Review: James P. Cannon and Origins of the American Revolutionary Left
Quitting the Socialist Party freed me to commit the twin heresies of reading V.I. Lenin and Michael Harrington. My political perspective hasn’t changed very much, but my perspective has become more nuanced. This leaves me very familiar with American social democratic theory and with the twists and turns of the old Socialist Party, as well as its last major off-shoots, and, thanks to Si Gerson’s library, with the external work and internal factionalism of the Communist Party, at least up until 1960. But the history of the American Trotskyite movement has remained a willful gap in my knowledge, mostly because I tend to find modern-day Trotskyites so interminable.
Bryan D. Palmer’s “James P. Cannon and the American Revolutionary Left” begins to fill in some of that gap. Cannon is best known (to the extent that he’s known at all) as a father of American Trotskyism and founder of the Socialist Workers Party. Palmer’s volume focuses on the period when he was a founder of the Workers (Communist) Party. Along with such odd bedfellows as William Z. Foster and Jay Lovestone, Cannon helped foster a native expression of Marxist-Leninist agitation in America, while navigating intense and ever-changing factional intrigue in the party and the International. As such, it is an adjunct to Theodore Draper’s stalwart “The Roots of American Communism” and a cousin to Edward P. Johanningsmeier’s and James Barrett’s recent biographies of Foster.
I consider Foster my favorite tragic hero; the first truly modern trade union organizer and a brilliantly pragmatic navigator of union structure who cast his lot with the Communists after Lenin endorsed his union work in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” In Palmer’s pages, in the first flush of the Third International, when revolution was proved to be possible, the attraction of foreign revolutionary leadership for Cannon and Foster is understandable. It is quite possible that most people on the Left would still be spinning their wheels trying to create new, perfect labor unions if that generation of activists were not directed from Moscow to get dirty inside the bureaucratic AFL unions and organize some new members and strike actions. Equally ironically, the lily-white left might never have evolved past the chauvinism that led good men like Eugene Debs to say dumb things like, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races,” to take seriously the civil rights of African-Americans without the pressure from Moscow.
But as the Communist International degenerated into a cult of personality around Stalin, national issues in Russia came to dictate what was seen to be in the best interests of the American activists, and led to constant faction-fighting that hobbled much of the party’s potential in the 1920’s. Foster eventually came out on top, losing most of what was best about him and becoming an unrepentant Stalinist. Cannon left at his earliest opportunity and cast his lot with Trotsky.
Much of the book is taken up in documenting temporary alliances like Cannon-Foster, Foster-Bittelman and Lovestone-Ruthenberg. It’s somewhat tedious and distracting from the main action, which may well have been Palmer’s point. (His attention to detail is laudable). The book is at its most exciting in describing Cannon’s International Labor Defense work in support of class-war prisoners like Sacco and Vanzetti, and in describing the intrigue of smuggling Trotsky’s criticism of the 1928 CI proceedings into America and surreptitiously forming the new Socialist Workers Party. That’s where Palmer’s book leaves off. It is clear that there is another volume still to come, documenting the effort to build a new sectarian political party and the lesser-noted work of Trotskyites in the labor struggles of the 1930’s, and that that book is where Palmer’s heart truly lies. I look forward to it, and to continuing my cautious research into American Trotskyism.
We Memoir Econo
Michael Azerrad’s excellent collection of 13 micro-biogrophies of beloved 80’s indie bands is a love letter to the era when pop culture began to fragment into mini-mass media of fanzines, underground rock clubs and vanity record labels. Cribbed from a Minutemen lyrics, Azerrad’s book, “Our Band Could Be Your Life” fleshes out the notion of gaining inspiration, principles and encouragement by the songs from some obscure band that your parents and most of your classmates never heard of.
Teh internets have exacerbated this tendency towards fragmentation. It is regrettable, to some extent, that there can never be another Beatles to saunter across (the equivalent of) Ed Sullivan’s stage and capture the hearts and imaginations of an entire nation in two and a half minutes. But it is perhaps better to have the Replacements, whose music feels more personal due to their underdog cult status, and whose “Let it Be” far outshines the sorry first record to share that name (made famous by its teevee and film pedigree).
Focused on the SST record label, Azerrad’s book has a clear narrative guiding it, despite its scattered vignette structure. It starts with Southern California’s Black Flag, who spearheaded not just America’s hardcore punk scene, but a network of record labels and concert venues (VFW halls, people’s basements and the occasional Actual Night Club), and follows the story as labelmates The Minutemen and Husker Du push against hardcore’s rigid boundaries, while east coast contemporaries Minor Threat aided in rigidly defining hardcore’s boundaries before leaving the scene behind.
Ian McKaye’s musical progress away from hardcore’s stifling “loud fast rules” while strictly adhering to a non-conformist independence from Corporate America, mass media and liquor provides “Your Band” with its most compelling narrative, as well as its most trenchant observation, courtesy of McKaye’s Fugazi bandmate Guy Picciotto:
“PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED, YOUR PARENTS HAVE TAKEN ALL THE DRUGS THEY CAN TAKE, YOU’VE HAD THE 70’S, YOU HAD HEAVY METAL – GET WITH IT, IT’S OVER WITH, WAKE UP. KIDS ARE LIVING RE-RUNS, THE SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER AND THEIR MINDS GET CLOSED TIGHTER AND TIGHTER, IT’S SUCH A WASTE.”
I missed hardcore, so 80’s indie was all about the Replacements for me (and REM, but they’re not indie enough for Azerrad). Other acts feted by Azerrad (such as Big Black and the Butthole Surfers) were familiar to me by reputation, but no one had made such a compelling case to purchase “Hairway to Steven” or “Songs About Fucking” until this book. Perhaps these bands, too, could be my life.
Things the Grandchildren Should Buy
Eels frontman, E., has long mined personal tragedy to make uplifting art. Starting with 1997’s beautiful “Electro-Shock Blues,” a visceral elegy to the twin tragedies of his sister’s suicide and his mother’s death from cancer (events that occurred within months of his scoring his first big hit with “Novocain for the Soul”), and culminating with 2006’s sprawling “Blinking Lights (And Other Revelations),” E has incorporated his family biography into his music. But in the last two years, the erstwhile Mark Oliver Everett has gotten explicitly autobiographical. First, he hosted a documentary, which aired in the U.S. on PBS’ “Nova,” about his troubled genius of a father, Hugh Everett III, who directly challenged Niels Bohr with his “many worlds” theory and was crushed, professionally and spiritually, as a result. Finally, E published a sprightly memoir, “Things The Grandchildren Should Know,” late last year.
The book reveals Everett as a memoirist on par with Sedaris and as a smart ass philisopher who could hold his own with Vonnegut. The Vonnegut comparison is particularly apt. All that’s missing is the “So it goes” refrain as death compounds death. The tragic slow decline of his older sister is well-worn territory, but brings extra poignancy to both the book and the earlier eels LPs, while his bizarro accounts of a mad scientist father who spoke not more than a dozen sentences to his son during his life would be too fantastical, if it were not corroborated by the “Parallel Lives” documentary. Meanwhile, a beloved dg is put to sleep (so it goes), a ghost-watching neighbor unexpectedly passes (so it goes), a beloved roadie OD’s on heroin after a joke made in bad taste (so it goes) and a cousin is a flight attendant on the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 — probably into the side of the building where Everett’s dad once worked (so it goes and goes and goes).
There is a certain lump-in-the-throat quality to E’s memoir that is nicely cut with sweet reminiscences, plain-spoken confessions and good old fashioned piss and vinegar. There are few rock-n-rollers today who are as vital or as relevant as Everett. Would he to publish the Vol. 2 of his “Chronicles.” In the meantime, we can rejoice in the impending release of his first album of new material in four years, “Hombre Loco” (due out June 2nd).