The CLA(O) was the United States section of Leon Trotsky's International Left Opposition and initially positioned itself as not a rival party to the CPUSA but as a faction of it and the Comintern.

"[1] 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.

So, lo and behold, it was laid in my lap, translated into English by Maurice Spector, a delegate from the Canadian Party, and in somewhat the same frame of mind as myself, was also on the program commission and he got a copy.

[4] The factional war between the dominant group headed by party Executive Secretary Jay Lovestone and the Chicago-based chief of the Trade Union Educational League, William Z.

[5] Meanwhile, Cannon and his small circle of close associates set to work at another task, personally evangelizing to "carefully selected individuals" by reading to them from the single copy of the Trotsky document that they had at their disposal.

[8] At this session Foster associate Clarence Hathaway, newly returned from a stint at the Comintern's Lenin School in Moscow, demanded passage of a formal resolution condemning Trotskyism as "counter-revolutionary" in the name of the joint Foster-Cannon caucus.

[8] 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.

[10] Just one week after the October 27, 1928, expulsion of Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern from the Communist Party the first issue of a new newspaper called The Militant rolled off the presses.

"[12]Max Shachtman made arrangements with a sympathetic New York printer he knew that was a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World to produce a newspaper in his small shop extending credit to the expelled dissidents.

[13] Funding began to become available, with Max Eastman, a translator of Trotsky that had recently produced a book called The Real Situation in Russia chipping in the $200 the job had paid him, and additional funds coming from Hungarian communists led by Louis Basky, an expelled group of Italian supporters of Amadeo Bordiga in New York, and a Boston group headed by left-wing veteran Antoinette Konikow.

[13] On November 15, 1928, the first issue of a new tabloid newspaper for the fledgling supporters saw light, The Militant — a paper tellingly subtitled "Semi-Monthly Organ of the Opposition Group in the Workers (Communist) Party of America.

Over the next six weeks a series of about 60 expulsions of party members for their support of Cannon and the Trotskyist movement, including key activists Arne Swabeck and Albert Glotzer in Chicago, Ray Dunne in Minneapolis, and others in Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.

[18] According to a 1940 tell-all book by Benjamin Gitlow, the Communist Party's assistant organizational secretary Jack Stachel and the business manager of the Daily Worker, a man named Ravitch, were responsible for the Cannon burglary.

[18] Documents were transported to Stachel's New York City apartment, where they were examined by top party leaders Jay Lovestone and John Pepper, according to Gitlow.

[20] A 1929 Boston meeting was completed thanks only to the posting of a security team of about 10 former Industrial Workers of the World associates of Cannon around the podium — a sufficient show of force to deter disruption.

[23] In response to the physical tactics of the regular Communist Party Trotskyists formed a "Workers Defense Guard" equipped with clubs and wooden axe handles and maintained security at subsequent public meetings in Minneapolis (a hotbed of the organization) and New York.

[24] The negative publicity and escalation of force surrounding this event ended the first spate of organized violence by the Communist Party against the fledgling CLA.

"[30] As by-product of the group's small size, its quarrelsome and iconoclastic membership, and its isolation from the broader labor movement, a culture of fierce internal squabbling reigned supreme.