Guilty as charged?

"Socialism on Trial" deals with a dramatic episode in American labor history. In 1941, 29 leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Teamster union in Minneapolis (Local 544) were indicted for violation of the Smith Act. Among the defendants were James P Cannon, the national secretary of the SWP, militant union organizer Farrell Dobbs (who later became SWP national secretary and authored four books on Teamster history), and Albert Goldman (who was both a defendant and defense attorney during the trial). The trial, known as the Minneapolis sedition trial, ended with most of the defendants being sentenced and jailed. The trial may have been masterminded by the Roosevelt administration and Daniel Tobin, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). The administration resented the SWP's outspoken opposition to Roosevelt's pro-war policies, while Tobin wanted to get rid of the Trotskyists who dominated the important Local 544. The main purpose of the Smith Act (which prohibited any agitation in favor of overthrowing the U.S. government by force) was to stop or hinder overt anti-war opposition. More bizarrely, the SWP leaders were also charged with violation of the 1861 Sedition Act, an old law from the Civil War directed against the Confederacy and never before used!

"Socialism on Trial" contains the transcripts of James P Cannon's testimony before the court. Cannon is "examined" by Goldman, and then cross-examined by Mr Schweinhaut, the prosecutor. The book, published by the Trotskyist movement in the United States, exists in several different editions. Some also include a criticism of Cannon's defense by Grandizo Munis, a Spanish Trotskyist who later became an ultraleftist, and a sharp rejoinder by Cannon. "Socialism on Trial" has become something of a classic, and has been translated to several foreign languages (I have a Swedish edition from 1982).

During the trial, Cannon attempted to explain the Marxist or Trotskyist message as best he could under the circumstances. He openly defended the decision of the SWP and Local 544 to form defense squads against fascist violence. He explicitly opposed any U.S. intervention in the war. However, Cannon and Goldman also consistently denied having broken any laws. Thus, they claimed that the SWP only "predicted" a revolution, that the party "preferred" a peaceful solution, that it would attempt to win a majority in Congress through elections, etc. The revolution is necessary since the ruling class won't accept the democratic, socialist vote of the majority. Cannon compares this to the refusal of the slave-owning South to accept Lincoln's election victory. Schweinhaut has little problem showing that the SWP had made far more militant pronouncements in some of their earlier documents (written before the Smith Act).

On one point, Cannon's defense is simply absurd: he denies that the Bolsheviks took power through an actual insurrection, instead claiming that the Bolshevik government was duly appointed by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets! In reality, the congress didn't convene until the day after the Bolshevik overthrow of Kerensky's government, when the question of power had already been settled. To counter Cannon, Schweinhaut reads from a book by Trotsky, where the Russian revolutionary leader clearly states that the Bolsheviks used "soviet legality" as a "cover" to trick Kerensky and the Mensheviks, that they only pretended to be "defensive", etc. In his polemic with Munis, Cannon actually quotes some of these statements himself, now in order to prove that it's alright for Marxists to, well, *pretend* being legal or on the defensive (say, during a sedition trial in Minneapolis)... Munis wanted the SWP to issue ringing calls for sabotage and violence during the trial, something Cannon refused to do, since this would have handed the SWP over to Schweinhaut, Tobin and Roosevelt on a silver plate.

Cannon's testimony also touched on the "proletarian military policy" (PMP), adopted by the Fourth International at an emergency conference in 1940, shortly before the fall of France. The PMP has been controversial among Trotskyists ever since, as two distinct interpretations of it are possible. Before 1940, Trotskyist called for "revolutionary defeatism" in all capitalist nations involved in an "imperialist" war. This policy, of course, comes from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who applied it to World War I and (in a more radical form) to the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. The PMP, by contrast, seems to be suggesting a form of "revolutionary defensism" (my term) in Western Allied nations under attack by Nazi Germany. However, it could also be seen as an attempt to "sell" the unpopular message of revolutionary defeatism by pretending that it's really defensist. Cannon didn't do much to clear up the confusion, probably because the SWP really were confused on this point. As already noted, he explicitly opposed U.S. entry into the war. On the other hand, however, he called for "trade union control of military training" to be instituted by Congress legislation, said that the SWP didn't want to aid Nazi Germany or Japan in defeating the U.S, and claimed that Hitler is the "greatest enemy of mankind". However, if these were the actual policies of the SWP, they *didn't* have the same line as the Bolsheviks during World War I. Lenin, of course, didn't call Kaiser Wilhelm "the greatest enemy of humanity", he didn't say that he opposed a German victory over the Czar, and he certainly didn't call for "trade union control of military training" in, say, France or the United States. Logically, the SWP should have *supported* the war moves of Roosevelt's administration, albeit very critically. Unless the PMP is simply a trick, a bit like "soviet legality", to fool the unwary into supporting a message that is really defeatist. Munis, with his blather about sabotage, couldn't really challenge Cannon effectively on this point. Cannon had little problem showing that Lenin *didn't* call for crazy anarchist action, not even during World War I. (Lenin was rather waiting for the Czar's defeat to create a fully fledged revolutionary situation, and strike then - which the Bolsheviks did indeed do in 1917.)

I admit that I never really liked "Socialism on Trial", neither during my younger and more radical days, nor today, when my older pragmatic self sympathizes with the Allied war effort against Hitler (yes, he really was the greatest enemy of mankind, no argument there). I think the work's enduring popularity is due to the fact that a certain leftists want to portray the Marxist message as more democratic, peaceful and harmless than it really is. That was hardly Cannon's intention - he simply wanted to save the SWP's neck, while explaining its program as best he could under the constricted circumstances of Schweinhaut's court. I don't think anyone was *really* fooled. Everyone knew that Cannon was hard line. Indeed, even Cannon himself said that Munis underestimated the intelligence of the workers following the trial. In a sense, Cannon was "guilty as charged".

However, I can't help thinking that "Socialism on Trial" has somehow transformed Cannon into a harmless icon...