On Revolutionary Continuity

(Quote of the Week)

This month marks fifty years since the Spartacist League was founded at its first National Conference in September 1966. The founding cadres of our tendency had fought within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to uphold the understanding of the need for a Leninist vanguard party to lead the proletariat in socialist revolution. In 1963-64, they were bureaucratically expelled for opposing the SWP’s deepening capitulation to non-working-class political forces, from Fidel Castro in Cuba to the misleaders of the black struggle in America, particularly black nationalists.

Since our founding, our determined efforts to find international cothinkers enabled us to extend internationally and forge the international Spartacist tendency, which became the International Communist League in 1989. While we recognize the challenge of today’s post-Soviet period, when consciousness has been thrown back and class struggle is generally at a low ebb, our task remains the same: to defend and extend the revolutionary program of Lenin and Trotsky. We commemorate this anniversary with pride, tempered by sober recognition of the immensity of our task.

We reprint below an observation on the fight for revolutionary continuity by James P. Cannon, who was a central leader of the American Communist Party and subsequently became the principal leader of the then-Trotskyist SWP. When the SWP went over to revisionism, our founding cadre continued the fight for Trotskyism.

On the basis of a long historical experience, it can be written down as a law that revolutionary cadres, who revolt against their social environment and organize parties to lead a revolution, can—if the revolution is too long delayed—themselves degenerate under the continuing influences and pressures of this same environment.

This was the case with the pre-war German Social Democracy whose original leaders had been the immediate disciples of Marx. The same thing occurred in the Communist Party of Russia, whose leaders had been taught by Lenin. It happened again—with a big push and pull from the Russians—in the Communist Party of the United States, whose leaders lacked the benefit of systematic theoretical instruction and who had, in addition, to work in the most unfavorable social environment in the richest and most conservative country in the world.

But the same historical experience also shows that there are exceptions to this law too. The exceptions are the Marxists who remain Marxists, the revolutionists who remain faithful to the banner. The basic ideas of Marxism, upon which alone a revolutionary party can be constructed, are continuous in their application and have been for a hundred years. The ideas of Marxism, which create revolutionary parties, are stronger than the parties they create, and never fail to survive their downfall. They never fail to find representatives in the old organizations to lead the work of reconstruction.

These are the continuators of the tradition, the defenders of the orthodox doctrine. The task of the uncorrupted revolutionists, obliged by circumstances to start the work of organizational reconstruction, has never been to proclaim a new revelation—there has been no lack of such Messiahs, and they have all been lost in the shuffle—but to reinstate the old program and bring it up to date.

—James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)