 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
For Class-Struggle Defense! (Quote of the Week) Writing in mid-August 1927 after a temporary stay of execution was granted for anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, James P. Cannon, founder of the International Labor Defense and later of American Trotskyism, upheld the necessity for class-struggle defense against the liberals and reformists who preached reliance on the capitalist courts. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on 23 August 1927. The eleventh-hour reprieve for Sacco and Vanzetti was brought about by the thunderous clamor of the laboring masses of the world who demonstrated their international working class solidarity in an imposing manner. It did not for a moment mean, as some naive people believe, that the Massachusetts Bourbons whose whole energy is bent on continuing their horrible torture of Sacco and Vanzetti until they can safely destroy them in the electric chair, have experienced any change of heart. On the contrary, the reprieve only enabled them to create most dangerous illusions and to gain for themselves some relief from the aroused world’s millions. To believe otherwise is to fall victim to just those illusions that the reactionaries are anxious to spread. Not to realize that this latest action is a maneuver to gain time, during which to demoralize and split and weaken the protest movement, is to fail to see the fundamental question involved. Those who from the beginning had seen the class issue in the case, and based their activities and confidence on the mass movement of the workers, were entirely correct, and all events have proved this.... The case has always been an issue of the class struggle and not merely one of an exceptional miscarriage of so-called justice. The Massachusetts Bourbons know this well, and they recognize the magnificent protest movement as a distinctly class movement against which there must be, and is being, organized a counter-campaign.... No faith in capitalist justice and institutions! That is the lesson of history confirmed by every development in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. —James P. Cannon, “Class Against Class in the Sacco and Vanzetti Case,” Labor Defender, September 1927, reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
