Honor Class-War Prisoners!

(Quote of the Week)

In building its annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, the Partisan Defense Committee follows in the tradition of the International Labor Defense, established by the early Communist Party and headed by James P. Cannon, who subsequently became the founder of American Trotskyism. In struggling to mobilize labor-centered protest to free the class-war prisoners, we seek to imbue the proletariat with the understanding that it must sweep away the capitalist system through socialist revolution.

In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting….

The class-war prisoners of today, just as those in previous periods of history, are representatives of the most courageous and advanced section of the oppressed but upward-striving class. As a rule they are individuals of particular audacity and ability who have stood out conspicuously in their environment as leaders and militants, and have thereby incurred the hatred of the oppressors….

The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem. The class-war prisoners are stronger than all the jails and jailers and judges. They rise triumphant over all their enemies and oppressors. Confined in prison, covered with ignominy, branded as criminals, they are not defeated. They are destined to triumph. They are the representatives of an idea that will crack the walls of every prison and crumble them into dust.

There is a way of saying that the class-war prisoners are victorious, which smacks of superficial optimism and which offers little consolation to men who spend long, almost forgotten years behind the gray walls of the jail. We do not mean to speak in this sense, as though it were an automatic process. The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement and when that movement claims them for its own, takes up their battle cry and carries on their work.

—James P. Cannon, “The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,”
Labor Defender (September 1926), reprinted in
Notebook of an Agitator (Pioneer Publishers, 1958)