FOUNDER OF AMERICAN
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Copoin TROTSKYISM James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism and leoder for three decodes of the Socialist Workers party, the American Trotskyist organization, died in Los Angeles on August 21 at the age of eighty-four. He had spent sixty-four of those years in the struggle for the socialist revolution. That in itself would be on achievement of no mean value. But Cannon was also a leader -- one who worked in circumstances that wore far from the most favorable and who remained ever confident in the ultimate power of the ideas of Marxism. Cannon come from the middle of the United States, the town of Rosedale, Kansas. He was born in 1890. His father had been an activist in the earliest American socialist movement, and Cannon remained true to his father's tradition. In 1911 he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, the most militant class-struggle organization then existing in America and the training ground for many of the future leaders of American Communism. He worked as a traveling organizer for the IWW
JAMES P. CANNON 1890 1974 and later, under the impact of the October Revolution, became a member of the Left Wing of the Socialist party. In the spring of 1919 he attended the National Conference of the SP Left Wing faction and was later a founding member of the Communist Labor party -- one of the two Third Internationalist groups to emerge out of the SP Left Wing. He became a member of the National Committee of the party in 1920 and was one of the central leaders who helped guide the fledgling organization through its years of underground existence during the Palmer raid witch-hunt after the first world imperialist war. In 1922 he was a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, where he met with many of the leaders of the Russian revolution and obtained their support in the fight to have the American party move to a legal existence as the political situation began to change. He remained in the leadership of the Communist party until his expulsion in 1928. During that time he was instrumental in building the