America's Road to Socialism

James P Cannon's vision of the future projects a world without poverty, unemployment, and inflation, where individuals will be free to realize their full human potential, where white will not oppress Black, where women will organize to throw off household drudgery in "the greatest jailbreak in history."

Writing during the post-World War II economic boom, Cannon predicted the coming turn in the "American way of life" just now beginning. He foresaw a time when the capitalist system could no longer satisfy its thirst for profits through expansion, when millions would be thrown out of jobs and prosperity would give way to a scramble for the basic necessities of life. Eventually, Cannon warned, America's rulers, no longer able to pay the price of democracy, would launch an all-out attack in a desperate attempt to slash workers' living standards and crush their resistance.

Cannon was not utopian. Drawing on his nearly forty years' experience in the labor movement, he shows how American workers, faced with the choice between submitting to a barbaric economic and political regime or else taking control of their own destiny, will establish a new society based on production for human need rather than individual profit - a society free from the bureaucratic despotism that disfigures the Soviet Union.

- From the back cover