The Revolutionary Party: Its Role in the Struggle for Socialism By James P. Cannon

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The Revolutionary Party: Its Role in the Struggle for Socialism
By James P. Cannon

At the time Jim Cannon wrote this (it was first published in a 1968 book entitled 50 years of World Revolution), there was no one more qualified than he was to write on the topic of how to build a revolutionary Leninist-type party. This may someday serve as a preface or an afterword to a future edition of What Is to Be Done.

Cannon went through the school of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Debsian Socialist Party before becoming a founding leader of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919, one hundred years ago (see The First Ten Years of American Communism; Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement; James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism).

1n 1928 Cannon was expelled from the CP for remaining true to the program of Lenin; those who did so were called "Trotskyists (see The History of American Trotskyism; The Left Opposition in the US, 1928–31; The Communist League of America, 1932–34).

Everything by Cannon is worth reading, but the most relevant books for how to build a Leninist party are The Struggle for a Proletarian Party; Speeches to the Party; Letters From Prison.

The Cuban Revolution was made without a party; something that we can't expect to see repeated, especially in an imperialist country. But after winning the military battles, they had to form a party for the political ones. For how Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement fused with two other tendencies to become what was initially the United Party of the Socialist Revolution, see "I Will Be a Marxist-Leninist To the End of MY Life" in Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro.