The Russian Question and the Class Line

(Quote of the Week)

In 1939, James P. Cannon, leader of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., delivered the speech excerpted below on the vital necessity for revolutionaries to defend the Soviet Union despite its degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy. His fire was directed against a minority faction headed by Max Shachtman, among others, which argued to abandon that position in the face of petty-bourgeois public opinion.

Like Shachtman, the reformists in the defunct International Socialist Organization renounced the Soviet Union as a workers state and embraced imperialist “democracy” against Stalinist “totalitarianism.” In continuity with Trotsky and Cannon, the ICL fought for the unconditional military defense of the USSR and the deformed workers states of East and Central Europe, as well as for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misrulers. Today, we uphold the same program for the remaining deformed workers states—China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and Laos.

The mighty power of the October revolution is shown by the vitality of its conquests. The nationalized property and the planned economy stood up under all the difficulties and pressures of the capitalist encirclement and all the blows of a reactionary bureaucracy at home. In the Soviet Union, despite the monstrous mismanagement of the bureaucracy, we saw a tremendous development of the productive forces—and in a backward country at that—while capitalist economy declined. Conclusion: Nationalized and planned economy, made possible by a revolution that overthrew the capitalists and landlords, is infinitely superior, more progressive. It shows the way forward. Don’t give it up before it is lost! Cling to it and defend it!

On the Russian question there are only two really independent forces in the world. Two forces who think about the question independently because they based themselves, their thoughts, their analyses and their conclusions, on fundamental class considerations. Those two independent forces are:

(1) The conscious vanguard of the world bourgeoisie, the statesmen of both democratic and fascist imperialism.

(2) The conscious vanguard of the world proletariat.

Between them it is not simply a case of two opinions on the Russian question, but rather of two camps. All those who in the past rejected the conclusions of the Fourth International and broke with our movement on that account, have almost invariably fallen into the service of the imperialists, through Stalinism, social and liberal democracy, or passivity, a form of service....

We do not examine the Russian revolution and what remains of its great conquests as though it were a bug under a glass. We have an interest! We take part in the fight! At each stage in the development of the Soviet Union, its advances and its degeneration, we seek the basis for revolutionary action. We want to advance the world revolution, overthrow capitalism, establish socialism. The Soviet Union is an important and decisive question on this line.

—James P. Cannon, “Speech on the Russian Question” (15 October 1939)