John’s follow-up post, sharing James P. Cannon’s insightful review of the use of “defensive formulations” is essential. Cannon wrote not only as a “theorist” but as a revolutionary leader with real experience helping to lead workers in open struggle against the employers and their government who then faced arrest, trial and imprisonment for his views and actions.

Cannon concludes with a reference to the experience of the Russian Revolution. I would draw that out even further in order to make a point as clearly as it can be made to Eric Blanc and others who share his view. The October 1917 Revolution that replaced the rule of the Provisional Government, which came to power as a result of the February Revolution, was a defensive action.

The October insurrection that brought the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies to power was required and was possible precisely because Lenin’s Bolshevik Party had won the majority to the conclusion that the only way to defend the Russian Revolution was for the soviets to take the power.

One need not re-read all of Trotsky’s three-volume “History of the Russian Revolution” to grasp this central point. A simple review of the table of contents with its list of chapter titles offers clear clues.

https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/trotsky/history-of-the-russian-revolution/ebook-history-of-the-russian-revolution-v1.pdf

Volume One is titled, “The Overthrow of Tzarism.” Suffice it to say for the purposes of this discussion, that overthrow was not the result of any parliamentary election. Elections — of a different type — were a consequence of the overthrow of the Tsar. In the wake of the overthrow, the 1917 revolution recreated — and expanded — the councils of workers that first appeared in Russia’s 1905 revolution (now including soldiers — largely peasants in uniform) and elected representative of the various worker and peasant parties to them.

Volume Two is titled, “The Attempted Counter-Revolution.” It begins with a chapter on the “July Days” of 1917 and — of particular interest — includes a chapter titled, “Kerensky’s Plot,” followed immediately by another titled, “Kornilov’s Insurrection.”

Volume Three is titled, “The Triumph of the Soviets.” There we find chapters entitled, “Lenin Summons to Insurrection,” “The Art of Insurrection,” “The Conquest of the Capital,” “The October Insurrection,” etc.

The deadly threat of counterrevolution posed by the forces represented by Kornilov as well as the machinations of the Provisional Government led by Kerensky in response to that threat, ultimately had to be countered by the October action that replaced the Provisional Government with a government of the soviets of workers and soldiers. As Mike Taber has already explained well in his response to Eric Blanc, this action and the subsequent actions taken by the soviet government were anything BUT “undemocratic.”

I do take issue with one element of John Riddell’s article. He refers to:

“The electoral path to a workers’ government sketched out by Cannon expresses revolutionary socialists’ preference but does not reflect the usual course of struggles for social change.”

I don’t think this accurately captures the political perspective Cannon defended in both his trial testimony or his defense of the SWP’s course at the trial, that is excerpted in John’s follow-up post titled, “James P. Cannon on Defensive Formulations and the Organization of Action.”

One reason I consider this important is because John’s words do not answer as forthrightly as I had hoped to see, the basic political line put forward in Eric Blanc’s original article and — equally important — the practical political perspective Eric is putting forth every day in his determined support for Bernie Sanders campaign for U.S. president in the 2020 elections.

In summarizing Jim Cannon’s views I would cite, as he did in his original court testimony, this unequivocal sentence from what was known then as the SWP’s “Declaration of Principles”:

“The belief that in such a country as the United States we live in a free democratic society in which fundamental economic change can be effected by persuasion, by education, by legal and purely parliamentary method, is an illusion.”

The heart of the debate with Eric Blanc and those who share his views is not — as Eric claims — the lack of validity, “in such a country as the Unite States,” of Lenin’s alleged “insurrectionary strategy.” That term does not summarize Lenin’s political strategy. Rather it is the long standing debate over whether there is a “parliamentary” or “electoral” “road to socialism.”

Jim Cannon — because he learned from Lenin — defended the value of revolutionary socialists and the working class participating in capitalist elections (or as in Russia, in some elections in a historical period even before the capitalist class held political power). But he never believed or acted as if a workers and farmers government could truly come to power that way. He may not have completely precluded such an unlikely possibility, but he made clear it was an illusion.

Cannon returned to this issue in his trial testimony:

Q: What would you say is the opinion of Marxists as far as the desirability of a peaceful transition is concerned?

A: The position of the Marxists is that the most economical and preferable, the most desirable method of social transformation, by all means, is to have it done peacefully.

Q: And in the opinion of the Marxists, is that absolutely excluded?

A: Well, I wouldn’t say absolutely excluded. We say that the lessons of history don’t show any important examples in favor of the idea so that you can count upon it.

He is then asked to clarify his views further:

Q: Explain the sentence that I read from page 6 of the Declaration of Principles, Government’s Exhibit 1:

“The belief that in such a country as the United States we live in a free democratic society in which fundamental economic change can be effected by persuasion, by education, by legal and purely parliamentary method, is an illusion.”

A: That goes back to what I said before, that we consider it an illusion for the workers to think that the ruling-class violence will not be invoked against them in the course of their efforts to organise the majority of the people.

Cannon enunciated clearly two central ideas that have stood the test of all anti-capitalist revolutions up until today.

1) A workers and farmers government can only be brought to power in the U.S. based on winning majority support of the working people; a majority that includes not only a decisive majority of the working class but significant sections of the middle classes as well.

2) As much as the working class movement would ALWAYS prefer to minimize violence, we will face violence from the capitalist class which will always claim that legal means — as defined by the capitalist class and its government — are being violated by the oppressed.

I should also add that whatever the political weaknesses in Kautsky’s theory and practice later in his life (not the subject of this contribution) even he subscribed to these two ideas, at least in words.