Ultimately, the majority faction of Jim Cannon, Max Shachtman, and James Burnham won the day and the Workers Party determined to enter the Socialist Party of America ; a minority faction headed by Hugo Oehler refused to accept this result and split from the organization.

Cannon went to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to establish another new newspaper, Labor Action, targeted to trade unionists and SP members and aimed at winning them over to Trotskyist views, while Shachtman and Burnham handled the bulk of the faction's activities in New York.

In December 1937 an agenda was published by the Convention Organizing Committee, naming Cannon as the primary reporter on the Trade Union question, Shachtman on the Russian Resolution, Goldman on the Spanish Resolution, Canadian Maurice Spector on the International Resolution, Burnham on the Declaration of Principles of the new organization, and Abern on Party Organization and Constitution.

Through most of his time in the Communist Party Shachtman, along with Abern, associated with a group led by James P. Cannon.

A division of labor developed within the CLA in which Cannon led the organization while Shachtman directed its literature and international relations.

Frictions between Shachtman and Cannon, especially over Shachtman's work when representing the League in Europe, broke out into a factional struggle in 1932.

These tensions were amplified by the social differences within the leadership: the older trade unionists supported Cannon ; Shachtman and his allies Abern, Albert Glotzer and Maurice Spector were young intellectuals.

During this time, Cannon experienced a spell of depression, during which the CLA's organizing secretary was Abern while Shachtman worked on The Militant.

Glotzer's memoir mentions age as a factor: Cannon and other leaders were older than Shachtman, Abern, Maurice Spector and himself.

Although the line-up of opponents largely anticipated Shachtman's 1940 split from the mainstream Trotskyists, the years from 1933 to 1938 restored the co-operation between Cannon and Shachtman.

When the development of the WP was cut short by the rapid growth of the Socialist Party, George Breitman recalls that Shachtman and Cannon successfully proposed that the U. S. Workers Party, should dissolve, so that its members could recruit to Trotskyism from inside the Socialist Party.

In March 1938, Shachtman and Cannon were part of a delegation sent to Mexico City to discuss the draft Transitional Program of the Fourth International with Trotsky: they would later teach a series of classes together in New York about the Program.

Shachtman and his allies broke with Cannon and the majority of the SWP leadership, which along with Trotsky continued to uphold unconditional critical defense of the USSR.

While Cannon and his allies regarded the Soviet Union as a " degenerated workers ' state ", Shachtman and his party argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was following an imperialist policy in Eastern Europe.

* Dog days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America 1931-1933 New York, N. Y.: Prometheus Research Library 2002

* Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933 Emily Turnbull and James Robertson ( editors ) Prometheus Research Library.

It has been argued by some on the left that Matgamna's embrace of the politics of Shachtman and Draper, which he has described as " the other Trotskyism ", merely reverses his embrace of the ideas of James P. Cannon in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Outside of the Communist Party, Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern founded a new political party, the Communist League of America and began publishing The Militant.

Although the Communist League had been a small organization — opponents dubbing Cannon, Abern and Shachtman " Three generals without an army " — it had won a majority of the Communist Party branch in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Cannon played a major role in this dispute directing the work of the Communist League on a daily basis, along with Shachtman.

Day-to-day operations of the organized Trotskyist faction in the Socialist Party during 1936-37 were handled by Shachtman and James Burnham in New York, while Cannon made what he later deemed as " futile attempts to participate in correspondence in the work of the New York center.

In 1940, Shachtman left with a large part of the membership to form the Workers Party, with Shachtman and Burnham arguing that the Stalinists constituted a new bureaucratic class in the Soviet Union while Cannon, like Trotsky, felt that the Soviet Union should be defended despite Stalin's dictatorship and invasion of Finland.

* Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933.

The resident International Executive Committee failed to meet, largely because of a struggle in the U. S. Socialist Workers Party ( SWP ) between Trotsky's supporters and the tendency of Max Shachtman, Martin Abern and James Burnham.

In 1940 this faction, led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Martin Abern, split from the SWP to form the Workers Party.

Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the Communist youth organization and edit the Young Worker.

Wohlforth's History reports a factional battle upon Cannon's return, in which the Minneapolis branch successfully backed Cannon's return to leadership against Abern and Shachtman.

This resulted in his expulsion on October 27, 1928, together with his co-thinkers Max Shachtman and Martin Abern.

The April 1940 convention of the SWP instructed the National Committee of the party to take disciplinary action against Abern, Shachtman, James Burnham, and their factional supporters if that group failed to abide by the decisions of the convention.

In accordance with these instructions, the National Committee suspended Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern at its meeting of April 22, 1940, giving the members of this so-called " petty-bourgeois opposition " an opportunity to recant and return to the party.

Abern continued to support Trotsky's unconditional defense of the Soviet Union and broke politically with Shachtman in 1940, but he remained in the Workers Party organization until his death from a heart attack in April 1949.

Back in America, Cannon and his close associates in the ILD such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, dubbed the " three generals without an army ," began to organize support for Trotsky's theses.

He then founded the Communist League of America with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, and started publishing The Militant.

MacDonald and Spector sided with Martin Abern and Max Shachtman in a dispute within the Communist League of America that threatened to split the Trotskyist movement in North America in the early 1930s.

The Militant, edited by James P. Cannon, Martin, Abern, and Max Shachtman, was the official organ of the Communist League of America throughout its six years of existence.

The Communist League of America ( Opposition ) was founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern late in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism.

" The trio — Communist Labor Party founder James P. Cannon, Labor Defender editor Max Shachtman, and Romanian-born former head of the Young Workers League Martin Abern — had been won over to the ideas of Leon Trotsky when Cannon had been exposed to a translation of Trotsky's manuscript " The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals " while a delegate to the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow that summer.

After about a month word leaked about the dissident gospel being propagated by Cannon and his co-thinkers — Rose Karsner ( Cannon's wife ), Max Shachtman, and Marty Abern.

Ultimately, however, the Foster group was forced to blow the whistle that Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern were attempting to convert party members to Trotskyism, lest they too be tainted as silent accomplices if the Lovestone faction should discover the heresy on their own.

The Cannon group was expelled from the joint caucus with the Fosterites and charges were preferred against Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern before a joint session of the Political Committee and the disciplinary Central Control Committee.

The secretariat was composed of those committee members who happened to be in the city, most of whom were co-thinkers of Shachtman.

Secretariat members who had supported Shachtman were expelled by the emergency conference, with the support of Trotsky himself.

While in Britain the pair were able to meet with Reg Groves and other members of the recently formed Communist League with whom Shachtman had corresponded.

After the Trotskyists were expelled from the SP in 1937, Shachtman became a leader of their new organization, the Socialist Workers Party ( SWP ).

After the April 1940 convention of the SWP, when Shachtman and his supporters on the new Political Committee refused to a vote on a motion pledging each member to abide by the convention decisions, they were expelled from the party.

Harrington and Shachtman believed that socialism, which in their view promised a just and fully democratic society, could not be realized under authoritarian Communism and they were both fiercely critical of the " bureaucratic collectivist " states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Cannon, Abern, and Shachtman were also expelled from the mass organization of the Communist Party which Cannon had previously headed, the International Labor Defense ( ILD ).

Max Shachtman was an editor of the ILD's magazine, the Labor Defender, during the 1920s ; Whittaker Chambers and Jacob Burck were contributing editors during the early 1930s.