James p cannon biography

Primary Sources

(1) James Cannon, speech, New York City (23rd December, 1921)

We have had for two years many struggles and much strife in our ranks. This was inevitable after the great upheaval of the World War and the Russian Revolution that shook all of our organizations to their foundations and put every one of our old theories and dogmas to the acid test. Every one of us was compelled to revise some of his theories and some of his plans. It was no more than natural, I might say it was inevitable, that in the beginning we should have some confusion and some disintegration.

The task is before us. We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized. We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized by the masters. We have a revolutionary movement which, until this inspirational call for a Workers Party convention, was disheartened, discouraged and demoralized. Our labor unions, upon which the workers build their first line of resistance; and I wa

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Paul Le Blanc

James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism
in the United States, 1928-38
by Bryan Palmer
Leiden/Boston: Brill Publishers, 2021,1208 pages; $445 hardback.
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022, $65 paperback.

WHAT JUSTIFIES A book of 1200 pages, which is only the second volume of the biography of someone generally seen as an obscure figure on the far left of the political spectrum? Is this a case of sectarian iconography gone mad? Is it an example of a scholar who has done an enormous amount of research but is not in control of his material? I don’t think so.

The answer: we are not dealing with a book. Between the covers of this volume are six books: (1) a continuation of Bryan Palmer’s biography of James P. Cannon in a key decade of his life; (2) a history of the first 10 years of U.S. Trotskyism; (3) a history of the social and political dynamics of the class struggle in the United States from 1928 to 1938; (4) a study of the world Communist movement through the prism of U.S. radicalism; (5) a critique of the historiography on the previous two t

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The Cannon Biography & Its Critics

Revolutionary Continuity & Historical Memory

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928, Bryan D. Palmer, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, 542 pages, $50 hardcover.

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The first volume of Bryan D. Palmer’s biography of James P. Cannon, the historic leader of American Trotskyism, is an important contribution to the documentation of the red thread of revolutionary continuity in North America. Palmer’s extensive and painstaking research brings Cannon alive as an individualand provides a valuable account of the momentous events in which he participated.

Palmer’s book traces Cannon’s political evolution from a footloose cadre of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) through his pivotal role in the creation of the American Communist Party (CP) in the early 1920s, and concludes with his crucial decision in 1928 to align with Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition. In a projecte