of society is not in the direct struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie. The workers are such an overwhelming majority, and their strength is multiplied so many times by their strategic position in production, that if they were united to act consciously in their own interests their victory over the bourgeoisie would be a mere pushover. But they are not united, not class conscious. The reason for this is the influence of bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the workers. This influence is carried into the ranks of the workers in various ways, but its most direct representatives are the labor bureaucracy. That is why our main struggle against the bourgeoisie takes the form, in the first place, of a struggle against their agents in the labor movement. Nobody ever improved De Leon’s classic definition of the conservative labor fakers as “the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.” Lenin was especially pleased with this striking characterization. And nobody ever emphasized the primacy of the struggle against these labor lieutenants of the capitalist class more than Lenin did….

The experience of 100 years has shown that bourgeois influence and ideology is also carried into the political organizations of the workers, even the most advanced ones, in various indirect forms, and frequently gets the upper hand there, resulting in the transformation of these political organizations into supporting props of the capitalist regime instead of organs of struggle against it.

—James P. Cannon, “Mass Work and Factional Struggle” (1953), reprinted in Speeches to the Party (Pathfinder Press, 1973)