This Socialist Resurgence webinar, with Cannon’s biographer Bryan Palmer, took place on Nov. 7. See the video here:  
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa7Z51_EQ9SCBPAuJEG08Ddiu_EVxdl6q&fbclid=IwAR22kpuEiWLxfQmGVnDwNA2VXPiEWd8FAIdLB4HDG69fVss2-Vg_m1W0sKk

The American working class made major strides in the first half of the last century. There are many lessons for workers today, from massive defense campaigns for victims of the Red Scares, first in the 1920s and then in the 1950s, to the great fights for industrial union organizing by the IWW at the turn of the century and the CIO movement in the 1930s and 1940s.

Born in 1890, James Patrick Cannon experienced and helped lead many of these struggles. Cutting his teeth as an IWW militant, Cannon would go on to spend his life fighting for workers’ power, internationalism, and political clarity among revolutionaries.

Bryan Palmer is an acclaimed Marxist historian and author of a number of works on U.S. and Canadian labor struggles. Included in his long list of titles is a two-volume biography of James Cannon, “Revolutionary Teamsters” (a history of the Minneapolis strikes of 1934), and “Marxism and Historical Practice.” He is a contributing editor of the three-volume collection of essays on “U.S. Trotskyism,” published by Haymarket last year.

On Nov. 7, Socialist Resurgence hosted Palmer for a discussion on the life and times of James Cannon and the lessons they hold for the class struggle today. Watch the video now.

Photo: James P. Cannon in Russia in the 1920s.