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9 Labor Defender Bolshevization and Leninist Mass Work As Cannon embarked upon yet another transatlantic crossing, his sense of the politics of revolutionary communism was anything but settled. A public advocate of Bolshevization, he could not have helped but be aware of the human costs that were being exacted, month by grueling month, with the hard turn against the cultural softness and political indeterminacy of a languagefederations -based cadre. Party membership had begun to inch back after a low point in 1922 and, all complications associated with the dual-stamp system that allowed husbands and wives to purchase a single stamp and record themselves as two, often fictitious, members (eventually abolished in 1925) aside, the dues figures for the months of January through April 1924 constituted a high water mark of 1920s communist membership: January, 16,875; February, 18,323; March, 19,471; April, 17,401. On the eve of Bolshevization, the Workers’ Party seemed to be growing, or at least holding its own in terms of a stable membership. Bolshevization, implemented gingerly in 1924, but in a more thoroughgoing fashion by 1925, seemingly stifled this growth; party rolls dipped dramatically, falling to roughly 14,000 in September 1925 and declining precipitously to 7,200 a month later. Comments in the Daily Worker acknowledged that Bolshevization had contributed to a loss of members. Party insiders generally agreed that membership over the course of the 1920s never really exceeded 10,000, and although the Workers (Communist) Party ranks would expand slowly in 1927–1929, climbing to perhaps as many as 9,500, the combination of Bolshevization and factional battle that coincided with the breakup of the Foster-Cannon group in 1925, in 090 Palmer Ch09 (252-284) 11/27/06 2:34 PM Page 252 conjunction with a generalized political economy shift detrimental to radicalism , resulted in at least two years of membership stagnation at the rather low number of roughly 7,500. Factoring in the routine fluctuations in membership, by which it has been estimated that of the 23,000 new members who joined the communist movement between 1923 and 1927, fully 18,000 subsequently dropped out,it is obvious that the mass communist party that Cannon had been struggling to build was a long way from realization. The party ranks remained dominated by the immigrant Finns, East Europeans, and Jews who, together with a smattering of Central and Southern Europeans, continued to constitute approximately 90 percent of the communist membership. Heavily proletarianized , the party rolls were 75 percent waged working class, 15 percent housewives, and 10 percent petty bourgeois, but the small shop nuclei that Bolshevization staked out as the central unit of Workers (Communist) Party organization never really “took” among the communist rank-and-file. This was at least in part because such nuclei were always relatively tiny and inconsequential within any given industry. They were particularly weak in the primary economic sectors of metal production and mining, where large workplaces were the norm, but only 25 percent of all working-class communists could be found.With more than half of its proletarian ranks concentrated in the relatively small-scale productive enterprises of the needle trades and foodstuffs distribution, the communist project of making shop nuclei the foundation of a revolutionary penetration of the working class was doomed to failure because of the marginality and isolation of the nuclei themselves, a problem further compounded by the geographical concentration of communists in New York and Chicago. After two years of pushing them to the fore, party organizers had to confess that no more than 15 percent of American communists belonged to the much-promoted shop nuclei, a number of which contained only two or three comrades. Fewer than one in three wage-working communists actually belonged to unions in 1924–1925. Bolshevization appeared as something of a dark cloud hanging over the project of communist recruitment; its only silver linings were that it appeared to increase union affiliation among the party ranks, which climbed to almost 50 percent by 1927, and those recruited to communism under Bolshevization were more likely to remain affiliated with the Workers (Communist) Party than those who came into the party at other times.1 Had this sorry record, combined with the ongoing factional gang warfare that, by 1925, had fractured the party leadership into at least three discernible groupings, been the sum total of communist practice in this period, Cannon’s perspective and prospects would have been glum indeed. In the mid-1920s, though...

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