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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(17 May 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_20" target="new">Vol. V No. 20</a>, 17 May 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The March on Washington</h4>
<p class="fst">Last week the announcement was made that the march of 10,000 Negroes to Washington, to protest against Jim Crowism in industry and the armed forces, is already being organized. The date has been set fox June 30, according to the committee in charge which is composed, of A. Philip Randolph, original advocate of the march, Walter White, the Rev. William L. Imes, Lester B. Granger, Frank R. Crosswaith, Layle Lane, Richard Parrish, Dr. Rayford Logan, and Henry K. Craft.</p>
<p>The purpose of the march, according to this committee, is “to shake up white America, arouse official Washington and gain respect for our people.”</p>
<p>Organization of local committees throughput the country, and especially on the eastern seaboard, to recruit and, register marchers, raise funds through the sale of buttons, is already under way. Conferences are being held this week in New York, Jersey City, Newark, Trenton, Camden, Philadelphia and Baltimore.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Militant Action Is Necessary</h4>
<p class="fst">From the beginning the Socialist Workers Party has pointed out that fighting action is necessary if the Negro people are to win a real victory over the practices of Jim Crowism in industry by the employers and in the armed forces by the government.</p>
<p>We said that words alone are not enough. Resolutions and telegrams are helpful, letters to Congressmen can do no harm, but if you really want to smash Jim Crowism, if you want to win jobs from the bosses who refuse to hire Negroes, if you want to finish segregation in the army and navy, you’ve got to fight.</p>
<p>That was why we welcomed the series of articles, by A. Philip Randolph, beginning last January, in the Negro press as a possible beginning to set the ball rolling in the right direction.</p>
<p>Randolph, when he takes time out from his reactionary defence of all-out aid to Britain, can make good sense if he wants to. In these articles for the most part that is what he did.</p>
<p>He did more than describe the situation that the Negro finds himself in today (“The whole National Defense Set-up reeks and stinks with race prejudice, hatred and discrimination”).</p>
<p>He also called on the Negroes to organize themselves (“power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses. Power does not even rest with the masses as such. Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definite purpose”).</p>
<p>And he proposed a march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington to protest against existing conditions:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Let them swarm from every hamlet, village and town; from the highways and byways, out of the churches, lodges, homes, schools, mills, mines, factories and fields. Let them come in automobiles, buses, trains, trucks and on foot. Let them come though the winds blow and the rains beat against them, when the date is set. We shall not call upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone. This is our fight and we must see it through. If it costs money to finance a march on Washington, let Negroes pay for it. If any sacrifices are to be made for Negro rights in national defense, let Negroes make them. If Negroes fail this chance for work, for freedom and training, it may never, come again. Let the Negro masses speak!”<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>A Good Plan</h4>
<p class="fst">Insofar as this goes, we can only hail the whole plan. A militant march on Washington, the national capital of Jim Crowism, a march made up of thousands of Negroes who will be able to get there only because hundreds of thousands of others support the march morally and financially – this would really strike fear into the hearts of the administration and the bosses. It would really put a spoke in their wheel at the time they are shrieking about “national unity” (at the expense of the workers) and taking the last steps prior to full entry into the war! It would give a real jolt to all the propaganda about a war “for democracy,” put the issue of Jim Crowism on the high plane where it belongs and organize the forces for a finish fight for full social, economic and political equality!</p>
<p>Correctly carried out demonstration would also establish the Negroes as a force to be reckoned with by the conservative leaders of trade unions in the AFL who are guilty of Jim Crow practices themselves, and could be used as a wedge for breaking down bars against Negro membership in those sections of the labor movement where they still exist.</p>
<p>Nor should it be forgotten that a correctly carried out struggle of this kind, even if <em>actively</em> supported at the start by only a minority of the Negro people, would be an inspiration and a source of new hope and courage to millions of other Negroes; would help to deepen and extend the local struggles of the Negroes throughout the North; and would undoubtedly serve to set off in the direction of organized struggle millions of Negroes in the South who are awaiting action from their brothers in other parts of the country, and who need only inspiring example from the rest of the working class to set them into action on a wide scale at last.</p>
<p>That is why the Socialist Workers Party, and advanced Negro and white workers everywhere, are 100% for support of an action of this kind.</p>
<p>But to be worthy of support, and to accomplish its ends, the march must (1) really be militant, (2) really involve the masses, and (3) be based on the proper set of demands.</p>
<p class="c"><a href="negrostruggle4.htm"><strong>(Continued next week)</strong></a></p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(17 May 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 20, 17 May 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The March on Washington
Last week the announcement was made that the march of 10,000 Negroes to Washington, to protest against Jim Crowism in industry and the armed forces, is already being organized. The date has been set fox June 30, according to the committee in charge which is composed, of A. Philip Randolph, original advocate of the march, Walter White, the Rev. William L. Imes, Lester B. Granger, Frank R. Crosswaith, Layle Lane, Richard Parrish, Dr. Rayford Logan, and Henry K. Craft.
The purpose of the march, according to this committee, is “to shake up white America, arouse official Washington and gain respect for our people.”
Organization of local committees throughput the country, and especially on the eastern seaboard, to recruit and, register marchers, raise funds through the sale of buttons, is already under way. Conferences are being held this week in New York, Jersey City, Newark, Trenton, Camden, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Militant Action Is Necessary
From the beginning the Socialist Workers Party has pointed out that fighting action is necessary if the Negro people are to win a real victory over the practices of Jim Crowism in industry by the employers and in the armed forces by the government.
We said that words alone are not enough. Resolutions and telegrams are helpful, letters to Congressmen can do no harm, but if you really want to smash Jim Crowism, if you want to win jobs from the bosses who refuse to hire Negroes, if you want to finish segregation in the army and navy, you’ve got to fight.
That was why we welcomed the series of articles, by A. Philip Randolph, beginning last January, in the Negro press as a possible beginning to set the ball rolling in the right direction.
Randolph, when he takes time out from his reactionary defence of all-out aid to Britain, can make good sense if he wants to. In these articles for the most part that is what he did.
He did more than describe the situation that the Negro finds himself in today (“The whole National Defense Set-up reeks and stinks with race prejudice, hatred and discrimination”).
He also called on the Negroes to organize themselves (“power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses. Power does not even rest with the masses as such. Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definite purpose”).
And he proposed a march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington to protest against existing conditions:
“Let them swarm from every hamlet, village and town; from the highways and byways, out of the churches, lodges, homes, schools, mills, mines, factories and fields. Let them come in automobiles, buses, trains, trucks and on foot. Let them come though the winds blow and the rains beat against them, when the date is set. We shall not call upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone. This is our fight and we must see it through. If it costs money to finance a march on Washington, let Negroes pay for it. If any sacrifices are to be made for Negro rights in national defense, let Negroes make them. If Negroes fail this chance for work, for freedom and training, it may never, come again. Let the Negro masses speak!”
A Good Plan
Insofar as this goes, we can only hail the whole plan. A militant march on Washington, the national capital of Jim Crowism, a march made up of thousands of Negroes who will be able to get there only because hundreds of thousands of others support the march morally and financially – this would really strike fear into the hearts of the administration and the bosses. It would really put a spoke in their wheel at the time they are shrieking about “national unity” (at the expense of the workers) and taking the last steps prior to full entry into the war! It would give a real jolt to all the propaganda about a war “for democracy,” put the issue of Jim Crowism on the high plane where it belongs and organize the forces for a finish fight for full social, economic and political equality!
Correctly carried out demonstration would also establish the Negroes as a force to be reckoned with by the conservative leaders of trade unions in the AFL who are guilty of Jim Crow practices themselves, and could be used as a wedge for breaking down bars against Negro membership in those sections of the labor movement where they still exist.
Nor should it be forgotten that a correctly carried out struggle of this kind, even if actively supported at the start by only a minority of the Negro people, would be an inspiration and a source of new hope and courage to millions of other Negroes; would help to deepen and extend the local struggles of the Negroes throughout the North; and would undoubtedly serve to set off in the direction of organized struggle millions of Negroes in the South who are awaiting action from their brothers in other parts of the country, and who need only inspiring example from the rest of the working class to set them into action on a wide scale at last.
That is why the Socialist Workers Party, and advanced Negro and white workers everywhere, are 100% for support of an action of this kind.
But to be worthy of support, and to accomplish its ends, the march must (1) really be militant, (2) really involve the masses, and (3) be based on the proper set of demands.
(Continued next week)
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(28 December 1940)</h3>
<p> </p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_52" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 52</a>, 28 December 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="pt1"></a>
<h4>The <em>Courier</em> Conference</h4>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> recognized, before the Hampton Institute conference was over, that nothing was going to come out of it that would be worth two beans in the struggle against Jim Crow in the army.</p>
<p>Evidently, then, at the last minute, the <strong>Courier</strong>, trying to salvage something out of the mess and to utilize the wide publicity the Hampton meeting got, decided to hold its own conference on the same subject, and there presumably take the steps rejected by Hampton. That was why this second conference, “called and sponsored” by the <strong>Courier</strong>, was called to order in Washington three days after the Hampton conference.</p>
<p>The overwhelming majority at Hampton seemed to be government job-holders and teachers or professors – what George Schuyler described as “soft-handed, well-groomed, cultured, income-tax-paying pillars-of-society.” This was a very fitting description – but it fits the composition of the <strong>Courier</strong> conference just as well.</p>
<p>The Who’s Who in the <strong>Courier </strong>lists 41 names, and gives information about 31. Of these 31, 19 are either government job-holders, or teachers or professors. All “soft-handed,” that is, not a worker in the crowd. In addition, most of them had also been at the Hampton conference.</p>
<p>Nor is the resolution of the second conference much better than that of the first. True, its language is sharper, more vigorous, more direct. Its position is less ambiguous, although it too does not name names or place the responsibility for the present state of things where it belongs. It also fails to take up the question of Roosevelt’s “separate regiment” policy by name, only hinting at it.</p>
<p>It certainly is not a revolutionary solution. And yet there is signed to it the name of George Schuyler who, in criticizing the Hampton Conference, said that only a revolutionary approach can solve the Negro’s problems. Instead of being revolutionary, as a matter of fact, it contains a section just as harmful to the Negro as anything pulled off at Hampton.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2"></a>
<h4>Not a Pro-Labor Resolution</h4>
<p class="fst">That is the section dealing with labor, which calls on the government to investigate labor unions which by constitutional or ritualistic provisions bar Negroes from getting jobs. The <strong>Courier </strong>makes still clearer what is meant when it says, “we call upon the Attorney-General of the United States to prosecute these racketeering unions under the provisions of that (Sherman Anti-Trust) law.”</p>
<p>That is, the conference called on the government to end Jim Crowism in the unions, the very same government that shows its approval of Jim Crowism as a principle by its handling of the Negro in the armed forces!</p>
<p>Let us see what the <strong>Courier</strong>’s proposal would accomplish:</p>
<ol>
<li>It will give the government (which dislikes both the unions and the Negroes) a handle to enter and break up the unions. Will this be in the interests of the Negro people – or in the interests of the ruling capitalist class (“the very people who keep race prejudice alive”, as Schuyler put it)?<br>
</li>
<li>It will give reactionary, lily white trade union leaders a handle to incite white workers against the Negroes, for they will be able to say, “Do you see now why we want to keep Negroes out of our unions? Because they are our enemies and are calling on the government to prosecute us and break us up.” Will this be in the interests of the Negro people – or in the interests of the reactionaries who want to keep Negroes out of the trade unions?</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The one point that distinguished the <strong>Courier </strong>resolution at Hampton was the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“That Negroes in each community immediately proceed to the organization of a Defense Committee, composed of representatives of local organizations ... to cooperate with the central Committee in Washington, D.C., and with the local authorities.” Said the <strong>Courier</strong>: “Once these organizations have united it is proposed that they, hold huge defense mass meetings ... Representatives from these united organizations would be selected to attend” another conference planned for Washington in January shortly after the next Congress opens.”</p>
<p class="fst">This means that the <strong>Courier </strong>recognizes that action is necessary against the Jim Crow system in the army, and that action by the local organizations, that is, by the masses, is necessary. Insofar as the resolution draws attention to these things, it serves the interests of the Negro people.</p>
<p>But just because real action is necessary, the section of the resolution on the trade unions must be condemned, because it weakened if it didn’t destroy, the possibility of including the trade unions in the united front.</p>
<p>The main objection to be made against both the Courier and Hampton conferences, is that, while both ask for the correction of certain Jim Crow evils, they propose to leave the <em>control</em> of military training in the hands of the lily-white officer caste.</p>
<p>It is already a <em>law</em> that there shall be no discrimination in the armed forces – but since control of military training is in the hands of a military and governmental caste that wants to perpetuate Jim Crowism, discrimination goes on.</p>
<p>The National Defense Commission has already laid down the ruling that there must be no discrimination because of race or color in the factories getting war contracts, but because the bosses, who profit from racial division, control both the factories and the Defense Commission, discrimination goes on.</p>
<p>What is needed therefore is a system of trade union control of military training, to put control of it in the hands of the workers who have nothing to gain from discrimination. What is needed in addition is expropriation Of the war industries and their operation under workers’ control to put an end to discrimination in industry./p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(28 December 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 52, 28 December 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Courier Conference
The Pittsburgh Courier recognized, before the Hampton Institute conference was over, that nothing was going to come out of it that would be worth two beans in the struggle against Jim Crow in the army.
Evidently, then, at the last minute, the Courier, trying to salvage something out of the mess and to utilize the wide publicity the Hampton meeting got, decided to hold its own conference on the same subject, and there presumably take the steps rejected by Hampton. That was why this second conference, “called and sponsored” by the Courier, was called to order in Washington three days after the Hampton conference.
The overwhelming majority at Hampton seemed to be government job-holders and teachers or professors – what George Schuyler described as “soft-handed, well-groomed, cultured, income-tax-paying pillars-of-society.” This was a very fitting description – but it fits the composition of the Courier conference just as well.
The Who’s Who in the Courier lists 41 names, and gives information about 31. Of these 31, 19 are either government job-holders, or teachers or professors. All “soft-handed,” that is, not a worker in the crowd. In addition, most of them had also been at the Hampton conference.
Nor is the resolution of the second conference much better than that of the first. True, its language is sharper, more vigorous, more direct. Its position is less ambiguous, although it too does not name names or place the responsibility for the present state of things where it belongs. It also fails to take up the question of Roosevelt’s “separate regiment” policy by name, only hinting at it.
It certainly is not a revolutionary solution. And yet there is signed to it the name of George Schuyler who, in criticizing the Hampton Conference, said that only a revolutionary approach can solve the Negro’s problems. Instead of being revolutionary, as a matter of fact, it contains a section just as harmful to the Negro as anything pulled off at Hampton.
Not a Pro-Labor Resolution
That is the section dealing with labor, which calls on the government to investigate labor unions which by constitutional or ritualistic provisions bar Negroes from getting jobs. The Courier makes still clearer what is meant when it says, “we call upon the Attorney-General of the United States to prosecute these racketeering unions under the provisions of that (Sherman Anti-Trust) law.”
That is, the conference called on the government to end Jim Crowism in the unions, the very same government that shows its approval of Jim Crowism as a principle by its handling of the Negro in the armed forces!
Let us see what the Courier’s proposal would accomplish:
It will give the government (which dislikes both the unions and the Negroes) a handle to enter and break up the unions. Will this be in the interests of the Negro people – or in the interests of the ruling capitalist class (“the very people who keep race prejudice alive”, as Schuyler put it)?
It will give reactionary, lily white trade union leaders a handle to incite white workers against the Negroes, for they will be able to say, “Do you see now why we want to keep Negroes out of our unions? Because they are our enemies and are calling on the government to prosecute us and break us up.” Will this be in the interests of the Negro people – or in the interests of the reactionaries who want to keep Negroes out of the trade unions?
The one point that distinguished the Courier resolution at Hampton was the following:
“That Negroes in each community immediately proceed to the organization of a Defense Committee, composed of representatives of local organizations ... to cooperate with the central Committee in Washington, D.C., and with the local authorities.” Said the Courier: “Once these organizations have united it is proposed that they, hold huge defense mass meetings ... Representatives from these united organizations would be selected to attend” another conference planned for Washington in January shortly after the next Congress opens.”
This means that the Courier recognizes that action is necessary against the Jim Crow system in the army, and that action by the local organizations, that is, by the masses, is necessary. Insofar as the resolution draws attention to these things, it serves the interests of the Negro people.
But just because real action is necessary, the section of the resolution on the trade unions must be condemned, because it weakened if it didn’t destroy, the possibility of including the trade unions in the united front.
The main objection to be made against both the Courier and Hampton conferences, is that, while both ask for the correction of certain Jim Crow evils, they propose to leave the control of military training in the hands of the lily-white officer caste.
It is already a law that there shall be no discrimination in the armed forces – but since control of military training is in the hands of a military and governmental caste that wants to perpetuate Jim Crowism, discrimination goes on.
The National Defense Commission has already laid down the ruling that there must be no discrimination because of race or color in the factories getting war contracts, but because the bosses, who profit from racial division, control both the factories and the Defense Commission, discrimination goes on.
What is needed therefore is a system of trade union control of military training, to put control of it in the hands of the workers who have nothing to gain from discrimination. What is needed in addition is expropriation Of the war industries and their operation under workers’ control to put an end to discrimination in industry./p>
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Southern Revolt Sharpens Democratic Party Crisis</h1>
<h3>(15 March 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_11" target="new">Vol. XII No. 11</a>, 15 March 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The Democratic Party today is like a ship in a storm that has already sprung one bad leak, is on the verge of springing others and never wilt be the same, even if it should succeed in reaching port. In fact, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of its power as a major national party.</p>
<p>This capitalist party has suffered from internal dissension, conflicts and crises since at least, the end of the Civil War. That is natural, because it has appealed to and won the support of diverse and even antagonistic groups. But never before in its modern history has it been hit simultaneously by serious disaffection from its extreme tendencies on both sides.</p>
<p>One section has already split off from the party, and only a rash man would predict that this will be the last such split. Henry Wallace may return to the party in the future, despite his denials about the possibility of such a move this year, but for the time being he has taken a sizable chunk of the Democratic vote with him.<br>
</p>
<h4>Differs on Foreign Policy</h4>
<p class="fst">Wallace’s main differences with Truman are over tactics on foreign policy, but he is also able to exploit the mass discontent with the administration’s domestic policy. The effectiveness of his demagogy on these issues was made evident in the Bronx congressional election last month, when Boss Flynn’s machine worked hard to bring out the registered Democrats, only to have a great number of them vote for the Wallace-endorsed candidate.</p>
<p><em>The Wallace strength is enough to damage Truman’s chances beyond repair in several important states, if not in most of them. To counteract this, Truman has had to start waving the New Deal flag again in order to try to hold on to the labor vote, and to issue a mild “civil rights program,” going beyond any of Roosevelt’s promises in this sphere, in order to win the allegiance of the Negro vote in the North.</em></p>
<p>Instead of helping, this has produced a new crack in the party structure, and now the Southern Bourbons, poll taxers arid cracker politicians are staging a revolt of their own.</p>
<p>This isn’t the first time. Some of them tried the same thing in the latter years of the Roosevelt regime. But it wasn’t so serious a matter for the party then as it is now.</p>
<p>First of all, the Southern Democrats knew they needed Roosevelt to win national elections for them and were fairly sure that he could do so. Secondly, the Democrats at that time controlled not only the White House but also Congress, and a serious split would have cost the Southern Democrats a good deal of the power and patronage accruing to them from the important committee chairmanships they held as a result of seniority and the undemocratic electoral practices of the South.<br>
</p>
<h4>Little Confidence in Truman</h4>
<p class="fst">Today, the Southern Democrats have little confidence in the ability of Truman to lead their party to victory in Congress. Furthermore, the Republican congressional victory of 1946 made the Democrats a minority, and they consequently feel that they don’t stand to lose as much through a possible party split as they would have under Roosevelt.</p>
<p><em>Even more important, they bitterly resent the “civil rights program,” passage of which might set into motion mass forces in the South that could unseat them for good. They realize that Truman, deep down in his heart, is no more a friend of the Negro people than they are. But they know he is in a tough situation, requiring him to pay lip service to the Negroes’ demands and to sign such legislation as the anti-poll tax and anti-lynching bills if the Southern Democrats cannot prevent their passage in Congress.</em></p>
<p>Under the circumstances, the Southern Democrats appear willing to gamble on sacrificing the national interests of their party rather than to permit any changes in the Southern <em>status quo</em>. Besides, they have learned from experience that they can get along on most issues with the Republican Party as well as they can with their own Northern comrades.<br>
</p>
<h4>Southern Democrats Determined</h4>
<p class="fst">Already they are taking steps to strengthen their hand in this intra-party fight, even to the point of preparing local measures to withhold part of the Southern electoral votes from Truman. This may be only a bluff but it is a sign that the Southern Democrats have taken the offensive and are engaged in a cold war with the administration. They appear determined now not merely to regain their former dominant position in the party. but if possible to take it over altogether, as their forefathers, the slaveholding aristocracy, did before the Civil War.</p>
<p>A compromise is still possible, of course, but that might ruin the Democratic Party in the North just as effectively as would a split in the South.</p>
<p><em>These troubles have produced a growing coolness to Truman’s candidacy in recent weeks. Numerous Southern party leaders have laid down the ultimatum that Truman must go. At the same time the labor leaders and liberals of the Americans for Democratic Action stripe have refused thus far to come out openly for Truman.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Possibility of Eisenhower</h4>
<p class="fst">Serious attention is being given to the possibility of persuading Eisenhower to accept a Democratic draft on the theory that he won’t antagonize anyone because no one knows what his position is and in the belief that his candidacy might also heal the breach with Wallace, who is known to have a high regard for this particular brass hat.</p>
<p>The situation had become so alarming by last week that Truman, immediately after returning from his Caribbean jaunt, felt it necessary to change his strategy and try to head off a possible Eisenhower boom by proclaiming his own candidacy. But this move did nothing to solve the dilemma tormenting Truman and the Democratic high command – how to successfully woo the labor and minority vote in the North without further antagonizing the Southern Democrats.</p>
<p>What keeps the Democratic ship afloat? It’s true that it still commands the support of the local machine bosses like Flynn. Hague, Kelly, etc. But their power is not what it used to be if the Bronx election is any kind of index, and the party would sink like a rock if that was all it had to depend on.</p>
<p><em>More important than the local machine bosses – are the leaders of the AFL, CIO and Railroad Brotherhoods. Ordinarily not distinguished by over-activity in any field, today they are bailing away like mad to keep this capitalist craft from going under. To tell the plain truth, if it wasn’t for the hope that the Murrays, Greens and Whitneys can pull it through, the Democratic Party might very well disintegrate by the end of this year.</em></p>
<p>It would be hard to imagine a more contemptible spectacle. Here is a party that has been swindling and oppressing the American people for decades, a collection of corrupt machine bosses and Southern Bourbons whose only devotion is to Big Business, a gang which is just as responsible as the Republican Party for the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, to mention only recent history.</p>
<p>Here it is in its worst straits, ready for well-deserved oblivion, on the verge of a collapse that would necessarily make it easier for the workers and poor farmers and minorities to construct a party that would really represent their interests.<br>
</p>
<h4>Bureaucrats to the Rescue</h4>
<p class="fst">And at this point – when a really golden opportunity exists to end this monstrosity forever with a minimum of effort – the labor bureaucrats come rushing to its aid like the U.S. Cavalry in the movies, flinging the workers’ money around in a desperate attempt to save it and reserving its most vicious attacks for those who want to desert it. That’s what is known as “labor statesmanship.”</p>
<p>Some of the labor leaders, more aware than others of the deep-going rank and file dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party; try to present this policy in a more “radical” cloak. A good example was the resolution adopted March 3 by the International Executive Board of the CIO United Auto Workers at a meeting in Chicago.</p>
<p><em>The Board voted to support the national CIO policy in rejecting Wallace’s third party “as a political maneuver contrary to the best interests of labor and the nation and as an obstacle in the way of the establishment of a successful and genuine progressive political party in the U.S.A.,” which the UAW leaders are presumably willing to help build some time after the 1948 elections.</em></p>
<p>Whom do they think they are going to kid with this kind of stuff? Instead of finishing off the Democratic Party when it is in a bad way, first they propose to rehabilitate it by striving to give it a victory in November, and then after it is strengthened, they are going to try to replace it with another new party sometime in the distant future. That’s what passes for “practical politics” in the more “progressive” circles of the labor bureaucracy.</p>
<p>The real duty of all genuine labor fighters is not to prop up the Democratic Party in the period of its collapse, but to utilize this very collapse to launch an independent Labor Party which could emerge at once as a major party on the American political scene.</p>
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George Breitman
Southern Revolt Sharpens Democratic Party Crisis
(15 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 11, 15 March 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Democratic Party today is like a ship in a storm that has already sprung one bad leak, is on the verge of springing others and never wilt be the same, even if it should succeed in reaching port. In fact, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of its power as a major national party.
This capitalist party has suffered from internal dissension, conflicts and crises since at least, the end of the Civil War. That is natural, because it has appealed to and won the support of diverse and even antagonistic groups. But never before in its modern history has it been hit simultaneously by serious disaffection from its extreme tendencies on both sides.
One section has already split off from the party, and only a rash man would predict that this will be the last such split. Henry Wallace may return to the party in the future, despite his denials about the possibility of such a move this year, but for the time being he has taken a sizable chunk of the Democratic vote with him.
Differs on Foreign Policy
Wallace’s main differences with Truman are over tactics on foreign policy, but he is also able to exploit the mass discontent with the administration’s domestic policy. The effectiveness of his demagogy on these issues was made evident in the Bronx congressional election last month, when Boss Flynn’s machine worked hard to bring out the registered Democrats, only to have a great number of them vote for the Wallace-endorsed candidate.
The Wallace strength is enough to damage Truman’s chances beyond repair in several important states, if not in most of them. To counteract this, Truman has had to start waving the New Deal flag again in order to try to hold on to the labor vote, and to issue a mild “civil rights program,” going beyond any of Roosevelt’s promises in this sphere, in order to win the allegiance of the Negro vote in the North.
Instead of helping, this has produced a new crack in the party structure, and now the Southern Bourbons, poll taxers arid cracker politicians are staging a revolt of their own.
This isn’t the first time. Some of them tried the same thing in the latter years of the Roosevelt regime. But it wasn’t so serious a matter for the party then as it is now.
First of all, the Southern Democrats knew they needed Roosevelt to win national elections for them and were fairly sure that he could do so. Secondly, the Democrats at that time controlled not only the White House but also Congress, and a serious split would have cost the Southern Democrats a good deal of the power and patronage accruing to them from the important committee chairmanships they held as a result of seniority and the undemocratic electoral practices of the South.
Little Confidence in Truman
Today, the Southern Democrats have little confidence in the ability of Truman to lead their party to victory in Congress. Furthermore, the Republican congressional victory of 1946 made the Democrats a minority, and they consequently feel that they don’t stand to lose as much through a possible party split as they would have under Roosevelt.
Even more important, they bitterly resent the “civil rights program,” passage of which might set into motion mass forces in the South that could unseat them for good. They realize that Truman, deep down in his heart, is no more a friend of the Negro people than they are. But they know he is in a tough situation, requiring him to pay lip service to the Negroes’ demands and to sign such legislation as the anti-poll tax and anti-lynching bills if the Southern Democrats cannot prevent their passage in Congress.
Under the circumstances, the Southern Democrats appear willing to gamble on sacrificing the national interests of their party rather than to permit any changes in the Southern status quo. Besides, they have learned from experience that they can get along on most issues with the Republican Party as well as they can with their own Northern comrades.
Southern Democrats Determined
Already they are taking steps to strengthen their hand in this intra-party fight, even to the point of preparing local measures to withhold part of the Southern electoral votes from Truman. This may be only a bluff but it is a sign that the Southern Democrats have taken the offensive and are engaged in a cold war with the administration. They appear determined now not merely to regain their former dominant position in the party. but if possible to take it over altogether, as their forefathers, the slaveholding aristocracy, did before the Civil War.
A compromise is still possible, of course, but that might ruin the Democratic Party in the North just as effectively as would a split in the South.
These troubles have produced a growing coolness to Truman’s candidacy in recent weeks. Numerous Southern party leaders have laid down the ultimatum that Truman must go. At the same time the labor leaders and liberals of the Americans for Democratic Action stripe have refused thus far to come out openly for Truman.
Possibility of Eisenhower
Serious attention is being given to the possibility of persuading Eisenhower to accept a Democratic draft on the theory that he won’t antagonize anyone because no one knows what his position is and in the belief that his candidacy might also heal the breach with Wallace, who is known to have a high regard for this particular brass hat.
The situation had become so alarming by last week that Truman, immediately after returning from his Caribbean jaunt, felt it necessary to change his strategy and try to head off a possible Eisenhower boom by proclaiming his own candidacy. But this move did nothing to solve the dilemma tormenting Truman and the Democratic high command – how to successfully woo the labor and minority vote in the North without further antagonizing the Southern Democrats.
What keeps the Democratic ship afloat? It’s true that it still commands the support of the local machine bosses like Flynn. Hague, Kelly, etc. But their power is not what it used to be if the Bronx election is any kind of index, and the party would sink like a rock if that was all it had to depend on.
More important than the local machine bosses – are the leaders of the AFL, CIO and Railroad Brotherhoods. Ordinarily not distinguished by over-activity in any field, today they are bailing away like mad to keep this capitalist craft from going under. To tell the plain truth, if it wasn’t for the hope that the Murrays, Greens and Whitneys can pull it through, the Democratic Party might very well disintegrate by the end of this year.
It would be hard to imagine a more contemptible spectacle. Here is a party that has been swindling and oppressing the American people for decades, a collection of corrupt machine bosses and Southern Bourbons whose only devotion is to Big Business, a gang which is just as responsible as the Republican Party for the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, to mention only recent history.
Here it is in its worst straits, ready for well-deserved oblivion, on the verge of a collapse that would necessarily make it easier for the workers and poor farmers and minorities to construct a party that would really represent their interests.
Bureaucrats to the Rescue
And at this point – when a really golden opportunity exists to end this monstrosity forever with a minimum of effort – the labor bureaucrats come rushing to its aid like the U.S. Cavalry in the movies, flinging the workers’ money around in a desperate attempt to save it and reserving its most vicious attacks for those who want to desert it. That’s what is known as “labor statesmanship.”
Some of the labor leaders, more aware than others of the deep-going rank and file dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party; try to present this policy in a more “radical” cloak. A good example was the resolution adopted March 3 by the International Executive Board of the CIO United Auto Workers at a meeting in Chicago.
The Board voted to support the national CIO policy in rejecting Wallace’s third party “as a political maneuver contrary to the best interests of labor and the nation and as an obstacle in the way of the establishment of a successful and genuine progressive political party in the U.S.A.,” which the UAW leaders are presumably willing to help build some time after the 1948 elections.
Whom do they think they are going to kid with this kind of stuff? Instead of finishing off the Democratic Party when it is in a bad way, first they propose to rehabilitate it by striving to give it a victory in November, and then after it is strengthened, they are going to try to replace it with another new party sometime in the distant future. That’s what passes for “practical politics” in the more “progressive” circles of the labor bureaucracy.
The real duty of all genuine labor fighters is not to prop up the Democratic Party in the period of its collapse, but to utilize this very collapse to launch an independent Labor Party which could emerge at once as a major party on the American political scene.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Trotsky’s Story – Tragedy or Triumph</h1>
<h3>(3 May 1954)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../newspape/themilitant/1954/v18n18-may-03-1954-mil.pdf" target="new">Vol. 18 No. 18</a>, 3 May 1954.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the <strong> Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) in 2012</strong><br>
<strong>Copyleft:</strong> Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the <a href="../../../../../admin/legal/cc/by-sa.htm">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0</a> .</p>
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<p class="sub">(Last of a series)</p>
<p class="fst">By executing some fast shuffles, as we showed in the previous article in this series, Isaac Deutscher reaches the conclusion in his book, <em>The Prophet Armed</em>, that Trotsky and Lenin set political and theoretical “precedents” that “paved the way” for Stalin. He also expresses “absorbing interest” in the question: to what extent did Trotsky “pave the way for Stalin” by “his own character”?</p>
<p>Since this volume does not deal with the period of Trotsky’s <em>struggle</em> against Stalinism, Deutscher doesn’t answer his own question fully here. But he makes some beginnings, throwing out hints about Trotsky’s character that have already been eagerly snapped up by, reviewers who reduce everything to their own shallow level, find in the most profound social struggles a pretext to indulge in amateur psychoanalysis, and glibly explain the course of Soviet history by alleged “defects” in Trotsky’s personality.</p>
<p>Deutscher, of course, is much too shrewd to go that far himself. Elsewhere he has quoted approvingly Plekhanov’s statement:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Owing to the specific qualities of their minds and characters, influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces.”</p>
<p class="fst">Deutscher knows, and will say, that it was “other forces” (social, political, economic) that determined the victory of Stalin. He knows that Stalin won, not because he was more sociable and humble than Trotsky, but because he represented social forces in retreat and in reaction against the revolution (and because his was a character that could adapt to and express those forces, while Trotsky’s character couldn’t and didn’t).</p>
<p>But while Deutscher knows all this, he cannot refrain from making certain criticism of Trotsky’s character which we want to discuss briefly, not because they are new, but because they are genuinely related to Trotsky’s role.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Ideas and men</p>
<p class="fst">(1) As far back as 1904, Deutscher says, Trotsky “exhibited a characteristic of which he would never quite free himself: he could not separate ideas from men.”</p>
<p>The real substance of this stock complaint against Trotsky was that he took a serious attitude to serious ideas because he knew they are the indispensable bedrock for any party aspiring to lead a workers revolution. In other words, he was a principled politician &8211; without deviation from 1917 &8211; who put program ahead of all other considerations. He worked loyally with people when he found himself in political agreement with them, and did not hesitate to break and fight against even former friends after their political paths parted.</p>
<p>This characteristic offended and repelled centrists, vacillators and political dabblers; to people who were always ready to patch up, compromise or ignore basic differences in order to cement a “practical” bloc, Trotsky’s insistence on principles seemed “unworldly,” “harsh,” “sectarian” or “autocratic” (epithets which were all applied to Lenin and to Marx too). But far from being a fault, this was one of Trotsky’s greatest virtues. Instead of hampering him, it saved him.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Zinoviev and Kamenev</p>
<p class="fst">Zinoviev and Kamenev were Bolsheviks too. But after Lenin’s death they thrust principles to the side and set out to be “practical” politicians, figuring that first they would combine with Stalin to get power and then later would decide on the ends that power would serve. They separated, that is subordinated, ideas to their bloc with Stalin, and this proved to be their undoing. For they found themselves serving ends they had never dreamed of, and when they tried to draw back, it was too late &8211; Stalin had the power. Their reward was political degradation, to say nothing of bullets in the back of the head.</p>
<p>Trotsky too was approached by Stalin for a bloc. But he could not and would not separate Stalin from the ideas and forces he represented, and he rejected the offer. He saved himself as a revolutionist and was able to make further contributions to the movement precisely because his character inclined him to, and his experience increasingly confirmed him in, principled politics.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Out of his element?</p>
<p class="fst">(2) Deutscher writes: “Trotsky’s strength, Stalin said, reveals itself when the revolution gains momentum and advances; his weakness comes to the fore when the revolution is defeated and must retreat. There is some truth in this. Trotsky’s mental and moral constitution was such that he received the strongest impulses from, and best mobilized his resources amid, the strains and stresses of actual upheaval. On a gigantic stage, which dwarfed others, he rose to the giant’s stature... When the revolution was on the wane, however, he was out of his element and his strength sagged. He was equal to herculean, not to lesser, labors.”</p>
<p>There is “some” truth in this &8211; this much: In periods of revolutionary upsurge, great leaders always shine most brightly &8211; after all, that is what they have been living, working and preparing for. In periods of reaction and defeat, even the best of leaders are, so to speak, out of their element, thrown on the defensive, reduced to different labors.</p>
<p>Trotsky stood out among men in 1905 and 1917 because he so accurately reflected the revolutionary moods and hopes of the masses. He did not and could not play the same role in the periods of reaction that followed these two revolutions. But we must distinguish &8211; for he did not play the same kind of role in both these periods of reaction either.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Role in two periods</p>
<p class="fst">After 1905, when so many revolutionists became demoralized and deserted, Trotsky stuck to his revolutionary guns and, as Deutscher admits, “went on expounding the idea of permanent revolution with an optimism and ardor uncommon in those years of depression.” But as Trotsky wrote later in <em>In Defense of Marxism</em>: </p>
<p class="quoteb">”I bad not freed myself at that period especially in the organizational sphere from the traits of a petty-bourgeois revolutionist. I was sick with the disease of conciliationism toward Menshevism and with a distrustful attitude toward Leninist centralism.”</p>
<p class="fst">Consequently Trotsky, then still pursuing the illusion of uniting the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, was largely isolated from 1906 to 1917. In this pursuit he certainly was out of his element, and he did not fully come into it until 1917 when he became a Bolshevik.</p>
<p>It will be noted that Trotsky explains his isolation at this time mainly by political reasons, while Deutscher emphasizes mainly personal traits.. The correctness of Trotsky’s explanation is confirmed by the role he played from 1923 on.</p>
<p>The wave of reaction that struck Russia after 1923 was deeper and longer than anything living men and women had <em> ever </em> experienced. The persecution and terror visited on the Trotskyist opposition was more severe than in the worst days of the Czarist reaction after 1905. Bolsheviks who had not flinched at jail, Siberia or exile in 1906 were broken morally and capitulated to Stalin in 1926. What did Trotsky do?</p>
<p class="fst">(3) This is the subject of Deutscher’s next book, but in this one he expresses approval for the statement that “it was Trotsky’s <em>major weakness</em> that he did not persist in his wisdom, especially when to be wise was to be alone.” (Our emphasis.)</p>
<p>This statement alone, in our opinion, is sufficient to disqualify Deutscher as any objective judge of Trotsky the man and his work.</p>
<p>Against all odds, Trotsky stood up against the fierce reaction represented by Stalinism. He stood up and fought back in defense of Bolshevism. He resisted all the pressures, spurned all the offers for compromise, refused to yield an inch on principle. He did this virtually alone, against practically the whole leadership of the party, who held the state power in their hands and did not hesitate to use its coercive instruments. If anyone in the history of the revolutionary movement “persisted,” it was Trotsky, whom Stalin could neither bribe nor beat into line.</p>
<p>This was not Trotsky’s natural “element.” But his strength did not “sag” at the prospect, This was not actually a “lesser labor” than leading a revolution &8211; it was merely a different, harder and less personally gratifying labor. But Trotsky was equal to it, and he mobilized all his resources to carry it through to the finish.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Trotsky’s triumph</p>
<p class="fst">To Deutscher, Trotsky’s story is “tragic.” That only shows how little he understands. Trotsky, it is true, was expelled, exiled and finally murdered, but standing high above all these personal reverses, which Trotsky had foreseen was that greater triumph which he snatched from Stalin’s hands by discharging his revolutionary duty to the full.</p>
<p>Stalin’s aim was to exterminate Bolshevism root and branch. In this he was thwarted. For Trotsky, almost singlehanded, kept the banner of Bolshevism aloft and preserved it from stain; he maintained the continuity of revolutionary Marxism; he gathered together as new cadre and armed it and hardened it. Lenin’s great achievement was to organize Bolshevism; Trotsky’s was to preserve it in its most difficult days.</p>
<p>When the balance is struck, we believe, history will recognize as Trotsky’s greatest achievement not the role he played in the Russian revolution in 1917, outstanding as that was, when all the conditions favored revolutionary activity, but the role he filled in the reactionary years from 1923 to 1940 in patiently explaining the meaning of Stalinism and tirelessly recruiting the forces of the Fourth International who will lead the workers in ridding the world of both capitalism and Stalinism.</p>
<p>A Deutscher couldn’t understand that. He’s too busy searching for the “revolutionary” sides of Stalinism, and for signs that the Soviet bureaucracy is going to reform itself, to be able to recognize the real path of socialist revolution in our time or the magnitude of Trotsky’s work in clearing that path for the revolutionist of today and tomorrow.</p>
<p class="sub">* * *</p>
<p class="fst">It would be wrong, however, to conclude without some remarks about positive aspects of the book. For one thing, Deutscher has done a lot of research, particularly in the earlier writings of Trotsky &8211; literary and cultural criticism, war correspondence, etc. &8211; and he quotes enough from them to make his book worth reading. And to increase our appetite. When is some publisher going to be astute enough to get these writings translated?</p>
<p>For another thing, the book has many anecdotes and sidelights that will appeal to readers already familiar with Trotsky’s works. For example, Trotsky’s autobiography merely records in a phrase the fact that the police arrested the Petersburg Soviet which he headed in December, 1905; Deutscher devotes two pages to the amusing details. Trotsky spent only a few lines on the subsequent trial of its leaders; Deutscher has six pages highlighting the dramatic events.</p>
<p>But for a genuinely objective account of Russian revolutionary history, and for an account that can serve as a guide to people who want to participate in revolutionary politics, we repeat, the reader will still have to turn to Trotsky’s own writings, for which there is still no substitute.</p>
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George Breitman
Trotsky’s Story – Tragedy or Triumph
(3 May 1954)
From The Militant, Vol. 18 No. 18, 3 May 1954.
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) in 2012
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 .
(Last of a series)
By executing some fast shuffles, as we showed in the previous article in this series, Isaac Deutscher reaches the conclusion in his book, The Prophet Armed, that Trotsky and Lenin set political and theoretical “precedents” that “paved the way” for Stalin. He also expresses “absorbing interest” in the question: to what extent did Trotsky “pave the way for Stalin” by “his own character”?
Since this volume does not deal with the period of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism, Deutscher doesn’t answer his own question fully here. But he makes some beginnings, throwing out hints about Trotsky’s character that have already been eagerly snapped up by, reviewers who reduce everything to their own shallow level, find in the most profound social struggles a pretext to indulge in amateur psychoanalysis, and glibly explain the course of Soviet history by alleged “defects” in Trotsky’s personality.
Deutscher, of course, is much too shrewd to go that far himself. Elsewhere he has quoted approvingly Plekhanov’s statement:
“Owing to the specific qualities of their minds and characters, influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces.”
Deutscher knows, and will say, that it was “other forces” (social, political, economic) that determined the victory of Stalin. He knows that Stalin won, not because he was more sociable and humble than Trotsky, but because he represented social forces in retreat and in reaction against the revolution (and because his was a character that could adapt to and express those forces, while Trotsky’s character couldn’t and didn’t).
But while Deutscher knows all this, he cannot refrain from making certain criticism of Trotsky’s character which we want to discuss briefly, not because they are new, but because they are genuinely related to Trotsky’s role.
Ideas and men
(1) As far back as 1904, Deutscher says, Trotsky “exhibited a characteristic of which he would never quite free himself: he could not separate ideas from men.”
The real substance of this stock complaint against Trotsky was that he took a serious attitude to serious ideas because he knew they are the indispensable bedrock for any party aspiring to lead a workers revolution. In other words, he was a principled politician &8211; without deviation from 1917 &8211; who put program ahead of all other considerations. He worked loyally with people when he found himself in political agreement with them, and did not hesitate to break and fight against even former friends after their political paths parted.
This characteristic offended and repelled centrists, vacillators and political dabblers; to people who were always ready to patch up, compromise or ignore basic differences in order to cement a “practical” bloc, Trotsky’s insistence on principles seemed “unworldly,” “harsh,” “sectarian” or “autocratic” (epithets which were all applied to Lenin and to Marx too). But far from being a fault, this was one of Trotsky’s greatest virtues. Instead of hampering him, it saved him.
Zinoviev and Kamenev
Zinoviev and Kamenev were Bolsheviks too. But after Lenin’s death they thrust principles to the side and set out to be “practical” politicians, figuring that first they would combine with Stalin to get power and then later would decide on the ends that power would serve. They separated, that is subordinated, ideas to their bloc with Stalin, and this proved to be their undoing. For they found themselves serving ends they had never dreamed of, and when they tried to draw back, it was too late &8211; Stalin had the power. Their reward was political degradation, to say nothing of bullets in the back of the head.
Trotsky too was approached by Stalin for a bloc. But he could not and would not separate Stalin from the ideas and forces he represented, and he rejected the offer. He saved himself as a revolutionist and was able to make further contributions to the movement precisely because his character inclined him to, and his experience increasingly confirmed him in, principled politics.
Out of his element?
(2) Deutscher writes: “Trotsky’s strength, Stalin said, reveals itself when the revolution gains momentum and advances; his weakness comes to the fore when the revolution is defeated and must retreat. There is some truth in this. Trotsky’s mental and moral constitution was such that he received the strongest impulses from, and best mobilized his resources amid, the strains and stresses of actual upheaval. On a gigantic stage, which dwarfed others, he rose to the giant’s stature... When the revolution was on the wane, however, he was out of his element and his strength sagged. He was equal to herculean, not to lesser, labors.”
There is “some” truth in this &8211; this much: In periods of revolutionary upsurge, great leaders always shine most brightly &8211; after all, that is what they have been living, working and preparing for. In periods of reaction and defeat, even the best of leaders are, so to speak, out of their element, thrown on the defensive, reduced to different labors.
Trotsky stood out among men in 1905 and 1917 because he so accurately reflected the revolutionary moods and hopes of the masses. He did not and could not play the same role in the periods of reaction that followed these two revolutions. But we must distinguish &8211; for he did not play the same kind of role in both these periods of reaction either.
Role in two periods
After 1905, when so many revolutionists became demoralized and deserted, Trotsky stuck to his revolutionary guns and, as Deutscher admits, “went on expounding the idea of permanent revolution with an optimism and ardor uncommon in those years of depression.” But as Trotsky wrote later in In Defense of Marxism:
”I bad not freed myself at that period especially in the organizational sphere from the traits of a petty-bourgeois revolutionist. I was sick with the disease of conciliationism toward Menshevism and with a distrustful attitude toward Leninist centralism.”
Consequently Trotsky, then still pursuing the illusion of uniting the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, was largely isolated from 1906 to 1917. In this pursuit he certainly was out of his element, and he did not fully come into it until 1917 when he became a Bolshevik.
It will be noted that Trotsky explains his isolation at this time mainly by political reasons, while Deutscher emphasizes mainly personal traits.. The correctness of Trotsky’s explanation is confirmed by the role he played from 1923 on.
The wave of reaction that struck Russia after 1923 was deeper and longer than anything living men and women had ever experienced. The persecution and terror visited on the Trotskyist opposition was more severe than in the worst days of the Czarist reaction after 1905. Bolsheviks who had not flinched at jail, Siberia or exile in 1906 were broken morally and capitulated to Stalin in 1926. What did Trotsky do?
(3) This is the subject of Deutscher’s next book, but in this one he expresses approval for the statement that “it was Trotsky’s major weakness that he did not persist in his wisdom, especially when to be wise was to be alone.” (Our emphasis.)
This statement alone, in our opinion, is sufficient to disqualify Deutscher as any objective judge of Trotsky the man and his work.
Against all odds, Trotsky stood up against the fierce reaction represented by Stalinism. He stood up and fought back in defense of Bolshevism. He resisted all the pressures, spurned all the offers for compromise, refused to yield an inch on principle. He did this virtually alone, against practically the whole leadership of the party, who held the state power in their hands and did not hesitate to use its coercive instruments. If anyone in the history of the revolutionary movement “persisted,” it was Trotsky, whom Stalin could neither bribe nor beat into line.
This was not Trotsky’s natural “element.” But his strength did not “sag” at the prospect, This was not actually a “lesser labor” than leading a revolution &8211; it was merely a different, harder and less personally gratifying labor. But Trotsky was equal to it, and he mobilized all his resources to carry it through to the finish.
Trotsky’s triumph
To Deutscher, Trotsky’s story is “tragic.” That only shows how little he understands. Trotsky, it is true, was expelled, exiled and finally murdered, but standing high above all these personal reverses, which Trotsky had foreseen was that greater triumph which he snatched from Stalin’s hands by discharging his revolutionary duty to the full.
Stalin’s aim was to exterminate Bolshevism root and branch. In this he was thwarted. For Trotsky, almost singlehanded, kept the banner of Bolshevism aloft and preserved it from stain; he maintained the continuity of revolutionary Marxism; he gathered together as new cadre and armed it and hardened it. Lenin’s great achievement was to organize Bolshevism; Trotsky’s was to preserve it in its most difficult days.
When the balance is struck, we believe, history will recognize as Trotsky’s greatest achievement not the role he played in the Russian revolution in 1917, outstanding as that was, when all the conditions favored revolutionary activity, but the role he filled in the reactionary years from 1923 to 1940 in patiently explaining the meaning of Stalinism and tirelessly recruiting the forces of the Fourth International who will lead the workers in ridding the world of both capitalism and Stalinism.
A Deutscher couldn’t understand that. He’s too busy searching for the “revolutionary” sides of Stalinism, and for signs that the Soviet bureaucracy is going to reform itself, to be able to recognize the real path of socialist revolution in our time or the magnitude of Trotsky’s work in clearing that path for the revolutionist of today and tomorrow.
* * *
It would be wrong, however, to conclude without some remarks about positive aspects of the book. For one thing, Deutscher has done a lot of research, particularly in the earlier writings of Trotsky &8211; literary and cultural criticism, war correspondence, etc. &8211; and he quotes enough from them to make his book worth reading. And to increase our appetite. When is some publisher going to be astute enough to get these writings translated?
For another thing, the book has many anecdotes and sidelights that will appeal to readers already familiar with Trotsky’s works. For example, Trotsky’s autobiography merely records in a phrase the fact that the police arrested the Petersburg Soviet which he headed in December, 1905; Deutscher devotes two pages to the amusing details. Trotsky spent only a few lines on the subsequent trial of its leaders; Deutscher has six pages highlighting the dramatic events.
But for a genuinely objective account of Russian revolutionary history, and for an account that can serve as a guide to people who want to participate in revolutionary politics, we repeat, the reader will still have to turn to Trotsky’s own writings, for which there is still no substitute.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began</h1>
<h3>(Spring 1954)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi54_spr" target="new">Vol.15 No.2</a>, Spring 1954, pp.42-45.<br>
To see an expanded 1960 pamphlet version of this article <a href="Anti-Negro-Prejudice.pdf">click here</a><br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">IT IS now common knowledge even among conservative circles in the labor movement that race prejudice benefits the interests of the capitalist class and injures the interests of the working class. What is not well known – it still comes as a surprise to many Marxists – and should be made better known is the fact that race prejudice is a uniquely capitalist phenomenon, which either did not exist or had no perceptible influence in pre-capitalist society (that is, before the sixteenth century).</p>
<p>Hundreds of modern scholars have traced anti-Negro prejudice (to take the most important and prevalent type of race prejudice in the United States) back to the African slave trade and the slave system that was introduced into the Americas. Those who profited from the enslavement of the Negroes – the slave traders and merchant capitalists first of Europe and then of America, and the slaveholders – required a rationalization and a moral justification for an archaic social institution that obviously flouted the relatively enlightened principles proclaimed by capitalist society in its struggle against feudalism. Rationalizations always become available when powerful economic interests need them (that is how most politicians and preachers, editors and teachers earn their living) and in this case the theory that Negroes are “inferior” followed close on the discovery that Negro slavery was exceptionally profitable.</p>
<p>This theory was embraced, fitted out with pseudo-scientific trappings and Biblical quotations, and trumpeted forth as a truth so self-evident that only madmen or subversives could doubt or deny it. Its influence on the minds of men was great at all levels of society, and undoubtedly aided the slaveholders in retarding the abolition of slavery. But with the growth of the productive forces, economic interests hostile to the slaveholders brought forth new theories and ideas, and challenged the supremacy of the slaveholders on all fronts, including ideology. The ensuing class struggles – between the capitalists, slaves, workers and farmers on one side and the slaveholders on the other – resulted in the destruction of the slave system.</p>
<p>But if anti-Negro prejudices and ideas arose out of the need to justify and maintain slavery, why didn’t they wither away after slavery was abolished? In the first place, ideas, although they must reflect broad material interests before they can achieve wide circulation, can live lives of their own once they are set into motion, and can survive for a time after the disappearance of the conditions that produced them. (It is instructive to note, for example, that Lincoln did not free himself wholly of race prejudice and continued to believe in the “inferiority” of the Negro even while he was engaged in prosecuting the civil war that abolished the slave system – a striking illustration both of the tendency of ideas to lag behind events and of the primacy of material interest over ideology.)</p>
<p>This is a generalization, however, and does not provide the main explanation for the survival of anti-Negro prejudice after the Civil War. For the striking thing about the Reconstruction period which followed the abolition of slavery was the speed with which old ideas and customs began to change and break up. In the course of a few short years millions of whites began to recover from the racist poisons to which they had been subjected from their birth, to regard Negroes as equals and to work together with them amicably, under the protection of the federal government, in the solution of joint problems. The obliteration of anti-Negro prejudice was started in the social revolution that we know by the name of Reconstruction, and it would have been completed if Reconstruction had been permitted to develop further.</p>
<table align="center" cellspacing="2" border="2">
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<td><img src="solidarity.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="179" align="bottom" alt="Radical reconstruction: Solidarity between Black and White"></td>
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</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">But Reconstruction was halted and then strangled – by the capitalists, acting now in alliance with the former slaveholders. No exploiting class lightly discards weapons that can help maintain its rule, and anti-Negro prejudice had already demonstrated its potency as a force to divide, disrupt and disorient oppressed classes in an exploitative society .After some vacillation and internal struggle that lasted through most of Reconstruction, the capitalist class decided it could make use of anti-Negro prejudice for its own purposes. The capitalists adopted it, nursed it, fed it, gave it new clothing, and infused it with a vigor and an influence it had never commanded before. Anti-Negro prejudice today operates in a different social setting and therefore in a somewhat different form than a century ago, but it was retained after slavery for essentially the same reason that it was introduced under the slave system that developed from the sixteenth century on – for its convenience as an instrument of exploitation; and for that same reason it will not be abandoned by the ruling class of any exploitative society in this country.</p>
<p>But why do we speak of the <em>introduction</em> of anti-Negro prejudice in the slave system, whose spread coincided with the birth of capitalism? Wasn’t there slavery long centuries before capitalism? Didn’t race prejudice exist in the earlier slave societies? Why designate race prejudice as a uniquely capitalist phenomenon? A brief look at slavery of both the capitalist and pre-capitalist periods can lead us to the answers.</p>
<p>Capitalism, the social system that followed and replaced feudalism, owed its rise to world dominance in part to its revival or expansion of forms of exploitation originally developed in the pre-feudal slave societies, and to its adaptation and integration of those forms into the framework of capitalist productive relations. As “the chief <em>momenta</em> of primitive accumulation” through which the early capitalists gathered together the capital necessary to establish and spread the new system, Marx listed “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins.” The African slave trade and slavery produced fortunes that laid the foundations for the most important of the early industries of capitalism, which in turn served to revolutionize the economy of the whole world.</p>
<p>Thus we see, side by side, in clear operation of the laws of uneven and combined development, archaic pre-feudal forms and the most advanced social relations then possible in the post-feudal world. The former were of course in the service of the latter, at least during the first stages of their co-existence. This was not a mere repetition of the slavery of ancient times: one basic economic difference was that the slave system of the Americas produced commodities for the world capitalist market, and was therefore subordinate to and dependent on that market. There were other differences, but here we confine ourselves to the one most relevant to the subject of this article – race relations in the early slave societies.</p>
<p>For the information that follows we are indebted to the writings of an anthropologist and of a sociologist: Ina Corinne Brown, <strong>Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems</strong>, 1942, chapter 2 (this government publication, the first volume in the National Survey of the Higher Education of Negroes sponsored, by the US Office of Education, is now out of print, but the same material is covered in her book. <strong>Race Relations in a Democracy</strong>, 1949, chapter 4); and Oliver C. Cox, <strong>Caste, Class, and Race</strong>, 1948, chapter 16. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> Dr. Cox’s treatment is fuller; he also has been more influenced by Marx.</p>
<p>This is what they write about the ancient Egyptians:</p>
<p class="quoteb">So many persons assume that racial antipathy is a natural or instinctive reaction that it is important to emphasize the fact that race prejudice such as we know did not exist before the modern age. To be sure there was group antipathy which those who read history backwards take to be race prejudice, but actually this antipathy had little or nothing to do with color or the other physical differences by which races are distinguished. For example, the ancient Egyptians looked down upon the Negroes to the south of them. They enslaved these Negroes and spoke scornfully of them. Many writers, reading later racial attitudes into the situation, have seen in this scorn a color prejudice. But the Egyptians were just as scornful of the Asiatic sand dwellers, or Troglodytes as Herodotus called them, and of their other neighbors who were as light or lighter than the Egyptians. The Egyptian artists caricature the wretched captives taken in the frequent wars, but they emphasize the hooked noses of the Hittites, the woolen garments of the Hebrews, and the peculiar dress of the Libyans quite as much as the color or the thick lips of the Negroes. That the Egyptians mixed freely with their southern neighbors, either in slavery or out of it, is evidenced by the fact that some of the Pharaohs were obviously Negroid and eventually Egypt was ruled by an Ethiopian dynasty. (Brown, 1942)</p>
<p class="quoteb">There seems to be no basis for imputing racial antagonism to the Egyptians, Babylonians, or Persians. (Cox)</p>
<p class="fst">On the Greeks:</p>
<p class="quoteb">One frequently finds mention of the scornful way in which Negro slaves were referred to in Greece and Rome, but the fact is that equally scornful remarks were made of the white slaves from the North and the East. There seems to be no evidence that color antipathy was involved, and of the total slave population the Negroes constituted only a minor element. (Brown, 1942)</p>
<p class="quoteb">The slave population was enormous, but the slave and the master in Greece were commonly of the same race and there was no occasion to associate any given physical type with the slave status. An opponent of Athenian democracy complained that it was impossible in Athens to distinguish slaves and aliens from citizens because all classes dressed alike and lived in the same way. (Brown, 1949.)</p>
<p class="quoteb">... we do not find race prejudice even in the great Hellenistic empire which extended deeper into the territories of colored people than any other European empire up to the end of the fifteenth century.</p>
<p class="quote">The Hellenic Greeks had a cultural, not a racial, standard of belonging, so that their basic division of the peoples of the world were Greeks and barbarians – the barbarians having been all those persons who did not possess the Greek culture, especially its language ... the people of the Greek city-states, who founded colonies among the barbarians on the shores of the Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, welcomed those barbarians to the extent that they were able to participate in Greek culture, and intermarried freely with them. The Greeks knew that they had a superior culture to those of the barbarians, but they included Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics in the concept Hellas as these peoples acquired a working knowledge of the Greek culture.</p>
<p class="quote">The experience of the later Hellenistic empire of Alexander tended to be the direct contrary of modern racial antagonism. The narrow patriotism of the city-states was given up for a new cosmopolitanism. Every effort was made to assimilate the barbarians to Greek culture, and in the process a new Greco-Oriental culture with a Greco-Oriental ruling class came into being. Alexander himself took a Persian princess for his wife and encouraged his men to intermarry with the native population. In this empire there was an estate, not a racial, distinction between the rulers and the un-Hellenized natives. (Cox)</p>
<p class="fst">On the Romans:</p>
<p class="fst">In Rome, as in Greece, the slaves did not differ in outward appearance from free men. R.H. Barrow in his study of the Roman slave says that “neither color nor clothing revealed his condition.” Slaves of different nationalities intermarried. There was no color barrier. A woman might be despised as a wife because she came from a despised group or because she practiced barbaric rites but not because her skin was darker. Furthermore, as W.W. Buckland points out, “any citizen might conceivably become a slave; almost any slave might become a citizen.” (Brown, 1949)</p>
<p class="quoteb">In this civilization also we do not find racial antagonism, for the norm of superiority in the Roman system remained a cultural-class attribute. The basic distinction was Roman citizenship, and gradually this was extended to all free-born persons in the municipalities of the empire. Slaves came from every province, and there was no racial distinction among them. (Cox)</p>
<p class="fst">There is really no need to go on quoting. The same general picture is true of all the societies, slave and non-slave, from the Roman empire down to the discovery of America – in the barbarian invasions into Europe, which led to enslavement of whites, in the reign of the Moslems, in the era of political domination by the Catholic Church. There were divisions, discriminations and antagonisms of class, cultural, political and religious character, but none along race or color lines, at least none that have left any serious trace in the historical materials now available. As late as the middle of the fifteenth century, when the West African slave trade to Portugal first began, the rationalization for the enslavement of Negroes was not that they were Negro but that they were not Christian. Those who became Christians were freed, intermarried with the Portuguese and were accepted as equals in Portugal. Afterward, of course, when the slave trade became a big business, the readiness of a slave to convert to Christianity no longer sufficed to gain his emancipation.</p>
<p>Why did race prejudice develop in the capitalist era when it did not under the earlier slave systems? Without thinking we have in any way exhausted the subject, we make the following suggestion: In previous times the slaves were usually of the same color as their masters; both whites and Negroes were masters and slaves; in the European countries the Negroes formed a minority of the slave population. The invidious connotations of slavery were attached to all slaves, white and Negro. If under these conditions the notion of Negro “inferiority” occurred to anyone, it would have seemed ridiculous on the face of it; at any rate, it could never have received any social acceptance.</p>
<p>But slavery in the Americas became confined exclusively to Negroes. <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> The Negro was distinguished by his color, and the invidious connotations of slavery could easily be transferred to that; it was inevitable that the theory of Negro “inferiority” and that anti-Negro prejudice should be created, that they should be extended to other non-white people who offered the possibility of exploitation, and that they should be spread around the globe.</p>
<p>Thus anti-Negro prejudice was not born until after capitalism had come into the world. There are differences of opinion as to the approximate birthdate. M.F. Ashley Montagu, discussing the “modern conception of ‘race’,” says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Neither in the ancient world nor in the world up to the latter part of the eighteenth century did there exist any notion corresponding to it ... A study of the cultures and literatures of mankind, both ancient and recent, shows us that the conception of natural or biological races of mankind differing from one another mentally as well as physically, is an idea which was not born until the latter part of the eighteenth century,” or around the French Revolution. (<strong>Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race</strong>)</p>
<p class="fst">Cox says that if he had to put his finger on the year which marked the beginning of race relations, he would select 1493-94 – when the Pope granted to Catholic Spain and Portugal jurisdictional control over, and the right to exploit, all of the (pre-dominantly non-white) heathen people of the world and their resources. He sees “nascent race prejudice” with the beginning of the slave trade: “Although this peculiar kind of exploitation was then in its incipiency, it had already achieved its significant characteristics.” However, he finds that “racial antagonism attained full maturity” only in the second half of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>Whichever century one chooses, the point is this: Anti-Negro prejudice was originated to justify and preserve a slave-labor system that operated in the interests of capitalism in its pre-industrialist stages, and it was retained in slightly modified form by industrial capitalism after slavery became an obstacle to the further development of capitalism and had to be abolished. Few things in the world are more distinctly stamped with the mark of capitalism.</p>
<table border="2" align="center" cellspacing="2">
<tbody><tr>
<td><img src="lynching.jpg" border="0" width="346" height="295" align="bottom" alt="Terror against opponents of racism"></td>
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</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The implications of this fact are so plain that it is no wonder it has received so little attention in the schools and press of a country dominated by capitalists and their apologists. Anti-Negro prejudice arose out of the needs of capitalism, it is a product of capitalism, it belongs to capitalism, and it will die when capitalism dies.</p>
<p>We who are going to participate in the replacement of capitalism by socialism, and who have good reason to be curious about the first stages of socialism, because we will be living in them, need have no fear about the possibility of any extended lag with respect to race prejudice. Unlike the capitalist system that dominated this country after the Civil War, the socialist society will be free of all exploitative features; it will have no conceivable use for race prejudice, and it will consciously seek to eradicate it along with all the other props of the old system. That is why race prejudice will wither away when capitalism dies – just as surely as the leaf withers when the tree dies, and not much later.</p>
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<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Neither of these would claim they were the first to discover this historical information, and it may well be that other scholars unknown to us preceded them in writing about this field in recent years; all we know is that it first came to our attention through their books. Historical material often lies neglected for long periods until current social and political needs reawaken interest in it. These writers were undoubtedly stimulated into a new and more purposeful interest in the subject by the growth of American Negro militancy and colonial independence struggles during the last 15-20 years.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> Slavery was not confined to Negroes at the beginning. Before the Negro slave on the plantations, there was the Indian slave and the white indentured servant. But Negro slave labor proved cheaper and was more plentiful than either of these, and eventually they were abandoned. The most satisfactory study of this question is in the excellent book by Eric Williams, <strong>Capitalism and Slavery</strong>, 1944. Williams writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior ... The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘sub-human’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”</p>
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George Breitman
When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began
(Spring 1954)
From Fourth International, Vol.15 No.2, Spring 1954, pp.42-45.
To see an expanded 1960 pamphlet version of this article click here
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
IT IS now common knowledge even among conservative circles in the labor movement that race prejudice benefits the interests of the capitalist class and injures the interests of the working class. What is not well known – it still comes as a surprise to many Marxists – and should be made better known is the fact that race prejudice is a uniquely capitalist phenomenon, which either did not exist or had no perceptible influence in pre-capitalist society (that is, before the sixteenth century).
Hundreds of modern scholars have traced anti-Negro prejudice (to take the most important and prevalent type of race prejudice in the United States) back to the African slave trade and the slave system that was introduced into the Americas. Those who profited from the enslavement of the Negroes – the slave traders and merchant capitalists first of Europe and then of America, and the slaveholders – required a rationalization and a moral justification for an archaic social institution that obviously flouted the relatively enlightened principles proclaimed by capitalist society in its struggle against feudalism. Rationalizations always become available when powerful economic interests need them (that is how most politicians and preachers, editors and teachers earn their living) and in this case the theory that Negroes are “inferior” followed close on the discovery that Negro slavery was exceptionally profitable.
This theory was embraced, fitted out with pseudo-scientific trappings and Biblical quotations, and trumpeted forth as a truth so self-evident that only madmen or subversives could doubt or deny it. Its influence on the minds of men was great at all levels of society, and undoubtedly aided the slaveholders in retarding the abolition of slavery. But with the growth of the productive forces, economic interests hostile to the slaveholders brought forth new theories and ideas, and challenged the supremacy of the slaveholders on all fronts, including ideology. The ensuing class struggles – between the capitalists, slaves, workers and farmers on one side and the slaveholders on the other – resulted in the destruction of the slave system.
But if anti-Negro prejudices and ideas arose out of the need to justify and maintain slavery, why didn’t they wither away after slavery was abolished? In the first place, ideas, although they must reflect broad material interests before they can achieve wide circulation, can live lives of their own once they are set into motion, and can survive for a time after the disappearance of the conditions that produced them. (It is instructive to note, for example, that Lincoln did not free himself wholly of race prejudice and continued to believe in the “inferiority” of the Negro even while he was engaged in prosecuting the civil war that abolished the slave system – a striking illustration both of the tendency of ideas to lag behind events and of the primacy of material interest over ideology.)
This is a generalization, however, and does not provide the main explanation for the survival of anti-Negro prejudice after the Civil War. For the striking thing about the Reconstruction period which followed the abolition of slavery was the speed with which old ideas and customs began to change and break up. In the course of a few short years millions of whites began to recover from the racist poisons to which they had been subjected from their birth, to regard Negroes as equals and to work together with them amicably, under the protection of the federal government, in the solution of joint problems. The obliteration of anti-Negro prejudice was started in the social revolution that we know by the name of Reconstruction, and it would have been completed if Reconstruction had been permitted to develop further.
But Reconstruction was halted and then strangled – by the capitalists, acting now in alliance with the former slaveholders. No exploiting class lightly discards weapons that can help maintain its rule, and anti-Negro prejudice had already demonstrated its potency as a force to divide, disrupt and disorient oppressed classes in an exploitative society .After some vacillation and internal struggle that lasted through most of Reconstruction, the capitalist class decided it could make use of anti-Negro prejudice for its own purposes. The capitalists adopted it, nursed it, fed it, gave it new clothing, and infused it with a vigor and an influence it had never commanded before. Anti-Negro prejudice today operates in a different social setting and therefore in a somewhat different form than a century ago, but it was retained after slavery for essentially the same reason that it was introduced under the slave system that developed from the sixteenth century on – for its convenience as an instrument of exploitation; and for that same reason it will not be abandoned by the ruling class of any exploitative society in this country.
But why do we speak of the introduction of anti-Negro prejudice in the slave system, whose spread coincided with the birth of capitalism? Wasn’t there slavery long centuries before capitalism? Didn’t race prejudice exist in the earlier slave societies? Why designate race prejudice as a uniquely capitalist phenomenon? A brief look at slavery of both the capitalist and pre-capitalist periods can lead us to the answers.
Capitalism, the social system that followed and replaced feudalism, owed its rise to world dominance in part to its revival or expansion of forms of exploitation originally developed in the pre-feudal slave societies, and to its adaptation and integration of those forms into the framework of capitalist productive relations. As “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation” through which the early capitalists gathered together the capital necessary to establish and spread the new system, Marx listed “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins.” The African slave trade and slavery produced fortunes that laid the foundations for the most important of the early industries of capitalism, which in turn served to revolutionize the economy of the whole world.
Thus we see, side by side, in clear operation of the laws of uneven and combined development, archaic pre-feudal forms and the most advanced social relations then possible in the post-feudal world. The former were of course in the service of the latter, at least during the first stages of their co-existence. This was not a mere repetition of the slavery of ancient times: one basic economic difference was that the slave system of the Americas produced commodities for the world capitalist market, and was therefore subordinate to and dependent on that market. There were other differences, but here we confine ourselves to the one most relevant to the subject of this article – race relations in the early slave societies.
For the information that follows we are indebted to the writings of an anthropologist and of a sociologist: Ina Corinne Brown, Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems, 1942, chapter 2 (this government publication, the first volume in the National Survey of the Higher Education of Negroes sponsored, by the US Office of Education, is now out of print, but the same material is covered in her book. Race Relations in a Democracy, 1949, chapter 4); and Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 1948, chapter 16. [1] Dr. Cox’s treatment is fuller; he also has been more influenced by Marx.
This is what they write about the ancient Egyptians:
So many persons assume that racial antipathy is a natural or instinctive reaction that it is important to emphasize the fact that race prejudice such as we know did not exist before the modern age. To be sure there was group antipathy which those who read history backwards take to be race prejudice, but actually this antipathy had little or nothing to do with color or the other physical differences by which races are distinguished. For example, the ancient Egyptians looked down upon the Negroes to the south of them. They enslaved these Negroes and spoke scornfully of them. Many writers, reading later racial attitudes into the situation, have seen in this scorn a color prejudice. But the Egyptians were just as scornful of the Asiatic sand dwellers, or Troglodytes as Herodotus called them, and of their other neighbors who were as light or lighter than the Egyptians. The Egyptian artists caricature the wretched captives taken in the frequent wars, but they emphasize the hooked noses of the Hittites, the woolen garments of the Hebrews, and the peculiar dress of the Libyans quite as much as the color or the thick lips of the Negroes. That the Egyptians mixed freely with their southern neighbors, either in slavery or out of it, is evidenced by the fact that some of the Pharaohs were obviously Negroid and eventually Egypt was ruled by an Ethiopian dynasty. (Brown, 1942)
There seems to be no basis for imputing racial antagonism to the Egyptians, Babylonians, or Persians. (Cox)
On the Greeks:
One frequently finds mention of the scornful way in which Negro slaves were referred to in Greece and Rome, but the fact is that equally scornful remarks were made of the white slaves from the North and the East. There seems to be no evidence that color antipathy was involved, and of the total slave population the Negroes constituted only a minor element. (Brown, 1942)
The slave population was enormous, but the slave and the master in Greece were commonly of the same race and there was no occasion to associate any given physical type with the slave status. An opponent of Athenian democracy complained that it was impossible in Athens to distinguish slaves and aliens from citizens because all classes dressed alike and lived in the same way. (Brown, 1949.)
... we do not find race prejudice even in the great Hellenistic empire which extended deeper into the territories of colored people than any other European empire up to the end of the fifteenth century.
The Hellenic Greeks had a cultural, not a racial, standard of belonging, so that their basic division of the peoples of the world were Greeks and barbarians – the barbarians having been all those persons who did not possess the Greek culture, especially its language ... the people of the Greek city-states, who founded colonies among the barbarians on the shores of the Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, welcomed those barbarians to the extent that they were able to participate in Greek culture, and intermarried freely with them. The Greeks knew that they had a superior culture to those of the barbarians, but they included Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics in the concept Hellas as these peoples acquired a working knowledge of the Greek culture.
The experience of the later Hellenistic empire of Alexander tended to be the direct contrary of modern racial antagonism. The narrow patriotism of the city-states was given up for a new cosmopolitanism. Every effort was made to assimilate the barbarians to Greek culture, and in the process a new Greco-Oriental culture with a Greco-Oriental ruling class came into being. Alexander himself took a Persian princess for his wife and encouraged his men to intermarry with the native population. In this empire there was an estate, not a racial, distinction between the rulers and the un-Hellenized natives. (Cox)
On the Romans:
In Rome, as in Greece, the slaves did not differ in outward appearance from free men. R.H. Barrow in his study of the Roman slave says that “neither color nor clothing revealed his condition.” Slaves of different nationalities intermarried. There was no color barrier. A woman might be despised as a wife because she came from a despised group or because she practiced barbaric rites but not because her skin was darker. Furthermore, as W.W. Buckland points out, “any citizen might conceivably become a slave; almost any slave might become a citizen.” (Brown, 1949)
In this civilization also we do not find racial antagonism, for the norm of superiority in the Roman system remained a cultural-class attribute. The basic distinction was Roman citizenship, and gradually this was extended to all free-born persons in the municipalities of the empire. Slaves came from every province, and there was no racial distinction among them. (Cox)
There is really no need to go on quoting. The same general picture is true of all the societies, slave and non-slave, from the Roman empire down to the discovery of America – in the barbarian invasions into Europe, which led to enslavement of whites, in the reign of the Moslems, in the era of political domination by the Catholic Church. There were divisions, discriminations and antagonisms of class, cultural, political and religious character, but none along race or color lines, at least none that have left any serious trace in the historical materials now available. As late as the middle of the fifteenth century, when the West African slave trade to Portugal first began, the rationalization for the enslavement of Negroes was not that they were Negro but that they were not Christian. Those who became Christians were freed, intermarried with the Portuguese and were accepted as equals in Portugal. Afterward, of course, when the slave trade became a big business, the readiness of a slave to convert to Christianity no longer sufficed to gain his emancipation.
Why did race prejudice develop in the capitalist era when it did not under the earlier slave systems? Without thinking we have in any way exhausted the subject, we make the following suggestion: In previous times the slaves were usually of the same color as their masters; both whites and Negroes were masters and slaves; in the European countries the Negroes formed a minority of the slave population. The invidious connotations of slavery were attached to all slaves, white and Negro. If under these conditions the notion of Negro “inferiority” occurred to anyone, it would have seemed ridiculous on the face of it; at any rate, it could never have received any social acceptance.
But slavery in the Americas became confined exclusively to Negroes. [2] The Negro was distinguished by his color, and the invidious connotations of slavery could easily be transferred to that; it was inevitable that the theory of Negro “inferiority” and that anti-Negro prejudice should be created, that they should be extended to other non-white people who offered the possibility of exploitation, and that they should be spread around the globe.
Thus anti-Negro prejudice was not born until after capitalism had come into the world. There are differences of opinion as to the approximate birthdate. M.F. Ashley Montagu, discussing the “modern conception of ‘race’,” says:
“Neither in the ancient world nor in the world up to the latter part of the eighteenth century did there exist any notion corresponding to it ... A study of the cultures and literatures of mankind, both ancient and recent, shows us that the conception of natural or biological races of mankind differing from one another mentally as well as physically, is an idea which was not born until the latter part of the eighteenth century,” or around the French Revolution. (Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race)
Cox says that if he had to put his finger on the year which marked the beginning of race relations, he would select 1493-94 – when the Pope granted to Catholic Spain and Portugal jurisdictional control over, and the right to exploit, all of the (pre-dominantly non-white) heathen people of the world and their resources. He sees “nascent race prejudice” with the beginning of the slave trade: “Although this peculiar kind of exploitation was then in its incipiency, it had already achieved its significant characteristics.” However, he finds that “racial antagonism attained full maturity” only in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Whichever century one chooses, the point is this: Anti-Negro prejudice was originated to justify and preserve a slave-labor system that operated in the interests of capitalism in its pre-industrialist stages, and it was retained in slightly modified form by industrial capitalism after slavery became an obstacle to the further development of capitalism and had to be abolished. Few things in the world are more distinctly stamped with the mark of capitalism.
The implications of this fact are so plain that it is no wonder it has received so little attention in the schools and press of a country dominated by capitalists and their apologists. Anti-Negro prejudice arose out of the needs of capitalism, it is a product of capitalism, it belongs to capitalism, and it will die when capitalism dies.
We who are going to participate in the replacement of capitalism by socialism, and who have good reason to be curious about the first stages of socialism, because we will be living in them, need have no fear about the possibility of any extended lag with respect to race prejudice. Unlike the capitalist system that dominated this country after the Civil War, the socialist society will be free of all exploitative features; it will have no conceivable use for race prejudice, and it will consciously seek to eradicate it along with all the other props of the old system. That is why race prejudice will wither away when capitalism dies – just as surely as the leaf withers when the tree dies, and not much later.
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Footnote
1. Neither of these would claim they were the first to discover this historical information, and it may well be that other scholars unknown to us preceded them in writing about this field in recent years; all we know is that it first came to our attention through their books. Historical material often lies neglected for long periods until current social and political needs reawaken interest in it. These writers were undoubtedly stimulated into a new and more purposeful interest in the subject by the growth of American Negro militancy and colonial independence struggles during the last 15-20 years.
2. Slavery was not confined to Negroes at the beginning. Before the Negro slave on the plantations, there was the Indian slave and the white indentured servant. But Negro slave labor proved cheaper and was more plentiful than either of these, and eventually they were abandoned. The most satisfactory study of this question is in the excellent book by Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944. Williams writes:
“Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior ... The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘sub-human’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Your Stake in the Case<br>
of the Legless Veteran</h1>
<h3>(17 January 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_03" target="new">Vol. 14 No. 3</a>, 17 January 1949, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>If you’re serious about participating in the fight for a better world, the case of James Kutcher concerns you directly and totally. For it is (1) a gauge to the state of civil liberties in the U.S.; (2) a test of the readiness and viability of the labor and liberal movements to preserve them; (3) a contest to decide if the administration can by decree outlaw the Socialist Workers Party and other political opponents</strong></p>
<p>In the beginning there was a certain tendency, especially among iberal opponents of thought-control, to regard the Kutcher lismissal as a “blunder” or ‘hysterical excess” that would surely be corrected on second thought. The Truman administration for its own reasons encouraged this idea for a while, but today it can be given no credence whatever.</p>
<p>It is true that the government had ho idea when it started the persecution of Kutcher last August that it would meet any more resistance in his case than in the hundreds of others that are being handled behind the scenes and disposed of far from the public eye.</p>
<p><em>But they miscalculated. And they were visibly embarrassed when Kutcher decided to fight back, took the case to the public and set off a storm of outraged protest – right in the midle of the election campaign. The purgers could not help noticing, furthermore, that the protests came not only from the administration’s political opponents but also from some of its firmest political supporters, including a section of the union leadership.</em></p>
<p>They therefore proceeded cautiously. At the VA Branch Loyalty Board hearing in Philadelphia last September, Kutcher was told his membership in the SWP would not automatically dictate an adverse decision and that his case would be considered fairly on its own merits.</p>
<p>Attorney General Clark invited Kutcher to Washington for a conference. He as much as promised that if Kutcher refrained from making “political capital” out of the case, he himself would intervene to help restore Kutcher to his job. He explicitly promised to djseuss the eas.e with Gen. Carl R. Gray, VA Administrator. And, a few days before the election, he stopped off in Newark to tell reporters that Kutcher’s “war record is very much in his favor as far as I am concerned.”</p>
<p>From then until the election, rumors were circulated that the whole thing had been a mistake, Kutcher would surely get his job back, etc. After the elections, reporters even phoned Kutcher to check on the story they had heard that he was to get his job back any day.</p>
<p>All these pretenses Were blown sky-high last week when Gen. Gray confirmed the dismissal of Kutcher on the basis of a new Loyalty Board directive, <em>Memorandum No. 32</em>, dated Dec. 17. This document – the first change in the purge procedure since Truman’s election – makes it mandatory to dismiss from government employment all members of the Stalinist party, the SWP and the Workers Party.</p>
<p><em>From now on, the purgers won’t even pretend to consider each case on its individual merits;, from now on, mere membership in these organizations will be considered conclusive guilt of “disloyalty.” Kutcher will have another administrative hearing in the near future – before the trip Loyalty Review Board in Washington – but <strong>Memorandum No. 32</strong> guarantees in advance that he’ll get no semblance of real consideration or justice there.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Why They’re Adamant</h4>
<p class="fst">All this makes it perfectly clear now that the decision to purge Kutcher was not the accidental result of routine operations on the part of some secondary bureaucrat. It |is a question of policy, arrived at and executed by the highest officials in the administration. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it with a purpose.</p>
<p>The question that arises at this point is: Why is the administration following such a get-tough policy toward Kutcher? Why doesn’t it “make an exception” in this ease, restore Kutcher to his job and thus put an end to the furore the case has raised?</p>
<p><em>Because Kutcher’s fight has posed the problem of the blacklist as a matter of principle, and can now be settled only on that basis. Kutcher ha9 shown that it is not only a matter of individual injustice, but of political discrimination against his party and all the other groups on the list. He has proved that it is really impossible to separate these questions – a fact which the administration admits in its own Way and from its own viewpoint by the publication of Memorandum No. 32.</em></p>
<p>This memorandum indicates that the government cannot give way on the Kutcher case without further discrediting the whole purge system. To reinstate him now would be in effect to admit the discriminatory and arbitrary nature of Clark’s inclusion of the SWP on the blacklist, And that in turn would deal a moral blow to the blacklist system itself from which it might not recover. That is why the administration refuses to half its persecution of Kutcher, and why tlic importance of the ease transpefids hjs individual fate as well as the political rights of the SWP, vital as both of these are.</p>
<p>The administration’s toughness in this case may be puzzling to liberals, who expected the Democratic victory of Nov. 2 to stimulate a new flowering of capitalist democracy. But it will hardly come as a surprise to readers of <strong>The Militant</strong>, which has consistently emphasized the threat that the bi-partisan war policy holds for democratic rights. What it proves is that the workers can rely only on their own organized strength for the preservation of civil liberties.<br>
</p>
<h4>Wide Support</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>That the struggle against thought-control cart be effective is already shown by the extent and diversity of the support enlisted on behalf of the veteran by the non partisan Kutcher Civil Rights Committee even before <strong>Memorandum No. 32</strong> fully clarified the nature of the problem.</em></p>
<p>As was to be expected, the greatest help, has come from the labor movement, and above all the CIO, The greatest credit belongs to the New Jersey CIO for its initiative In helping to launch the defense movement. The national CIO through its Committee to Abolish Discrimination, also helped effectively in the early stage of the case. Two CIO internationals – auto and retail clerks – and several state and local councils are on record to help Kutcher, and some of them are quite active in winning moral, and financial support. Some AFL unions and leaders are doing the same.</p>
<p>Civil liberties groups, liberal bodies including a number of ADA branches, the national AVC and religious bodies embracing several denominations are also engaged in the defense campaign.</p>
<p>Press comment has been, extensive and syriipathetie. So far only one out of scores of editorials has been hostile (<strong>Newark Star Eagle</strong>). Columnists of assorted political views have denounced the government’s persecution of Kutcher. Virtually all the liberal journals have taken a stand; only the <strong>New Republic</strong> and <strong>Socialist Call</strong> have not yet found space to express their views. Editorials in even conservative papers have supported Kutcher’s demand for a public hearing for his party.</p>
<p>The leaders of the Communist Party further discredited themselves in progressive opinion by refusing to support the Kutcher fight against the blacklist. They thereby undermine the very principle of labor solidarity against reactionary attacks which alone can put an end to government repressions against them as well as other working class groups. The CP position on Kutcher has provoked considerable dissatisfaction among gome of their rank-and-file members.</p>
<p>Not all of the supporting groups take the same approach to the case. Some are concerned primarily with what happens to Kutcher as an individual; others stress the fact that the job he held was “non-sensitive” or that the SWP is “small and harmless” or that it is anti-Stalinist.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fundamental Issue</h4>
<p class="fst">On the other, hand, some recognize that fundamental civil liberties issues are at stake. The national CIO, for one, called at its last convention for the scrapping of the blacklist itself. And there are many other groups which, while not opposing the blacklist as such, condemn the way in which it was drawn up by one man, the Attorney General, and demand that each group accused should be given a fair and public hearing at which it could defend itself.</p>
<p><em>In one sense these very differences are an encouraging sign. They show that the Kutcher case can be the starting point for a genuinely broad movement of struggle against thought-control. They show that while the witchhunters have had some effect in confusing wide numbers of people, they have by no means extinguished the democratic traditions of the American people, and that there is a great reservoir of organized strength which can be drawn on to overcome the assaults against political freedom and reserve the trend to reaction.</em></p>
<p>The Kutcher ease is sure to go to the courts now that the Loyalty Review Board has tipped its hand on the kind of administrative “hearing” it is preparing for Kutcher. A great legal contest will ensue, but the real decision will not be made by the courts. It will be made by the working people and their organizations. And that depends in great part on the energy and intelligence with which the mobilization of national support around the Kutcher case is approached by the politically more advanced workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Duty</h4>
<p class="fst">Much has already been accomplished, but it’s only a beginning. A liberal may be able to content himself by voting for a favorable resolution, donating a few dollars and wishing good luck to Kutcher. But that will never do for people who have a greater understanding than the liberals of the dangers of the witch hunt and the opportunities the Kutcher case gives us for combatting it.</p>
<p><em>James Kutcher has gone all-out in the fight for civil and political rights. Glass-conscious readers of <strong>The Militant</strong> and members of the SWP can do no less. If we don’t, we’ll be remiss in our duties not only to Kutcher but to ourselves and the rights of the workers as a whole, and we’ll be violating the high standards of working class morality. We must suit our deeds to our understanding of the necessities.</em></p>
<p>In its essence the Kutcher case is a fight to prevent the political party in power from outlawing its political opponents and thus paving the way for full-scale dictatorship. That means it is also a fight to prevent the outlawing of revolutionary socialism. In such a fight no half-way measures are permissible. We must give everything we’ve got to this fight. We’ve got to go out now and rouse the whole working class.</p>
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Breitman Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
George Breitman
Your Stake in the Case
of the Legless Veteran
(17 January 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 14 No. 3, 17 January 1949, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
If you’re serious about participating in the fight for a better world, the case of James Kutcher concerns you directly and totally. For it is (1) a gauge to the state of civil liberties in the U.S.; (2) a test of the readiness and viability of the labor and liberal movements to preserve them; (3) a contest to decide if the administration can by decree outlaw the Socialist Workers Party and other political opponents
In the beginning there was a certain tendency, especially among iberal opponents of thought-control, to regard the Kutcher lismissal as a “blunder” or ‘hysterical excess” that would surely be corrected on second thought. The Truman administration for its own reasons encouraged this idea for a while, but today it can be given no credence whatever.
It is true that the government had ho idea when it started the persecution of Kutcher last August that it would meet any more resistance in his case than in the hundreds of others that are being handled behind the scenes and disposed of far from the public eye.
But they miscalculated. And they were visibly embarrassed when Kutcher decided to fight back, took the case to the public and set off a storm of outraged protest – right in the midle of the election campaign. The purgers could not help noticing, furthermore, that the protests came not only from the administration’s political opponents but also from some of its firmest political supporters, including a section of the union leadership.
They therefore proceeded cautiously. At the VA Branch Loyalty Board hearing in Philadelphia last September, Kutcher was told his membership in the SWP would not automatically dictate an adverse decision and that his case would be considered fairly on its own merits.
Attorney General Clark invited Kutcher to Washington for a conference. He as much as promised that if Kutcher refrained from making “political capital” out of the case, he himself would intervene to help restore Kutcher to his job. He explicitly promised to djseuss the eas.e with Gen. Carl R. Gray, VA Administrator. And, a few days before the election, he stopped off in Newark to tell reporters that Kutcher’s “war record is very much in his favor as far as I am concerned.”
From then until the election, rumors were circulated that the whole thing had been a mistake, Kutcher would surely get his job back, etc. After the elections, reporters even phoned Kutcher to check on the story they had heard that he was to get his job back any day.
All these pretenses Were blown sky-high last week when Gen. Gray confirmed the dismissal of Kutcher on the basis of a new Loyalty Board directive, Memorandum No. 32, dated Dec. 17. This document – the first change in the purge procedure since Truman’s election – makes it mandatory to dismiss from government employment all members of the Stalinist party, the SWP and the Workers Party.
From now on, the purgers won’t even pretend to consider each case on its individual merits;, from now on, mere membership in these organizations will be considered conclusive guilt of “disloyalty.” Kutcher will have another administrative hearing in the near future – before the trip Loyalty Review Board in Washington – but Memorandum No. 32 guarantees in advance that he’ll get no semblance of real consideration or justice there.
Why They’re Adamant
All this makes it perfectly clear now that the decision to purge Kutcher was not the accidental result of routine operations on the part of some secondary bureaucrat. It |is a question of policy, arrived at and executed by the highest officials in the administration. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it with a purpose.
The question that arises at this point is: Why is the administration following such a get-tough policy toward Kutcher? Why doesn’t it “make an exception” in this ease, restore Kutcher to his job and thus put an end to the furore the case has raised?
Because Kutcher’s fight has posed the problem of the blacklist as a matter of principle, and can now be settled only on that basis. Kutcher ha9 shown that it is not only a matter of individual injustice, but of political discrimination against his party and all the other groups on the list. He has proved that it is really impossible to separate these questions – a fact which the administration admits in its own Way and from its own viewpoint by the publication of Memorandum No. 32.
This memorandum indicates that the government cannot give way on the Kutcher case without further discrediting the whole purge system. To reinstate him now would be in effect to admit the discriminatory and arbitrary nature of Clark’s inclusion of the SWP on the blacklist, And that in turn would deal a moral blow to the blacklist system itself from which it might not recover. That is why the administration refuses to half its persecution of Kutcher, and why tlic importance of the ease transpefids hjs individual fate as well as the political rights of the SWP, vital as both of these are.
The administration’s toughness in this case may be puzzling to liberals, who expected the Democratic victory of Nov. 2 to stimulate a new flowering of capitalist democracy. But it will hardly come as a surprise to readers of The Militant, which has consistently emphasized the threat that the bi-partisan war policy holds for democratic rights. What it proves is that the workers can rely only on their own organized strength for the preservation of civil liberties.
Wide Support
That the struggle against thought-control cart be effective is already shown by the extent and diversity of the support enlisted on behalf of the veteran by the non partisan Kutcher Civil Rights Committee even before Memorandum No. 32 fully clarified the nature of the problem.
As was to be expected, the greatest help, has come from the labor movement, and above all the CIO, The greatest credit belongs to the New Jersey CIO for its initiative In helping to launch the defense movement. The national CIO through its Committee to Abolish Discrimination, also helped effectively in the early stage of the case. Two CIO internationals – auto and retail clerks – and several state and local councils are on record to help Kutcher, and some of them are quite active in winning moral, and financial support. Some AFL unions and leaders are doing the same.
Civil liberties groups, liberal bodies including a number of ADA branches, the national AVC and religious bodies embracing several denominations are also engaged in the defense campaign.
Press comment has been, extensive and syriipathetie. So far only one out of scores of editorials has been hostile (Newark Star Eagle). Columnists of assorted political views have denounced the government’s persecution of Kutcher. Virtually all the liberal journals have taken a stand; only the New Republic and Socialist Call have not yet found space to express their views. Editorials in even conservative papers have supported Kutcher’s demand for a public hearing for his party.
The leaders of the Communist Party further discredited themselves in progressive opinion by refusing to support the Kutcher fight against the blacklist. They thereby undermine the very principle of labor solidarity against reactionary attacks which alone can put an end to government repressions against them as well as other working class groups. The CP position on Kutcher has provoked considerable dissatisfaction among gome of their rank-and-file members.
Not all of the supporting groups take the same approach to the case. Some are concerned primarily with what happens to Kutcher as an individual; others stress the fact that the job he held was “non-sensitive” or that the SWP is “small and harmless” or that it is anti-Stalinist.
Fundamental Issue
On the other, hand, some recognize that fundamental civil liberties issues are at stake. The national CIO, for one, called at its last convention for the scrapping of the blacklist itself. And there are many other groups which, while not opposing the blacklist as such, condemn the way in which it was drawn up by one man, the Attorney General, and demand that each group accused should be given a fair and public hearing at which it could defend itself.
In one sense these very differences are an encouraging sign. They show that the Kutcher case can be the starting point for a genuinely broad movement of struggle against thought-control. They show that while the witchhunters have had some effect in confusing wide numbers of people, they have by no means extinguished the democratic traditions of the American people, and that there is a great reservoir of organized strength which can be drawn on to overcome the assaults against political freedom and reserve the trend to reaction.
The Kutcher ease is sure to go to the courts now that the Loyalty Review Board has tipped its hand on the kind of administrative “hearing” it is preparing for Kutcher. A great legal contest will ensue, but the real decision will not be made by the courts. It will be made by the working people and their organizations. And that depends in great part on the energy and intelligence with which the mobilization of national support around the Kutcher case is approached by the politically more advanced workers.
Our Duty
Much has already been accomplished, but it’s only a beginning. A liberal may be able to content himself by voting for a favorable resolution, donating a few dollars and wishing good luck to Kutcher. But that will never do for people who have a greater understanding than the liberals of the dangers of the witch hunt and the opportunities the Kutcher case gives us for combatting it.
James Kutcher has gone all-out in the fight for civil and political rights. Glass-conscious readers of The Militant and members of the SWP can do no less. If we don’t, we’ll be remiss in our duties not only to Kutcher but to ourselves and the rights of the workers as a whole, and we’ll be violating the high standards of working class morality. We must suit our deeds to our understanding of the necessities.
In its essence the Kutcher case is a fight to prevent the political party in power from outlawing its political opponents and thus paving the way for full-scale dictatorship. That means it is also a fight to prevent the outlawing of revolutionary socialism. In such a fight no half-way measures are permissible. We must give everything we’ve got to this fight. We’ve got to go out now and rouse the whole working class.
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<h1>Castroism: Revolutionary or Centrist?</h1>
<h3>by George Breitman</h3>
<p>I found the PC discussion of Cuba starting in August 1978 and the NC
discussion at the December 1978 plenum helpful in clarifying certain
questions and reaching conclusions on others; the same may have
happened with other members who entered the discussion before having
made up their minds on everything. At the December plenum I found
myself in enough agreement with the NC majority so that I could support
the main lines of its reports (later reworked and published as “In
Defense of the Cuban Revolution” in Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No.
1, April 1979). This meant agreement that Cuba is a workers’ state with
bureaucratic deformations, requiring not political revolution, the
policy we apply to the Soviet Union today, but a policy of reform (to
use the terminology we used about the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1933,
although the majority report does not use this terminology). But while
accepting the main conclusion of the majority report, I continue to
question or reject parts of it. In the interests of political clarity
and the resolution on Cuba that eventually will replace the majority
report, I want to examine some of the differences I still have with the
majority document. I will leave aside subsidiary or minor differences<a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1" target="_blank">[1]</a> and concentrate on one or two
questions or clusters of questions I consider to be important
politically or methodologically.</p>
<p>The majority report rejects the view, supported by me in the PC-NC
discussion, that we should characterize the Castro regime as centrist.
Most of us in the discussion agreed, I think, that neither
“revolutionary” nor “centrist” fitted the Cuban reality perfectly or
completely. Some comrades of the majority said it would take stretching
before either of these terms could be applied to Cuba, but they also
held that the term revolutionary was more correct because it required
less stretching than the term centrist. I conceded that neither term
was perfect for the present purposes and said that whatever term was
better (centrist, I thought), it would have to be qualified. After the
plenum I decided that the term chosen was not as important as a
qualification that would correctly convey the complex and contradictory
reality of Cuba. Now the written form of the majority report has been
printed, and I still find its reasoning on this point wrong.</p>
<p>The majority report doesn’t want to be bothered with qualifications;
it prefers simplifications. It says, “If we were to adopt the term
centrist to describe them [the Castro leadership team], we would have
to say that it is a highly peculiar kind of centrism at best” (p. 23).
So what? What’s so terrible about saying that Castroism is a highly
peculiar kind of centrism when the report is filled with evidence that
Castroism is highly peculiar in many if not most respects, and has been
since its birth? And to the extent that Castroism can correctly be
called revolutionary, aren’t we compelled in effect to point out the
highly peculiar kind of revolutionariness that it represents? So let’s
not reject a term, if it fits generally, merely because it does not fit
perfectly. That is what qualifications are for. That is how terms like
degenerated workers’ state (a highly peculiar kind of workers’ state)
came into existence; without such qualifications our education would
really be retarded.</p>
<p>Let us recall that our own movement, the Left Opposition, and
Trotsky considered Stalinism in its early stages, the decade following
1923, to be a variety of centrism. Because Stalinism had certain
peculiarities which made it distinct and unlike other forms of
centrism, they called it by a special name, bureaucratic centrism; that
is, they qualified the term. I don’t propose that we call the
Castroists bureaucratic centrists because that might give the
impression that we consider them to be Stalinists, which we don’t. But
if on the whole we find the Castroists to be centrists it should not be
too difficult to find a scientifically correct term to qualify the
noun. (It is true that after 1933 our movement stopped calling the
Stalinists bureaucratic centrists, which has led some of our members to
think that the term was never correct. But they are quite wrong on this
point. After 1933 the Stalinists became counterrevolutionary; that was
why the previously correct term for them, a variety of centrism, was no
longer appropriate.)</p>
<p>In the majority report the question of centrism is devoid of both
complexity and validity. The only pseudo-concession it makes on this
score is, “In a loose way, of course, we can say that the Castro
current is somewhere between revolutionary Marxism and
counterrevolutionary Stalinism.” And it withdraws that immediately by
adding, “But that isn’t very useful. It doesn’t help orient us
politically. As is usually the case, behind the question of terminology
is not so much a theoretical debate as a question of political line”
(p. 23).</p>
<p>As one who thought and thinks Castroism veers between revolutionary
Marxism and counterrevolutionary Stalinism, I can’t see what is “loose”
about that way of viewing it, but I am willing to tighten it here as I
did in the NC discussion. Meanwhile I think it described the Cuban
phenomenon better than any one-sided, oversimplified characterization.
I would also like to have an explanation of why a conclusion that
Castroism is revolutionary should help to orient us politically while a
conclusion that it is centrist doesn’t help to orient us politically.
Can a simplistic reduction of a complex reality ever help to orient
anybody politically?</p>
<p>What do we mean by centrism and what is its relevance to Cuba? In
the sense that our movement has used the term up till now, centrism is
a tendency that oscillates between revolution and reformism, reflecting
the pressures of the workers at one time and those of the capitalists
at another. Castroism fits roughly or loosely into that category, the
fit becoming much tighter when we add that the reformism toward which
it gravitates, and by which it is repelled, is a very specific kind of
reformism —Stalinism.</p>
<p>There are many varieties of centrism, we also have said in the past,
some of them going far to the right, others far to the left. The
direction in which they are moving at a given moment has always been
stressed by us as a decisive criterion in our assessing and relating to
them. I see this as applicable to Castroism too. Where the majority
report sees only an undeviating and remarkable consistency of Cuban
policy and practice extending over twenty years, denying that the
Cubans have ever made a right turn or a left turn in this period,
objective analysis I think shows that the Cuban leadership has veered
right and left many times in this period, under different pressures,
and that it engaged in a major right turn in the late 1960s (which the
majority report delicately calls a pause for reflection), and then in a
left turn by the mid-1970s.</p>
<p>The pressures to which the Castroists respond are class pressures.
Sometimes they express the interests of the working class, but
sometimes they express those of the imperialists and capitalists. The
majority report praises them for never bending, never buckling, etc.
But whose class interests does Castroism serve when it fights against
workers’ democracy in Cuba, as it has done for twenty years? Whose
class interests did it serve when it backed the Kremlin’s invasion of
Czechoslovakia? Whose class interests did it serve when it supported
Torrijos in Panama at the very same time that its troops were fighting
those of the imperialists in Africa?</p>
<p>Now let us see how the majority report handles this question. First
of all it tries to dispose of it by definition: “In several decisive
aspects, the term ‘centrist’ does not fit the Cuban leadership. Most
importantly, no centrist current that has ever existed could have done
what the Castro team has done in Cuba” (lead the workers and peasants
to power, begin the socialist transformation of society, checkmate the
strongest imperialist power, fight to extend the revolution for twenty
years). But if no centrist current that ever existed could do what the
Castroists have done, it doesn’t automatically follow that Castroism
isn’t centrist; it might mean only that the Castro regime is the first
centrist current to have done them, if it is centrist. It would not be
the only unique thing about Castroism.</p>
<p>The majority report then has several paragraphs discussing
characteristics of centrism that do not fit Castroism: instability,
short life, inconsistency between left talk and right deeds,
halfheartedness, etc. But these traits are all secondary or tertiary
aspects of centrism, insignificant in comparison to the major
characteristics (oscillation between revolution and reformism, the
importance of the direction in which the given centrism is moving). It
is unfortunate that Trotsky is cited copiously on the secondary aspects
but not on the primary ones; this is not the way to educate ourselves
or anyone else. And it is doubly unfortunate that no room was found in
twenty-two long pages to cite or discuss the most relevant thing that
Trotsky said about centrism —namely, that under certain special
conditions centrists might be able to come to power at the head of a
workers’ and farmers’ government.<a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2" target="_blank">[2]</a>
The supporters of the majority report are well acquainted with
Trotsky’s view on this matter since they quote it frequently from the
Transitional Program where it appears, but they didn’t find time or
room to include it in their examination here of centrism and Castroism.</p>
<p>The majority report says, “If we agree that centrists couldn’t have
led the Cuban working class to power...” But we emphatically do not
agree on that, and it doesn’t seem to me that Trotsky would have agreed
either. But let them finish their thought: “If we agree that centrists
couldn’t have led the Cuban working class to power, then we have to
conclude that they at least began as revolutionists. But if there has
been no break in the continuity of their positions, when did they cease
being revolutionists and become centrists? If we were to decide they
are now centrists, we would have to go back and undo what we said and
wrote about the Cuban revolution from the beginning and explain why we
were wrong. Or we would have to try to pinpoint a qualitative change
from revolutionary to centrist, which doesn’t match the facts” (p. 23).</p>
<p>These are what I can only call trick questions; whatever their aim,
their result is to discourage thinking through complicated questions
about the Cuban experience. Trotsky tried to alert us to the
possibility that “revolutionary” and “centrist” could coincide and
coexist at certain times, but the majority report wants us to view such
categories as absolutely exclusive (if the Castroists were centrists,
they couldn’t have led the revolution; if they led the revolution, they
couldn’t have been centrists, etc.). Trotsky prepared us for unexpected
developments from leaders of petty-bourgeois parties, including the
Stalinists, under certain conditions that seem applicable to the
beginning of the Cuban revolution, but the majority report seems more
comfortable with emphasis on formal distinctions, despite its avowed
stress on the primacy of political line.</p>
<p>One thing that has to be rejected completely is the majority’s claim
that if we choose the term centrist now we have to go back and undo
what we said and wrote about the Cuban revolution and explain why we
were wrong. We wouldn’t have to undo anything except a term; the basic
analysis would remain unchanged even if we changed that term. Our
analysis of the Cuban revolution and our attitude to it did not flow
from or depend on our having said revolutionary instead of centrist
almost twenty years ago. Our analysis and our attitude never depended
on a term or label, but on the revolutionary things the Castroists were
doing.</p>
<p>We can easily change the label, if it is otherwise correct to do so,
without retracting a single basic thing we said or did. We can still
defend Cuba against imperialism even if its leadership is centrist. We
can still classify Cuba as a workers’ state with bureaucratic
deformations even if we decide that Castroism is centrist. We can still
be for the reform of the Cuban workers’ state, instead of for political
revolution, as we were for reform of the Soviet workers’ state from
1923 to 1933 when we considered Stalinism to be a form of centrism. So
we don’t have to undo a thing in what we said and wrote from the
beginning, except for the revolutionary/centrist label. And we also
wouldn’t have to go through the contortions of trying to pinpoint a
qualitative change from revolutionary to centrist, whatever that may
mean.</p>
<p>The majority report reminds us that from the beginning the SWP and
the Fourth International as a whole have characterized the Castro
leadership not as centrists but as revolutionaries. That is quite true,
and I fully concurred with that characterization in the early 1960s.
But that was a long time ago. A lot has changed since then, including
Castroism. We can now see that tendency and its evolution more clearly
than we did in 1960 or 1961. On the basis of more information and
longer experience we should not be afraid to say something different if
we see something different. Otherwise we’d be stuck forever with wrong
or inadequate concepts only because they were first adopted a long time
ago.</p>
<p>In 1960-61 Castroism was still developing, and largely to the left.
It had not congealed yet, it was still in transition and motion, it was
still in the process of maturing. It didn’t itself know precisely how
it would evolve in the future, and neither did anyone else. We
correctly gave it credit for all its positive achievements and as
revolutionary optimists did what we could to move it forward to
authentic revolutionary Marxism. The most absurd thing is to act as if
nothing has happened since then, as if Castroism is virtually the same
thing it was two decades ago. Some things may not have changed but
others certainly have. Castroism is not Stalinism, and never was, but
Castroism is not as independent of Stalinism as it used to be, and it
has made a certain amount of adaptation to Stalinist ideology and
practice, in both foreign and domestic policy. How can any serious
person deny this?</p>
<p>Castroism, we agree, is not a “hardened” or “crystallized”
bureaucratic caste of the type that rules in the USSR and can be
removed only through a political revolution. But Castroism does rest on
a privileged bureaucratic stratum that maintains a monopoly of
political power in Cuba. Is this stratum more privileged than it was
ten or twenty years ago? Is it bigger or smaller than it was then?
These are the kinds of questions we should be examining, but the
majority report is not much interested in them.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago the Castroists were against soviets and workers’
democracy; today they are still against them. Can we conclude then that
nothing has changed? No, because in the last five years the Castroists
have introduced new institutions, assemblies, constitution, etc., whose
<em>main purpose</em> is to prevent the introduction of workers’
democracy. So something definitely has changed. At the very least we
now can have a better perspective on the Castroist opposition to the
building of soviets in Cuba before they became economically dependent
on the Kremlin.</p>
<p>To conclude on this point: The term centrism fits Castroism better
than any other I have encountered in this discussion, but I can’t make
a motion to adopt this term because (1) it does not fit completely and
because (2) I have not been able, by myself, to work out a satisfactory
qualifying term. But if centrist is not a completely acceptable term,
revolutionary is even more unacceptable. My hopes that a correct and
adequate qualification of the term revolutionary might be made in the
majority report were not realized; and what is printed in our public
press contains even fewer qualifications than the majority report.</p>
<p>The majority report should be commended for criticizing certain
political defects and errors of Castroism (for the first time in
years), but its analysis would be improved if it would stop trying to
convince us at every possible opportunity, appropriate or not, that
Castroism is and always has been revolutionary. These explanations
sometimes take us to the border of apologetics. I feel embarrassment
for the SWP when I read what the majority report says about Castroism
and Eritrea. So far as I can see, there was nothing progressive or
revolutionary about the Castro policy on that question; the blood of
the Eritrean revolution is on their hands <em>politically</em>, and we
should be able to state it plainly, instead of insisting so strongly on
the two-bit differences Castro had on this question with Brezhnev and
Mengistu.</p>
<p>When the Castroists do something progressive or revolutionary, let’s
be the first to point it out. When they do something nonrevolutionary
or antirevolutionary, let’s point that out too. And at all times let’s
educate ourselves and others to understand that Castroism is capable of
both. That’s the line we ought to have, whatever the terminology we
choose.</p>
<p>June 11, 1979</p>
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1" target="_blank">1.</a> For example, I
cannot accept the report’s characterization of the Ogaden war in 1978
as an “imperialist-inspired attempt by the Somalian regime to roll back
the Ethiopian revolution” (p. 3). Neither here nor in other
writings by the supporters of the majority report do I see evidence to
support the “imperialist-inspired” claim about the origins of the war.
I was dubious about our first position on the Ogaden (support of the
Somalians) and I am dissatisfied with our current position (support of
the Ethiopians); I think we should have been neutral in this conflict.
But I do not go into the matter here because I do not regard it as
decisive one way or another for determining the character of the Cuban
regime, the degree of its degeneration, the basic attitude we should
have to the Cuban CP, etc. I don’t mean that the Ogaden question is
subsidiary or unimportant in and of itself —only that it does not
really help us to settle much about our differences over Cuba, despite
the contentions of the majority and advocates of the
political-revolution and state-capitalism positions.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2" target="_blank">2.</a> Trotsky in 1931:
“In some situations victory is possible even with a very bad policy.
With the deepening of the [world economic] crisis and its prolongation,
with the subsequent disintegration of the social democracy and the
demoralization of the [bourgeois] governments, the victory of the
German Communist Party <em>is not excluded,</em> even with the policy
of the Thaelmann leadership. But, unfortunately, it is merely not
excluded. The actual chances for such a victory are not great...”
(“Some Ideas on the Period and the Tasks of the Left Opposition,” July
28, 1931, in <em>Writings of Leon Trotsky</em> (1930-31), p. 293.)</p>
<p class="note">Trotsky in 1932: “In a previous letter the thought was
expressed that under <em>certain</em> historical circumstances the
proletariat can conquer even under a left centrist leadership. Many
comrades were inclined, I have been informed, to interpret this thought
in the sense of minimizing the role of the Left Opposition and of
mitigating the mistakes and sins of bureaucratic centrism. Needless to
say how far I am from such an interpretation.</p>
<p class="note">“The strategy of the party is an exceedingly important
element of the proletarian revolution. But it is by no means the only
factor. With an exceptionally favorable relation of forces the
proletariat can come to power even under a non Marxist leadership. This
was the case for example in the Paris Commune and, in a period which
lies closer to us, in Hungary. The depth of the disintegration of the
enemy camp, its political demoralization, the worthlessness of its
leaders, can assure decisive superiority to the proletariat for a
certain time even if its own leadership is weak.</p>
<p class="note">“But in the first place there is nothing to guarantee
such a ‘fortunate’ coincidence of circumstances; it represents the
exception rather than the rule. Second, the victory obtained under such
conditions remains, as the same two examples—Paris and Hungary—prove,
exceedingly unstable. To weaken the struggle against Stalinism on the
ground that under <em>certain</em> conditions even the Stalinist
leadership would prove unable to prevent the victory of the proletariat
(as the leadership of Thaelmann could not prevent the growth in the
number of Communist voters) would be to stand all of Marxist politics
on its head.</p>
<p class="note">“The theoretical possibility of a victory under
centrist leadership must be understood, besides, not mechanically but
dialectically...” (“On the State of the Left Opposition,” December 16,
1932, in <em>Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932-33),</em> p. 35.)</p>
<p class="note">Trotsky in 1938: “Is the creation of... [a workers’ and
farmers’] government by the traditional workers’ organizations
possible? Past experience shows, as has already been stated, that this
is, to say the least, highly improbable. However, one cannot
categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that under
the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat,
financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.) the petty bourgeois
parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves
wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case, one
thing is not to be doubted; even if this highly improbable variant
somewhere, at some time, becomes a reality and the workers’ and
farmers’ government in the above mentioned sense is established in
fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the
actual dictatorship of the proletariat...” (“The Death Agony of
Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” April 1938, in <em>The
Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution,</em> p. 135.)</p>
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Castroism: Revolutionary or Centrist?
by George Breitman
I found the PC discussion of Cuba starting in August 1978 and the NC
discussion at the December 1978 plenum helpful in clarifying certain
questions and reaching conclusions on others; the same may have
happened with other members who entered the discussion before having
made up their minds on everything. At the December plenum I found
myself in enough agreement with the NC majority so that I could support
the main lines of its reports (later reworked and published as “In
Defense of the Cuban Revolution” in Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No.
1, April 1979). This meant agreement that Cuba is a workers’ state with
bureaucratic deformations, requiring not political revolution, the
policy we apply to the Soviet Union today, but a policy of reform (to
use the terminology we used about the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1933,
although the majority report does not use this terminology). But while
accepting the main conclusion of the majority report, I continue to
question or reject parts of it. In the interests of political clarity
and the resolution on Cuba that eventually will replace the majority
report, I want to examine some of the differences I still have with the
majority document. I will leave aside subsidiary or minor differences[1] and concentrate on one or two
questions or clusters of questions I consider to be important
politically or methodologically.
The majority report rejects the view, supported by me in the PC-NC
discussion, that we should characterize the Castro regime as centrist.
Most of us in the discussion agreed, I think, that neither
“revolutionary” nor “centrist” fitted the Cuban reality perfectly or
completely. Some comrades of the majority said it would take stretching
before either of these terms could be applied to Cuba, but they also
held that the term revolutionary was more correct because it required
less stretching than the term centrist. I conceded that neither term
was perfect for the present purposes and said that whatever term was
better (centrist, I thought), it would have to be qualified. After the
plenum I decided that the term chosen was not as important as a
qualification that would correctly convey the complex and contradictory
reality of Cuba. Now the written form of the majority report has been
printed, and I still find its reasoning on this point wrong.
The majority report doesn’t want to be bothered with qualifications;
it prefers simplifications. It says, “If we were to adopt the term
centrist to describe them [the Castro leadership team], we would have
to say that it is a highly peculiar kind of centrism at best” (p. 23).
So what? What’s so terrible about saying that Castroism is a highly
peculiar kind of centrism when the report is filled with evidence that
Castroism is highly peculiar in many if not most respects, and has been
since its birth? And to the extent that Castroism can correctly be
called revolutionary, aren’t we compelled in effect to point out the
highly peculiar kind of revolutionariness that it represents? So let’s
not reject a term, if it fits generally, merely because it does not fit
perfectly. That is what qualifications are for. That is how terms like
degenerated workers’ state (a highly peculiar kind of workers’ state)
came into existence; without such qualifications our education would
really be retarded.
Let us recall that our own movement, the Left Opposition, and
Trotsky considered Stalinism in its early stages, the decade following
1923, to be a variety of centrism. Because Stalinism had certain
peculiarities which made it distinct and unlike other forms of
centrism, they called it by a special name, bureaucratic centrism; that
is, they qualified the term. I don’t propose that we call the
Castroists bureaucratic centrists because that might give the
impression that we consider them to be Stalinists, which we don’t. But
if on the whole we find the Castroists to be centrists it should not be
too difficult to find a scientifically correct term to qualify the
noun. (It is true that after 1933 our movement stopped calling the
Stalinists bureaucratic centrists, which has led some of our members to
think that the term was never correct. But they are quite wrong on this
point. After 1933 the Stalinists became counterrevolutionary; that was
why the previously correct term for them, a variety of centrism, was no
longer appropriate.)
In the majority report the question of centrism is devoid of both
complexity and validity. The only pseudo-concession it makes on this
score is, “In a loose way, of course, we can say that the Castro
current is somewhere between revolutionary Marxism and
counterrevolutionary Stalinism.” And it withdraws that immediately by
adding, “But that isn’t very useful. It doesn’t help orient us
politically. As is usually the case, behind the question of terminology
is not so much a theoretical debate as a question of political line”
(p. 23).
As one who thought and thinks Castroism veers between revolutionary
Marxism and counterrevolutionary Stalinism, I can’t see what is “loose”
about that way of viewing it, but I am willing to tighten it here as I
did in the NC discussion. Meanwhile I think it described the Cuban
phenomenon better than any one-sided, oversimplified characterization.
I would also like to have an explanation of why a conclusion that
Castroism is revolutionary should help to orient us politically while a
conclusion that it is centrist doesn’t help to orient us politically.
Can a simplistic reduction of a complex reality ever help to orient
anybody politically?
What do we mean by centrism and what is its relevance to Cuba? In
the sense that our movement has used the term up till now, centrism is
a tendency that oscillates between revolution and reformism, reflecting
the pressures of the workers at one time and those of the capitalists
at another. Castroism fits roughly or loosely into that category, the
fit becoming much tighter when we add that the reformism toward which
it gravitates, and by which it is repelled, is a very specific kind of
reformism —Stalinism.
There are many varieties of centrism, we also have said in the past,
some of them going far to the right, others far to the left. The
direction in which they are moving at a given moment has always been
stressed by us as a decisive criterion in our assessing and relating to
them. I see this as applicable to Castroism too. Where the majority
report sees only an undeviating and remarkable consistency of Cuban
policy and practice extending over twenty years, denying that the
Cubans have ever made a right turn or a left turn in this period,
objective analysis I think shows that the Cuban leadership has veered
right and left many times in this period, under different pressures,
and that it engaged in a major right turn in the late 1960s (which the
majority report delicately calls a pause for reflection), and then in a
left turn by the mid-1970s.
The pressures to which the Castroists respond are class pressures.
Sometimes they express the interests of the working class, but
sometimes they express those of the imperialists and capitalists. The
majority report praises them for never bending, never buckling, etc.
But whose class interests does Castroism serve when it fights against
workers’ democracy in Cuba, as it has done for twenty years? Whose
class interests did it serve when it backed the Kremlin’s invasion of
Czechoslovakia? Whose class interests did it serve when it supported
Torrijos in Panama at the very same time that its troops were fighting
those of the imperialists in Africa?
Now let us see how the majority report handles this question. First
of all it tries to dispose of it by definition: “In several decisive
aspects, the term ‘centrist’ does not fit the Cuban leadership. Most
importantly, no centrist current that has ever existed could have done
what the Castro team has done in Cuba” (lead the workers and peasants
to power, begin the socialist transformation of society, checkmate the
strongest imperialist power, fight to extend the revolution for twenty
years). But if no centrist current that ever existed could do what the
Castroists have done, it doesn’t automatically follow that Castroism
isn’t centrist; it might mean only that the Castro regime is the first
centrist current to have done them, if it is centrist. It would not be
the only unique thing about Castroism.
The majority report then has several paragraphs discussing
characteristics of centrism that do not fit Castroism: instability,
short life, inconsistency between left talk and right deeds,
halfheartedness, etc. But these traits are all secondary or tertiary
aspects of centrism, insignificant in comparison to the major
characteristics (oscillation between revolution and reformism, the
importance of the direction in which the given centrism is moving). It
is unfortunate that Trotsky is cited copiously on the secondary aspects
but not on the primary ones; this is not the way to educate ourselves
or anyone else. And it is doubly unfortunate that no room was found in
twenty-two long pages to cite or discuss the most relevant thing that
Trotsky said about centrism —namely, that under certain special
conditions centrists might be able to come to power at the head of a
workers’ and farmers’ government.[2]
The supporters of the majority report are well acquainted with
Trotsky’s view on this matter since they quote it frequently from the
Transitional Program where it appears, but they didn’t find time or
room to include it in their examination here of centrism and Castroism.
The majority report says, “If we agree that centrists couldn’t have
led the Cuban working class to power...” But we emphatically do not
agree on that, and it doesn’t seem to me that Trotsky would have agreed
either. But let them finish their thought: “If we agree that centrists
couldn’t have led the Cuban working class to power, then we have to
conclude that they at least began as revolutionists. But if there has
been no break in the continuity of their positions, when did they cease
being revolutionists and become centrists? If we were to decide they
are now centrists, we would have to go back and undo what we said and
wrote about the Cuban revolution from the beginning and explain why we
were wrong. Or we would have to try to pinpoint a qualitative change
from revolutionary to centrist, which doesn’t match the facts” (p. 23).
These are what I can only call trick questions; whatever their aim,
their result is to discourage thinking through complicated questions
about the Cuban experience. Trotsky tried to alert us to the
possibility that “revolutionary” and “centrist” could coincide and
coexist at certain times, but the majority report wants us to view such
categories as absolutely exclusive (if the Castroists were centrists,
they couldn’t have led the revolution; if they led the revolution, they
couldn’t have been centrists, etc.). Trotsky prepared us for unexpected
developments from leaders of petty-bourgeois parties, including the
Stalinists, under certain conditions that seem applicable to the
beginning of the Cuban revolution, but the majority report seems more
comfortable with emphasis on formal distinctions, despite its avowed
stress on the primacy of political line.
One thing that has to be rejected completely is the majority’s claim
that if we choose the term centrist now we have to go back and undo
what we said and wrote about the Cuban revolution and explain why we
were wrong. We wouldn’t have to undo anything except a term; the basic
analysis would remain unchanged even if we changed that term. Our
analysis of the Cuban revolution and our attitude to it did not flow
from or depend on our having said revolutionary instead of centrist
almost twenty years ago. Our analysis and our attitude never depended
on a term or label, but on the revolutionary things the Castroists were
doing.
We can easily change the label, if it is otherwise correct to do so,
without retracting a single basic thing we said or did. We can still
defend Cuba against imperialism even if its leadership is centrist. We
can still classify Cuba as a workers’ state with bureaucratic
deformations even if we decide that Castroism is centrist. We can still
be for the reform of the Cuban workers’ state, instead of for political
revolution, as we were for reform of the Soviet workers’ state from
1923 to 1933 when we considered Stalinism to be a form of centrism. So
we don’t have to undo a thing in what we said and wrote from the
beginning, except for the revolutionary/centrist label. And we also
wouldn’t have to go through the contortions of trying to pinpoint a
qualitative change from revolutionary to centrist, whatever that may
mean.
The majority report reminds us that from the beginning the SWP and
the Fourth International as a whole have characterized the Castro
leadership not as centrists but as revolutionaries. That is quite true,
and I fully concurred with that characterization in the early 1960s.
But that was a long time ago. A lot has changed since then, including
Castroism. We can now see that tendency and its evolution more clearly
than we did in 1960 or 1961. On the basis of more information and
longer experience we should not be afraid to say something different if
we see something different. Otherwise we’d be stuck forever with wrong
or inadequate concepts only because they were first adopted a long time
ago.
In 1960-61 Castroism was still developing, and largely to the left.
It had not congealed yet, it was still in transition and motion, it was
still in the process of maturing. It didn’t itself know precisely how
it would evolve in the future, and neither did anyone else. We
correctly gave it credit for all its positive achievements and as
revolutionary optimists did what we could to move it forward to
authentic revolutionary Marxism. The most absurd thing is to act as if
nothing has happened since then, as if Castroism is virtually the same
thing it was two decades ago. Some things may not have changed but
others certainly have. Castroism is not Stalinism, and never was, but
Castroism is not as independent of Stalinism as it used to be, and it
has made a certain amount of adaptation to Stalinist ideology and
practice, in both foreign and domestic policy. How can any serious
person deny this?
Castroism, we agree, is not a “hardened” or “crystallized”
bureaucratic caste of the type that rules in the USSR and can be
removed only through a political revolution. But Castroism does rest on
a privileged bureaucratic stratum that maintains a monopoly of
political power in Cuba. Is this stratum more privileged than it was
ten or twenty years ago? Is it bigger or smaller than it was then?
These are the kinds of questions we should be examining, but the
majority report is not much interested in them.
Twenty years ago the Castroists were against soviets and workers’
democracy; today they are still against them. Can we conclude then that
nothing has changed? No, because in the last five years the Castroists
have introduced new institutions, assemblies, constitution, etc., whose
main purpose is to prevent the introduction of workers’
democracy. So something definitely has changed. At the very least we
now can have a better perspective on the Castroist opposition to the
building of soviets in Cuba before they became economically dependent
on the Kremlin.
To conclude on this point: The term centrism fits Castroism better
than any other I have encountered in this discussion, but I can’t make
a motion to adopt this term because (1) it does not fit completely and
because (2) I have not been able, by myself, to work out a satisfactory
qualifying term. But if centrist is not a completely acceptable term,
revolutionary is even more unacceptable. My hopes that a correct and
adequate qualification of the term revolutionary might be made in the
majority report were not realized; and what is printed in our public
press contains even fewer qualifications than the majority report.
The majority report should be commended for criticizing certain
political defects and errors of Castroism (for the first time in
years), but its analysis would be improved if it would stop trying to
convince us at every possible opportunity, appropriate or not, that
Castroism is and always has been revolutionary. These explanations
sometimes take us to the border of apologetics. I feel embarrassment
for the SWP when I read what the majority report says about Castroism
and Eritrea. So far as I can see, there was nothing progressive or
revolutionary about the Castro policy on that question; the blood of
the Eritrean revolution is on their hands politically, and we
should be able to state it plainly, instead of insisting so strongly on
the two-bit differences Castro had on this question with Brezhnev and
Mengistu.
When the Castroists do something progressive or revolutionary, let’s
be the first to point it out. When they do something nonrevolutionary
or antirevolutionary, let’s point that out too. And at all times let’s
educate ourselves and others to understand that Castroism is capable of
both. That’s the line we ought to have, whatever the terminology we
choose.
June 11, 1979
Footnotes
1. For example, I
cannot accept the report’s characterization of the Ogaden war in 1978
as an “imperialist-inspired attempt by the Somalian regime to roll back
the Ethiopian revolution” (p. 3). Neither here nor in other
writings by the supporters of the majority report do I see evidence to
support the “imperialist-inspired” claim about the origins of the war.
I was dubious about our first position on the Ogaden (support of the
Somalians) and I am dissatisfied with our current position (support of
the Ethiopians); I think we should have been neutral in this conflict.
But I do not go into the matter here because I do not regard it as
decisive one way or another for determining the character of the Cuban
regime, the degree of its degeneration, the basic attitude we should
have to the Cuban CP, etc. I don’t mean that the Ogaden question is
subsidiary or unimportant in and of itself —only that it does not
really help us to settle much about our differences over Cuba, despite
the contentions of the majority and advocates of the
political-revolution and state-capitalism positions.
2. Trotsky in 1931:
“In some situations victory is possible even with a very bad policy.
With the deepening of the [world economic] crisis and its prolongation,
with the subsequent disintegration of the social democracy and the
demoralization of the [bourgeois] governments, the victory of the
German Communist Party is not excluded, even with the policy
of the Thaelmann leadership. But, unfortunately, it is merely not
excluded. The actual chances for such a victory are not great...”
(“Some Ideas on the Period and the Tasks of the Left Opposition,” July
28, 1931, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930-31), p. 293.)
Trotsky in 1932: “In a previous letter the thought was
expressed that under certain historical circumstances the
proletariat can conquer even under a left centrist leadership. Many
comrades were inclined, I have been informed, to interpret this thought
in the sense of minimizing the role of the Left Opposition and of
mitigating the mistakes and sins of bureaucratic centrism. Needless to
say how far I am from such an interpretation.
“The strategy of the party is an exceedingly important
element of the proletarian revolution. But it is by no means the only
factor. With an exceptionally favorable relation of forces the
proletariat can come to power even under a non Marxist leadership. This
was the case for example in the Paris Commune and, in a period which
lies closer to us, in Hungary. The depth of the disintegration of the
enemy camp, its political demoralization, the worthlessness of its
leaders, can assure decisive superiority to the proletariat for a
certain time even if its own leadership is weak.
“But in the first place there is nothing to guarantee
such a ‘fortunate’ coincidence of circumstances; it represents the
exception rather than the rule. Second, the victory obtained under such
conditions remains, as the same two examples—Paris and Hungary—prove,
exceedingly unstable. To weaken the struggle against Stalinism on the
ground that under certain conditions even the Stalinist
leadership would prove unable to prevent the victory of the proletariat
(as the leadership of Thaelmann could not prevent the growth in the
number of Communist voters) would be to stand all of Marxist politics
on its head.
“The theoretical possibility of a victory under
centrist leadership must be understood, besides, not mechanically but
dialectically...” (“On the State of the Left Opposition,” December 16,
1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932-33), p. 35.)
Trotsky in 1938: “Is the creation of... [a workers’ and
farmers’] government by the traditional workers’ organizations
possible? Past experience shows, as has already been stated, that this
is, to say the least, highly improbable. However, one cannot
categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that under
the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat,
financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.) the petty bourgeois
parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves
wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case, one
thing is not to be doubted; even if this highly improbable variant
somewhere, at some time, becomes a reality and the workers’ and
farmers’ government in the above mentioned sense is established in
fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the
actual dictatorship of the proletariat...” (“The Death Agony of
Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” April 1938, in The
Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p. 135.)
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>Many Bills Introduced Against Discrimination</h1>
<h4>But Not All of Them Are Really for the Benefit of the Negro;<br>
One Group of Them Is Really Bosses’ Weapon Against Unions</h4>
<h3>(29 March 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_13" target="new">Vol. V. No. 13</a>, 29 March 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">A considerable number of bills dealing with discrimination against Negroes in employment have been introduced in several state legislatures and in Congress. Negroes and trade unionists are quite naturally interested in learning what these bills are all about, which ones are worth supporting, which ones are harmful.</p>
<p>Most of the bills can be divided roughly into two categories: (1) Those which penalize employers who discriminate against Negroes in hiring; and (2) those which penalize trade unions which bar Negroes from membership.</p>
<p>In order for Negro workers to arrive at a correct approach toward these bills, it is necessary for them to think about them, not only as Negroes, but also as Negro <em>workers</em>.</p>
<p>To do that, they must be aware of the fundamental conflict between the bosses on one side, and the working class, including the Negro workers, on the other side.</p>
<p>The main interest of the bosses money. They can’t make it unless they have people working for them. These workers produce the material which the bosses can sell at a profit. Basically, the bosses don’t care who works for them. The ruling class as a whole would just as soon exploit and sweat a Negro worker as a white worker. It looks upon both in the same light: as sources of profit, as shoulders on which to place the burden of depressions created by the capitalist system as cannon fodder to be used in the wars for profit and privilege.</p>
<p>But the bosses who control industry have found it useful to exclude Negroes from almost all jobs but domestic service and agriculture. The bosses have done this because of their desire to find methods of keeping the working class divided, so that the workers will be less able to unite against their oppressors.</p>
<p>The bosses have poisoned the minds of large numbers of white workers with practices and theories of “white supremacy” and “Negro inferiority”. By their methods of propaganda, the schools, movies, newspapers, magazines, radio, etc., the bosses have sought to convince the white workers that they are not so badly off, because the Negroes have even less than they have. As a result of all these boss methods, many white workers have been taught to look down on the Negro people; as another result, Negro workers have been filled with suspicion of all white people, including white workers. All this is right up the bosses’ alley.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Fight to Get Jobs for Negroes</h4>
<p class="fst">In this situation, where the bosses are the exploiters and the Negroes are oppressed, it is correct to use every possible means to force the bosses to open the doors of industry to the Negro. It is correct to demand that the employers, who are getting billions through war controls, be refused such contracts if they refuse to hire Negroes.</p>
<p>This does not mean that we should place very much reliance on these bills as a means of winning jobs for Negroes. To do so and to forget about the method of mass action and mass demonstration to win concessions from the bosses, would be a great mistake. One good picket line is worth a dozen bills.</p>
<p>We must never forget that the government which is designated to carry out the provisions of these bills is a <em>bosses’</em> government;. that it believes in the same things the bosses believe in: that it sets the example of “white superiority” in its army and navy and in civil service; and that already there are plenty, of anti-discrimination laws on the statute books which are not enforced.<br>
</p>
<h4>Bills Against Unions Will Harm Negroes</h4>
<p class="fst">The bills penalizing employer may do some good. But the bills penalizing unions can do no good at all and are certain to do harm both to Negro and white workers Both the white worker and the Negro worker are victims of the capitalist system. Each suffers from wage cuts, depressions, fascism and war. Each suffers from the bosses’ divide-and-rule policy, even though many white workers (like many Negro workers) don’t see this very plainly yet.</p>
<p>Both the white worker and the Negro worker want the same things: decent jobs and homes, the right to live freely and happily. They are both denied these things by the capitalist system of private property and profit. What they must do to unite their forces against their common enemy and take the things they have built and created end use them for the common good of all.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the workers of both races don’t see things as clearly as that yet. They don’t fully understand that they have a common goal and that they must act together and for each other. Fortunately, large numbers of white workers in the CIO unions have begun to learn this through their own experiences of fighting side by side with Negro workers in strikes and on picket lines.</p>
<p>We can readily understand and sympathize with the resentment of the Negroes against the Jim Crow leadership of some of the AFL unions and the railroad brotherhoods. We of the Socialist Workers Party have always fought for full and unqualified equality for the Negro people. Our record shows that we have consistently fought William Green and Co. on this question.</p>
<p>Nevertheless we are forced to oppose passage of any bill penalizing unions. We oppose such bills because they will hurt the interests of the Negro and white workers alike.</p>
<p>The bosses could and would try to use such bills, in the name of “destroying discrimination,” to destroy the labor movement. We cannot delegate to the bosses or to the bosses’ government the job of destroying Jim Crowism in the unions, for the bosses are the friends of neither the Negroes nor the unions. They would try to destroy the unions, not to help one section of the working class, the Negroes, but to cut wages and lengthen hours of all workers including the Negroes.<br>
</p>
<h4>We Can’t Let Enemies “Clean” Our House</h4>
<p class="fst">We cannot depend on the boss government which Jim Crows the Negro in the army and navy to wipe out Jim Crowism in the labor movement. That job can be done only by the advanced workers of all races.</p>
<p>Passage of such bills against unions would not serve to educate the backward white workers in the unions. On the contrary, it would tend to arouse their antagonism to colored workers. The lily-white leaders in such unions would point to the bill and say that the Negroes are cooperating with the enemies of labor in destroying the unions, and would use that to incite the backward white workers still further against the Negroes.<br>
</p>
<h4>The CIO Shows What Can Be Done</h4>
<p class="fst">The only way to educate the backward rank-and-file unionists to the need of admitting Negroes on an equal basis to all unions is by showing them that unity is necessary to protect the unions gains, and that Negroes are good unionists who want to protect the unions.</p>
<p>This is often a hard job, we admit, but there is no other way to unite black and white? That it is not impossible is shown in the sample of the powerful CIO, where Negroes are admitted as members with full equality and play a leading role in the unions. The example of the CIO can be effectively used in the fight to expose the reactionary policy of the lily-white leaders like Green and Harrison.</p>
<p>Summed up, this means that bills penalizing unions will never accomplish the purposes hoped for by many sincere Negroes, and that instead of serving to integrate Negroes into the labor movement, such bills would tend to make that task more difficult.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But,” some Negroes will say, “these bills are not aimed at all the unions, they are aimed only at some unions guilty of Jim Crowism. We believe in unionism, we want to be good union men. It is the enemies of the Negroes who are keeping us from becoming good and devoted unionists.”</p>
<p class="fst">There is truth in this argument, but still it is not enough to change the fundamental task. Opening “only some” unions to the attacks of the bosses and their government is a springboard for opening the union movement as a whole to such attacks. For once some unions can be smashed, the appetite of the bosses will be whetted, and they will not be satisfied to let it go at that. We cannot ask our enemies to clean our own house, for they will not do it in our interests.. And the labor movement is the house of the Negro people. As against the bosses, we must defend the unions, even when some of their leaders or members have done wrong against the working class. If in any way we help the bosses to weaken our own class organizing, we lay ourselves open, and the Negroes lay themselves open, to attacks that if successful will send us all back ten or 15 years.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the advanced workers, the class conscious workers, the more far-seeing workers of all races, will work with us in educating all trade unionists. Widespread discussion of these bills can do much to awaken backward white workers to the necessity of admitting Negroes into all unions on an equal and comradely basis for the struggle to improve the conditions of workers of all races.</p>
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Albert Parker
Many Bills Introduced Against Discrimination
But Not All of Them Are Really for the Benefit of the Negro;
One Group of Them Is Really Bosses’ Weapon Against Unions
(29 March 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V. No. 13, 29 March 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A considerable number of bills dealing with discrimination against Negroes in employment have been introduced in several state legislatures and in Congress. Negroes and trade unionists are quite naturally interested in learning what these bills are all about, which ones are worth supporting, which ones are harmful.
Most of the bills can be divided roughly into two categories: (1) Those which penalize employers who discriminate against Negroes in hiring; and (2) those which penalize trade unions which bar Negroes from membership.
In order for Negro workers to arrive at a correct approach toward these bills, it is necessary for them to think about them, not only as Negroes, but also as Negro workers.
To do that, they must be aware of the fundamental conflict between the bosses on one side, and the working class, including the Negro workers, on the other side.
The main interest of the bosses money. They can’t make it unless they have people working for them. These workers produce the material which the bosses can sell at a profit. Basically, the bosses don’t care who works for them. The ruling class as a whole would just as soon exploit and sweat a Negro worker as a white worker. It looks upon both in the same light: as sources of profit, as shoulders on which to place the burden of depressions created by the capitalist system as cannon fodder to be used in the wars for profit and privilege.
But the bosses who control industry have found it useful to exclude Negroes from almost all jobs but domestic service and agriculture. The bosses have done this because of their desire to find methods of keeping the working class divided, so that the workers will be less able to unite against their oppressors.
The bosses have poisoned the minds of large numbers of white workers with practices and theories of “white supremacy” and “Negro inferiority”. By their methods of propaganda, the schools, movies, newspapers, magazines, radio, etc., the bosses have sought to convince the white workers that they are not so badly off, because the Negroes have even less than they have. As a result of all these boss methods, many white workers have been taught to look down on the Negro people; as another result, Negro workers have been filled with suspicion of all white people, including white workers. All this is right up the bosses’ alley.
The Fight to Get Jobs for Negroes
In this situation, where the bosses are the exploiters and the Negroes are oppressed, it is correct to use every possible means to force the bosses to open the doors of industry to the Negro. It is correct to demand that the employers, who are getting billions through war controls, be refused such contracts if they refuse to hire Negroes.
This does not mean that we should place very much reliance on these bills as a means of winning jobs for Negroes. To do so and to forget about the method of mass action and mass demonstration to win concessions from the bosses, would be a great mistake. One good picket line is worth a dozen bills.
We must never forget that the government which is designated to carry out the provisions of these bills is a bosses’ government;. that it believes in the same things the bosses believe in: that it sets the example of “white superiority” in its army and navy and in civil service; and that already there are plenty, of anti-discrimination laws on the statute books which are not enforced.
Bills Against Unions Will Harm Negroes
The bills penalizing employer may do some good. But the bills penalizing unions can do no good at all and are certain to do harm both to Negro and white workers Both the white worker and the Negro worker are victims of the capitalist system. Each suffers from wage cuts, depressions, fascism and war. Each suffers from the bosses’ divide-and-rule policy, even though many white workers (like many Negro workers) don’t see this very plainly yet.
Both the white worker and the Negro worker want the same things: decent jobs and homes, the right to live freely and happily. They are both denied these things by the capitalist system of private property and profit. What they must do to unite their forces against their common enemy and take the things they have built and created end use them for the common good of all.
Unfortunately, the workers of both races don’t see things as clearly as that yet. They don’t fully understand that they have a common goal and that they must act together and for each other. Fortunately, large numbers of white workers in the CIO unions have begun to learn this through their own experiences of fighting side by side with Negro workers in strikes and on picket lines.
We can readily understand and sympathize with the resentment of the Negroes against the Jim Crow leadership of some of the AFL unions and the railroad brotherhoods. We of the Socialist Workers Party have always fought for full and unqualified equality for the Negro people. Our record shows that we have consistently fought William Green and Co. on this question.
Nevertheless we are forced to oppose passage of any bill penalizing unions. We oppose such bills because they will hurt the interests of the Negro and white workers alike.
The bosses could and would try to use such bills, in the name of “destroying discrimination,” to destroy the labor movement. We cannot delegate to the bosses or to the bosses’ government the job of destroying Jim Crowism in the unions, for the bosses are the friends of neither the Negroes nor the unions. They would try to destroy the unions, not to help one section of the working class, the Negroes, but to cut wages and lengthen hours of all workers including the Negroes.
We Can’t Let Enemies “Clean” Our House
We cannot depend on the boss government which Jim Crows the Negro in the army and navy to wipe out Jim Crowism in the labor movement. That job can be done only by the advanced workers of all races.
Passage of such bills against unions would not serve to educate the backward white workers in the unions. On the contrary, it would tend to arouse their antagonism to colored workers. The lily-white leaders in such unions would point to the bill and say that the Negroes are cooperating with the enemies of labor in destroying the unions, and would use that to incite the backward white workers still further against the Negroes.
The CIO Shows What Can Be Done
The only way to educate the backward rank-and-file unionists to the need of admitting Negroes on an equal basis to all unions is by showing them that unity is necessary to protect the unions gains, and that Negroes are good unionists who want to protect the unions.
This is often a hard job, we admit, but there is no other way to unite black and white? That it is not impossible is shown in the sample of the powerful CIO, where Negroes are admitted as members with full equality and play a leading role in the unions. The example of the CIO can be effectively used in the fight to expose the reactionary policy of the lily-white leaders like Green and Harrison.
Summed up, this means that bills penalizing unions will never accomplish the purposes hoped for by many sincere Negroes, and that instead of serving to integrate Negroes into the labor movement, such bills would tend to make that task more difficult.
“But,” some Negroes will say, “these bills are not aimed at all the unions, they are aimed only at some unions guilty of Jim Crowism. We believe in unionism, we want to be good union men. It is the enemies of the Negroes who are keeping us from becoming good and devoted unionists.”
There is truth in this argument, but still it is not enough to change the fundamental task. Opening “only some” unions to the attacks of the bosses and their government is a springboard for opening the union movement as a whole to such attacks. For once some unions can be smashed, the appetite of the bosses will be whetted, and they will not be satisfied to let it go at that. We cannot ask our enemies to clean our own house, for they will not do it in our interests.. And the labor movement is the house of the Negro people. As against the bosses, we must defend the unions, even when some of their leaders or members have done wrong against the working class. If in any way we help the bosses to weaken our own class organizing, we lay ourselves open, and the Negroes lay themselves open, to attacks that if successful will send us all back ten or 15 years.
Meanwhile, the advanced workers, the class conscious workers, the more far-seeing workers of all races, will work with us in educating all trade unionists. Widespread discussion of these bills can do much to awaken backward white workers to the necessity of admitting Negroes into all unions on an equal and comradely basis for the struggle to improve the conditions of workers of all races.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(1 March 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_09" target="new">Vol. V No. 9</a>, 1 March 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>Fate of France’s Negro Troops</h4>
<p class="fst">The most interesting story of the week was undoubtedly the banner story in <strong>The Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, under the title <em>Half Million Black Men Killed To Save Honor of France</em>, by R. Waller Merguson, the <strong>Courier</strong>’s war correspondent, who has just returned from Europe.</p>
<p>In this, the first of a series, Merguson tells a story which has never before been printed, the account of what happened to at least a million Negro soldiers who were drawn out of the African colonies and into the French army as shock troops to stop the oncoming Nazi war machine.</p>
<p>No one has written about it before only because both the French and the Germans don’t want the truth to come out, says Merguson. That truth is that these Negro soldiers were mowed down in cold blood! <em>No prisoners were taken.</em> These colored soldiers are not in Germany, they are not in any part of France, occupied or unoccupied, they were never sent back to Africa.</p>
<p>Since the article is copyright, and “reproduction in whole or in part expressly forbidden,” we are unable to say much more about it. Our advice: don’t fail to get a copy of the Feb. 22nd <strong>Courier</strong>!<br>
</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>The Poll Tax Fight</h4>
<p class="fst">Action is being undertaken this week to petition the House of Representatives to bring H.R. Bill 1024. the anti-poll tax measure, out of committee, so that open discussion and a vote may be held on it in Congress.</p>
<p>This bill provides that failure to pay poll taxes shall not he used to prevent anyone from voting for candidates for federal office. Although, consequently, it provides for only a very partial reform, it is certain that it will be fought tooth and nail by the poll tax politicians who smothered the anti-lynch bill to death after a petition had brought that measure to the floor in last year’s session of Congress.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>Judas Goats (Colored)</h4>
<p class="fst">Dr. Rayford W. Logan, chairman of the National Committee on the Participation of the Negro in National Defense, did much this week to advance the cause of abolishing Jim Crowism in the armed forces.</p>
<p>Logan stated that the three colored men holding administrative assistant posts (Hastie of the Department of War, Johnson of selective service, and Weaver of the National Defense Advisory Committee) had been appointed only to serve as “barriers” against Negro “pressure groups” and were “being used to give them “a grand runaround.”</p>
<p>Anyone who tried to deny this would be a fool. These men are the salesmen of the Jim Crow policies of the administration. Their mere presence is supposed to refute the well-known “white supremacy” theories of the war and navy departments. Jim Crow announcements, coming from the lips of colored men, are supposed to sound better.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h4>Jim Crow in “Defense” Jobs</h4>
<p class="fst">A classical example of the endless circle of the runaround being given Negro labor by both the story of the Nashville, Tennessee, branch of the N.A.A.C.P., which has been carrying on an active campaign to attempt to get Negroes into industry.</p>
<p>First the branch tried to get a defense training course from the government and the local school Board so that Negroes would be able to get some training and qualify for skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the Nashville plant of the Vultee Aircraft</p>
<p>But the local school board replied that there was little chance of such a course being opened to Negro workers, because the Vultee management would not employ Negroes “in skilled capacities, even if properly trained persons were available.”</p>
<p>The branch then turned to the management of Vultee. The reply of the industrial relations manager was that they “do not now believe it advisable to include colored people with our regular working force. We may, at a later date, be capacities such as porters and cleaners.”</p>
<p>“From this distance,” says an <strong>Afro-American</strong> editorial entitled <em>Why We Are For Henry Ford</em>, “it doesn’t seem to us half so important whether or not the Ford plants are organized, as whether the Ford principle of equal opportunities for all workers shall survive and flourish.” (The “Ford principle of equal opportunity” referred to is the policy of hiring Negroes as “strike insurance” and threatening to fire them if they join the CIO union trying to organize the Ford. Empire.) “From this distance,” that is, from Baltimore, it may not seem so important to an editorial writer but to the Ford Negro workers who have to work at a pay 10¢ an hour lower than the national average for auto workers and who have to endure an inhuman speed-up which leaves them limp and almost lifeless after work, it seems a good, deal more important.</p>
<p>Warning was served on the AFL Executive Council by the NAACP that if certain AFL unions, such as the machinists, do not cease discrimination against Negro workers, they would “have no other resource” than to seek legislation amending the National Labor Relations Act to deny such unions the right of collective bargaining.</p>
<p>The fact that Negroes are even thinking of such action must serve as real food for thought for the ranks of the AFL unions. As long as the AFL permits such things to go on, the union movement will never be safe. While workers, to protect themselves as well as their colored brothers, must open the gates of the labor unions to them.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(1 March 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 9, 1 March 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Fate of France’s Negro Troops
The most interesting story of the week was undoubtedly the banner story in The Pittsburgh Courier, under the title Half Million Black Men Killed To Save Honor of France, by R. Waller Merguson, the Courier’s war correspondent, who has just returned from Europe.
In this, the first of a series, Merguson tells a story which has never before been printed, the account of what happened to at least a million Negro soldiers who were drawn out of the African colonies and into the French army as shock troops to stop the oncoming Nazi war machine.
No one has written about it before only because both the French and the Germans don’t want the truth to come out, says Merguson. That truth is that these Negro soldiers were mowed down in cold blood! No prisoners were taken. These colored soldiers are not in Germany, they are not in any part of France, occupied or unoccupied, they were never sent back to Africa.
Since the article is copyright, and “reproduction in whole or in part expressly forbidden,” we are unable to say much more about it. Our advice: don’t fail to get a copy of the Feb. 22nd Courier!
* * *
The Poll Tax Fight
Action is being undertaken this week to petition the House of Representatives to bring H.R. Bill 1024. the anti-poll tax measure, out of committee, so that open discussion and a vote may be held on it in Congress.
This bill provides that failure to pay poll taxes shall not he used to prevent anyone from voting for candidates for federal office. Although, consequently, it provides for only a very partial reform, it is certain that it will be fought tooth and nail by the poll tax politicians who smothered the anti-lynch bill to death after a petition had brought that measure to the floor in last year’s session of Congress.
Judas Goats (Colored)
Dr. Rayford W. Logan, chairman of the National Committee on the Participation of the Negro in National Defense, did much this week to advance the cause of abolishing Jim Crowism in the armed forces.
Logan stated that the three colored men holding administrative assistant posts (Hastie of the Department of War, Johnson of selective service, and Weaver of the National Defense Advisory Committee) had been appointed only to serve as “barriers” against Negro “pressure groups” and were “being used to give them “a grand runaround.”
Anyone who tried to deny this would be a fool. These men are the salesmen of the Jim Crow policies of the administration. Their mere presence is supposed to refute the well-known “white supremacy” theories of the war and navy departments. Jim Crow announcements, coming from the lips of colored men, are supposed to sound better.
* * *
Jim Crow in “Defense” Jobs
A classical example of the endless circle of the runaround being given Negro labor by both the story of the Nashville, Tennessee, branch of the N.A.A.C.P., which has been carrying on an active campaign to attempt to get Negroes into industry.
First the branch tried to get a defense training course from the government and the local school Board so that Negroes would be able to get some training and qualify for skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the Nashville plant of the Vultee Aircraft
But the local school board replied that there was little chance of such a course being opened to Negro workers, because the Vultee management would not employ Negroes “in skilled capacities, even if properly trained persons were available.”
The branch then turned to the management of Vultee. The reply of the industrial relations manager was that they “do not now believe it advisable to include colored people with our regular working force. We may, at a later date, be capacities such as porters and cleaners.”
“From this distance,” says an Afro-American editorial entitled Why We Are For Henry Ford, “it doesn’t seem to us half so important whether or not the Ford plants are organized, as whether the Ford principle of equal opportunities for all workers shall survive and flourish.” (The “Ford principle of equal opportunity” referred to is the policy of hiring Negroes as “strike insurance” and threatening to fire them if they join the CIO union trying to organize the Ford. Empire.) “From this distance,” that is, from Baltimore, it may not seem so important to an editorial writer but to the Ford Negro workers who have to work at a pay 10¢ an hour lower than the national average for auto workers and who have to endure an inhuman speed-up which leaves them limp and almost lifeless after work, it seems a good, deal more important.
Warning was served on the AFL Executive Council by the NAACP that if certain AFL unions, such as the machinists, do not cease discrimination against Negro workers, they would “have no other resource” than to seek legislation amending the National Labor Relations Act to deny such unions the right of collective bargaining.
The fact that Negroes are even thinking of such action must serve as real food for thought for the ranks of the AFL unions. As long as the AFL permits such things to go on, the union movement will never be safe. While workers, to protect themselves as well as their colored brothers, must open the gates of the labor unions to them.
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<h2>John F. Petrone</h2>
<h4>1948 in Review – What’s Ahead in 1949</h4>
<h1>Civil Rights Lynched in Growing Witch-Hunt</h1>
<h3>(27 December 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_52" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 52</a>, 27 December 1948, p. 2.<br>
ranscribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Like the confidence man who finds it profitable to be known as Honest John, the capitalist politicians devoted a great deal of time and attention in 1948 to Speeches and promises about civil rights while at the same time carrying through the biggest witchhunt in modern American history.</p>
<p>This witch-hunt extended into all fields, was executed at all levels in the government and threatened the democratic rights of all the working people. The White House and Congress differed over the method, but not the objective, of intimidating the masses.</p>
<p>The administration’s “loyalty” purge got under way in real earnest. The case of James Kutcher, Newark legless veteran fired for membership in the Socialist Workers Party, was the most dramatic and one of the few that aroused organized resistance. Hundreds were dismissed or forced to resign because they had read anti-capitalist literature or favored the abolition of racial discrimination; thousands more are still being investigated.</p>
<p>The department of Justice strengthened the implementation of its arbitrary “subversive” blacklist, denying tax exemptions to all groups on the list, even those that obviously were nonpolitical, like the American Committee for European Workers Relief. It categorically rejected the demand of the SWP for a public hearing at which it could defend itsdlf against the “subversive” charges. It took the initiative in securing the indictment under the Smith Act of 12 Communist Party leaders whose trial is scheduled to begin next month.<br>
</p>
<h4>Congress’ Share</h4>
<p class="fst">The House Un-American Committee continued its persecution of individuals and organizations and obtained a long list of “contempt” convictions. Congress itself held up enactment of the Mundt-Nixon "Police-State” Bill to outlaw the Stalinist and other parties, but it is sure to be reintroduced in the next Congress. Congress refused to pass a single civil rights bill.</p>
<p><em>The Supreme Court cooperated by refusing to hear any of the “contempt” case appeals. It also put its blessing on the legality of restrictive covenants while barring their enforcement by the courts.</em></p>
<p>The Immigration Department speeded up its moves to deport scores of Stalinists and active unionists. The State Department barred visas to opponents of the bipartisan foreign policy both at home and abroad.</p>
<p>Since it was an election year, both the harsh election laws and corrupt election boards were utilized freely to bar from the ballot candidates of minority parties, and in some cases even major party candidates.</p>
<p>Administrators of the peacetime draft sought and secured convictions of conscientious objectors.</p>
<p><em>“Liberal” government officials like Lilienthal of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had recently been subjected to reactionary inquisition himself, joined in the hunt this year by prohibiting strikes in atomic plants and taking steps to bar from such plants all unions that refused to sign Taft-Hartley yellow-dog affidavits.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Private Industry Too</h4>
<p class="fst">The same practices were extended into private industry at the connivance of the brass hats when Herbert Lewin and Frank Carner were fired from the Westinghouse plant in Philadelphia because of their political views. Although a militant strike by UE Local 107 won their reinstatement, they are still barred from so-called sensitive departments.</p>
<p>And what was done in the government was widely imitated outside of the government as local officials and the press whipped up reactionary hysteria. Wallace and his supporters were attacked, meeting halls were denied for political or educational rallies, professors were fired for daring to express unorthodox political sympathies and in one case a man was even prevented from reading his poems at a public meeting.</p>
<p>A<em>ssaults on civil liberties have always gone hand-in-hand with preparations for imperialist war. The events of 1948 prove that World War III will be no exception. Behind the lie that it will be a war against “totalitarianism” abroad, the capitalist rulers are already laying the foundations of a military-police dictatorship at home.</em></p>
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John F. Petrone
1948 in Review – What’s Ahead in 1949
Civil Rights Lynched in Growing Witch-Hunt
(27 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 2.
ranscribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Like the confidence man who finds it profitable to be known as Honest John, the capitalist politicians devoted a great deal of time and attention in 1948 to Speeches and promises about civil rights while at the same time carrying through the biggest witchhunt in modern American history.
This witch-hunt extended into all fields, was executed at all levels in the government and threatened the democratic rights of all the working people. The White House and Congress differed over the method, but not the objective, of intimidating the masses.
The administration’s “loyalty” purge got under way in real earnest. The case of James Kutcher, Newark legless veteran fired for membership in the Socialist Workers Party, was the most dramatic and one of the few that aroused organized resistance. Hundreds were dismissed or forced to resign because they had read anti-capitalist literature or favored the abolition of racial discrimination; thousands more are still being investigated.
The department of Justice strengthened the implementation of its arbitrary “subversive” blacklist, denying tax exemptions to all groups on the list, even those that obviously were nonpolitical, like the American Committee for European Workers Relief. It categorically rejected the demand of the SWP for a public hearing at which it could defend itsdlf against the “subversive” charges. It took the initiative in securing the indictment under the Smith Act of 12 Communist Party leaders whose trial is scheduled to begin next month.
Congress’ Share
The House Un-American Committee continued its persecution of individuals and organizations and obtained a long list of “contempt” convictions. Congress itself held up enactment of the Mundt-Nixon "Police-State” Bill to outlaw the Stalinist and other parties, but it is sure to be reintroduced in the next Congress. Congress refused to pass a single civil rights bill.
The Supreme Court cooperated by refusing to hear any of the “contempt” case appeals. It also put its blessing on the legality of restrictive covenants while barring their enforcement by the courts.
The Immigration Department speeded up its moves to deport scores of Stalinists and active unionists. The State Department barred visas to opponents of the bipartisan foreign policy both at home and abroad.
Since it was an election year, both the harsh election laws and corrupt election boards were utilized freely to bar from the ballot candidates of minority parties, and in some cases even major party candidates.
Administrators of the peacetime draft sought and secured convictions of conscientious objectors.
“Liberal” government officials like Lilienthal of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had recently been subjected to reactionary inquisition himself, joined in the hunt this year by prohibiting strikes in atomic plants and taking steps to bar from such plants all unions that refused to sign Taft-Hartley yellow-dog affidavits.
Private Industry Too
The same practices were extended into private industry at the connivance of the brass hats when Herbert Lewin and Frank Carner were fired from the Westinghouse plant in Philadelphia because of their political views. Although a militant strike by UE Local 107 won their reinstatement, they are still barred from so-called sensitive departments.
And what was done in the government was widely imitated outside of the government as local officials and the press whipped up reactionary hysteria. Wallace and his supporters were attacked, meeting halls were denied for political or educational rallies, professors were fired for daring to express unorthodox political sympathies and in one case a man was even prevented from reading his poems at a public meeting.
Assaults on civil liberties have always gone hand-in-hand with preparations for imperialist war. The events of 1948 prove that World War III will be no exception. Behind the lie that it will be a war against “totalitarianism” abroad, the capitalist rulers are already laying the foundations of a military-police dictatorship at home.
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<h2>Joseph Hansen & George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Wallace Ouster Signifies Third World War<br>
Has Early Date on Wall Streets Calendar</h1>
<h3>(28 September 1946)</h3>
<hr>
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source:</span> <em>The Militant</em>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_39" target="new">Vol. 10 No. 39</a>, 28 September 1946, p. 8.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Editing/HTML Markup:</span> 2021 by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a>.<br>
<span class="info">Public Domain:</span> Joseph Hansen Internet Archive 2021. This work is in the under the <a href="../../../../admin/legal/cc/by-sa.htm">Creative Commons Common Deed</a>. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists’ Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.</p>
<hr>
<p class="c"><em>(Joseph Hansen and George Breitman are SWP Candidates for U.S. Senate from New York, and New Jersey)</em></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>When Truman kicked Henry Wallace out of his Cabinet, he ended all uncertainty about Washington’s foreign policy. It is a policy of war.</strong></p>
<p><em>Wallace is the leading spokesman among the capitalist politicians of the tactic of talking softly with Stalin and hiding the big stick. Secretary of State Byrnes has come to represent the tactic of brandishing the big stick and talking with brutal toughness. Wide sections of the populace have thus identified Byrnes with Wall Street’s bristling preparations for another slaughter; while they have taken Wallace as a symbol of their desire for peace.</em></p>
<p>Thus, by removing Wallace from one of the most prominent posts in Washington, Wall Street and its obedient servant in the White House are telling the world they are headed straight down the highway to World War III.</p>
<p>By backing Byrnes, Wall Street has served notice on Stalin to come across with the concessions demanded of him at the Paris “Peace” Conference – or prepare for a dose of atomic bomb medicine.</p>
<p>The foreign capitalists now in the orbit of Wall Street (Britain, France, Latin America, etc.) and the capitalists Wall Street is drawing into its orbit (Germany, Japan) will Interpret the ouster of Wallace as a signal that the Third World War will break out sooner than they may have anticipated. They will redouble their oppressive measures against the workers in those lands in preparation for the new war.</p>
<p>To the labor movement, the incident is an ominous warning, not only of another war, but of immediate renewal of the Big Business onslaught against the working class. A war program requires the regimentation of the workers, the passage of antilabor legislation such as was foreshadowed in the Case bill and Truman’s draft-labor bill.</p>
<p>Thus the Wallace ouster portends an anti-labor drive although it involves a figure who is not at all a representative of the working class. Wallace is a shrewd capitalist politician, astutely gauging his course for high stakes.</p>
<p>Wallace correctly appraises the masses’ fear of a new war, and he realizes how developments on the domestic front are driving the workers to seek a radical solution to their problems. He wants to win unquestioned leadership of this movement, keeping it within the Democratic Party, if possible, and within the framework of capitalist politics at all costs.</p>
<p>Consequently he has patterned his speeches on the model developed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Just as Roosevelt could promise the people “again and again and again” he would not send their sons into any foreign wars, so Wallace today calls for an end of imperialism, for peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union, and for disarmament.</p>
<p>Examination of Wallace’s letter of July 23 to Truman and his speech of Sept. 12 reveals that at bottom his differences with Byrnes are purely tactical. Both are seeking the best way to advance the interests of American capitalism.</p>
<p>Wallace makes out that America has got sucked into imperialism by a “pro-British” policy. But the fact is, the British capitalists are only junior partners Wall Street is by far the dominant imperialist power in the world today. This is clear beyond all dispute in China, for instance. It is American troops and arms and money that reinforce the hated dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.</p>
<p>Wallace. avers that “The slogan that communism and capitalism, regimentation and democracy, cannot continue to exist in the same world, is from a historical point of view, pure propaganda.” The reconcilability of communism and capitalism is the line advanced by Stalin long before the rise of Hitler, long before the volcanic eruption of Wall Street imperialism. Its falsity has been demonstrated precisely by the greatest historical events. Vast regions of the Soviet Union still lie in ruins from the assault of German capitalism.</p>
<p>Hitler’s attack was not simply the result of a. criminal war “plot.” It followed from the irreconcilable conflict between planned economy and capitalist anarchy. In the end either the workers of the world will put an end to capitalism with its wars and depressions, or world imperialism will destroy the nationalized economy of the USSR.</p>
<p>Wallace advocates “disarmament” as the only way to end the threat of an atomic bomb race. But the atomic bomb race has already begun and will continue despite all the pious phrases Of well-meaning pacifists. In such circumstances the slogan of “disarmament” is exceedingly treacherous, for it can delude many people, disarming them for the real struggle against war.</p>
<p>It should be sufficient to recall that Hitler began his preparations for the Second World War under the slogan of “disarmament.” Hitler was simply utilizing an old propaganda device of imperialist politicians. The failure of other capitalist powers to “disarm” was converted by Hitler into an argument to “justify” his all-out preparations for war.</p>
<p>The slogan of “disarmament” always appears during an armaments race. But it does not prevent war. The Third World War which Wallace admits is now looming can be prevented only by ending capitalism and building socialism.</p>
<p>Make no mistake – Wallace is a dangerous capitalist politician. He spread all the lies about fighting the Second World War to bring “four freedoms” including a quart of milk to the world. He is now preparing himself to serve the capitalist, class equally well in the Third World War.</p>
<p>The press is filled with speculation about the effect of Wallace’s ouster on the 1946 elections. Wall Street, however, is little concerned about the effect. The political brains in the pay of the Morgans, Rockefellers and the rest of America’s ruling families have taken the election into account too.</p>
<p>They undoubtedly calculate that they will lose little. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are committed to follow the same reactionary foreign policy. No matter which party wins. Wall Street remains entrenched, dominating the political field. If the labor movement becomes apathetic toward the election, Wall Street still wins. If the workers resent the brazen avowal of a course leading straight to war – where can they turn? The perfidious labor fakers have done their utmost to keep labor from organizing on the political field. They have fought with all their energy against building an independent labor party. In a key state like New York, the Liberals, the American Labor Party and the Stalinists have all committed themselves to supporting the Democratic machine.</p>
<p>But even if some losses were registered on the domestic political front, Wall Street’s overwhelming concern at present is with foreign politics. The main axis of American politics has shifted to the international arena.</p>
<p>Wall Street is after big game – world domination. Above all, American Big Business is fascinated by the vast areas of the Soviet Union. Capitalism could stave off its doom a few years with a blood transfusion at the expense of the Soviet people.</p>
<p>American capitalism has advanced its military frontiers to the other side of both the Atlantic and Pacific basins. The generals and admirals are building bases for the coming attack on the Soviet Union, and at home they are fostering militarism on a scale never before seen in the world. Congress is pouring tens of billions of dollars into the machinery of war. Wall Street has the atomic bomb, deadly new gases, rockets and other frightful weapons.</p>
<p>But why the feverish haste? American Big Business knows that the Soviet liftlion is doing its utmost to work out the production of atomic energy. Success will enormously strengthen the defensive military power of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Understanding this, Wall Street cannot help feeling tempted to strike soon. Regarding a Third World War as inevitable in any case, Wall Street has apparently decided to move up the dates on the calendar.</p>
<p>The ouster of Wallace means the interval between the Second and Third World Wars will prove a short one unless the workers act in time.</p>
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Joseph Hansen & George Breitman
Wallace Ouster Signifies Third World War
Has Early Date on Wall Streets Calendar
(28 September 1946)
Source: The Militant, Vol. 10 No. 39, 28 September 1946, p. 8.
Transcription/Editing/HTML Markup: 2021 by Einde O’Callaghan.
Public Domain: Joseph Hansen Internet Archive 2021. This work is in the under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists’ Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
(Joseph Hansen and George Breitman are SWP Candidates for U.S. Senate from New York, and New Jersey)
When Truman kicked Henry Wallace out of his Cabinet, he ended all uncertainty about Washington’s foreign policy. It is a policy of war.
Wallace is the leading spokesman among the capitalist politicians of the tactic of talking softly with Stalin and hiding the big stick. Secretary of State Byrnes has come to represent the tactic of brandishing the big stick and talking with brutal toughness. Wide sections of the populace have thus identified Byrnes with Wall Street’s bristling preparations for another slaughter; while they have taken Wallace as a symbol of their desire for peace.
Thus, by removing Wallace from one of the most prominent posts in Washington, Wall Street and its obedient servant in the White House are telling the world they are headed straight down the highway to World War III.
By backing Byrnes, Wall Street has served notice on Stalin to come across with the concessions demanded of him at the Paris “Peace” Conference – or prepare for a dose of atomic bomb medicine.
The foreign capitalists now in the orbit of Wall Street (Britain, France, Latin America, etc.) and the capitalists Wall Street is drawing into its orbit (Germany, Japan) will Interpret the ouster of Wallace as a signal that the Third World War will break out sooner than they may have anticipated. They will redouble their oppressive measures against the workers in those lands in preparation for the new war.
To the labor movement, the incident is an ominous warning, not only of another war, but of immediate renewal of the Big Business onslaught against the working class. A war program requires the regimentation of the workers, the passage of antilabor legislation such as was foreshadowed in the Case bill and Truman’s draft-labor bill.
Thus the Wallace ouster portends an anti-labor drive although it involves a figure who is not at all a representative of the working class. Wallace is a shrewd capitalist politician, astutely gauging his course for high stakes.
Wallace correctly appraises the masses’ fear of a new war, and he realizes how developments on the domestic front are driving the workers to seek a radical solution to their problems. He wants to win unquestioned leadership of this movement, keeping it within the Democratic Party, if possible, and within the framework of capitalist politics at all costs.
Consequently he has patterned his speeches on the model developed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Just as Roosevelt could promise the people “again and again and again” he would not send their sons into any foreign wars, so Wallace today calls for an end of imperialism, for peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union, and for disarmament.
Examination of Wallace’s letter of July 23 to Truman and his speech of Sept. 12 reveals that at bottom his differences with Byrnes are purely tactical. Both are seeking the best way to advance the interests of American capitalism.
Wallace makes out that America has got sucked into imperialism by a “pro-British” policy. But the fact is, the British capitalists are only junior partners Wall Street is by far the dominant imperialist power in the world today. This is clear beyond all dispute in China, for instance. It is American troops and arms and money that reinforce the hated dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.
Wallace. avers that “The slogan that communism and capitalism, regimentation and democracy, cannot continue to exist in the same world, is from a historical point of view, pure propaganda.” The reconcilability of communism and capitalism is the line advanced by Stalin long before the rise of Hitler, long before the volcanic eruption of Wall Street imperialism. Its falsity has been demonstrated precisely by the greatest historical events. Vast regions of the Soviet Union still lie in ruins from the assault of German capitalism.
Hitler’s attack was not simply the result of a. criminal war “plot.” It followed from the irreconcilable conflict between planned economy and capitalist anarchy. In the end either the workers of the world will put an end to capitalism with its wars and depressions, or world imperialism will destroy the nationalized economy of the USSR.
Wallace advocates “disarmament” as the only way to end the threat of an atomic bomb race. But the atomic bomb race has already begun and will continue despite all the pious phrases Of well-meaning pacifists. In such circumstances the slogan of “disarmament” is exceedingly treacherous, for it can delude many people, disarming them for the real struggle against war.
It should be sufficient to recall that Hitler began his preparations for the Second World War under the slogan of “disarmament.” Hitler was simply utilizing an old propaganda device of imperialist politicians. The failure of other capitalist powers to “disarm” was converted by Hitler into an argument to “justify” his all-out preparations for war.
The slogan of “disarmament” always appears during an armaments race. But it does not prevent war. The Third World War which Wallace admits is now looming can be prevented only by ending capitalism and building socialism.
Make no mistake – Wallace is a dangerous capitalist politician. He spread all the lies about fighting the Second World War to bring “four freedoms” including a quart of milk to the world. He is now preparing himself to serve the capitalist, class equally well in the Third World War.
The press is filled with speculation about the effect of Wallace’s ouster on the 1946 elections. Wall Street, however, is little concerned about the effect. The political brains in the pay of the Morgans, Rockefellers and the rest of America’s ruling families have taken the election into account too.
They undoubtedly calculate that they will lose little. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are committed to follow the same reactionary foreign policy. No matter which party wins. Wall Street remains entrenched, dominating the political field. If the labor movement becomes apathetic toward the election, Wall Street still wins. If the workers resent the brazen avowal of a course leading straight to war – where can they turn? The perfidious labor fakers have done their utmost to keep labor from organizing on the political field. They have fought with all their energy against building an independent labor party. In a key state like New York, the Liberals, the American Labor Party and the Stalinists have all committed themselves to supporting the Democratic machine.
But even if some losses were registered on the domestic political front, Wall Street’s overwhelming concern at present is with foreign politics. The main axis of American politics has shifted to the international arena.
Wall Street is after big game – world domination. Above all, American Big Business is fascinated by the vast areas of the Soviet Union. Capitalism could stave off its doom a few years with a blood transfusion at the expense of the Soviet people.
American capitalism has advanced its military frontiers to the other side of both the Atlantic and Pacific basins. The generals and admirals are building bases for the coming attack on the Soviet Union, and at home they are fostering militarism on a scale never before seen in the world. Congress is pouring tens of billions of dollars into the machinery of war. Wall Street has the atomic bomb, deadly new gases, rockets and other frightful weapons.
But why the feverish haste? American Big Business knows that the Soviet liftlion is doing its utmost to work out the production of atomic energy. Success will enormously strengthen the defensive military power of the Soviet Union.
Understanding this, Wall Street cannot help feeling tempted to strike soon. Regarding a Third World War as inevitable in any case, Wall Street has apparently decided to move up the dates on the calendar.
The ouster of Wallace means the interval between the Second and Third World Wars will prove a short one unless the workers act in time.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>Roosevelt and the Negroes</h1>
<h4>The Balance Sheet Since Randolph Canceled the March on Washington</h4>
<h3>(May 1942)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi42_05" target="new">Vol.3 No.5</a>, May 1942, pp.145-149.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">A year has passed since the Negro March on Washington was called off and the growing mass movement around it was smashed. It should now be possible, therefore, by examining what has happened since then to the Negro struggle, to draw the necessary conclusions about the experiences of the March-on-Washington movement, and particularly about the policies of its leadership.</p>
<p>This movement was in existence for only a few months, it failed to achieve the purposes for which it was created, and it disintegrated in a few days. Nevertheless it was the most significant mass movement of Negroes in many years.</p>
<p>It was significant because it showed that the Negro masses had lost confidence in the old movements and methods offered for achieving the abolition of racial discrimination in industry, in government jobs and in the armed forces. Hitherto they had followed the leadership of the professional hat-in-handers, who told them that their salvation lay in acting “respectable” and voting for the “right man” – the right man being the capitalist politician who threw the misleaders of the Negro people a few crumbs every now and then.</p>
<p>The masses observed the approach of full United States participation in the war, they saw the war boom of industry all around them, and they were inspired by the successful organization campaigns of the trade union movement in industries where no headway had ever been made before. At the same time they were painfully aware that Negroes were still segregated in the Army, assigned to kitchen duty in the Navy and barred from the Marine Corps; they saw the total number of unemployed workers decreasing while the number of Negro unemployed remained stationary; they knew prices were going up, relief was being cut, and they were still barred from the overwhelming majority of jobs that paid half-way decent wages.</p>
<p>The conditions for a Negro mass movement were thus created. A. Philip Randolph and the others at the head of the March-on-Washington movement were able to assume its leadership only by speaking the language of militancy, by telling the masses that they had the power to improve their conditions if they would organize themselves and exert their mass pressure on Washington. The enthusiastic response of the masses, the swift wave of fighting optimism and the willingness to sacrifice for the struggle that swept the Negro population were evidence that the Randolphs had not created the movement – they were only capitalizing on the already existing sentiments of the masses. When Randolph first wrote about the march in January 1941, he said he thought it might be possible to have 10,000 Negroes marching down Pennsylvania Avenue; in two or three months, despite extremely poor organizational work, Randolph could predict 50,000 marchers, and before the march was called off at the end of June, he could claim to speak for 100,000 people preparing to march to Washington.</p>
<p>Another very significant thing about this movement was that it was not administered a direct defeat in action by its open enemies. Two weeks before the date set for the march a barrage was opened by the administration; every kind of attempt was made to have it called off; so-called “friends” of the Negro people such as Mrs. Roosevelt and LaGuardia appealed in the name of patriotism, and threatened that the march would “set back the progress which is being made”; Roosevelt himself took the unprecedented step of issuing a proclamation asking all employers to examine whether or not their employment policies made provision for the utilization of available and competent Negro workers. But none of this had the effect desired. The local march committees meeting that week refused to be taken in and they insistently let the Randolph leadership know that they wanted the march to go through unless they were actually granted what they had demanded.</p>
<p>A week later, Randolph and Co. “persuaded” Roosevelt to issue his Executive Order 8802, and then Randolph bureaucratically called off the march in a radio speech hailing the executive order as a second Emancipation Proclamation. Thus Randolph did what neither administration threats nor promises had been able to do. The movement melted away in short order as its members began to understand how they had been sold down the river. But the masses did not walk out because they felt defeated, or because they thought that their fight could not be won. They had not lost confidence in themselves or their ability to win the fight against Jim Crow – only in the Randolphs and their policies. When Negro misleaders and government agents deplore and grumble about “poor Negro morale,” they may not know it but they are really talking about the determination of the Negro masses to continue the struggle for equal rights, war or no war.</p>
<p>To see why the Negro ranks want to continue that struggle, despite the unhappy experience of the march and the pressure of the war regime, it is necessary only to examine the terms of Roosevelt’s executive order and to sum up the present state of Negro rights and conditions.</p>
<p>Randolph’s avowed aim for the march was an executive order decreeing the abolition of discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marines and on all war production. Despite his praise for Order 8802, not even Randolph was able to pretend that Roosevelt had granted what the Negro ranks wanted.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Roosevelt Gave the Negroes</h4>
<p class="fst">In the first place, the order concerned only discrimination by employers in “defense industries.” The order did <em>not</em> abolish discrimination in industry. It stated that all contracting agencies of the government would</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... include in all defense contracts hereafter negotiated by them a provision obligating the contractor not to discriminate against any worker because of race, creed, color or national origin.”</p>
<p class="fst">But what would happen to employers who violated such contracts? Randolph and the Negro press had been demanding that Roosevelt put “some teeth” into the order – that such employers be fined and their contracts withdrawn. Roosevelt’s order included no measures for punishing violators, which could be and was interpreted by the capitalists generally to mean that there would be no crackdown for violations.</p>
<p>Instead of putting teeth into his order, Roosevelt created a Committee on Fair Employment Practices which was to “receive and investigate complaints of discrimination in violation of the provisions of this order” and “to take appropriate steps to redress grievances which it finds to be valid.” But what effective steps could it take when it didn’t have the power to fine employers or revoke contracts? The committee has proved able only to hold local public hearings at which representatives of employers and workers speak about the situation in particular factories. Such publicity and private discussions with some employers who openly disregarded the no-discrimination provisions have resulted in a few Negroes being employed in plants where none had been employed before, But these are what the president of the New Jersey CIO has aptly described as “token employment.” Many employers have hired a half-dozen Negroes and point to them as proof that they do not discriminate. The committee is unable to do anything in these cases but “urge” that the employers comply with the spirit as well as the word of the executive order.</p>
<p>A recent press report demonstrates how weak and ineffective the committee has been. On April 12, more than nine months after the executive order, the committee issued a statement calling on ten industrial concerns “holding millions of dollars in war contracts” in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas to stop discrimination in employment. The companies include a General Motors Buick plant, a Studebaker branch factory, the Stewart-Warner Corporation, Allis-Chalmers and the Heil Company which is owned by the governor of Wisconsin. They are accused of giving orders to private and public employment agencies to submit employment applications of only white and Gentile workers; of advertising in newspapers only for whites, Gentiles and Protestants; and of having refused “to give workers of specified races or creeds opportunities for promotion in keeping with their qualifications.” Open violations of this kind indicate in what contempt the monopolies hold the executive order and the president’s committee. To finish the picture, it should be stated that this is the first time in its existence that the committee has taken so drastic a step as to name violators; it probably was done only after the committee had pleaded piteously with the employers involved to mend their ways. The only answer of the companies has been denials that they are guilty of discrimination. And there the matter rests.</p>
<p>It would be incorrect to conclude from this that additional Negro workers have not secured employment since the order was issued. Although there are no official figures on the question, occasional reports in the Negro press would indicate that several thousand Negroes have secured jobs in industry since last June. There is the “token employment” referred to above. In the second place, government agencies have been able to secure a few thousand jobs for Negroes from employers who are so busy piling profits into the bank that they are not concerned with what they consider to be secondary matters, or from employers who felt for local reasons that they had nothing to gain from discrimination. In the third place, Negroes have been able to get some jobs in a number of non-war industries as white workers leave, attracted by the generally higher pay and steadier work of the war industries.</p>
<p>More important, there has been a growing recognition inside even that minority of the trade union movement which barred Negroes from membership that a Jim Crow policy helps only the employers; in recent months there have been encouraging reports about AFL unions threatening to strike unless Negroes were hired by the companies with which they held contracts and about AFL local unions voting, despite the discriminating constitutions of their international organizations, to open their books to Negro workers. In the CIO, where the formal bans against racial discrimination have generally been respected, there are inspiring reports of white workers paying more than lip service to the struggle for Negro equality, winning jobs and promotions for their colored brothers despite the discriminating practices of the employers.</p>
<p>Finally, and this is by far the most important factor, a shortage of skilled and even unskilled labor is beginning to make itself felt; and employers who used to pretend that they could not hire Negroes because it would create resentment and “labor difficulties” among their white employees, have not hesitated where they could not get white workers to employ Negroes in the unskilled and lower paid positions. This process has been halted somewhat by the layoffs due to conversion of plants to war production and the increasing employment of women workers; but undoubtedly within the next year it will be resumed.</p>
<p>Thus most of the jobs the Negro people have received in the last year or will receive in the next are the result of the needs of the war machine, not of a successful struggle to abolish discrimination. This means that when the war is over the Negro worker will again be the first to be fired – except in those cases where he belongs to a strong trade union which is willing and able to protect his seniority rights; and even this will not be very much protection because the Negro is still the last one being hired in the war industries.<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt’s Jim Crow Armed Forces</h4>
<p class="fst">While Roosevelt has recognized <em>on paper</em> the right of the Negroes to equal treatment in industry, he has never recognized their right to equal treatment by the government in the armed forces. Here the needs and aspirations of the Negro people run smack into the opposition not of an individual employer or corporation, but the government itself.</p>
<p>By conscription the government has already provided the mechanism for drawing into the military struggle as many Negro soldiers as it will require. The administration does not object to using the Negroes in the armed forces any more than it objects to having the employers use Negroes to turn out the materials of war. And perhaps Roosevelt as an individual might have no objections to granting the Negro people the right to serve in the armed forces on the same basis as anyone else.</p>
<p>But Roosevelt is not in Washington as an individual – he is there as the leader of the Democratic Party, and by the grace of the viciously anti-Negro leaders of the Democratic Party of the South. Oppression of the Negro people is not an exclusive product of the South; the mob violence to prevent Negroes from moving into the Sojourner Truth federal housing project in Detroit on February 28 is proof of that. Nevertheless the oppression of the Negro plays a special role in the South; indeed, this oppression is at the foundation of all the power and profits of the Southern ruling class. The Bourbons know that they remain in power only through the super-exploitation of the Negro; when the “representatives” of the South in Congress rant about what they would do if “radicals” try to organize the Negro and restore their right to vote, they mean what they say, they would not hesitate to drown in blood any attempt to abolish the Jim Crow system.</p>
<p>These Southern Congressmen wield – through the poll tax and similar devices – a disproportionate influence not only in Congress, but also in the Democratic Party; without their support Roosevelt would not have been elected in 1940. Hence Roosevelt’s silence on anti-lynch legislation in the most liberal days of his New Deal. Roosevelt may have his differences on some questions with his Southern colleagues, but he does not dare to offend them or to cross them on what they call the color question.</p>
<p>The Jim Crow elements of the South dislike the use of the Negro in the armed forces; their resentment at seeing a Negro in uniform is at the bottom of most of the violence against Negro troops in the South. But war is war, and the more far-sighted of these elements realize that if Negroes are required to save what Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi calls “our way of life and our sacred institutions so that the white man’s civilization may not perish from the earth,” then Negroes will just have to be used in the armed forces.</p>
<p><em>But not as equals!</em> The Southern ruling class will not have them get any uppity ideas about “being as good as a white man,” as so many Negroes did when they returned from the first “war for democracy.” The Southern ruling class lynched the Negroes wearing uniforms on the street after 1918 to teach the Negro people that they had not been fighting for democracy for themselves. It wants to make sure that the Negroes will not have any illusions about this war too; hence in the armed forces they are to be branded as second-class citizens. For, as the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party put it almost two years ago, the Southern Bourbons</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... fear that no Negro trained to handle a gun would peacefully go back to the old life of discrimination, segregation, disfranchisement and insult, after training in an army where he was treated as an equal with white soldiers.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt’s Alibi – and the Reality</h4>
<p class="fst">So Roosevelt, despite the pleas of Randolph and Co., made no concessions in this field when he wrote his executive order last year; in fact, he did not even mention the armed forces in the order. It was not until April 5 of this year that he had anything to say about it. In a letter to the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches on that date, he summed up the administration’s policy as follows;</p>
<p class="quoteb">“At my direction, the armed services have taken numerous steps to open opportunities for Negroes in the armed forces of our country, and they are giving active consideration to other plans which will increase that participation.”</p>
<p class="fst">In other words, there are more Negroes in the armed forces than there were a year ago, and they have been given the opportunity to serve in a few more branches of the service. <em>But segregation continues untouched!</em> Negroes must still serve in separate regiments. These separate regiments are now being gathered together into divisions – as separate all-Negro divisions (all-Negro, that is, except for white officers). Negroes must still eat separately, sleep separately, march separately, pray separately, watch a movie separately, in this army ostensibly warring for democracy.</p>
<p>Segregation of this kind is hateful not only because it is a violation of the most elementary principles of equality and democracy and a token of the treatment the Negro will get after the war. It also lays the basis for the kind of discrimination that often makes the difference between life and death. It is much easier for Jim Crow elements in the General Staff to pick part of a Negro regiment as a “suicide squad” than it would be to pick the same number of individual Negro soldiers out of mixed regiments for the same job. This happened in the last war, and it happened in France in this war</p>
<p>when the lives of thousands of Negro colonial soldiers were thrown away simply on the basis that they were considered “inferior,” and could easily be assigned to the suicide work because they were in segregated regiments.</p>
<p>Roosevelt talks about the opportunities being opened – but the chief opportunity the Negro sees is to be killed or beaten by Jim Crow elements in the Army and out of it, long before he is even sent overseas. No amount of honeyed words can make Negroes forget how they are humiliated by the Southern police and mobs; how Ned Turman was shot to death in Fort Bragg last summer because he protested against MP brutality and resisted it with the cry, “I’m going to break up you MP’s beating us colored soldiers!”; how scores of Negro troops were shot and beaten by MP’s and state troopers in Alexandria, La., last January, because some of them objected to MP brutality; how in the last two months five Negro soldiers have been shot dead in New Jersey, Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia, and countless Negro soldiers attacked in these and other states.</p>
<p>Symbolic, too, of the opportunities offered the Negro soldiers is their first overseas assignment – Australia, where Negro immigration is forbidden by law and where the natives who inhabited the country before the whites came are segregated on reserves or on islands off the continent. And even there, where the very existence of Australian “democracy” is in danger, the United States Negro troops have been sent not as fighters, but as labor battalions.</p>
<p>The “other plans” which Roosevelt referred to on April 5 were the new regulations for Negro service in the Navy announced by Secretary Knox on April 7. These regulations were finally put into effect because of the national wave of protest against Navy segregation of Negroes that arose when the country learned the story of Doric Miller, a Negro mess, attendant on the <em>USS Arizona</em> at Pearl Harbor.</p>
<p>Miller, like all other Negroes in the Navy, was down in the kitchen when the war began. Twenty years ago, after the first “war for democracy” had been won, the Navy decreed that Negroes would hereafter be accepted only as flunkies. Negroes had kept winning promotions and becoming officers and the Navy found it difficult to give them assignments “where the rated Negroes exercised little or no military command.”</p>
<p>Protests against this ruling had little effect. Fifteen sailors on the <em>USS Philadelphia</em>, stationed at Pearl Harbor in the winter of 1940-41, had been discharged from the Navy for writing a letter to a Negro newspaper protesting against their Jim Crow conditions.</p>
<p>But when the bombs began to fall around the ship, Miller came to the deck, seized a machine gun and manned it until it ran out of ammunition, despite the fact that because of his color he had never been taught how to handle such guns; then, as the ship was sinking, he helped rescue a wounded officer. The cry that went up everywhere against the Jim Crow ruling over this succeeded in getting some action out of Roosevelt’s Knox – action which was intended to silence the criticism and yet at the same time continue to deny the Negro sailors the right to serve on the basis of equality with whites.</p>
<p>This writer pointed out a year ago:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Negroes long clamored for admission into the Air Corps; finally they got – a segregated all-Negro squadron. Negro doctors asked for admission into the Army; they were admitted – but limited to attend to Negro troops. Other branches of the service, such as the Marines and Coast Guard, are still closed to the Negro. If the government should open them, it would be on the same Jim Crow basis as the others.”</p>
<p class="fst">Knox’s April 7 order bore out this prediction – what he set up was a separate, Jim Crow section of the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.</p>
<p>According to this plan, Negroes will be accepted in the “reserve components” of these branches of the service, where they will not be mixed with whites, although serving under white officers; they will be eligible to become petty (non-commissioned) officers, but not commissioned officers. All-Negro crews will be assigned to small craft and to serve around shore establishments and in navy yards; skilled workers among them will be gathered together into labor battalions and may eventually be sent to build bases outside of US continental limits. The plan will begin as soon as Jim Crow training stations can be secured.</p>
<p>This is such an obvious evasion of the demand for Negro equality in the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard that even Randolph attacked it on the ground that “it accepts and extends and consolidates the policy of Jim Crowism in the Navy.” He also said that Negroes should “resent the stigma of inferiority and the status of vassals which Secretary Knox has affixed to them.” Randolph apparently does not realize that he is also condemning himself – for it was his own rotten policy that made possible the extension and consolidation of Jim Crowism by the government.<br>
</p>
<h4>Toward a New Negro Leadership</h4>
<p class="fst">The conditions of the Negro people are fully as bad as they were a year ago, and the Negro masses are fully aware of the fact. They are ready to take up the militant struggle where it was discontinued last year. Their eagerness for action, indeed, is so great that the Negro misleaders dare not openly counsel them to give up the struggle for equal rights, but must repeat the refrain that “winning the war must come first, and we must not do anything to interfere with the prosecution of the war.” The Negro masses are not interested in interfering with the prosecution of the war, but for them winning the struggle against Jim Crowism comes “first” because they know what is going to be their lot if the war against the Axis is won while the war against Jim Crowism is lost.</p>
<p>The conditions that lead to a renewed struggle, and the sentiments for conducting that struggle, both exist; the only thing lacking is a leadership with a militant program whom the masses would trust and follow. Where are they to find that leadership?</p>
<p>Again Randolph this spring is talking about militant action against discrimination sometime this summer. But this year he will find it much harder to sell himself as the Moses of the Negro people. Randolph won the Springarn medal for outstanding service to the Negro people in 1941 – but the decision to hand him a medal was made by people who shared his policies, not by the Negro masses who were so disgusted by his capitulation to Roosevelt; what they would have voted to give him he wouldn’t have been able to wear. It would be putting it mildly to say that the advanced Negro workers do not trust Randolph and his type. They saw that he made many speeches about how necessary it was to win the “war for democracy” – but was not disposed to grant them any democracy in the movement which they were building at great expense and sacrifice. They’ve heard him make militant speeches before – and they’ve seen him crawl before the Jim Crow forces only a few days later. An index to Randolph’s popularity among the Negro masses can be found in what happened after he called off the march; in the same speech announcing the granting of the “second Emanicipation Proclamation,” he pleaded with the Negro masses to remain in their local committees and to build them; but the masses paid no attention to him – they walked out of the organization the same night they heard about the calling off of the march.</p>
<p>In an interview with the press early this April, Randolph declared that in view of “the continued discriminations against colored Americans in the Army, Navy, US Marine and Air Corps, <em>as well as defense industries</em>” [what an admission about the executive order for which Randolph called off the march! – <em>A.P.</em>], it is necessary that “free, independent and courageous Negro leaders have a frank, candid and plain talk with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the whole situation.” Only one short year ago Randolph committed himself in print to the following statements:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Evidently, the regular, normal and respectable method of conferences and petitions, while proper and ought to be continued as conditions warrant, certainly don’t work. They don’t do the job.”</p>
<p class="quote">“Negroes cannot stop discrimination ... with conferences of leaders and the intelligentsia alone. While conferences have merit, they won’t get the desired results by themselves.”</p>
<p class="quote">“Power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.”</p>
<p class="fst">Whom shall the Negro masses believe – the Randolph of 1941 or the Randolph of 1942 ? Will they accept his story that what is now needed is a frank talk with Roosevelt, when he told them a year ago that such talks could accomplish nothing? Will they believe that their salvation now lies in the local mass meetings he now advocates, at which the part played by them will be limited to listening to Randolph explain about the need for a candid conversation with the president, when he told them a year ago that they had to put up a militant fight if they wanted to get <em>anything</em>, when he told them even after the march was called off that they had secured the executive order only by the threat of the march?</p>
<p>When we speak about Randolph’s policies merging with those of the old-line fakers, we are speaking also of at least 99 per cent of the present leaders of the Negro people – for Randolph still speaks more militantly than most of them.</p>
<p>The Negro masses cannot turn to them for leadership in the coming struggle, nor can they turn to the Communist Party, which has followed a policy since the march was called off fully as treacherous as Randolph and Co. Up until a week before the march was called off, the Stalinists had nothing but criticism for the Randolph leadership because its program did not go far enough, because it did not oppose the war. Then, three days before the executive order was signed, Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, and the Stalinist policies in the United States underwent a rapid flip-flop. They hailed the executive order as a step forward, although it had, they admitted, some loopholes, and they made no criticism of Randolph for calling off the march. Since then the Stalinists have gone much further along their treacherous road. In February of this year James W. Ford wrote a pamphlet entitled <strong>The War and the Negro People</strong>, in which he tries to justify the Stalinist policy by saying:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Four hundred years of Negro slavery are nothing besides Nazi persecution of Jewish peoples, peoples of the occupied countries, and ‘races’ of so-called ‘inferior’ status.”</p>
<p class="fst">In March, Eugene Gordon of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> editorial staff came out at a symposium in opposition to the Double V slogan of the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> (“double victory for democracy at home and abroad”) because, said the Stalinist, “Hitler is the main enemy” and the</p>
<p>“foes of Negro rights in this country should be considered as secondary.” In April, the Stalinist-controlled National Negro Congress was the most enthusiastic congratulator of Knox for his “bold, patriotic action in smashing age-old restrictions” in the Navy. Fortunately, the Stalinists are discredited among Negroes. The <strong>Chicago Defender</strong>, a Negro paper which had always sympathized with the Stalinist-led Congress, harshly denounced its statement on the Navy Jim Crow setup, saying that its leaders had broken faith with those “who looked to them as among our leaders” and that “they have destroyed their own influence and the influence of the organizations they represent.”</p>
<p>An end to the Negro worker’s acceptance of leadership from outside his own class! In the factories, thanks to the rise of the CIO, are Negro workers trained to represent their fellow-workers. Negroes are serving as grievance committee-men, shop stewards and local union officials, and are in the lead of the struggle in the shops to wipe out Jim Crowism. These Negro trade unionists, thanks to unionism, have developed from their experience the authority of confidence necessary to leaders. From the class struggle in the factories, as well as from their experience of Jim Crowism, they have learned that only the most resolute struggle will win for their people economic, political and social equality. They have helped mightily to build the trade unions and know that the unions are the strongest allies of the Negro struggle. They know that black and white must unite because the white and Negro workers have common problems and a common enemy and must join their forces in common struggle. These Negro proletarian leaders – they are the ones to lead the Negro struggle. When their leadership is recognized and accepted by the great Negro masses – that will be the terrible day of judgment for the Southern Bourbons and their political agents!</p>
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Albert Parker
Roosevelt and the Negroes
The Balance Sheet Since Randolph Canceled the March on Washington
(May 1942)
From Fourth International, Vol.3 No.5, May 1942, pp.145-149.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A year has passed since the Negro March on Washington was called off and the growing mass movement around it was smashed. It should now be possible, therefore, by examining what has happened since then to the Negro struggle, to draw the necessary conclusions about the experiences of the March-on-Washington movement, and particularly about the policies of its leadership.
This movement was in existence for only a few months, it failed to achieve the purposes for which it was created, and it disintegrated in a few days. Nevertheless it was the most significant mass movement of Negroes in many years.
It was significant because it showed that the Negro masses had lost confidence in the old movements and methods offered for achieving the abolition of racial discrimination in industry, in government jobs and in the armed forces. Hitherto they had followed the leadership of the professional hat-in-handers, who told them that their salvation lay in acting “respectable” and voting for the “right man” – the right man being the capitalist politician who threw the misleaders of the Negro people a few crumbs every now and then.
The masses observed the approach of full United States participation in the war, they saw the war boom of industry all around them, and they were inspired by the successful organization campaigns of the trade union movement in industries where no headway had ever been made before. At the same time they were painfully aware that Negroes were still segregated in the Army, assigned to kitchen duty in the Navy and barred from the Marine Corps; they saw the total number of unemployed workers decreasing while the number of Negro unemployed remained stationary; they knew prices were going up, relief was being cut, and they were still barred from the overwhelming majority of jobs that paid half-way decent wages.
The conditions for a Negro mass movement were thus created. A. Philip Randolph and the others at the head of the March-on-Washington movement were able to assume its leadership only by speaking the language of militancy, by telling the masses that they had the power to improve their conditions if they would organize themselves and exert their mass pressure on Washington. The enthusiastic response of the masses, the swift wave of fighting optimism and the willingness to sacrifice for the struggle that swept the Negro population were evidence that the Randolphs had not created the movement – they were only capitalizing on the already existing sentiments of the masses. When Randolph first wrote about the march in January 1941, he said he thought it might be possible to have 10,000 Negroes marching down Pennsylvania Avenue; in two or three months, despite extremely poor organizational work, Randolph could predict 50,000 marchers, and before the march was called off at the end of June, he could claim to speak for 100,000 people preparing to march to Washington.
Another very significant thing about this movement was that it was not administered a direct defeat in action by its open enemies. Two weeks before the date set for the march a barrage was opened by the administration; every kind of attempt was made to have it called off; so-called “friends” of the Negro people such as Mrs. Roosevelt and LaGuardia appealed in the name of patriotism, and threatened that the march would “set back the progress which is being made”; Roosevelt himself took the unprecedented step of issuing a proclamation asking all employers to examine whether or not their employment policies made provision for the utilization of available and competent Negro workers. But none of this had the effect desired. The local march committees meeting that week refused to be taken in and they insistently let the Randolph leadership know that they wanted the march to go through unless they were actually granted what they had demanded.
A week later, Randolph and Co. “persuaded” Roosevelt to issue his Executive Order 8802, and then Randolph bureaucratically called off the march in a radio speech hailing the executive order as a second Emancipation Proclamation. Thus Randolph did what neither administration threats nor promises had been able to do. The movement melted away in short order as its members began to understand how they had been sold down the river. But the masses did not walk out because they felt defeated, or because they thought that their fight could not be won. They had not lost confidence in themselves or their ability to win the fight against Jim Crow – only in the Randolphs and their policies. When Negro misleaders and government agents deplore and grumble about “poor Negro morale,” they may not know it but they are really talking about the determination of the Negro masses to continue the struggle for equal rights, war or no war.
To see why the Negro ranks want to continue that struggle, despite the unhappy experience of the march and the pressure of the war regime, it is necessary only to examine the terms of Roosevelt’s executive order and to sum up the present state of Negro rights and conditions.
Randolph’s avowed aim for the march was an executive order decreeing the abolition of discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marines and on all war production. Despite his praise for Order 8802, not even Randolph was able to pretend that Roosevelt had granted what the Negro ranks wanted.
What Roosevelt Gave the Negroes
In the first place, the order concerned only discrimination by employers in “defense industries.” The order did not abolish discrimination in industry. It stated that all contracting agencies of the government would
“... include in all defense contracts hereafter negotiated by them a provision obligating the contractor not to discriminate against any worker because of race, creed, color or national origin.”
But what would happen to employers who violated such contracts? Randolph and the Negro press had been demanding that Roosevelt put “some teeth” into the order – that such employers be fined and their contracts withdrawn. Roosevelt’s order included no measures for punishing violators, which could be and was interpreted by the capitalists generally to mean that there would be no crackdown for violations.
Instead of putting teeth into his order, Roosevelt created a Committee on Fair Employment Practices which was to “receive and investigate complaints of discrimination in violation of the provisions of this order” and “to take appropriate steps to redress grievances which it finds to be valid.” But what effective steps could it take when it didn’t have the power to fine employers or revoke contracts? The committee has proved able only to hold local public hearings at which representatives of employers and workers speak about the situation in particular factories. Such publicity and private discussions with some employers who openly disregarded the no-discrimination provisions have resulted in a few Negroes being employed in plants where none had been employed before, But these are what the president of the New Jersey CIO has aptly described as “token employment.” Many employers have hired a half-dozen Negroes and point to them as proof that they do not discriminate. The committee is unable to do anything in these cases but “urge” that the employers comply with the spirit as well as the word of the executive order.
A recent press report demonstrates how weak and ineffective the committee has been. On April 12, more than nine months after the executive order, the committee issued a statement calling on ten industrial concerns “holding millions of dollars in war contracts” in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas to stop discrimination in employment. The companies include a General Motors Buick plant, a Studebaker branch factory, the Stewart-Warner Corporation, Allis-Chalmers and the Heil Company which is owned by the governor of Wisconsin. They are accused of giving orders to private and public employment agencies to submit employment applications of only white and Gentile workers; of advertising in newspapers only for whites, Gentiles and Protestants; and of having refused “to give workers of specified races or creeds opportunities for promotion in keeping with their qualifications.” Open violations of this kind indicate in what contempt the monopolies hold the executive order and the president’s committee. To finish the picture, it should be stated that this is the first time in its existence that the committee has taken so drastic a step as to name violators; it probably was done only after the committee had pleaded piteously with the employers involved to mend their ways. The only answer of the companies has been denials that they are guilty of discrimination. And there the matter rests.
It would be incorrect to conclude from this that additional Negro workers have not secured employment since the order was issued. Although there are no official figures on the question, occasional reports in the Negro press would indicate that several thousand Negroes have secured jobs in industry since last June. There is the “token employment” referred to above. In the second place, government agencies have been able to secure a few thousand jobs for Negroes from employers who are so busy piling profits into the bank that they are not concerned with what they consider to be secondary matters, or from employers who felt for local reasons that they had nothing to gain from discrimination. In the third place, Negroes have been able to get some jobs in a number of non-war industries as white workers leave, attracted by the generally higher pay and steadier work of the war industries.
More important, there has been a growing recognition inside even that minority of the trade union movement which barred Negroes from membership that a Jim Crow policy helps only the employers; in recent months there have been encouraging reports about AFL unions threatening to strike unless Negroes were hired by the companies with which they held contracts and about AFL local unions voting, despite the discriminating constitutions of their international organizations, to open their books to Negro workers. In the CIO, where the formal bans against racial discrimination have generally been respected, there are inspiring reports of white workers paying more than lip service to the struggle for Negro equality, winning jobs and promotions for their colored brothers despite the discriminating practices of the employers.
Finally, and this is by far the most important factor, a shortage of skilled and even unskilled labor is beginning to make itself felt; and employers who used to pretend that they could not hire Negroes because it would create resentment and “labor difficulties” among their white employees, have not hesitated where they could not get white workers to employ Negroes in the unskilled and lower paid positions. This process has been halted somewhat by the layoffs due to conversion of plants to war production and the increasing employment of women workers; but undoubtedly within the next year it will be resumed.
Thus most of the jobs the Negro people have received in the last year or will receive in the next are the result of the needs of the war machine, not of a successful struggle to abolish discrimination. This means that when the war is over the Negro worker will again be the first to be fired – except in those cases where he belongs to a strong trade union which is willing and able to protect his seniority rights; and even this will not be very much protection because the Negro is still the last one being hired in the war industries.
Roosevelt’s Jim Crow Armed Forces
While Roosevelt has recognized on paper the right of the Negroes to equal treatment in industry, he has never recognized their right to equal treatment by the government in the armed forces. Here the needs and aspirations of the Negro people run smack into the opposition not of an individual employer or corporation, but the government itself.
By conscription the government has already provided the mechanism for drawing into the military struggle as many Negro soldiers as it will require. The administration does not object to using the Negroes in the armed forces any more than it objects to having the employers use Negroes to turn out the materials of war. And perhaps Roosevelt as an individual might have no objections to granting the Negro people the right to serve in the armed forces on the same basis as anyone else.
But Roosevelt is not in Washington as an individual – he is there as the leader of the Democratic Party, and by the grace of the viciously anti-Negro leaders of the Democratic Party of the South. Oppression of the Negro people is not an exclusive product of the South; the mob violence to prevent Negroes from moving into the Sojourner Truth federal housing project in Detroit on February 28 is proof of that. Nevertheless the oppression of the Negro plays a special role in the South; indeed, this oppression is at the foundation of all the power and profits of the Southern ruling class. The Bourbons know that they remain in power only through the super-exploitation of the Negro; when the “representatives” of the South in Congress rant about what they would do if “radicals” try to organize the Negro and restore their right to vote, they mean what they say, they would not hesitate to drown in blood any attempt to abolish the Jim Crow system.
These Southern Congressmen wield – through the poll tax and similar devices – a disproportionate influence not only in Congress, but also in the Democratic Party; without their support Roosevelt would not have been elected in 1940. Hence Roosevelt’s silence on anti-lynch legislation in the most liberal days of his New Deal. Roosevelt may have his differences on some questions with his Southern colleagues, but he does not dare to offend them or to cross them on what they call the color question.
The Jim Crow elements of the South dislike the use of the Negro in the armed forces; their resentment at seeing a Negro in uniform is at the bottom of most of the violence against Negro troops in the South. But war is war, and the more far-sighted of these elements realize that if Negroes are required to save what Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi calls “our way of life and our sacred institutions so that the white man’s civilization may not perish from the earth,” then Negroes will just have to be used in the armed forces.
But not as equals! The Southern ruling class will not have them get any uppity ideas about “being as good as a white man,” as so many Negroes did when they returned from the first “war for democracy.” The Southern ruling class lynched the Negroes wearing uniforms on the street after 1918 to teach the Negro people that they had not been fighting for democracy for themselves. It wants to make sure that the Negroes will not have any illusions about this war too; hence in the armed forces they are to be branded as second-class citizens. For, as the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party put it almost two years ago, the Southern Bourbons
“... fear that no Negro trained to handle a gun would peacefully go back to the old life of discrimination, segregation, disfranchisement and insult, after training in an army where he was treated as an equal with white soldiers.”
Roosevelt’s Alibi – and the Reality
So Roosevelt, despite the pleas of Randolph and Co., made no concessions in this field when he wrote his executive order last year; in fact, he did not even mention the armed forces in the order. It was not until April 5 of this year that he had anything to say about it. In a letter to the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches on that date, he summed up the administration’s policy as follows;
“At my direction, the armed services have taken numerous steps to open opportunities for Negroes in the armed forces of our country, and they are giving active consideration to other plans which will increase that participation.”
In other words, there are more Negroes in the armed forces than there were a year ago, and they have been given the opportunity to serve in a few more branches of the service. But segregation continues untouched! Negroes must still serve in separate regiments. These separate regiments are now being gathered together into divisions – as separate all-Negro divisions (all-Negro, that is, except for white officers). Negroes must still eat separately, sleep separately, march separately, pray separately, watch a movie separately, in this army ostensibly warring for democracy.
Segregation of this kind is hateful not only because it is a violation of the most elementary principles of equality and democracy and a token of the treatment the Negro will get after the war. It also lays the basis for the kind of discrimination that often makes the difference between life and death. It is much easier for Jim Crow elements in the General Staff to pick part of a Negro regiment as a “suicide squad” than it would be to pick the same number of individual Negro soldiers out of mixed regiments for the same job. This happened in the last war, and it happened in France in this war
when the lives of thousands of Negro colonial soldiers were thrown away simply on the basis that they were considered “inferior,” and could easily be assigned to the suicide work because they were in segregated regiments.
Roosevelt talks about the opportunities being opened – but the chief opportunity the Negro sees is to be killed or beaten by Jim Crow elements in the Army and out of it, long before he is even sent overseas. No amount of honeyed words can make Negroes forget how they are humiliated by the Southern police and mobs; how Ned Turman was shot to death in Fort Bragg last summer because he protested against MP brutality and resisted it with the cry, “I’m going to break up you MP’s beating us colored soldiers!”; how scores of Negro troops were shot and beaten by MP’s and state troopers in Alexandria, La., last January, because some of them objected to MP brutality; how in the last two months five Negro soldiers have been shot dead in New Jersey, Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia, and countless Negro soldiers attacked in these and other states.
Symbolic, too, of the opportunities offered the Negro soldiers is their first overseas assignment – Australia, where Negro immigration is forbidden by law and where the natives who inhabited the country before the whites came are segregated on reserves or on islands off the continent. And even there, where the very existence of Australian “democracy” is in danger, the United States Negro troops have been sent not as fighters, but as labor battalions.
The “other plans” which Roosevelt referred to on April 5 were the new regulations for Negro service in the Navy announced by Secretary Knox on April 7. These regulations were finally put into effect because of the national wave of protest against Navy segregation of Negroes that arose when the country learned the story of Doric Miller, a Negro mess, attendant on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.
Miller, like all other Negroes in the Navy, was down in the kitchen when the war began. Twenty years ago, after the first “war for democracy” had been won, the Navy decreed that Negroes would hereafter be accepted only as flunkies. Negroes had kept winning promotions and becoming officers and the Navy found it difficult to give them assignments “where the rated Negroes exercised little or no military command.”
Protests against this ruling had little effect. Fifteen sailors on the USS Philadelphia, stationed at Pearl Harbor in the winter of 1940-41, had been discharged from the Navy for writing a letter to a Negro newspaper protesting against their Jim Crow conditions.
But when the bombs began to fall around the ship, Miller came to the deck, seized a machine gun and manned it until it ran out of ammunition, despite the fact that because of his color he had never been taught how to handle such guns; then, as the ship was sinking, he helped rescue a wounded officer. The cry that went up everywhere against the Jim Crow ruling over this succeeded in getting some action out of Roosevelt’s Knox – action which was intended to silence the criticism and yet at the same time continue to deny the Negro sailors the right to serve on the basis of equality with whites.
This writer pointed out a year ago:
“Negroes long clamored for admission into the Air Corps; finally they got – a segregated all-Negro squadron. Negro doctors asked for admission into the Army; they were admitted – but limited to attend to Negro troops. Other branches of the service, such as the Marines and Coast Guard, are still closed to the Negro. If the government should open them, it would be on the same Jim Crow basis as the others.”
Knox’s April 7 order bore out this prediction – what he set up was a separate, Jim Crow section of the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.
According to this plan, Negroes will be accepted in the “reserve components” of these branches of the service, where they will not be mixed with whites, although serving under white officers; they will be eligible to become petty (non-commissioned) officers, but not commissioned officers. All-Negro crews will be assigned to small craft and to serve around shore establishments and in navy yards; skilled workers among them will be gathered together into labor battalions and may eventually be sent to build bases outside of US continental limits. The plan will begin as soon as Jim Crow training stations can be secured.
This is such an obvious evasion of the demand for Negro equality in the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard that even Randolph attacked it on the ground that “it accepts and extends and consolidates the policy of Jim Crowism in the Navy.” He also said that Negroes should “resent the stigma of inferiority and the status of vassals which Secretary Knox has affixed to them.” Randolph apparently does not realize that he is also condemning himself – for it was his own rotten policy that made possible the extension and consolidation of Jim Crowism by the government.
Toward a New Negro Leadership
The conditions of the Negro people are fully as bad as they were a year ago, and the Negro masses are fully aware of the fact. They are ready to take up the militant struggle where it was discontinued last year. Their eagerness for action, indeed, is so great that the Negro misleaders dare not openly counsel them to give up the struggle for equal rights, but must repeat the refrain that “winning the war must come first, and we must not do anything to interfere with the prosecution of the war.” The Negro masses are not interested in interfering with the prosecution of the war, but for them winning the struggle against Jim Crowism comes “first” because they know what is going to be their lot if the war against the Axis is won while the war against Jim Crowism is lost.
The conditions that lead to a renewed struggle, and the sentiments for conducting that struggle, both exist; the only thing lacking is a leadership with a militant program whom the masses would trust and follow. Where are they to find that leadership?
Again Randolph this spring is talking about militant action against discrimination sometime this summer. But this year he will find it much harder to sell himself as the Moses of the Negro people. Randolph won the Springarn medal for outstanding service to the Negro people in 1941 – but the decision to hand him a medal was made by people who shared his policies, not by the Negro masses who were so disgusted by his capitulation to Roosevelt; what they would have voted to give him he wouldn’t have been able to wear. It would be putting it mildly to say that the advanced Negro workers do not trust Randolph and his type. They saw that he made many speeches about how necessary it was to win the “war for democracy” – but was not disposed to grant them any democracy in the movement which they were building at great expense and sacrifice. They’ve heard him make militant speeches before – and they’ve seen him crawl before the Jim Crow forces only a few days later. An index to Randolph’s popularity among the Negro masses can be found in what happened after he called off the march; in the same speech announcing the granting of the “second Emanicipation Proclamation,” he pleaded with the Negro masses to remain in their local committees and to build them; but the masses paid no attention to him – they walked out of the organization the same night they heard about the calling off of the march.
In an interview with the press early this April, Randolph declared that in view of “the continued discriminations against colored Americans in the Army, Navy, US Marine and Air Corps, as well as defense industries” [what an admission about the executive order for which Randolph called off the march! – A.P.], it is necessary that “free, independent and courageous Negro leaders have a frank, candid and plain talk with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the whole situation.” Only one short year ago Randolph committed himself in print to the following statements:
“Evidently, the regular, normal and respectable method of conferences and petitions, while proper and ought to be continued as conditions warrant, certainly don’t work. They don’t do the job.”
“Negroes cannot stop discrimination ... with conferences of leaders and the intelligentsia alone. While conferences have merit, they won’t get the desired results by themselves.”
“Power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.”
Whom shall the Negro masses believe – the Randolph of 1941 or the Randolph of 1942 ? Will they accept his story that what is now needed is a frank talk with Roosevelt, when he told them a year ago that such talks could accomplish nothing? Will they believe that their salvation now lies in the local mass meetings he now advocates, at which the part played by them will be limited to listening to Randolph explain about the need for a candid conversation with the president, when he told them a year ago that they had to put up a militant fight if they wanted to get anything, when he told them even after the march was called off that they had secured the executive order only by the threat of the march?
When we speak about Randolph’s policies merging with those of the old-line fakers, we are speaking also of at least 99 per cent of the present leaders of the Negro people – for Randolph still speaks more militantly than most of them.
The Negro masses cannot turn to them for leadership in the coming struggle, nor can they turn to the Communist Party, which has followed a policy since the march was called off fully as treacherous as Randolph and Co. Up until a week before the march was called off, the Stalinists had nothing but criticism for the Randolph leadership because its program did not go far enough, because it did not oppose the war. Then, three days before the executive order was signed, Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, and the Stalinist policies in the United States underwent a rapid flip-flop. They hailed the executive order as a step forward, although it had, they admitted, some loopholes, and they made no criticism of Randolph for calling off the march. Since then the Stalinists have gone much further along their treacherous road. In February of this year James W. Ford wrote a pamphlet entitled The War and the Negro People, in which he tries to justify the Stalinist policy by saying:
“Four hundred years of Negro slavery are nothing besides Nazi persecution of Jewish peoples, peoples of the occupied countries, and ‘races’ of so-called ‘inferior’ status.”
In March, Eugene Gordon of the Daily Worker editorial staff came out at a symposium in opposition to the Double V slogan of the Pittsburgh Courier (“double victory for democracy at home and abroad”) because, said the Stalinist, “Hitler is the main enemy” and the
“foes of Negro rights in this country should be considered as secondary.” In April, the Stalinist-controlled National Negro Congress was the most enthusiastic congratulator of Knox for his “bold, patriotic action in smashing age-old restrictions” in the Navy. Fortunately, the Stalinists are discredited among Negroes. The Chicago Defender, a Negro paper which had always sympathized with the Stalinist-led Congress, harshly denounced its statement on the Navy Jim Crow setup, saying that its leaders had broken faith with those “who looked to them as among our leaders” and that “they have destroyed their own influence and the influence of the organizations they represent.”
An end to the Negro worker’s acceptance of leadership from outside his own class! In the factories, thanks to the rise of the CIO, are Negro workers trained to represent their fellow-workers. Negroes are serving as grievance committee-men, shop stewards and local union officials, and are in the lead of the struggle in the shops to wipe out Jim Crowism. These Negro trade unionists, thanks to unionism, have developed from their experience the authority of confidence necessary to leaders. From the class struggle in the factories, as well as from their experience of Jim Crowism, they have learned that only the most resolute struggle will win for their people economic, political and social equality. They have helped mightily to build the trade unions and know that the unions are the strongest allies of the Negro struggle. They know that black and white must unite because the white and Negro workers have common problems and a common enemy and must join their forces in common struggle. These Negro proletarian leaders – they are the ones to lead the Negro struggle. When their leadership is recognized and accepted by the great Negro masses – that will be the terrible day of judgment for the Southern Bourbons and their political agents!
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./articles/Parker-Albert-(George-Breitman)/https:..www.marxists.org.history.etol.document.fi.1950-1953.ic-issplit.14c | <body>
<h4>DOCUMENT 14c</h4>
<h2>Letter from George Breitman to James P. Cannon, October 7, 1953</h2>
<p><strong><em>Documents 3 to 17 and 19 to 24 originally published in
Internal Bulletins of the SWP and the International Bulletins of the
International Committee</em></strong></p>
<hr>
<p>Dear Jim:</p>
<p>There is some information available that I regard as significant,
which I’d like to pass on to you. (You may already have it, but I got
it so tardily and accidentally that you may not; I am not sure if all
the other comrades attach the same significance to it that I do. We
discussed it for the first time last night, and I’m telling you about
it on the chance that it may be lost in the rush of other news passing
back and forth.)</p>
<p>Some time ago (during the last month, I assume) a ‘naive’ rank and
filer was holding a discussion with Sid Winn, a leading Cochranite
(formerly on the City Committee). This comrade assumed that a majority
of the International was with us, and said so. Winn’s reply was
approximately as follows (and remember I have this fourth-or
fifth-hand): Yes, it’s true you have a mechanical majority of the
International, but we have a majority of the ideological leadership,
and so on. He also said, in passing, that because of the peculiarities
of the voting there, we (the majority) have the West German party with
us.</p>
<p>Dave Weiss got a report about this discussion. About two weeks ago,
or maybe less, Monroe, the Flint Cochranite, came to town and Dave ran
into him. In the discussion Dave decided to use the approach of the
’naive’ rank and filer and boldly told Monroe that of course we have a
decisive majority of the International with us. Monroe’s reply was very
much like that of Winn’s.</p>
<p>Was Winn expressing ideas of his own? It’s hardly likely. Was
Monroe’s reply like Winn’s merely because of coincidence? That’s even
less likely. The minority is a very tight caucus. Its members would not
have such ideas unless they had received them from their leaders, whom
they surely have been asking questions about the international relation
of forces. Also, the minority, I am sorry to say, is better informed
about these matters than we are, if only because Pablo is in a better
position to know where the different parties tend to stand.</p>
<p>Thus, with what you call my customary restraint, I have come to
certain conclusions: The minority does not think it has the support of
a majority of the International. Its estimate must be supported by
information that we do not have available (the news about West Germany
certainly falls into that category). Perhaps some of us have been
unduly pessimistic about the outcome of an international showdown --
with less cause than the minority has to be pessimistic.</p>
<p>At the meeting last night it was also reported that Bartell, in his
discussion with Steve Roberts, had spoken in a derogatory manner about
the size and influence of the International (the same kind of thing he
started doing about our own party after he saw they were in a hopeless
minority here). This is not the way he would talk about the
International if he thought they had the majority; on the contrary.
Also, it was reported that at a social last week members of the
minority were speaking in a belittling manner about the Ceylon party.</p>
<p>Doesn’t this tend to explain the hysterical and almost desperate
tone of Pablo’s recent letters and statements? Would he write that way
unless there was a good psychological-political reason for it?</p>
<p>Also: we have been talking about the behaviour of the Pabloists,
which to some has seemed possibly motivated by a desire to force some
kind of showdown <em>before</em> the Congress takes place. Can it be
for the aforementioned reason? Why should they risk a possible split
before the Congress if they thought they’d have a majority there?</p>
<p>Then there is the argument about ‘why don’t you accept the same
discipline in the International that you want the American minority to
accept in the American party?’ It seemed for a time that this was going
to be a big pitch on their part, but it has been muted for the most
part; certainly not put forward full-scale. Myra observed that she
noted Pablo’s answer to you on internationalism placed this argument
within the framework of the past and present, rather than the future;
there was no bold statement about letting the Congress decide. (I
haven’t checked this point myself yet.) This too fits in with the
premise that they don’t have a majority, and know it. And isn’t it
possible also that this premise has something to do with Pablo’s
repeated requests for a ‘face-to-face’ talk?</p>
<p>I won’t go on further along this line. But it seems obvious to me
that we ought to reflect on it carefully. It not only throws light on
their tactics, I believe, but it must be weighed in formulating our own
tactics. I will not enter into that myself, because I am not much of a
tactician, but I believe it will have to condition our attitude to the
Congress and our statements about the Congress. (Of course we can probe
the thing further if that seems necessary.)</p>
<p>Comradely,</p>
<p>George Breitman</p>
<p>P.S. Have you noticed that Pablo, in his article of Sept. 9,
answering your speech on internationalism, finds it necessary for some
reason to say in his opening line that he did not see the text of your
speech until Sept. 5? What in the world is the reason for that, or the
significance he places on it? The IS letter of Sept. 3 makes clear
reference to the speech in its sixth paragraph, even using quotation
marks around certain words. How could they quote from it without having
seen it? Furthermore, what is he trying to say by pretending that he
hadn’t seen the speech before Sept. 5’that Clarke didn’t show him
the speech when he arrived in August, or mail it to him even earlier
when he got it (in July, and possibly even in June)? Has he trapped
himself through some over-use of duplicity? (These are rhetorical
questions, and I don’t want any answers; I just call it to your
attention as a 16th rate matter that may possibly be of interest to
you.)</p>
<hr>
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DOCUMENT 14c
Letter from George Breitman to James P. Cannon, October 7, 1953
Documents 3 to 17 and 19 to 24 originally published in
Internal Bulletins of the SWP and the International Bulletins of the
International Committee
Dear Jim:
There is some information available that I regard as significant,
which I’d like to pass on to you. (You may already have it, but I got
it so tardily and accidentally that you may not; I am not sure if all
the other comrades attach the same significance to it that I do. We
discussed it for the first time last night, and I’m telling you about
it on the chance that it may be lost in the rush of other news passing
back and forth.)
Some time ago (during the last month, I assume) a ‘naive’ rank and
filer was holding a discussion with Sid Winn, a leading Cochranite
(formerly on the City Committee). This comrade assumed that a majority
of the International was with us, and said so. Winn’s reply was
approximately as follows (and remember I have this fourth-or
fifth-hand): Yes, it’s true you have a mechanical majority of the
International, but we have a majority of the ideological leadership,
and so on. He also said, in passing, that because of the peculiarities
of the voting there, we (the majority) have the West German party with
us.
Dave Weiss got a report about this discussion. About two weeks ago,
or maybe less, Monroe, the Flint Cochranite, came to town and Dave ran
into him. In the discussion Dave decided to use the approach of the
’naive’ rank and filer and boldly told Monroe that of course we have a
decisive majority of the International with us. Monroe’s reply was very
much like that of Winn’s.
Was Winn expressing ideas of his own? It’s hardly likely. Was
Monroe’s reply like Winn’s merely because of coincidence? That’s even
less likely. The minority is a very tight caucus. Its members would not
have such ideas unless they had received them from their leaders, whom
they surely have been asking questions about the international relation
of forces. Also, the minority, I am sorry to say, is better informed
about these matters than we are, if only because Pablo is in a better
position to know where the different parties tend to stand.
Thus, with what you call my customary restraint, I have come to
certain conclusions: The minority does not think it has the support of
a majority of the International. Its estimate must be supported by
information that we do not have available (the news about West Germany
certainly falls into that category). Perhaps some of us have been
unduly pessimistic about the outcome of an international showdown --
with less cause than the minority has to be pessimistic.
At the meeting last night it was also reported that Bartell, in his
discussion with Steve Roberts, had spoken in a derogatory manner about
the size and influence of the International (the same kind of thing he
started doing about our own party after he saw they were in a hopeless
minority here). This is not the way he would talk about the
International if he thought they had the majority; on the contrary.
Also, it was reported that at a social last week members of the
minority were speaking in a belittling manner about the Ceylon party.
Doesn’t this tend to explain the hysterical and almost desperate
tone of Pablo’s recent letters and statements? Would he write that way
unless there was a good psychological-political reason for it?
Also: we have been talking about the behaviour of the Pabloists,
which to some has seemed possibly motivated by a desire to force some
kind of showdown before the Congress takes place. Can it be
for the aforementioned reason? Why should they risk a possible split
before the Congress if they thought they’d have a majority there?
Then there is the argument about ‘why don’t you accept the same
discipline in the International that you want the American minority to
accept in the American party?’ It seemed for a time that this was going
to be a big pitch on their part, but it has been muted for the most
part; certainly not put forward full-scale. Myra observed that she
noted Pablo’s answer to you on internationalism placed this argument
within the framework of the past and present, rather than the future;
there was no bold statement about letting the Congress decide. (I
haven’t checked this point myself yet.) This too fits in with the
premise that they don’t have a majority, and know it. And isn’t it
possible also that this premise has something to do with Pablo’s
repeated requests for a ‘face-to-face’ talk?
I won’t go on further along this line. But it seems obvious to me
that we ought to reflect on it carefully. It not only throws light on
their tactics, I believe, but it must be weighed in formulating our own
tactics. I will not enter into that myself, because I am not much of a
tactician, but I believe it will have to condition our attitude to the
Congress and our statements about the Congress. (Of course we can probe
the thing further if that seems necessary.)
Comradely,
George Breitman
P.S. Have you noticed that Pablo, in his article of Sept. 9,
answering your speech on internationalism, finds it necessary for some
reason to say in his opening line that he did not see the text of your
speech until Sept. 5? What in the world is the reason for that, or the
significance he places on it? The IS letter of Sept. 3 makes clear
reference to the speech in its sixth paragraph, even using quotation
marks around certain words. How could they quote from it without having
seen it? Furthermore, what is he trying to say by pretending that he
hadn’t seen the speech before Sept. 5’that Clarke didn’t show him
the speech when he arrived in August, or mail it to him even earlier
when he got it (in July, and possibly even in June)? Has he trapped
himself through some over-use of duplicity? (These are rhetorical
questions, and I don’t want any answers; I just call it to your
attention as a 16th rate matter that may possibly be of interest to
you.)
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>The Generals and the Admirals</h1>
<h3>(21 September 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_38" target="new">Vol. X No. 38</a>, 21 September 1946, p. 6<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Generals and admirals are used to having their own way. That fact, and the fact that they are surrounded with yes-men who do not</p>
<p>dare to dispute their stupidest remarks, account for their often saying what they think. In this respect they are a little different from politicians, who are trained generally not to say what they think.</p>
<p>“It’s nobody’s damn business where we go; we will go anywhere we please.” That’s what Admiral Halsey said last month, and that’s exactly what he meant. He was answering the criticism about the U.S. Navy’s fleet going to Greece. He meant it was not the Soviet Union’s business – or Greece’s; he also meant it was the business only of the U.S. government and the brass hats. That is, it wasn’t the business of the American people.</p>
<p>The same idea was expressed by General Eisenhower a few days later. Former War Production Chairman Donald P. Nelson had just published a book revealing that the Army had tried to take over the country’s economy during the war. Eisenhower denied this, adding as a clincher: “The Army wants no domination of anything but its own affairs.”</p>
<p>When Eisenhower says “the Army,” he of course means the big brass. But since when has the brass got the right to “dominate” even the affairs of the Army? Isn’t Congress alone supposed to have that right?</p>
<p>Yes, Congress is supposed to, but more and more the brass hats are taking over. Long before Congress voted to authorize the Bikini atomic bomb maneuvers, the admirals had picked the men, the ships and the place, and had the project three-quarters completed.</p>
<p>Congress adjourned without acting on the “Inter-American Military Cooperation Bill” to integrate all of Latin America into the U.S. military machine. But Eisenhower has just returned from a Latin-American tour where he made arrangements for executing this plan despite Congress’ failure to approve it.</p>
<p>The generals and admirals sincerely think that the military way of life is the best. All they have to do is issue commands, and millions of people have to execute them. No fuss, no bother, no back-talk, no “labor trouble.” Could anything be more efficient? No one had more admiration for the way Mussolini “made the trains run” than the brass hats. They would like to “make the country run” that way too. And the world.</p>
<p>The labor movement had better open its eyes and see what is going on. The brass hats who tried to take over the country during the war have not changed their colors. The danger of military dictatorship remains – and will grow as the threat of a Third World War grows. Either labor will curb the expanding power and arrogance of the generals and the admirals, or all of labor’s rights and gains will be threatened.</p>
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George Breitman
The Generals and the Admirals
(21 September 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 38, 21 September 1946, p. 6
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Generals and admirals are used to having their own way. That fact, and the fact that they are surrounded with yes-men who do not
dare to dispute their stupidest remarks, account for their often saying what they think. In this respect they are a little different from politicians, who are trained generally not to say what they think.
“It’s nobody’s damn business where we go; we will go anywhere we please.” That’s what Admiral Halsey said last month, and that’s exactly what he meant. He was answering the criticism about the U.S. Navy’s fleet going to Greece. He meant it was not the Soviet Union’s business – or Greece’s; he also meant it was the business only of the U.S. government and the brass hats. That is, it wasn’t the business of the American people.
The same idea was expressed by General Eisenhower a few days later. Former War Production Chairman Donald P. Nelson had just published a book revealing that the Army had tried to take over the country’s economy during the war. Eisenhower denied this, adding as a clincher: “The Army wants no domination of anything but its own affairs.”
When Eisenhower says “the Army,” he of course means the big brass. But since when has the brass got the right to “dominate” even the affairs of the Army? Isn’t Congress alone supposed to have that right?
Yes, Congress is supposed to, but more and more the brass hats are taking over. Long before Congress voted to authorize the Bikini atomic bomb maneuvers, the admirals had picked the men, the ships and the place, and had the project three-quarters completed.
Congress adjourned without acting on the “Inter-American Military Cooperation Bill” to integrate all of Latin America into the U.S. military machine. But Eisenhower has just returned from a Latin-American tour where he made arrangements for executing this plan despite Congress’ failure to approve it.
The generals and admirals sincerely think that the military way of life is the best. All they have to do is issue commands, and millions of people have to execute them. No fuss, no bother, no back-talk, no “labor trouble.” Could anything be more efficient? No one had more admiration for the way Mussolini “made the trains run” than the brass hats. They would like to “make the country run” that way too. And the world.
The labor movement had better open its eyes and see what is going on. The brass hats who tried to take over the country during the war have not changed their colors. The danger of military dictatorship remains – and will grow as the threat of a Third World War grows. Either labor will curb the expanding power and arrogance of the generals and the admirals, or all of labor’s rights and gains will be threatened.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(23 August 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_34" target="new">Vol. V No. 34</a>, 23 August 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>Auto Workers Fight Jim Crow</h4>
<p class="fst">It is clear that the United Automobile Workers, CIO, is fully awake to its responsibilities to the Negro workers, and understands that if it wants the aid of the Negro people in its struggles, it must do more than pass resolutions against Jim Crow, it must actively take up the struggle to win equality for the Negroes in the auto factories and in industry generally.</p>
<p>The convention of the union last week passed a resolution instructing all locals to fight for the following program:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Hiring of Negro workers in all departments in all auto, aircraft and “defense” industries.</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>Equal opportunities for transfers, promotions and training for Negro workers in all auto, aircraft and “defense” plants.</em></li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The delegates made it clear that they wanted the officers to carry out this program without any fail.</p>
<p>One Negro delegate in a moving speech said, “We (Negro people) want to demonstrate we are men and we are brothers and we believe in the CIO.” Most of the Negro auto workers have already demonstrated this. It is now up to their white brothers to understand that action on the job to fulfill the union’s resolution will make the Negro workers the best and most loyal members of the union.</p>
<p>The convention also passed a resolution demanding abolition of the poll tax which disfranchises millions of Negro and white workers and sharecroppers in the South.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Whose Idea Is Jim Crowism?</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>PM</strong>, New York newspaper controlled by Marshall Field, department store magnate who refuses to hire Negroes except as janitors or doormen, has been making a bid for Negro nickels by deploring Jim Crowism every now and then as “inconsistent” with the “all-out war for democracy” which <strong>PM</strong> so ardently supports.</p>
<p>Last week in their editorial columns they printed a letter from a white soldier in a northern camp, who told how his commanding officer had addressed the men in his company, some of whom were about to be transferred to a southern camp. The officer told them “not to drink with niggers” and not to shake a colored man’s hand when saying good-bye.</p>
<p><strong>PM</strong> prints the letter to show its “sympathy” for the Negro people, to. “take the curse” off the officers, and to try to round-up Negro support for the war.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“<strong>PM</strong> does not condemn the entire army or entire officers’ corps on the basis of this one incident – although it is far from the only incident of similar nature reported.”</p>
<p class="fst">But, says <strong>PM</strong>, the main thing is this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The war against fascism must be a total war, fought with guns against Hitler’s guns abroad, and fought with ideas against Hitler’s ideas at home. Racial discrimination is a Hitler idea ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Of course Hitler has used persecution of Jewish people and other minorities to divide the German workers and maintain himself in power. But is it his idea alone? Did he invent it?</p>
<p>Every Negro knows that this is not true, that Jim Crowism existed and was nourished by the capitalists in this country long before Hitler was heard of. Racial discrimination is also a Roosevelt idea and a Willkie idea and a Marshall Field idea.</p>
<p>Racial discrimination must and will be fought and destroyed in this country. But that can be done only if it is clearly understood who and what are responsible for and benefit from it.</p>
<p><strong>PM</strong> tries to confuse the Negroes by telling them the fight against Jim Crowism is tied up with and is part of the drive for imperialist war.</p>
<p>The truth is that the fight against Jini Crowism is part of the fight against those forces who want to get us into the war – the capitalist class and all its political and journalistic stooges.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>Answer to a Reader</h4>
<p class="fst">One of our readers has challenged our statement that practically all of the Uncle Tom leaders have already sold but to the war machine. Admitting that “many of our so-called promising young men” have already taken jobs in Washington as assistant administrative assistants, our reader nevertheless points to the formation of the Colonel Charles Young branch of the America First Committee as a proof that some of the Negro figures are still opposing the war.</p>
<p>It is true that there are a few Negro “leaders” who have not yet come out in support of Roosevelt’s war plans, who understand that the Negro masses are overwhelmingly against those plans and who figure on maintaining some prestige among the masses by not committing themselves as yet. Among these are J. Finley Wilson of the Elks and Perry Howard, Negro Republican.</p>
<p>But to assume from this that they can or want to lead the Negro struggle against war is to make a fatal mistake. For even if you forget for the moment Lindbergh’s anti-Negro phobias, you cannot forget that the America First Committee is only a “loyal opposition” to Roosevelt, and itself expresses the interests of one section of the Jim Crow ruling class.</p>
<p>They may hold out a little longer, but we can be sure that Wilson and Howard, like Lindbergh and Wheeler, will come rushing to the defense of the capitalists’ interests, once the war is declared and those interests are at stake.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(23 August 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 34, 23 August 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Auto Workers Fight Jim Crow
It is clear that the United Automobile Workers, CIO, is fully awake to its responsibilities to the Negro workers, and understands that if it wants the aid of the Negro people in its struggles, it must do more than pass resolutions against Jim Crow, it must actively take up the struggle to win equality for the Negroes in the auto factories and in industry generally.
The convention of the union last week passed a resolution instructing all locals to fight for the following program:
Hiring of Negro workers in all departments in all auto, aircraft and “defense” industries.
Equal opportunities for transfers, promotions and training for Negro workers in all auto, aircraft and “defense” plants.
The delegates made it clear that they wanted the officers to carry out this program without any fail.
One Negro delegate in a moving speech said, “We (Negro people) want to demonstrate we are men and we are brothers and we believe in the CIO.” Most of the Negro auto workers have already demonstrated this. It is now up to their white brothers to understand that action on the job to fulfill the union’s resolution will make the Negro workers the best and most loyal members of the union.
The convention also passed a resolution demanding abolition of the poll tax which disfranchises millions of Negro and white workers and sharecroppers in the South.
* * *
Whose Idea Is Jim Crowism?
PM, New York newspaper controlled by Marshall Field, department store magnate who refuses to hire Negroes except as janitors or doormen, has been making a bid for Negro nickels by deploring Jim Crowism every now and then as “inconsistent” with the “all-out war for democracy” which PM so ardently supports.
Last week in their editorial columns they printed a letter from a white soldier in a northern camp, who told how his commanding officer had addressed the men in his company, some of whom were about to be transferred to a southern camp. The officer told them “not to drink with niggers” and not to shake a colored man’s hand when saying good-bye.
PM prints the letter to show its “sympathy” for the Negro people, to. “take the curse” off the officers, and to try to round-up Negro support for the war.
“PM does not condemn the entire army or entire officers’ corps on the basis of this one incident – although it is far from the only incident of similar nature reported.”
But, says PM, the main thing is this:
“The war against fascism must be a total war, fought with guns against Hitler’s guns abroad, and fought with ideas against Hitler’s ideas at home. Racial discrimination is a Hitler idea ...”
Of course Hitler has used persecution of Jewish people and other minorities to divide the German workers and maintain himself in power. But is it his idea alone? Did he invent it?
Every Negro knows that this is not true, that Jim Crowism existed and was nourished by the capitalists in this country long before Hitler was heard of. Racial discrimination is also a Roosevelt idea and a Willkie idea and a Marshall Field idea.
Racial discrimination must and will be fought and destroyed in this country. But that can be done only if it is clearly understood who and what are responsible for and benefit from it.
PM tries to confuse the Negroes by telling them the fight against Jim Crowism is tied up with and is part of the drive for imperialist war.
The truth is that the fight against Jini Crowism is part of the fight against those forces who want to get us into the war – the capitalist class and all its political and journalistic stooges.
* * *
Answer to a Reader
One of our readers has challenged our statement that practically all of the Uncle Tom leaders have already sold but to the war machine. Admitting that “many of our so-called promising young men” have already taken jobs in Washington as assistant administrative assistants, our reader nevertheless points to the formation of the Colonel Charles Young branch of the America First Committee as a proof that some of the Negro figures are still opposing the war.
It is true that there are a few Negro “leaders” who have not yet come out in support of Roosevelt’s war plans, who understand that the Negro masses are overwhelmingly against those plans and who figure on maintaining some prestige among the masses by not committing themselves as yet. Among these are J. Finley Wilson of the Elks and Perry Howard, Negro Republican.
But to assume from this that they can or want to lead the Negro struggle against war is to make a fatal mistake. For even if you forget for the moment Lindbergh’s anti-Negro phobias, you cannot forget that the America First Committee is only a “loyal opposition” to Roosevelt, and itself expresses the interests of one section of the Jim Crow ruling class.
They may hold out a little longer, but we can be sure that Wilson and Howard, like Lindbergh and Wheeler, will come rushing to the defense of the capitalists’ interests, once the war is declared and those interests are at stake.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(31 May 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_22" target="new">Vol. V No. 22</a>, 31 May 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The March on Washington</h4>
<p class="fst">The Socialist Workers Party recognizes the need for action such as the proposed march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington to protest against discrimination and Jim Crowism in the armed forces and industry. That is why, in spite of our disagreements on many things with the Randolph Committee making the march preparations, we have endorsed the march and will support it in every way possible.</p>
<p>Our support, while it is complete, is not uncritical. It is the duty of all those who support militant action against Jim Crowism to point out the shortcomings in the proposals of the Randolph Committee – to prevent, if possible, mistakes which can have a very bad effect on the action as a whole, and which can demoralize and discourage those militants who are supporting the March.</p>
<p>Last week we criticized the half-hearted approach of the Committee, as demonstrated in its <strong>Call To Negro America</strong>. We could also criticize the organizational preparations for the march; the fact that so far very little has been done about informing and arousing the masses of Negroes to action, although the date for the action, July 1, is little more than a month away; that apparently insufficient attention is being paid to the task of drawing the trade unions into the struggle.</p>
<p><em>But an even more important concern than how the march is being organized, and how many people are being drawn into it, is the question: What are the marchers going to demand when they get to Washington?</em></p>
<p>Militancy is necessary, the participation of the masses is required, but what they actually seek is the decisive thing. There would be no sense in 10,000, or even 100,000 Negroes marching on Washington and fighting for something which will not solve their problems.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>What Randolph Wants</h4>
<p class="fst">The Randolph Committee is making its central demand the issuance of an executive order by the president of the United States abolishing discrimination in the armed forces, all government departments, and industry holding contracts from the government.</p>
<p>According to the present plans, this will be the request of the march in Washington. The local demonstrations will also call on the city governmental bodies to memorialize the president to issue this order.</p>
<p>To understand the theory behind this, one has to read the article, <em>Why P.D. Won’t End Defense Jim Crow</em>, by A. Philip Randolph, published in the Negro press several weeks ago. It starts this way:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“President Roosevelt can issue an executive order tomorrow to abolish discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marine and on all defense contracts awarded by the Federal Government, on account of race or color, <em>and discriminations against colored people would promptly end</em>.” (Our emphasis.)</p>
<p class="fst">Now if this statement means anything at all, it means that discrimination and segregation continue to exist in the government and the armed forces and in industry only because the president hasn’t issued an order abolishing them.</p>
<p>Just to pose the question that way is to show how ridiculous Randolph’s statement really is.</p>
<p><em>Jim Crowism does not depend for its existence on the lack of executive orders abolishing it. li exists because it serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class to keep the working class in a position where it is divided and split along racial lines and therefore more easily exploited.</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>The Demand Is Inadequate</h4>
<p class="fst">Undoubtedly it will be very difficult to get a man like Roosevelt to issue such an order. The Randolph Committee does not do the Negro people a service when it calls Roosevelt “a great humanitarian and idealist.” Calling him nice names will not make the man, who for eight years has refused to even speak one word against the crimes of lynching in the south, suddenly issue an order abolishing all forms of Jim Crowism. Praise of Roosevelt will not produce any changes in the administration that refuses to even pass the poll tax bill. After all, what is the march on Washington for – to praise F.D.R. or to bury Jim Crowism?</p>
<p><em>In our opinion, forcing the issuance of such an order from Roosevelt would be a definite step forward in the struggle for abolition of all racial discrimination. It would not “promptly end” discrimination, as Randolph claims, but it would make it easier to fight specific cases of discrimination. That is why, in a clear and cool manner, without fooling ourselves as Randolph does, we are able to endorse this demand.</em></p>
<p>But while we endorse it, we also believe that it is not enough, that it is insufficient as the central demand of the march.</p>
<p><em>It is insufficient because it does not go to the heart of the question of discrimination. There have been and there still are plenty of laws and rulings and orders on the books, prohibiting discrimination. In spite of them, Jim Crow still rides high. There are the federal constitution, state laws, the selective service bill and plenty of other rulings from Washington. Everyone knows they are ignored.</em></p>
<p>If this is so, the Negroes who march on Washington must demand more than the issuance of an executive order. Just what is it that they should ask for?</p>
<p class="c"><a href="../06/negrostruggle.htm"><strong>(Continued next week)</strong></a></p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(31 May 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 22, 31 May 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The March on Washington
The Socialist Workers Party recognizes the need for action such as the proposed march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington to protest against discrimination and Jim Crowism in the armed forces and industry. That is why, in spite of our disagreements on many things with the Randolph Committee making the march preparations, we have endorsed the march and will support it in every way possible.
Our support, while it is complete, is not uncritical. It is the duty of all those who support militant action against Jim Crowism to point out the shortcomings in the proposals of the Randolph Committee – to prevent, if possible, mistakes which can have a very bad effect on the action as a whole, and which can demoralize and discourage those militants who are supporting the March.
Last week we criticized the half-hearted approach of the Committee, as demonstrated in its Call To Negro America. We could also criticize the organizational preparations for the march; the fact that so far very little has been done about informing and arousing the masses of Negroes to action, although the date for the action, July 1, is little more than a month away; that apparently insufficient attention is being paid to the task of drawing the trade unions into the struggle.
But an even more important concern than how the march is being organized, and how many people are being drawn into it, is the question: What are the marchers going to demand when they get to Washington?
Militancy is necessary, the participation of the masses is required, but what they actually seek is the decisive thing. There would be no sense in 10,000, or even 100,000 Negroes marching on Washington and fighting for something which will not solve their problems.
What Randolph Wants
The Randolph Committee is making its central demand the issuance of an executive order by the president of the United States abolishing discrimination in the armed forces, all government departments, and industry holding contracts from the government.
According to the present plans, this will be the request of the march in Washington. The local demonstrations will also call on the city governmental bodies to memorialize the president to issue this order.
To understand the theory behind this, one has to read the article, Why P.D. Won’t End Defense Jim Crow, by A. Philip Randolph, published in the Negro press several weeks ago. It starts this way:
“President Roosevelt can issue an executive order tomorrow to abolish discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marine and on all defense contracts awarded by the Federal Government, on account of race or color, and discriminations against colored people would promptly end.” (Our emphasis.)
Now if this statement means anything at all, it means that discrimination and segregation continue to exist in the government and the armed forces and in industry only because the president hasn’t issued an order abolishing them.
Just to pose the question that way is to show how ridiculous Randolph’s statement really is.
Jim Crowism does not depend for its existence on the lack of executive orders abolishing it. li exists because it serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class to keep the working class in a position where it is divided and split along racial lines and therefore more easily exploited.
The Demand Is Inadequate
Undoubtedly it will be very difficult to get a man like Roosevelt to issue such an order. The Randolph Committee does not do the Negro people a service when it calls Roosevelt “a great humanitarian and idealist.” Calling him nice names will not make the man, who for eight years has refused to even speak one word against the crimes of lynching in the south, suddenly issue an order abolishing all forms of Jim Crowism. Praise of Roosevelt will not produce any changes in the administration that refuses to even pass the poll tax bill. After all, what is the march on Washington for – to praise F.D.R. or to bury Jim Crowism?
In our opinion, forcing the issuance of such an order from Roosevelt would be a definite step forward in the struggle for abolition of all racial discrimination. It would not “promptly end” discrimination, as Randolph claims, but it would make it easier to fight specific cases of discrimination. That is why, in a clear and cool manner, without fooling ourselves as Randolph does, we are able to endorse this demand.
But while we endorse it, we also believe that it is not enough, that it is insufficient as the central demand of the march.
It is insufficient because it does not go to the heart of the question of discrimination. There have been and there still are plenty of laws and rulings and orders on the books, prohibiting discrimination. In spite of them, Jim Crow still rides high. There are the federal constitution, state laws, the selective service bill and plenty of other rulings from Washington. Everyone knows they are ignored.
If this is so, the Negroes who march on Washington must demand more than the issuance of an executive order. Just what is it that they should ask for?
(Continued next week)
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Sidney Hook – Then and Now</h1>
<h3>(14 March 1947)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_11" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 11</a>, 14 March 1947, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Most of the intellectuals who were attracted to movements of rebellion against capitalism by the crisis of the Thirties have signed their separate peace with Big Business and entered into its service. Hypnotized by the power of capitalism in its last real stronghold and blind to the potentially greater power of the working class, they devote themselves nowadays to defending the same reactionary practices and institutions which they used to oppose ten or fifteen years ago. A good illustration of this transformation is afforded by the leading article in the Feb. 27 <strong>N.Y. Times Magazine</strong>, written by Sidney Hook, head of the Philosophy Department of New York University and contributing editor of the Social Democratic <strong>New Leader</strong>.</p>
<p>As part of the cold war against democratic rights in this country, the ruling class has decided to drive from the schools all teachers in any way critical of Wall Street’s preparations for war and world domination. The signal was given with the purge at the University of Washington, and while many educators are reluctant or truly puzzled about what to do, the Social Democrats have jumped into line.</p>
<p>Over 90% of Hook’s article is an aggressive defense of the witch-hunt, along the following lines: Purging “communist” teachers is in accord with the best and highest tradition of academic freedom, rather than a violation of it, because they are under the pressure of their party’s discipline to preach its views and therefore are not free to teach the objective truth. (What about all the other teachers who are subjected to pressures and prejudices, social and ecomonic as well as political, which drastically impede their presentation of the truth? Hook can’t seem to get worked up over them, especially when their concepts of the “objective truth” jibe with the interests of capitalism.)</p>
<p>To the objection that this is an attack on the fight of teachers to hold dissident political opinions, Hook replies that the purge is warranted because membership in the CP is “an act, not merely an expression of opinion.” But what good is the right to hold opinions if you cannot express them effectively, if you cannot exercise this right in organizational as well as mental terms – that is, by association with other people sharing your opinions in a party which, after all, it is still legal to belong to in. this country? Teachers harboring “dangerous thoughts” can still keep their jobs in the Soviet Union so long as they don’t express them; is that “academic freedom” too?</p>
<p>Hook’s zeal in logic-chopping leads, him to denounce even the “civil libertarians” who cling to the old-fashioned notion that all teachers, regardless of political affiliations, “must be judged by. their individual actions in the. classroom.” Their position has “two fatal difficulties,” he says:</p>
<ol>
<li>It would “require spying in every classroom to detect the party line, and disorganize or intimidate ... the entire faculty.” (Thus academic thought-control turns out to be really just a laudable bulwark against intimidation of ALL teachers!)<br>
</li>
<li>It would be “very difficult” to decide when a teacher defended a conclusion because he “honestly believed it” and when he was merely following the party line. (Why bother with such “difficulties” when a purge is so much simpler?)</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">But the most interesting thing about Hook’s article is its conclusion, advancing some mild and tentative reservations to an all-out purge. He is not satisfied that the proper formula has been found for dealing with “the more difficult and involved ’question” of the “fellow-traveler.” Furthermore, “Although the exclusion of Communist party teachers from the academic community seems justified in principle, thjs by itself does not determine whether it is a wise and prudent action in all circumstances ... If removal of Communist party members were to be used by other reactionary elements as a pretext to hurl irresponsible charges against professors whose views they disapprove, a case might be made for suspending action.”</p>
<p>In other words, Hook recognizes the very clear and present danger that the witch-hunt against the Stalinists will be extended to encompass other dissident elements. He wants a purge but he wants it regulated so it won’t hit at teachers who couple their support of capitalism with criticism of some of its aspects. And he even suggests a solution: <em>“If the execution of the policy were left to university faculties themselves,</em> and not to administrators and trustees who are harried by pressure groups, there would be little ground for complaint.” In short, let the purge be conducted under a bastardized form of “workers§rsquo; control” – control by the teachers, who have control over nothing else in the universities – and then it will be a nice, safe, effective purge, with little ground for complaint.</p>
<p>What accounts for these reservations? For one thing, a few anti-Stalinist teachers, including some of Hook’s own blood-brothers, have already felt the axe in the purge’s first stages. But something else is worrying Hook, something of a more personal nature, and here is what it is:</p>
<p>In 1934–5 the itearst press ran a rabid redbaiting campaign to clean the “subversives” out of the colleges. And one of Hearst’s specific targets was Hook himself. (At that time Hook was a member of the organization led by A.J. Muste, which merged with the Trotskyists in December 1934 to form the Workers Party, a forerunner of the present Socialist Workers Party.) Hearst’s campaign became so virulent that a mass meeting denouncing it was held under the auspices of the Non-Partisan Lahor Defense in the Central Opera House, New York, on Feb. 3, 1935, with Hook as one of the main speakers before an audience of 2,500.</p>
<p>Hook is still haunted by that memory. Although he long ago gave up all pretence of being a revolutionary Marxist, he knows there is no telling where a witch-hunt in high gear will stop, and he is thinking about his own neck. But his reservations don’t change the fundamental nature of his position – namely, that he is now proposing in the name of “anti-totalitarianism” to do to his political opponents precisely what Hearst tried to do to him in the name of jingo-patriotism. And his pleas for special privilege will have no effect at all in retarding the machine of reaction, whose engine he has fueled and whose wheels he has greased.</p>
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George Breitman
Sidney Hook – Then and Now
(14 March 1947)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 11, 14 March 1947, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Most of the intellectuals who were attracted to movements of rebellion against capitalism by the crisis of the Thirties have signed their separate peace with Big Business and entered into its service. Hypnotized by the power of capitalism in its last real stronghold and blind to the potentially greater power of the working class, they devote themselves nowadays to defending the same reactionary practices and institutions which they used to oppose ten or fifteen years ago. A good illustration of this transformation is afforded by the leading article in the Feb. 27 N.Y. Times Magazine, written by Sidney Hook, head of the Philosophy Department of New York University and contributing editor of the Social Democratic New Leader.
As part of the cold war against democratic rights in this country, the ruling class has decided to drive from the schools all teachers in any way critical of Wall Street’s preparations for war and world domination. The signal was given with the purge at the University of Washington, and while many educators are reluctant or truly puzzled about what to do, the Social Democrats have jumped into line.
Over 90% of Hook’s article is an aggressive defense of the witch-hunt, along the following lines: Purging “communist” teachers is in accord with the best and highest tradition of academic freedom, rather than a violation of it, because they are under the pressure of their party’s discipline to preach its views and therefore are not free to teach the objective truth. (What about all the other teachers who are subjected to pressures and prejudices, social and ecomonic as well as political, which drastically impede their presentation of the truth? Hook can’t seem to get worked up over them, especially when their concepts of the “objective truth” jibe with the interests of capitalism.)
To the objection that this is an attack on the fight of teachers to hold dissident political opinions, Hook replies that the purge is warranted because membership in the CP is “an act, not merely an expression of opinion.” But what good is the right to hold opinions if you cannot express them effectively, if you cannot exercise this right in organizational as well as mental terms – that is, by association with other people sharing your opinions in a party which, after all, it is still legal to belong to in. this country? Teachers harboring “dangerous thoughts” can still keep their jobs in the Soviet Union so long as they don’t express them; is that “academic freedom” too?
Hook’s zeal in logic-chopping leads, him to denounce even the “civil libertarians” who cling to the old-fashioned notion that all teachers, regardless of political affiliations, “must be judged by. their individual actions in the. classroom.” Their position has “two fatal difficulties,” he says:
It would “require spying in every classroom to detect the party line, and disorganize or intimidate ... the entire faculty.” (Thus academic thought-control turns out to be really just a laudable bulwark against intimidation of ALL teachers!)
It would be “very difficult” to decide when a teacher defended a conclusion because he “honestly believed it” and when he was merely following the party line. (Why bother with such “difficulties” when a purge is so much simpler?)
But the most interesting thing about Hook’s article is its conclusion, advancing some mild and tentative reservations to an all-out purge. He is not satisfied that the proper formula has been found for dealing with “the more difficult and involved ’question” of the “fellow-traveler.” Furthermore, “Although the exclusion of Communist party teachers from the academic community seems justified in principle, thjs by itself does not determine whether it is a wise and prudent action in all circumstances ... If removal of Communist party members were to be used by other reactionary elements as a pretext to hurl irresponsible charges against professors whose views they disapprove, a case might be made for suspending action.”
In other words, Hook recognizes the very clear and present danger that the witch-hunt against the Stalinists will be extended to encompass other dissident elements. He wants a purge but he wants it regulated so it won’t hit at teachers who couple their support of capitalism with criticism of some of its aspects. And he even suggests a solution: “If the execution of the policy were left to university faculties themselves, and not to administrators and trustees who are harried by pressure groups, there would be little ground for complaint.” In short, let the purge be conducted under a bastardized form of “workers§rsquo; control” – control by the teachers, who have control over nothing else in the universities – and then it will be a nice, safe, effective purge, with little ground for complaint.
What accounts for these reservations? For one thing, a few anti-Stalinist teachers, including some of Hook’s own blood-brothers, have already felt the axe in the purge’s first stages. But something else is worrying Hook, something of a more personal nature, and here is what it is:
In 1934–5 the itearst press ran a rabid redbaiting campaign to clean the “subversives” out of the colleges. And one of Hearst’s specific targets was Hook himself. (At that time Hook was a member of the organization led by A.J. Muste, which merged with the Trotskyists in December 1934 to form the Workers Party, a forerunner of the present Socialist Workers Party.) Hearst’s campaign became so virulent that a mass meeting denouncing it was held under the auspices of the Non-Partisan Lahor Defense in the Central Opera House, New York, on Feb. 3, 1935, with Hook as one of the main speakers before an audience of 2,500.
Hook is still haunted by that memory. Although he long ago gave up all pretence of being a revolutionary Marxist, he knows there is no telling where a witch-hunt in high gear will stop, and he is thinking about his own neck. But his reservations don’t change the fundamental nature of his position – namely, that he is now proposing in the name of “anti-totalitarianism” to do to his political opponents precisely what Hearst tried to do to him in the name of jingo-patriotism. And his pleas for special privilege will have no effect at all in retarding the machine of reaction, whose engine he has fueled and whose wheels he has greased.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(16 August 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_33" target="new">Vol. V No. 33</a>, 16 August 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The Army and Segregations</h4>
<p class="fst">A United Press dispatch from Fort Bragg, N.C., last week told of another of the tragic outbreaks between white and Negro solders that result from the Army-enforced system of segregation of all Negroes in the armed forces.</p>
<p>Like most of the other cases reported, this one came about when a southern white M.P. decided for some reason to arrest a Negro private. So far the only version of the story that has appeared has come from Army officials. According to them, Sergeant E.L. Hargraves attempted to arrest Private Ned Turman, a Negro soldier on a bus containing over a score of other Negroes. The Army does not mention why the arrest was being made.</p>
<p>Then, suddenly, if you can believe the story, Turman grabbed Hargraves’ gun and shot him to death. Other M.P.’s opened up and apparently shot at every one in the bus. Turman was killed, another Negro seriously wounded, and six others suffered “minor wounds.”</p>
<p>One does not have to know any more to understand what is really responsible for this tragedy, which is so like the hundreds of other cases in other camps.</p>
<p><em>By order from the White House, Negroes are separated from contact with white soldiers in every sphere of military life. White soldiers who do not already have it are thus inculcated with the theory of “white supremacy” and “Negro inferiority.” The situation is further aggravated by the inferior accommodations for the Negroes (in recreational facilities, etc.) and the lack of Negro officers and military police.</em></p>
<p>Thus, racial outbreaks are directly caused and indirectly encouraged by the Roosevelt system of Negro segregation.</p>
<p>An ironic twist ends the story. The Army officials decided that it was a bad situation, and that there might be further trouble. So:</p>
<p>All of the 4,000 Negroes in the camp were taken out and sent to another camp nine miles away.</p>
<p>The headline on the U.P. dispatch reads, “Negroes Segregated After M.P. Is Slain.” The Army solves a problem raised by its own segregation policies by deciding to segregate the segregated!<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>What Will the USO Do?</h4>
<p class="fst">Since the Communist Party has decided that the boss government will defend the Soviet Union, it has also decided that the bosses will solve other problems as well.</p>
<p>In the August 7 issue of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> was an account of the Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers in army recreational life. A few months ago the Stalinists said that only the united militant action of Negro and white workers could end this and all other forms of discrimination. Now however they say of the problem: “Here is a task for the United Service Organizations.”</p>
<p>If this is a task for the USG, then the workers don’t have to worry about it anymore.</p>
<p>The Stalinists are deliberately confusing the issue. They know as well as anyone else that the USO is not going to do any more about Jim Crowism than the YMCA and similar bodies did in World War I. They know that all the USO can do or will do for Negroes is establish a few segregated recreational centers for them.</p>
<p><em>All the USO intends to do is make the Army system of segregation and discrimination a little more acceptable to the Negro soldiers.</em></p>
<p>And with this the Stalinists would now be satisfied. They too know that the bosses and their organizations will not end Jim Crowism. With their present bootlicking support of the government, they themselves do not dare to conduct a fight against it. And so if the USO would make army Jim Crowism a little less harsh, they could go to the Negroes, hail this as a victory and use it to justify Negro support of the war.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>A Correction by Pickens</h4>
<p class="fst">William Pickens, now working for the U.S. Treasury, complained this week that “so many, misstatements have been made about my position” that he has to explain what it really is.</p>
<p>The misstatements he refers to are the attacks launched against him from many sources for taking a $6,000 a year job with the Treasury to sell “defense” bonds and support of the war to the impoverished Negro people who want no part of the war.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I am ‘selling bonds’ and am not a salesman of any kind,” he says, “unless we use a figure of speech and call it ‘selling ideas’.”</p>
<p class="fst">So print the correction: Pickens is not selling bonds, he is just selling out.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(16 August 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 33, 16 August 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Army and Segregations
A United Press dispatch from Fort Bragg, N.C., last week told of another of the tragic outbreaks between white and Negro solders that result from the Army-enforced system of segregation of all Negroes in the armed forces.
Like most of the other cases reported, this one came about when a southern white M.P. decided for some reason to arrest a Negro private. So far the only version of the story that has appeared has come from Army officials. According to them, Sergeant E.L. Hargraves attempted to arrest Private Ned Turman, a Negro soldier on a bus containing over a score of other Negroes. The Army does not mention why the arrest was being made.
Then, suddenly, if you can believe the story, Turman grabbed Hargraves’ gun and shot him to death. Other M.P.’s opened up and apparently shot at every one in the bus. Turman was killed, another Negro seriously wounded, and six others suffered “minor wounds.”
One does not have to know any more to understand what is really responsible for this tragedy, which is so like the hundreds of other cases in other camps.
By order from the White House, Negroes are separated from contact with white soldiers in every sphere of military life. White soldiers who do not already have it are thus inculcated with the theory of “white supremacy” and “Negro inferiority.” The situation is further aggravated by the inferior accommodations for the Negroes (in recreational facilities, etc.) and the lack of Negro officers and military police.
Thus, racial outbreaks are directly caused and indirectly encouraged by the Roosevelt system of Negro segregation.
An ironic twist ends the story. The Army officials decided that it was a bad situation, and that there might be further trouble. So:
All of the 4,000 Negroes in the camp were taken out and sent to another camp nine miles away.
The headline on the U.P. dispatch reads, “Negroes Segregated After M.P. Is Slain.” The Army solves a problem raised by its own segregation policies by deciding to segregate the segregated!
What Will the USO Do?
Since the Communist Party has decided that the boss government will defend the Soviet Union, it has also decided that the bosses will solve other problems as well.
In the August 7 issue of the Daily Worker was an account of the Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers in army recreational life. A few months ago the Stalinists said that only the united militant action of Negro and white workers could end this and all other forms of discrimination. Now however they say of the problem: “Here is a task for the United Service Organizations.”
If this is a task for the USG, then the workers don’t have to worry about it anymore.
The Stalinists are deliberately confusing the issue. They know as well as anyone else that the USO is not going to do any more about Jim Crowism than the YMCA and similar bodies did in World War I. They know that all the USO can do or will do for Negroes is establish a few segregated recreational centers for them.
All the USO intends to do is make the Army system of segregation and discrimination a little more acceptable to the Negro soldiers.
And with this the Stalinists would now be satisfied. They too know that the bosses and their organizations will not end Jim Crowism. With their present bootlicking support of the government, they themselves do not dare to conduct a fight against it. And so if the USO would make army Jim Crowism a little less harsh, they could go to the Negroes, hail this as a victory and use it to justify Negro support of the war.
A Correction by Pickens
William Pickens, now working for the U.S. Treasury, complained this week that “so many, misstatements have been made about my position” that he has to explain what it really is.
The misstatements he refers to are the attacks launched against him from many sources for taking a $6,000 a year job with the Treasury to sell “defense” bonds and support of the war to the impoverished Negro people who want no part of the war.
“I am ‘selling bonds’ and am not a salesman of any kind,” he says, “unless we use a figure of speech and call it ‘selling ideas’.”
So print the correction: Pickens is not selling bonds, he is just selling out.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h4>Workers’ Bookshelf</h4>
<h1>The New Sad Sack</h1>
<h3>(13 July 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_28" target="new">Vol. X No. 28</a>, 13 July 1946, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The New Sad Sack</strong><br>
by George Baker<br>
<em>published by Simon and Schuster, 162 pages, $2, 1946</em></p>
<p class="fst">The Sad Sack was one of the better comic creations of the war – like Bill Mauldin’s characters, a great advance over those produced in the first world war. He was the private of the U.S. Army, caught in a military machine he did not like and did not fully understand, always the good soldier getting the short end of the stick, always the victim and the fall guy for the brass, always sadly disillusioned in the end. It is easy to see why millions of soldiers came to identify themselves with the Sad Sack.</p>
<p>Baker’s hero is the Charlie Chaplin of the cartoons – a wistful, loveable "little man,” digging either foxholes or latrines, working hard, being shot at, hounded by fate and bullied by officers. He is always trying to improve things, to do his job conscientiously, to make life a little more liveable – but he is invariably defeated either by bad luck or red tape or some fangtoothed officer who takes credit for the Sad Sack’s work or dumps the blame for his own errors on the Sad Sack. In the first strip the Sad Sack is usually happy, sometimes even jubilant as he starts out on his little adventure – in the last, he is either horribly deflated or unconscious.</p>
<p>This pattern is maintained even on that happy day when he finally gets his hand or, his discharge papers. He leaps into the air with joy as he leaves the separation center, even jitterbugs as he goes down the street. But he is slowed down a little by a newspaper headline: <em>Housing Shortage Worst in 100 Years</em>. He recoils as he hears the blare of a radio: <em>Inflation Spreads as Prices Rise</em>. And so it goes: Another headline: <em>International Diplomatic Crisis Looms</em>. Another radio: <em>3,000,000 Unemployed by Spring</em>. Another newspaper: <em>Atomic Rocket Can Wipe Out USA in 30 Minutes</em>. Finally, passers-by turn in curiosity to stare at the Sad Sack sitting on the sidewalk curb, holding his head in one hand and his discharge papers in the other, a look of profound woe on his face.</p>
<p>Together in a book, the Sad Sack cartoons read as well as they did in the pages of <strong>Yank</strong>. But something is more noticeable now than when they were read week by week. And that is the absence of the element of protest, the desire to rebel and get even – to which Mauldin’s cartoons gave recognition every once in a while. In that sense alone is the Sad Sack not faithful to the typical army private he is patterned after.</p>
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George Breitman
Workers’ Bookshelf
The New Sad Sack
(13 July 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 28, 13 July 1946, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The New Sad Sack
by George Baker
published by Simon and Schuster, 162 pages, $2, 1946
The Sad Sack was one of the better comic creations of the war – like Bill Mauldin’s characters, a great advance over those produced in the first world war. He was the private of the U.S. Army, caught in a military machine he did not like and did not fully understand, always the good soldier getting the short end of the stick, always the victim and the fall guy for the brass, always sadly disillusioned in the end. It is easy to see why millions of soldiers came to identify themselves with the Sad Sack.
Baker’s hero is the Charlie Chaplin of the cartoons – a wistful, loveable "little man,” digging either foxholes or latrines, working hard, being shot at, hounded by fate and bullied by officers. He is always trying to improve things, to do his job conscientiously, to make life a little more liveable – but he is invariably defeated either by bad luck or red tape or some fangtoothed officer who takes credit for the Sad Sack’s work or dumps the blame for his own errors on the Sad Sack. In the first strip the Sad Sack is usually happy, sometimes even jubilant as he starts out on his little adventure – in the last, he is either horribly deflated or unconscious.
This pattern is maintained even on that happy day when he finally gets his hand or, his discharge papers. He leaps into the air with joy as he leaves the separation center, even jitterbugs as he goes down the street. But he is slowed down a little by a newspaper headline: Housing Shortage Worst in 100 Years. He recoils as he hears the blare of a radio: Inflation Spreads as Prices Rise. And so it goes: Another headline: International Diplomatic Crisis Looms. Another radio: 3,000,000 Unemployed by Spring. Another newspaper: Atomic Rocket Can Wipe Out USA in 30 Minutes. Finally, passers-by turn in curiosity to stare at the Sad Sack sitting on the sidewalk curb, holding his head in one hand and his discharge papers in the other, a look of profound woe on his face.
Together in a book, the Sad Sack cartoons read as well as they did in the pages of Yank. But something is more noticeable now than when they were read week by week. And that is the absence of the element of protest, the desire to rebel and get even – to which Mauldin’s cartoons gave recognition every once in a while. In that sense alone is the Sad Sack not faithful to the typical army private he is patterned after.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Exchange of Views on Deutscher Biography</h1>
<h4>[Critique of <a href="../../../../../../archive/hansen/1964/xx/review.htm" target="new">Joseph Hansen’s Review</a><br>
of Vol.3 of Deutscher’s <em>Trotsky</em>]</h4>
<h3>(Summer 1964)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr64sum" target="new">Vol.25 No.3</a>, Summer 1964, pp.66, 90.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Editor:</p>
<p class="fst">I strongly disagree with <a href="../../../../../../archive/hansen/1964/xx/deutscher.htm" target="new">Joseph Hansen’s review</a> of the final volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky (<strong>ISR</strong>, Winter 1964). Although Comrade Hansen lists many of the points on which Deutscher is wrong and misleading, and answers some of them, he is on the whole too soft, too conciliatory An example of what I object to is his footnote about Deutscher’s reference in <strong>The Prophet Outcast</strong> to an attack on his views by James P. Cannon in 1954. Hansen attempts to “clear this up” in the following way:</p>
<p>“Some harsh and even unjustified things were said of Deutscher.” His explanation is that “at the time Deutscher’s theory about the possibility of the self-reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy figured in an internal crisis of the Socialist Workers Party.” A minority, which eventually split away, was strongly influenced by Deutscher’s theory.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“To many Trotskyists, Deutscher’s position appeared as an alternative program which could be a bridge to Stalinism. It therefore was viewed with hostility. It turned out, however, that Deutscher was not interested in recruiting from the Trotskyist movement or in organizing a sect of his own, still less a cult. This spoke strongly in his favor.”</p>
<p class="fst">After the Hungarian uprising, Hansen continues, “another phenomenon” became noticeable. Many Communist Party members, still afraid to read Trotsky’s writings, began to read Deutscher. “Having begun dipping into Trotskyism in this way, they thirsted for more. Through Deutscher, some of them eventually found their way to Trotskyism.” Thus Deutscher’s position proved to be “a bridge <em>from</em> Stalinism to Trotskyism. Trotskyists could not be against that kind of public facility. They therefore began undertaking their own self-reform – in relation to Deutscher.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Deutscher and the Cochranites</h4>
<p class="fst">But it is simply not true that “harsh things” said about Deutscher in our press can be attributed to the undoubted fact that the Cochranite minority of the Socialist Workers Party embraced Deutscher’s views in 1953. That embrace and its consequences were the main reason why Cannon attacked Deutscher’s position at that time, as he himself pointed out (<strong>Fourth International</strong>, Winter 1954), but harsh things had been written about Deutscher long before then. In 1949, when his Stalin biography appeared, I wrote two articles in <strong>The Militant</strong> sharply condemning it, despite its positive features, for its false analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy as fundamentally progressive. This had nothing whatever to do with any internal situation in the SWP.</p>
<p>In 1953, <strong>The Militant</strong> printed two more articles by me on the development of Deutscher’s ideas after Stalin’s death (in <strong>Russia: What Next?</strong>). By this time Deutscherism was an internal issue, but I would have written exactly the same criticism if it hadn’t been. In the spring of 1954, when the first volume of Deutscher’s Trotsky biography appeared, the Cochranites had broken with revolutionary Marxism completely and were no longer of interest to me. But <strong>The Militant</strong> printed six more articles by me on the pernicious errors and distortions of Deutscher. They were harsh, all right, but I cannot find anything unjustified in them, even ten years later; and I see that I correctly predicted then just what position Deutscher would take now in the final volume on the formation of the Fourth International.</p>
<p>Hansen now makes it appear that our common hostility to Deutscher 10 and 15 years ago was based on a belief that he was interested in “recruiting” Trotskyists to a sect or cult of his own. This was never my opinion at that time, nor did I hear of anyone expressing such an idea until, after the publication of the second volume of the biography in 1959 Hansen began to revise his attitude toward Deutscher. It never occurred to me 10 years ago because, on the face of it, Deutscher was essentially a commentator and bystander. He could not have any interest in recruiting anybody to any organization because he thought and thinks organization is useless or harmful. All he was interested in doing was refuting Trotsky’s <em>ideas</em>, while praising Trotsky was a genius and prophet.</p>
<p>What Deutscher wanted to recruit members of the Fourth International to was not another organization but to the conception that it was a waste of time to build such organizations. Personally, I think it would speak more “strongly in his favor” if he had tried to build an organization to put his ideas into effect, as Trotsky did. In this connection, I do not understand why Hansen finds it “hard to know exactly what Deutscher thinks” Trotsky and his followers should have been doing. Everything Deutscher writes testifies to his belief that Trotsky and his supporters should have been writing against fascism, Stalinism, imperialism, etc., and that’s all. Analysis and propaganda, yes; building a revolutionary party or international, no.</p>
<p>I also have serious reservations about Hansen’s contention that “through Deutscher, some of them (Communist Party members) eventually found their way to Trotskyism.” It is true that some of them found an introduction to Trotsky’s ideas in Deutscher, but in a distorted form. To find “their way to Trotskyism,” they would have had to go around or over Deutscher, not through him, and, in this country at least, few did. For most of them, Deutscher served as a stopping point; as a justification for breaking with Stalinism, but also as a justification for rejecting Trotsky’s conclusion on what to do.</p>
<p>For most readers of the Trotsky biography, I believe, the conclusion will be that Trotsky was a great man but that “Trotskyism” is Utopian and impractical. As a “public facility,” Deutscher is more like a detour or dead end than a bridge, and I not only could be against that kind of facility, but am. If this is what led Hansen to “reform” his attitude to Deutscher, I would recommend that he take another and closer look at where this facility has led most readers.</p>
<p>Finally, I question the use of Hansen’s analogy of Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky with a portrait that might be painted of Trotsky by an artist. (“Let us not ask too much from them (artists), but take gratefully what they can give.”) If Deutscher gives a portrait, that is only incidental. His is a <em>political</em> biography, that is, political analysis, not art (however well Deutscher writes). Perhaps Hansen’s review would have been better if he had treated it primarily as false political analysis rather than as a work of art marred by the obtrusiveness of a gesticulating brush.</p>
<table width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="60%">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="fst"><em>George Breitman</em><br>
Detroit, Michigan</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p> </p>
<p class="link"><big><a href="../../../../../../archive/hansen/1964/xx/deutscher.htm">Joseph Hansen’s Reply</a></big><br>
<br>
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George Breitman
Exchange of Views on Deutscher Biography
[Critique of Joseph Hansen’s Review
of Vol.3 of Deutscher’s Trotsky]
(Summer 1964)
From International Socialist Review, Vol.25 No.3, Summer 1964, pp.66, 90.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Editor:
I strongly disagree with Joseph Hansen’s review of the final volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky (ISR, Winter 1964). Although Comrade Hansen lists many of the points on which Deutscher is wrong and misleading, and answers some of them, he is on the whole too soft, too conciliatory An example of what I object to is his footnote about Deutscher’s reference in The Prophet Outcast to an attack on his views by James P. Cannon in 1954. Hansen attempts to “clear this up” in the following way:
“Some harsh and even unjustified things were said of Deutscher.” His explanation is that “at the time Deutscher’s theory about the possibility of the self-reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy figured in an internal crisis of the Socialist Workers Party.” A minority, which eventually split away, was strongly influenced by Deutscher’s theory.
“To many Trotskyists, Deutscher’s position appeared as an alternative program which could be a bridge to Stalinism. It therefore was viewed with hostility. It turned out, however, that Deutscher was not interested in recruiting from the Trotskyist movement or in organizing a sect of his own, still less a cult. This spoke strongly in his favor.”
After the Hungarian uprising, Hansen continues, “another phenomenon” became noticeable. Many Communist Party members, still afraid to read Trotsky’s writings, began to read Deutscher. “Having begun dipping into Trotskyism in this way, they thirsted for more. Through Deutscher, some of them eventually found their way to Trotskyism.” Thus Deutscher’s position proved to be “a bridge from Stalinism to Trotskyism. Trotskyists could not be against that kind of public facility. They therefore began undertaking their own self-reform – in relation to Deutscher.”
Deutscher and the Cochranites
But it is simply not true that “harsh things” said about Deutscher in our press can be attributed to the undoubted fact that the Cochranite minority of the Socialist Workers Party embraced Deutscher’s views in 1953. That embrace and its consequences were the main reason why Cannon attacked Deutscher’s position at that time, as he himself pointed out (Fourth International, Winter 1954), but harsh things had been written about Deutscher long before then. In 1949, when his Stalin biography appeared, I wrote two articles in The Militant sharply condemning it, despite its positive features, for its false analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy as fundamentally progressive. This had nothing whatever to do with any internal situation in the SWP.
In 1953, The Militant printed two more articles by me on the development of Deutscher’s ideas after Stalin’s death (in Russia: What Next?). By this time Deutscherism was an internal issue, but I would have written exactly the same criticism if it hadn’t been. In the spring of 1954, when the first volume of Deutscher’s Trotsky biography appeared, the Cochranites had broken with revolutionary Marxism completely and were no longer of interest to me. But The Militant printed six more articles by me on the pernicious errors and distortions of Deutscher. They were harsh, all right, but I cannot find anything unjustified in them, even ten years later; and I see that I correctly predicted then just what position Deutscher would take now in the final volume on the formation of the Fourth International.
Hansen now makes it appear that our common hostility to Deutscher 10 and 15 years ago was based on a belief that he was interested in “recruiting” Trotskyists to a sect or cult of his own. This was never my opinion at that time, nor did I hear of anyone expressing such an idea until, after the publication of the second volume of the biography in 1959 Hansen began to revise his attitude toward Deutscher. It never occurred to me 10 years ago because, on the face of it, Deutscher was essentially a commentator and bystander. He could not have any interest in recruiting anybody to any organization because he thought and thinks organization is useless or harmful. All he was interested in doing was refuting Trotsky’s ideas, while praising Trotsky was a genius and prophet.
What Deutscher wanted to recruit members of the Fourth International to was not another organization but to the conception that it was a waste of time to build such organizations. Personally, I think it would speak more “strongly in his favor” if he had tried to build an organization to put his ideas into effect, as Trotsky did. In this connection, I do not understand why Hansen finds it “hard to know exactly what Deutscher thinks” Trotsky and his followers should have been doing. Everything Deutscher writes testifies to his belief that Trotsky and his supporters should have been writing against fascism, Stalinism, imperialism, etc., and that’s all. Analysis and propaganda, yes; building a revolutionary party or international, no.
I also have serious reservations about Hansen’s contention that “through Deutscher, some of them (Communist Party members) eventually found their way to Trotskyism.” It is true that some of them found an introduction to Trotsky’s ideas in Deutscher, but in a distorted form. To find “their way to Trotskyism,” they would have had to go around or over Deutscher, not through him, and, in this country at least, few did. For most of them, Deutscher served as a stopping point; as a justification for breaking with Stalinism, but also as a justification for rejecting Trotsky’s conclusion on what to do.
For most readers of the Trotsky biography, I believe, the conclusion will be that Trotsky was a great man but that “Trotskyism” is Utopian and impractical. As a “public facility,” Deutscher is more like a detour or dead end than a bridge, and I not only could be against that kind of facility, but am. If this is what led Hansen to “reform” his attitude to Deutscher, I would recommend that he take another and closer look at where this facility has led most readers.
Finally, I question the use of Hansen’s analogy of Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky with a portrait that might be painted of Trotsky by an artist. (“Let us not ask too much from them (artists), but take gratefully what they can give.”) If Deutscher gives a portrait, that is only incidental. His is a political biography, that is, political analysis, not art (however well Deutscher writes). Perhaps Hansen’s review would have been better if he had treated it primarily as false political analysis rather than as a work of art marred by the obtrusiveness of a gesticulating brush.
George Breitman
Detroit, Michigan
Joseph Hansen’s Reply
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(2 August 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_31" target="new">Vol. V No. 31</a>, 2 August 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>Roosevelt Picks Six</h4>
<p class="fst">When A. Philip Randolph and Walter White called off the July 1 March on Washington, Roosevelt issued an executive order stipulating that future contracts let by the government would contain a clause against racial employment discrimination, and announcing the formation of a five-man Committee on Fair Labor Practices as a subdivision of the Office of Production Management.</p>
<p><em>The very inclusion of the clause establishing the Fair Practices Committee was an admission that the executive order had no teeth since it made no provision for punishing employers who disregarded the new clause in their contracts.</em></p>
<p>After the Uncle Toms who condoned calling off the March had finished praising and extolling Roosevelt for his reat ”statesman-like” act, a behind-the-scenes struggle took place as to the composition of the five-man Committee which would ”investigate” all complaints of discrimination and ”recommend” punitive and corrective steps to be taken.</p>
<p>Exactly what took place behind the scenes has not been revealed to the Negro people whose welfare is involved. All that leaked out was >that it had developed into a fight over the question: Should there be two Negroes on this Committee, or only one?</p>
<p>In the end, Roosevelt solved the problem by appointing six men to the five-man Committee, and among the six, two Negroes.</p>
<p><em>So that even if no Negroes have gotten jobs in industry as a result of Roosevelt’s order, at least two of them have gotten posts with Roosevelt.</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>The Six He Picked</h4>
<p class="fst">Picked to head the committee “was one Mark P. Ethridge, a newspaper executive from the South, labeled a “Southern liberal.” This is to satisfy southern sentiment, and to assure the Jim Crow sections of the Democratic Party that they will not be discriminated against.</p>
<p>The two Negroes are Earl B. Dickerson, Chicago alderman and a member of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, which endorsed the March on Washington when it was being organized and endorsed its being called off when Roosevelt made the request; and Milton P. Webster, vice-president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, of which Randolph is president.</p>
<p>Selected as representatives of organised labor were Philip Murray, head of the CIO which practices equality in admission and treament of membership; and to compensate for him there was added William Green, president of the AFL which refuses to do anything about the many affiliated international craft unions which bar Negroes from membership or admit them only to Jim Crow locals.</p>
<p><em>Representing business and industry is David Sarnoff, president of RCA. And with regard to industry and the Negro, Sarnoff certainly represents it in this case, for his own company hires practically no Negroes, with the exception of a few Negro salesmen and porters.</em></p>
<p><em>One thing these six men have in common: they are political supporters of the Roosevelt administration and its war program.</em></p>
<p>The Committee does not have any real powers. Its job is to investigate what everybody of high school age knows, and to recommend corrective steps to a man who has shown that he doesn’t want to take them.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>How the Committee Will Work</h4>
<p class="fst">The word “runaround” has always neatly summed up Roosevelt’s handling of the demand of the Negro people for equality.</p>
<p><em>Runaround is also the description of the machinery adopted by the Fair Practices Committee for the carrying out of its work. The set-up is as follows:</em></p>
<ol>
<li>Any complaint of racial discrimination is to be reported to the local office of the state employment service. A field worker will be directed to ascertain the facts of the case from the sides of both applicant and employer.<br>
</li>
<li>In the event the field worker finds that the employer is at fault, “he will be informed of the President’s executive order and immediate adjustment will be sought.”<br>
</li>
<li>“Failure to reach a solution through these preliminary efforts will result in a referral of the case” to the office of the Chairman of the state labor supply bureau of the Division of Labor Supply, OPM.<br>
</li>
<li>“If satisfaction is not then obtained, the entire case is to be referred to Washington for the consideration of and adjudication” by the Fair Practices Committee.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">This is all of the process reported by the <strong>Chicago Defender</strong>. Of course, it does not stop there. After the Fair Practices Committee considers and tries to adjudicate the case, and fails, the case goes before the arch-hypocrite responsible for all this rigamarole.</p>
<p><em>Negroes who want job equality and who pin their faith to Roosevelt and his Committee, had better be prepared to live to a ripe old age before anything is done.</em></p>
<p>As always, the struggle for Negro rights continues to require mass action and mistrust in all promises, whether they come from white Jim Crow politicians or Negro Uncle Tom stooges for those politicians.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(2 August 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 31, 2 August 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Roosevelt Picks Six
When A. Philip Randolph and Walter White called off the July 1 March on Washington, Roosevelt issued an executive order stipulating that future contracts let by the government would contain a clause against racial employment discrimination, and announcing the formation of a five-man Committee on Fair Labor Practices as a subdivision of the Office of Production Management.
The very inclusion of the clause establishing the Fair Practices Committee was an admission that the executive order had no teeth since it made no provision for punishing employers who disregarded the new clause in their contracts.
After the Uncle Toms who condoned calling off the March had finished praising and extolling Roosevelt for his reat ”statesman-like” act, a behind-the-scenes struggle took place as to the composition of the five-man Committee which would ”investigate” all complaints of discrimination and ”recommend” punitive and corrective steps to be taken.
Exactly what took place behind the scenes has not been revealed to the Negro people whose welfare is involved. All that leaked out was >that it had developed into a fight over the question: Should there be two Negroes on this Committee, or only one?
In the end, Roosevelt solved the problem by appointing six men to the five-man Committee, and among the six, two Negroes.
So that even if no Negroes have gotten jobs in industry as a result of Roosevelt’s order, at least two of them have gotten posts with Roosevelt.
The Six He Picked
Picked to head the committee “was one Mark P. Ethridge, a newspaper executive from the South, labeled a “Southern liberal.” This is to satisfy southern sentiment, and to assure the Jim Crow sections of the Democratic Party that they will not be discriminated against.
The two Negroes are Earl B. Dickerson, Chicago alderman and a member of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, which endorsed the March on Washington when it was being organized and endorsed its being called off when Roosevelt made the request; and Milton P. Webster, vice-president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, of which Randolph is president.
Selected as representatives of organised labor were Philip Murray, head of the CIO which practices equality in admission and treament of membership; and to compensate for him there was added William Green, president of the AFL which refuses to do anything about the many affiliated international craft unions which bar Negroes from membership or admit them only to Jim Crow locals.
Representing business and industry is David Sarnoff, president of RCA. And with regard to industry and the Negro, Sarnoff certainly represents it in this case, for his own company hires practically no Negroes, with the exception of a few Negro salesmen and porters.
One thing these six men have in common: they are political supporters of the Roosevelt administration and its war program.
The Committee does not have any real powers. Its job is to investigate what everybody of high school age knows, and to recommend corrective steps to a man who has shown that he doesn’t want to take them.
How the Committee Will Work
The word “runaround” has always neatly summed up Roosevelt’s handling of the demand of the Negro people for equality.
Runaround is also the description of the machinery adopted by the Fair Practices Committee for the carrying out of its work. The set-up is as follows:
Any complaint of racial discrimination is to be reported to the local office of the state employment service. A field worker will be directed to ascertain the facts of the case from the sides of both applicant and employer.
In the event the field worker finds that the employer is at fault, “he will be informed of the President’s executive order and immediate adjustment will be sought.”
“Failure to reach a solution through these preliminary efforts will result in a referral of the case” to the office of the Chairman of the state labor supply bureau of the Division of Labor Supply, OPM.
“If satisfaction is not then obtained, the entire case is to be referred to Washington for the consideration of and adjudication” by the Fair Practices Committee.
This is all of the process reported by the Chicago Defender. Of course, it does not stop there. After the Fair Practices Committee considers and tries to adjudicate the case, and fails, the case goes before the arch-hypocrite responsible for all this rigamarole.
Negroes who want job equality and who pin their faith to Roosevelt and his Committee, had better be prepared to live to a ripe old age before anything is done.
As always, the struggle for Negro rights continues to require mass action and mistrust in all promises, whether they come from white Jim Crow politicians or Negro Uncle Tom stooges for those politicians.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Churchill Rejects Stalin Plea for ‘Western Front’</h1>
<h3>(22 November 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_47" target="new">Vol. V No. 47</a>, 22 November 1941, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The Soviet soldiers, workers and peasants who have borne the full brunt of the German fascist attack during the past five months will have to continue to bear it alone in the next period. This was made clear last week by authoritative representatives of the British and American ruling classes.</p>
<p>Stalin’s speech of November 6, directed partially toward the British and American governments and appealing to them for the creation of a “western front”, has been answered. He has been told that he’s not going to get a “western front” for a long, long time.</p>
<p>In answer to Stalin’s plea, Prime Minister Churchill spoke before the House of Commons on Nov. 12 and declared that:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If we are able to get through this year we shall certainly find ourselves in a good supply of ships in 1942, and if the war against U-boats and enemy aircraft continues to prosper as it has done – about which of course there can be no guarantee – it seems to me that the freedom- loving powers will be possessed of large quantities of ships in 1943 which will enable overseas operations to take place utterly beyond British resources at the present time.”</p>
<p class="fst">That is to say, if all goes well, and if it suits his purposes, Churchill promises that “in 1943” the “freedom-loving powers”, Britain and her allies, may perhaps be able to open a “second front”.</p>
<p>Churchill was not speaking for the British ruling class alone. He was also speaking for the American imperialists. The New York Times, authoritative spokesman for Roosevelt and America’s Sixty Families, made this clear in no uncertain terms in its leading editorial on Nov. 10:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“(There is) the slim hope of preserving an eastern front. There is no possibility of opening a new one in the west ... There is still hope that by bending every effort toward sending war supplies to Russia a catastrophe can be averted there, but it is preposterous to believe that Russia’s fate lies entirely in the hands of this country and Great Britain. It would be well for the Administration to point out some of the difficulties in the way of helping Russia as well as the need for doing so ... the effectiveness of what assistance we can give and deliver depends upon Russia’s ability to help herself in the immediate future.”</p>
<p class="fst">The “democratic” imperialists would no doubt like to open a “western front” – not for the purpose of saving the Soviet Union, but for the purpose of striking Hitler a blow while most of his forces are occupied in the east. But for many reasons – military, geographic, technical and political – they are sure that it would not serve their own interests to attempt it at this time. Whatever the reason, it is deal’ that they are not even going to attempt to open a new front in the next period.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalin Explained and Promised</h4>
<p class="fst">In his November 6 speech, Stalin had explained the defeats suffered by the Soviet Union primarily by “the absence of a second front in Europe against the German fascist armies.” In this way he is preparing to shift the responsibility for the defeats from his own policies onto the shoulders of his “democratic” imperialist allies.</p>
<p>He did more than that. He also promised the Soviet masses that “undoubtedly this (a second front) will appear in the near future.” In this way he tried to reassure the masses that his policy of depending on the “democratic” imperialists, which has brought only defeats up to now, would save the USSR “in the near future” when these “allies” would come to the rescue of the USSR.</p>
<p>The answer of the “democratic” imperialists did two things at the same time:</p>
<ol>
<li>It demonstrated that Stalin’s policies have from the beginning been based on an illusion – the illusion that if Stalin throttled the program of revolutionary war against Hitler, if he did nothing to arouse the revolutionary spirit of the masses of Germany and Europe, if he proclaimed unconditional support of the war of the “democratic” imperialists, they would come to the rescue of the Soviet Union.<br>
</li>
<li>It means, furthermore that a continuation of the Stalinist policy – under conditions when the USSR must face Hitler’s armies alone – is bound to end in catastrophe for the workers state.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Stalin in his speech and the local Stalinists a score of times in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> have virtually admitted that the Soviet Union cannot hope to defeat Hitler alone. Does it mean now, when it is clear to all that a “western front” is wishful thinking on Stalin’s part, that the Soviet Union is doomed?</p>
<p>This is the perspective as long as the war of the USSR is conducted along the lines of the Stalinist policy!<br>
</p>
<h4>How to Save the USSR</h4>
<p class="fst">The way out now for the Soviet Union is the disintegration of Hitler’s forces from the rear, from within Germany and from within the German army itself. Since Stalin admits that the USSR by itself cannot stop the advance of the German troops – and since Stalin himself no longer denies the shortage of tanks and aircraft and he himself explains that the Germans “now have at their disposal not only their own tank industry but also the industries of Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Holland and France” – it is obvious that the disintegration of the Hitler regime from the rear is the only way out, the only way the Soviet Union can compensate for the shortcomings of its own war machine.</p>
<p>But Stalin’s program for accomplishing this has thus far, been to rely on the armies of the “democratic” imperialists to attack and undermine Hitler from the rear. Over and above this he offers only his own recent boasts that eventually in “a few more months, another half year, perhaps a year, and Hitler Germany must collapse under the burden of her crimes.”</p>
<p>And meanwhile? Meanwhile what will happen to the Soviet Union with its admitted shortages of tanks and aircraft? In five months under Stalin’s policy, the workers state has lost vital European territory and more than two-thirds of its productive capacity. It is in a far weaker position than it was five months ago, and less able to offer effective resistance. What will happen while Stalin is awaiting the verification for his pleas and boasts?<br>
</p>
<h4>What the German Workers Fear</h4>
<p class="fst">The chief obstacle to the overthrow of Hitler by the German workers is their fear of what will happen if the “democratic” imperialists win the war. They know from the pronouncements of the “democratic” statesmen that an even worse fate awaits them after this war than was imposed by the Versailles Treaty on the German people after the last war. That is why they are afraid to move, for they do not yet see any allies in the revolutionary fight first against Hitler and then against the “democratic” imperialists. Goebbels’ main weapon in maintaining “discipline” in Germany is precisely this threat which he is now able to hold over their heads. Stalin’s plea for a “western front” by the imperialists against Germany has played right into the hands of Hitler and Goebbels who use it demagogically to identify the war of the USSR with the reactionary war being waged by the “democratic” imperialists.</p>
<p>The German masses can be moved into action against Hitler – only by the policy of revolutionary war which Stalin refuses to employ. Only by a revolutionary appeal to the German workers to rise up against their capitalist oppressors and join the Soviet masses in the straggle for the Socialist United States of Europe and the world. Only by the assurance to the German workers that the Soviet masses will fight side by side with them against all the forces of reaction.</p>
<p>Hitler will not fall, as Stalin promises, under the “weight of his crimes”. He will fall only when the German masses begin to move. And they will begin to move only when they see a chance for success, only when they feel they have a fighting chance, and a real way out.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Revolutionary Policy Could Have Done</h4>
<p class="fst">If five month sago, this policy of revolutionary war had been adopted by the Soviet masses, by this time – and not “perhaps” in a year – deep fissures would already have appeared in the German home front. The German soldiers would by this time have been in ferment, they would be asking questions, they would be thinking about the future. The ferment in Germany would have raised to fever pitch in the occupied countries. Real help would have been on its way to the embattled Soviet masses, and it would have been the kind that would sweep the Hitlers and Churchills from the face of the earth.</p>
<p>But Stalin’s “substitute” for this powerful weapon has been to place dependence on the “democratic” imperialists. In return for this policy, the Soviet masses have already paid a terrible price they have suffered calamitous blows. Meanwhile Hitler has felt secure in Germany and free to throw all his forces against the workers state.</p>
<p>Events themselves – as well as Churchill’s statement – have shown the bankruptcy of Stalinism. But it is folly to believe that Stalinism will change its course and adopt the revolutionary program. It will continue the cry for a “western front” to come to the rescue of the USSR. It will east about for other panaceas to lull the Soviet masses and confuse the Stalinist rank and file.<br>
</p>
<h4>C.P. Members Warned Not to Speculate</h4>
<p class="fst">In his <em>Question and Answer</em> column in the Nov. 17 <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, William Z. Foster tries to answer the question which has been worrying and alarming so many rank and file members of the C.P.: “Can the Soviet Union lick Hitler without outside help?” His answer: “This is an abstract speculative question ... It is not our task to speculate as to whether or not the Soviet Union can beat Hitler alone. Our job is to wake up the American people to a fuller realization that this is their war and that the Red Army is defending the United States as well as the USSR, etc.”</p>
<p>The Stalinist bureaucrats are panic-stricken lest the rank and file begin to think about the fundamental problems involved in the defense of the Soviet Union. The ranks are beginning to ask “abstract speculative questions” not only in the United States, but also in the USSR.</p>
<p>“It is not our task to speculate” shrieks Foster. What he really means is that any worker who begins to ask questions has already taken the first step on the road of understanding that Stalinism is incapable of leading a successful defense of the first workers state.</p>
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George Breitman
Churchill Rejects Stalin Plea for ‘Western Front’
(22 November 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 47, 22 November 1941, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Soviet soldiers, workers and peasants who have borne the full brunt of the German fascist attack during the past five months will have to continue to bear it alone in the next period. This was made clear last week by authoritative representatives of the British and American ruling classes.
Stalin’s speech of November 6, directed partially toward the British and American governments and appealing to them for the creation of a “western front”, has been answered. He has been told that he’s not going to get a “western front” for a long, long time.
In answer to Stalin’s plea, Prime Minister Churchill spoke before the House of Commons on Nov. 12 and declared that:
“If we are able to get through this year we shall certainly find ourselves in a good supply of ships in 1942, and if the war against U-boats and enemy aircraft continues to prosper as it has done – about which of course there can be no guarantee – it seems to me that the freedom- loving powers will be possessed of large quantities of ships in 1943 which will enable overseas operations to take place utterly beyond British resources at the present time.”
That is to say, if all goes well, and if it suits his purposes, Churchill promises that “in 1943” the “freedom-loving powers”, Britain and her allies, may perhaps be able to open a “second front”.
Churchill was not speaking for the British ruling class alone. He was also speaking for the American imperialists. The New York Times, authoritative spokesman for Roosevelt and America’s Sixty Families, made this clear in no uncertain terms in its leading editorial on Nov. 10:
“(There is) the slim hope of preserving an eastern front. There is no possibility of opening a new one in the west ... There is still hope that by bending every effort toward sending war supplies to Russia a catastrophe can be averted there, but it is preposterous to believe that Russia’s fate lies entirely in the hands of this country and Great Britain. It would be well for the Administration to point out some of the difficulties in the way of helping Russia as well as the need for doing so ... the effectiveness of what assistance we can give and deliver depends upon Russia’s ability to help herself in the immediate future.”
The “democratic” imperialists would no doubt like to open a “western front” – not for the purpose of saving the Soviet Union, but for the purpose of striking Hitler a blow while most of his forces are occupied in the east. But for many reasons – military, geographic, technical and political – they are sure that it would not serve their own interests to attempt it at this time. Whatever the reason, it is deal’ that they are not even going to attempt to open a new front in the next period.
Stalin Explained and Promised
In his November 6 speech, Stalin had explained the defeats suffered by the Soviet Union primarily by “the absence of a second front in Europe against the German fascist armies.” In this way he is preparing to shift the responsibility for the defeats from his own policies onto the shoulders of his “democratic” imperialist allies.
He did more than that. He also promised the Soviet masses that “undoubtedly this (a second front) will appear in the near future.” In this way he tried to reassure the masses that his policy of depending on the “democratic” imperialists, which has brought only defeats up to now, would save the USSR “in the near future” when these “allies” would come to the rescue of the USSR.
The answer of the “democratic” imperialists did two things at the same time:
It demonstrated that Stalin’s policies have from the beginning been based on an illusion – the illusion that if Stalin throttled the program of revolutionary war against Hitler, if he did nothing to arouse the revolutionary spirit of the masses of Germany and Europe, if he proclaimed unconditional support of the war of the “democratic” imperialists, they would come to the rescue of the Soviet Union.
It means, furthermore that a continuation of the Stalinist policy – under conditions when the USSR must face Hitler’s armies alone – is bound to end in catastrophe for the workers state.
Stalin in his speech and the local Stalinists a score of times in the Daily Worker have virtually admitted that the Soviet Union cannot hope to defeat Hitler alone. Does it mean now, when it is clear to all that a “western front” is wishful thinking on Stalin’s part, that the Soviet Union is doomed?
This is the perspective as long as the war of the USSR is conducted along the lines of the Stalinist policy!
How to Save the USSR
The way out now for the Soviet Union is the disintegration of Hitler’s forces from the rear, from within Germany and from within the German army itself. Since Stalin admits that the USSR by itself cannot stop the advance of the German troops – and since Stalin himself no longer denies the shortage of tanks and aircraft and he himself explains that the Germans “now have at their disposal not only their own tank industry but also the industries of Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Holland and France” – it is obvious that the disintegration of the Hitler regime from the rear is the only way out, the only way the Soviet Union can compensate for the shortcomings of its own war machine.
But Stalin’s program for accomplishing this has thus far, been to rely on the armies of the “democratic” imperialists to attack and undermine Hitler from the rear. Over and above this he offers only his own recent boasts that eventually in “a few more months, another half year, perhaps a year, and Hitler Germany must collapse under the burden of her crimes.”
And meanwhile? Meanwhile what will happen to the Soviet Union with its admitted shortages of tanks and aircraft? In five months under Stalin’s policy, the workers state has lost vital European territory and more than two-thirds of its productive capacity. It is in a far weaker position than it was five months ago, and less able to offer effective resistance. What will happen while Stalin is awaiting the verification for his pleas and boasts?
What the German Workers Fear
The chief obstacle to the overthrow of Hitler by the German workers is their fear of what will happen if the “democratic” imperialists win the war. They know from the pronouncements of the “democratic” statesmen that an even worse fate awaits them after this war than was imposed by the Versailles Treaty on the German people after the last war. That is why they are afraid to move, for they do not yet see any allies in the revolutionary fight first against Hitler and then against the “democratic” imperialists. Goebbels’ main weapon in maintaining “discipline” in Germany is precisely this threat which he is now able to hold over their heads. Stalin’s plea for a “western front” by the imperialists against Germany has played right into the hands of Hitler and Goebbels who use it demagogically to identify the war of the USSR with the reactionary war being waged by the “democratic” imperialists.
The German masses can be moved into action against Hitler – only by the policy of revolutionary war which Stalin refuses to employ. Only by a revolutionary appeal to the German workers to rise up against their capitalist oppressors and join the Soviet masses in the straggle for the Socialist United States of Europe and the world. Only by the assurance to the German workers that the Soviet masses will fight side by side with them against all the forces of reaction.
Hitler will not fall, as Stalin promises, under the “weight of his crimes”. He will fall only when the German masses begin to move. And they will begin to move only when they see a chance for success, only when they feel they have a fighting chance, and a real way out.
What Revolutionary Policy Could Have Done
If five month sago, this policy of revolutionary war had been adopted by the Soviet masses, by this time – and not “perhaps” in a year – deep fissures would already have appeared in the German home front. The German soldiers would by this time have been in ferment, they would be asking questions, they would be thinking about the future. The ferment in Germany would have raised to fever pitch in the occupied countries. Real help would have been on its way to the embattled Soviet masses, and it would have been the kind that would sweep the Hitlers and Churchills from the face of the earth.
But Stalin’s “substitute” for this powerful weapon has been to place dependence on the “democratic” imperialists. In return for this policy, the Soviet masses have already paid a terrible price they have suffered calamitous blows. Meanwhile Hitler has felt secure in Germany and free to throw all his forces against the workers state.
Events themselves – as well as Churchill’s statement – have shown the bankruptcy of Stalinism. But it is folly to believe that Stalinism will change its course and adopt the revolutionary program. It will continue the cry for a “western front” to come to the rescue of the USSR. It will east about for other panaceas to lull the Soviet masses and confuse the Stalinist rank and file.
C.P. Members Warned Not to Speculate
In his Question and Answer column in the Nov. 17 Daily Worker, William Z. Foster tries to answer the question which has been worrying and alarming so many rank and file members of the C.P.: “Can the Soviet Union lick Hitler without outside help?” His answer: “This is an abstract speculative question ... It is not our task to speculate as to whether or not the Soviet Union can beat Hitler alone. Our job is to wake up the American people to a fuller realization that this is their war and that the Red Army is defending the United States as well as the USSR, etc.”
The Stalinist bureaucrats are panic-stricken lest the rank and file begin to think about the fundamental problems involved in the defense of the Soviet Union. The ranks are beginning to ask “abstract speculative questions” not only in the United States, but also in the USSR.
“It is not our task to speculate” shrieks Foster. What he really means is that any worker who begins to ask questions has already taken the first step on the road of understanding that Stalinism is incapable of leading a successful defense of the first workers state.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Truman’s Bill No Bar<br>
to Use of Injunctions</h1>
<h4>Bloc in Congress Prepares Other Anti-Labor Provisions</h4>
<h3>(7 February 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_06" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 6</a>, 7 February 1949, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>Truman’s new labor relations bill, now under consideration by the Senate Labor Committee, would abandon most of the Taft-Hartley Act’s restrictions an unions, including the specific anti-strike injunction weapons it had granted the administration. But it would not deprive the administration of the power to go into court for injunctions to break strikes.</strong></p>
<p>This was clearly indicated by Attorney General Clark’s testimony before the Senate Committee. He said the “inherent lower of the President to deal with emergencies” is “exceedingly great” .and the government would have “access to the courts to protect the national health, safety and welfare ... This bill, as I read it, does not purport to circumscribe the rights of the United States in this respect.”</p>
<p>The duplicity of the measure was also demonstrated by Secretary of Labor Tobin’s reply to Sen. Humphrey’s question if the Truman bill “provided for government seizure of struck facilities.” Tobin refused to give a yes or no answer, saying the question should be directed to Clark.</p>
<p>In short, Truman’s bill makes a number of formal concessions to labor while at the same time he retains the power to circumvent or negate many of these confessions.</p>
<p>The main concessions in the proposed measure include: Repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and restoration of the Wagner Act, with certain amendments. Recognition of the closed shop, even in the area of interstate commerce in states where it is banned. Abolition of the anti-communist affidavit. Withdrawal of the ban on political expenditures by unions. Termination of the NLRB general counsel’s separate investigation and prosecution powers. Provisions prohibiting strikes by federal employees and permitting employers not to bargain collectively with foremen are also omitted.<br>
</p>
<h4>Gig Loopholes</h4>
<p class="fst">On the other hand, the Wagner Act is amended to extend certain “unfair labor practice” curbs to unions. The “unfair” practices include “unjustifiable secondary boycotts and jurisdictional strikes; strikes to compel an employer to bargain when he is under obligation to bargain with another union; and failure to give at least 30 day’s notice before termination or modification of contracts.</p>
<p>Another restrictive provision requires that disputes over existing contracts be submitted to “final and binding” arbitration.</p>
<p><em>These provisions definitely empower the NLRB to use injunctions and to order compulsory arbitration. In comparison with the Wagner Act, they considerably extend the power of the government to intervene in and regulate the internal affairs of the labor movement.</em></p>
<p>In case of important strikes, the administration would be authorized to declare a “national emergency,” requiring a 30-day “cooling-off” period and setting up a board to make recommendation within 25 days. This provision, which replaced the T-H authorization for 80-day injunctions, does not stipulate any penalties for non-compliance.</p>
<p>Tobin says the administration will rely on “public opinion” to compel settlement of disputes under this provision. In the background, of course, will be the “implicit” injunction and seizure powers referred to by Clark and Humphrey.<br>
</p>
<h4>Union Leaders Content</h4>
<p class="fst">Despite its dangerous loopholes, the Truman bill is no worse than measures which some labor leaders had voluntarily offered to support Dubinsky; for example, had asked for the retention of the anti-communist affidavit along with other restrictive clauses. The union leaders, on the whole, are well-satisfied with Truman’s bill. While for tactical reasons they are objecting to one or another clause, they will not offer it any real opposition if it is passed in its present form – which is by no means certain.</p>
<p>The union leaders had asked Truman for a two-package deal, Which would repeal the Taft Act and restore the Wagner Act before any amendments were considered. Truman chose to follow a single-package procedure, which leaves the unions under the disadvantages of the Taft Act and weakens their bargaining position while the debate goes on.</p>
<p><em>This opens the way for the adoption of T-H amendments to Truman’s bill, and puts him in a position to sign virtually any bill finally adopted by Congress as a “lesser evil” and “only alternative” to the existing Taft Act.</em></p>
<p>Moves to “stiffen” the bill are sure to get strong backing from Democrats as well as Republicans. Since Truman voluntarily made use of T-H injunctions on many occasions and since he removed some “teeth” from his own bill only at the last minute and under strong labor prodding, it is unlikely that he will really crack the whip to force all Democrats to vote for his measure in its present form.</p>
<p>Despite Truman’s duplicity and the likelihood that Congress will modify the bill, the fact remains that it represents a concession to the labor movement and will be regarded as such by the workers, at least for a time.</p>
<p>This development was predicted and analyzed in the resolution on <em>The Election Results and the Tasks of the SWP</em>, adopted by the SWP National Committee last December and printed in the February issue of the magazine, <strong>Fourth International</strong>. Its careful study by union militants will serve as a guide for the struggle to preserve the independence and militancy of the labor movement.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hard Cop, Soft Cop</h4>
<p class="fst">Briefly stated, this is the situation: After the war, the capitalist class set out to establish “class peace” by the methods of the “hard cop.” The aim was to put the unions “in their place”; to make their leadership more conciliatory and conservative; to instill the workers with a feeling of dependence on the good will of the employers and with a sense of their own subordinate position in society; to weaken the unions by reducing their bargaining power while raising that of the corporations. The method adopted was the Taft-Hartley Act.</p>
<p><em>The 1948 elections showed that it failed to do what was intended. The capitalists had underestimated the resistance as well as the union-consciousness of the workers, and provoked a reaction that could lead to the intensification of the class struggle and its extension onto the field of politics in the form of a labor party challenging the two-party system for power.</em></p>
<p>The Truman bill is a recognition of this fact. It is also an attempt by the administration to achieve by “soft-cop” methods most of the ends which the Taft-Hartley Act could not achieve with the present relationship of class forces.</p>
<p>It seeks to secure “class peace” by placating the labor leaders, rather than by antagonizing them; by granting them minor concessions in return for major concessions, rather than by demanding that they be the only ones to make concessions; by offering them a junior partnership if they will cooperate, rather than by threatening them with the loss of everything if they won’t.<br>
</p>
<h4>Deadly Dangers</h4>
<p class="fst">The workers are faced with dangers under this policy no less deadly than those that were presented by the Taft Act, namely.</p>
<ol>
<li>The growth of classcollaboration practices that undermine the fighting spirit of the workers and prepare the ground for a new Taft Act arid a new offensive of the capitalists when the workers’ resistance is dispersed.<br>
</li>
<li>Acceleration of the trend toward the integration of the union movement into the machinery of the capitalist state, whicli would utterly deprive them of their independent role as defender of the workers’ class interests and transform them into mere appendages of the capitalist government.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">These dangers, which are increased by the policies of the union leaders and their liberal allies, must be combatted vigorously. The starting point for this fight should be opposition to Truman’s bill and a struggle for the restoration of the Wagner Act, with no ifs, ands or buts. <em>The premise for this struggle should be the need to apply curbs not to the labor movement, which represents the interests of the vast majority, but to the rule of the rapacious capitalist class which is out to dominate the whole world.</em></p>
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George Breitman
Truman’s Bill No Bar
to Use of Injunctions
Bloc in Congress Prepares Other Anti-Labor Provisions
(7 February 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 6, 7 February 1949, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Truman’s new labor relations bill, now under consideration by the Senate Labor Committee, would abandon most of the Taft-Hartley Act’s restrictions an unions, including the specific anti-strike injunction weapons it had granted the administration. But it would not deprive the administration of the power to go into court for injunctions to break strikes.
This was clearly indicated by Attorney General Clark’s testimony before the Senate Committee. He said the “inherent lower of the President to deal with emergencies” is “exceedingly great” .and the government would have “access to the courts to protect the national health, safety and welfare ... This bill, as I read it, does not purport to circumscribe the rights of the United States in this respect.”
The duplicity of the measure was also demonstrated by Secretary of Labor Tobin’s reply to Sen. Humphrey’s question if the Truman bill “provided for government seizure of struck facilities.” Tobin refused to give a yes or no answer, saying the question should be directed to Clark.
In short, Truman’s bill makes a number of formal concessions to labor while at the same time he retains the power to circumvent or negate many of these confessions.
The main concessions in the proposed measure include: Repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and restoration of the Wagner Act, with certain amendments. Recognition of the closed shop, even in the area of interstate commerce in states where it is banned. Abolition of the anti-communist affidavit. Withdrawal of the ban on political expenditures by unions. Termination of the NLRB general counsel’s separate investigation and prosecution powers. Provisions prohibiting strikes by federal employees and permitting employers not to bargain collectively with foremen are also omitted.
Gig Loopholes
On the other hand, the Wagner Act is amended to extend certain “unfair labor practice” curbs to unions. The “unfair” practices include “unjustifiable secondary boycotts and jurisdictional strikes; strikes to compel an employer to bargain when he is under obligation to bargain with another union; and failure to give at least 30 day’s notice before termination or modification of contracts.
Another restrictive provision requires that disputes over existing contracts be submitted to “final and binding” arbitration.
These provisions definitely empower the NLRB to use injunctions and to order compulsory arbitration. In comparison with the Wagner Act, they considerably extend the power of the government to intervene in and regulate the internal affairs of the labor movement.
In case of important strikes, the administration would be authorized to declare a “national emergency,” requiring a 30-day “cooling-off” period and setting up a board to make recommendation within 25 days. This provision, which replaced the T-H authorization for 80-day injunctions, does not stipulate any penalties for non-compliance.
Tobin says the administration will rely on “public opinion” to compel settlement of disputes under this provision. In the background, of course, will be the “implicit” injunction and seizure powers referred to by Clark and Humphrey.
Union Leaders Content
Despite its dangerous loopholes, the Truman bill is no worse than measures which some labor leaders had voluntarily offered to support Dubinsky; for example, had asked for the retention of the anti-communist affidavit along with other restrictive clauses. The union leaders, on the whole, are well-satisfied with Truman’s bill. While for tactical reasons they are objecting to one or another clause, they will not offer it any real opposition if it is passed in its present form – which is by no means certain.
The union leaders had asked Truman for a two-package deal, Which would repeal the Taft Act and restore the Wagner Act before any amendments were considered. Truman chose to follow a single-package procedure, which leaves the unions under the disadvantages of the Taft Act and weakens their bargaining position while the debate goes on.
This opens the way for the adoption of T-H amendments to Truman’s bill, and puts him in a position to sign virtually any bill finally adopted by Congress as a “lesser evil” and “only alternative” to the existing Taft Act.
Moves to “stiffen” the bill are sure to get strong backing from Democrats as well as Republicans. Since Truman voluntarily made use of T-H injunctions on many occasions and since he removed some “teeth” from his own bill only at the last minute and under strong labor prodding, it is unlikely that he will really crack the whip to force all Democrats to vote for his measure in its present form.
Despite Truman’s duplicity and the likelihood that Congress will modify the bill, the fact remains that it represents a concession to the labor movement and will be regarded as such by the workers, at least for a time.
This development was predicted and analyzed in the resolution on The Election Results and the Tasks of the SWP, adopted by the SWP National Committee last December and printed in the February issue of the magazine, Fourth International. Its careful study by union militants will serve as a guide for the struggle to preserve the independence and militancy of the labor movement.
Hard Cop, Soft Cop
Briefly stated, this is the situation: After the war, the capitalist class set out to establish “class peace” by the methods of the “hard cop.” The aim was to put the unions “in their place”; to make their leadership more conciliatory and conservative; to instill the workers with a feeling of dependence on the good will of the employers and with a sense of their own subordinate position in society; to weaken the unions by reducing their bargaining power while raising that of the corporations. The method adopted was the Taft-Hartley Act.
The 1948 elections showed that it failed to do what was intended. The capitalists had underestimated the resistance as well as the union-consciousness of the workers, and provoked a reaction that could lead to the intensification of the class struggle and its extension onto the field of politics in the form of a labor party challenging the two-party system for power.
The Truman bill is a recognition of this fact. It is also an attempt by the administration to achieve by “soft-cop” methods most of the ends which the Taft-Hartley Act could not achieve with the present relationship of class forces.
It seeks to secure “class peace” by placating the labor leaders, rather than by antagonizing them; by granting them minor concessions in return for major concessions, rather than by demanding that they be the only ones to make concessions; by offering them a junior partnership if they will cooperate, rather than by threatening them with the loss of everything if they won’t.
Deadly Dangers
The workers are faced with dangers under this policy no less deadly than those that were presented by the Taft Act, namely.
The growth of classcollaboration practices that undermine the fighting spirit of the workers and prepare the ground for a new Taft Act arid a new offensive of the capitalists when the workers’ resistance is dispersed.
Acceleration of the trend toward the integration of the union movement into the machinery of the capitalist state, whicli would utterly deprive them of their independent role as defender of the workers’ class interests and transform them into mere appendages of the capitalist government.
These dangers, which are increased by the policies of the union leaders and their liberal allies, must be combatted vigorously. The starting point for this fight should be opposition to Truman’s bill and a struggle for the restoration of the Wagner Act, with no ifs, ands or buts. The premise for this struggle should be the need to apply curbs not to the labor movement, which represents the interests of the vast majority, but to the rule of the rapacious capitalist class which is out to dominate the whole world.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>A Letter About the NAACP</h1>
<h3>(14 June 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_24" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 24</a>, 14 June 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The following letter, from a reader in Santa Monica, Calif., raises a number of questions worth thinking about and discussing:</p>
<p class="fst">Dear Comrade Parker:</p>
<p class="fst">For many years I have conscientiously read <em>The Negro Struggle</em> in <strong>The Militant </strong>and have gained a great deal from it. But I do not recall ever reading any discussion concerning the problems involved in day-to-day, year-by-year membership and activity in the NAACP.</p>
<p>I have belonged to the local branch for three years and have learned that it is not a matter of signing a membership card and then jumping-up in meetings to tell the Negro people all the big things they ought to be doing. In many respects, working in the NAACP is like working in the unions.</p>
<p>No matter how socially advanced your ideas may be, you must first of all show yourself to be a patient, loyal, hard-working union member before you will be listened to by the membership. The same thing applies to the NAACP. Its members, just like union members, are rightfully resentful of outsiders and newcomers rushing in with a Jesus complex to tell them how to solve their problems.</p>
<p>When the NAACP here set up the United Committee to End Job Discrimination at Sears last January, it was obvious that the Negro leaders were anxious that the direction of the fight should not slip from their grasp. This was not due to mere politics or petty jealousy. The NAACP leaders knew that only they could win over and make active the Negro population. The sad history of the Stalinist-dominated National Negro Congress out here had taught them a lesson. They knew they were in the best position to pace the struggle in terms of Negro response. And after many months of shrewd effort, they have achieved the united backing of the Negro community.</p>
<p>When the United Committee was set up, it was presented with a statement of policy by the NAACP executive committee, making it plain that the NAACP was the responsible organization of the Negro people, that it was calling representatives of other organizations together to mobilize support for its fight against Sears, and that it would remain the basic policy-making organization and would negotiate the settlement with Sears.</p>
<p>The Stalinists, who had come as representatives of a number of groups, hit the ceiling and beefed no end. They acknowledge the leadership of the NAACP in the fight, but for months have turned the committee meetings into vicious conflicts over the question of where the policy-making authority lies – with the NAACP or the United Committee.</p>
<p>The Stalinists have adopted a new theory. They insist that discrimination against Negroes is not a Negro problem, but a community problem, and should be handled by a community organization. You may be sure they will show up as a majority in any such organization. Personally, I would never trust any vague community organization to handle things right for the Negro people. But if you don’t accept their proposals, the Stalinists will cut your throat. All who have defended the stand of the NAACP have been attacked in the Stalinist <strong>People’s World</strong> for seeking to “isolate” the Negro people.</p>
<p>Back of all this controversy lies the question of whether we believe in the NAACP; whether we believe that with patient, hard work it will fulfill its role as the fighting mass organization of the Negro people. Out here, we have that belief. The Stalinists don’t. Yet many sincere socialists have mistaken ideas. They may think the NAACP moves too slow for them and be tempted to stay away from participation in its activities.</p>
<p>I look forward to the day when no one interested in doing something about Negro oppression will think of making a move without close collaboration and direction from the NAACP.</p>
<table width="100%">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="60%">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="fst">Fraternally, J. Hawkins</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
A Letter About the NAACP
(14 June 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 24, 14 June 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The following letter, from a reader in Santa Monica, Calif., raises a number of questions worth thinking about and discussing:
Dear Comrade Parker:
For many years I have conscientiously read The Negro Struggle in The Militant and have gained a great deal from it. But I do not recall ever reading any discussion concerning the problems involved in day-to-day, year-by-year membership and activity in the NAACP.
I have belonged to the local branch for three years and have learned that it is not a matter of signing a membership card and then jumping-up in meetings to tell the Negro people all the big things they ought to be doing. In many respects, working in the NAACP is like working in the unions.
No matter how socially advanced your ideas may be, you must first of all show yourself to be a patient, loyal, hard-working union member before you will be listened to by the membership. The same thing applies to the NAACP. Its members, just like union members, are rightfully resentful of outsiders and newcomers rushing in with a Jesus complex to tell them how to solve their problems.
When the NAACP here set up the United Committee to End Job Discrimination at Sears last January, it was obvious that the Negro leaders were anxious that the direction of the fight should not slip from their grasp. This was not due to mere politics or petty jealousy. The NAACP leaders knew that only they could win over and make active the Negro population. The sad history of the Stalinist-dominated National Negro Congress out here had taught them a lesson. They knew they were in the best position to pace the struggle in terms of Negro response. And after many months of shrewd effort, they have achieved the united backing of the Negro community.
When the United Committee was set up, it was presented with a statement of policy by the NAACP executive committee, making it plain that the NAACP was the responsible organization of the Negro people, that it was calling representatives of other organizations together to mobilize support for its fight against Sears, and that it would remain the basic policy-making organization and would negotiate the settlement with Sears.
The Stalinists, who had come as representatives of a number of groups, hit the ceiling and beefed no end. They acknowledge the leadership of the NAACP in the fight, but for months have turned the committee meetings into vicious conflicts over the question of where the policy-making authority lies – with the NAACP or the United Committee.
The Stalinists have adopted a new theory. They insist that discrimination against Negroes is not a Negro problem, but a community problem, and should be handled by a community organization. You may be sure they will show up as a majority in any such organization. Personally, I would never trust any vague community organization to handle things right for the Negro people. But if you don’t accept their proposals, the Stalinists will cut your throat. All who have defended the stand of the NAACP have been attacked in the Stalinist People’s World for seeking to “isolate” the Negro people.
Back of all this controversy lies the question of whether we believe in the NAACP; whether we believe that with patient, hard work it will fulfill its role as the fighting mass organization of the Negro people. Out here, we have that belief. The Stalinists don’t. Yet many sincere socialists have mistaken ideas. They may think the NAACP moves too slow for them and be tempted to stay away from participation in its activities.
I look forward to the day when no one interested in doing something about Negro oppression will think of making a move without close collaboration and direction from the NAACP.
Fraternally, J. Hawkins
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>A Slick Distortion about Trotsky and Lenin</h1>
<h3>(5 April 1954)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../newspape/themilitant/1954/v18n14-apr-05-1954-mil.pdf" target="new">Vol. 18 No. 14</a>, 5 April 1954.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong> in 2012.<br>
<strong>Copyleft:</strong> Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the <a href="../../../../../admin/legal/cc/by-sa.htm">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0</a> .</p>
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<p class="fst">Isaac Deutscher, author of a new biography of Leon Trotsky (<em>The Prophet Armed</em>) wants to prove that he is more “objective” than Trotsky and has more to offer to students of Russian revolutionary history. To support this claim, he points to the controversies between Trotsky and Lenin between 1903 and 1917. He cannot accuse Trotsky of suppressing the facts about these controversies, so he accuses him of having “blurred” their sharp outlines and importance.</p>
<p>What are the facts?</p>
<p>Trotsky met Lenin in London in 1902 and worked closely with him until the 1903 congress of the Russian revolutionary party which ended in a split and the formation of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. Trotsky, not yet 24 years old, failed to understand the significance of the dispute and the necessity for the kind of party Lenin was trying to build. He went with the Mensheviks, and attacked Lenin vigorously.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">The 1903 split</p>
<p class="fst">The Mensheviks differed from the Bolsheviks not only over internal organizational principles but also, it began to be clear, over theoretical and political perspectives for the Russian revolution. When they started moving toward an alliance with the liberal capitalists, Trotsky broke with them and began to move in the direction of the Bolsheviks, who were as hostile to such an alliance as he was.</p>
<p>But his return to Lenin’s side was delayed by a number of complications. For one thing, Trotsky developed the theory of the permanent revolution, which forecast that a revolution against Czarism would quickly be turned into a workers revolution that would lead to the establishment of a working class government faced with socialist tasks. It took some years for even Lenin to grasp the correctness of this daring conception, although it was not a basic conflict with his own.</p>
<p>Another complication was that the Mensheviks vacillated back and forth between the perspectives of revolution and reform, especially under the impact of the 1905 revolution. This led to numerous proposals for reuniting the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which at times Lenin himself supported, and which was actually tried unsuccessfully. Trotsky, although moving closer to the Bolsheviks politically, favored unification of the two groups and worked for it until 1912 in the belief that the revolutionary wing would be predominant in a united party.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Historic context</p>
<p class="smc">In the light of everything he stood and fought for from 1917 on, Trotsky’s conciliationist efforts are hard to understand today unless they are examined in their historic context. Lenin had begun to build a new kind of party, whose like had never existed before, a revolutionary combat party fit to lead the workers in taking power. His genius was proved in 1917, when his party fulfilled precisely the mission it had set itself. But it should not be too surprising that other great Marxists, lacking historic working class models to base them selves on, at first mistook the meaning and purpose of Lenin’s pioneering work.</p>
<p>When World War I began, Trotsky realized that it would be wrong in principle as well as impossible to unite the pro-war Mensheviks and the anti-war Bolsheviks. On his return to revolutionary Russia in 1917, he found himself and Lenin in complete agreement on the tasks of the revolution; he also saw now that Lenin’s ideas on revolutionary organization had been completely confirmed by the test of events, and that the Bolsheviks were the only revolutionary party in the country.</p>
<p>He then became a Bolshevik in heart, mind and soul, played a role in the Bolshevik leadership of the revolution second only to Lenin’s, and defended Bolshevism to his dying day.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Trotsky’s answer</p>
<p class="fst">After Lenin’s death the Stalinists launched their big slander campaign by quoting Trotsky’s pre-1917 polemics against Lenin to prove that he had never really been, a Bolshevik. Trotsky’s answer was not to “blur” the differences, as Deutscher claims, but to present them in their proper perspective.</p>
<p>Trotsky neither concealed nor denied his early differences with Lenin. He stated what they had been and explained them. Distinguishing between those of his differences with Lenin which had been serious and genuine and those which had been episodic and due partly to misunderstandings on both sides, he admitted where he had been wrong and why (such as in his criticism of Lenin’s organizational principles and in his efforts to reunite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) and defended the positions on which he had been correct (such as his theory of the permanent revolution, which Lenin accepted in action in 1917).</p>
<p>That is, he examined his relations with Lenin in their totality, and assigned the different parts of their proper sphere and rank. Objectively viewed, the earlier disagreements were far outweighed by the later agreements. If this was not the case, the agreements could never have taken place. The subordinate, transitory character of the disagreements was demonstrated by everything that happened later, including the close and loyal collaboration between Trotsky and Lenin from 1917 on. Lenin himself testified to this by observing that no one had been a better Bolshevik than Trotsky after he joined.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Deutscher’s view</p>
<p class="fst">Deutscher, however, is not satisfied with this method or this evaluation, although he does not challenge it directly and in places even pays lip-service to it. In the guise of objective historian he devotes a great deal of space to the early differences &8211; as much space, or more, as he gives to the later agreements between Trotsky and Lenin. The result is to make the differences and the agreements assume an equal importance on the historical scale.</p>
<p>We all know that it is possible to tell a lie while using strictly truthful words, depending on the tone, the arrangement of the words, the words omitted, etc. In the same way Deutscher, even if everything he writes on the differences is factually correct, lends himself to what can only be called a historical distortion &8211; the kind which the Stalinists, who dislike Deutscher on other grounds, can only welcome.</p>
<p>In part, as we have explained, Deutscher does this in an effort to establish his superior “objectivity” over Trotsky. But there is another and more important reason &8211; a political reason &8211; for the emphasis he puts on Trotsky’s early differences with Bolshevism.</p>
<p>And that is the fact that he obviously half-sympathizes with the criticism of Bolshevism that Trotsky later rejected and attacked.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">His own sympathies</p>
<p class="fst">Naturally Deutscher doesn’t express his sympathies openly and honestly. No, he suggests indirectly to the reader what he finds inconvenient to state directly. But the suggestions are unmistakable. Trotsky’s polemics against Bolshevism are evaluated by Deutscher as “Acute and venomous,” as an “odd ... assortment of great ideas and petty polemical tricks, of subtle historical insights and fustian flourishes,” as “the faithful mirror of the future,” etc. He says the 1903 controversy “at its more advanced stage will become one of the major motifs” of the book; in fact, it is the major theme.</p>
<p>Now let’s examine that part of Trotsky’s polemics against Lenin which Deutscher regards as acute, great, subtle, a faithful mirror and so on. It is all summed up in a single sentence, written by Trotsky in 1904 in a pamphlet, <em>Our Political Tasks</em>, which reads as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">”Lenin’s methods lead to this; the party organization (the caucus) at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single ’dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”</p>
<p class="fst">Out of the millions of words Trotsky wrote in 40 years of steady literary output, this is the favorite sentence of all the renegades and opponents of Bolshevism, and they naturally use it against Trotsky as well as Lenin. Deutscher too is so fond of this sentence that he recurs to it repeatedly and uses it for the climax and conclusion on his last page.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">The 1904 prediction</p>
<p class="fst">The 24-year old Trotsky, he marvels, “predicted” the post-revolution degeneration of the Bolshevik party with “uncanny clearsightedness,” his chief error being that it was Stalin (unknown in 1904) and not Lenin who became dictator over the party. The obvious implication here is that Trotsky should have stuck by his 1904 prediction instead of turning around and becoming a Bolshevik himself.</p>
<p>The trouble with this prediction was that it too was guilty of a form of “substitutism.” It sought to foresee the development of the Bolshevik party solely in abstract terms of its internal organizational procedures, to the neglect of the much more decisive effects on the party of concrete social-political developments in the class struggles outside the party.</p>
<p>The Bolshevik party did not degenerate after the revolution because Lenin had molded it into a highly disciplined organization &8211; in fact, the revolution would never have taken place unless he had done that &8211; but because the revolution, instead of being extended from Russia to the more industrially developed countries of Europe, was defeated in the years after World War I (with the aid of the treacherous Social Democrats) and confined to an economically and cultural weak and backward country.</p>
<p>If the revolution had been extended (and it would have been extended if the revolutionists in Germany and elsewhere had built in advance precisely the kind of party Lenin built in Russia), if the Soviet Union had been able to link its economy with that of more advanced countries, then the relation of forces inside the Bolshevik party would have been different, the party would have been able to escape or overcome the Stalinist degeneration, and it would have continued to function in the Same healthy democratic-centralist fashion that it did in its best and most creative years.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">The differences</p>
<p class="fst">Thanks to his growing mastery of the Marxist method of analysis and to his own enlightening experience with the Bolsheviks, Trotsky came to see the inadequacy, narrowness and, abstractness of his 1904 prediction. He rejected it totally and fought untiringly against all the opponents of Marxism who sought to explain the degeneration of the Bolshevik party by its adoption of Lenin’s correct organizational principles rather than by the complex historical process that unfolded and crushed the party in the years of reaction after the revolution.</p>
<p>But Deutscher, in his own sly way, tries to patch up one of the main crutches in the arsenal of anti-Bolshevism. The difference between the writings of Trotsky and Deutscher is not only that Trotsky acts openly while Deutscher operates by innuendo, but that Trotsky defends Bolshevism while Deutscher seeks to discredit it. Further proof will be supplied in <a href="deutscher-trotsky-4.htm">future articles</a>.</p>
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George Breitman
A Slick Distortion about Trotsky and Lenin
(5 April 1954)
From The Militant, Vol. 18 No. 14, 5 April 1954.
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) in 2012.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 .
Isaac Deutscher, author of a new biography of Leon Trotsky (The Prophet Armed) wants to prove that he is more “objective” than Trotsky and has more to offer to students of Russian revolutionary history. To support this claim, he points to the controversies between Trotsky and Lenin between 1903 and 1917. He cannot accuse Trotsky of suppressing the facts about these controversies, so he accuses him of having “blurred” their sharp outlines and importance.
What are the facts?
Trotsky met Lenin in London in 1902 and worked closely with him until the 1903 congress of the Russian revolutionary party which ended in a split and the formation of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. Trotsky, not yet 24 years old, failed to understand the significance of the dispute and the necessity for the kind of party Lenin was trying to build. He went with the Mensheviks, and attacked Lenin vigorously.
The 1903 split
The Mensheviks differed from the Bolsheviks not only over internal organizational principles but also, it began to be clear, over theoretical and political perspectives for the Russian revolution. When they started moving toward an alliance with the liberal capitalists, Trotsky broke with them and began to move in the direction of the Bolsheviks, who were as hostile to such an alliance as he was.
But his return to Lenin’s side was delayed by a number of complications. For one thing, Trotsky developed the theory of the permanent revolution, which forecast that a revolution against Czarism would quickly be turned into a workers revolution that would lead to the establishment of a working class government faced with socialist tasks. It took some years for even Lenin to grasp the correctness of this daring conception, although it was not a basic conflict with his own.
Another complication was that the Mensheviks vacillated back and forth between the perspectives of revolution and reform, especially under the impact of the 1905 revolution. This led to numerous proposals for reuniting the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which at times Lenin himself supported, and which was actually tried unsuccessfully. Trotsky, although moving closer to the Bolsheviks politically, favored unification of the two groups and worked for it until 1912 in the belief that the revolutionary wing would be predominant in a united party.
Historic context
In the light of everything he stood and fought for from 1917 on, Trotsky’s conciliationist efforts are hard to understand today unless they are examined in their historic context. Lenin had begun to build a new kind of party, whose like had never existed before, a revolutionary combat party fit to lead the workers in taking power. His genius was proved in 1917, when his party fulfilled precisely the mission it had set itself. But it should not be too surprising that other great Marxists, lacking historic working class models to base them selves on, at first mistook the meaning and purpose of Lenin’s pioneering work.
When World War I began, Trotsky realized that it would be wrong in principle as well as impossible to unite the pro-war Mensheviks and the anti-war Bolsheviks. On his return to revolutionary Russia in 1917, he found himself and Lenin in complete agreement on the tasks of the revolution; he also saw now that Lenin’s ideas on revolutionary organization had been completely confirmed by the test of events, and that the Bolsheviks were the only revolutionary party in the country.
He then became a Bolshevik in heart, mind and soul, played a role in the Bolshevik leadership of the revolution second only to Lenin’s, and defended Bolshevism to his dying day.
Trotsky’s answer
After Lenin’s death the Stalinists launched their big slander campaign by quoting Trotsky’s pre-1917 polemics against Lenin to prove that he had never really been, a Bolshevik. Trotsky’s answer was not to “blur” the differences, as Deutscher claims, but to present them in their proper perspective.
Trotsky neither concealed nor denied his early differences with Lenin. He stated what they had been and explained them. Distinguishing between those of his differences with Lenin which had been serious and genuine and those which had been episodic and due partly to misunderstandings on both sides, he admitted where he had been wrong and why (such as in his criticism of Lenin’s organizational principles and in his efforts to reunite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) and defended the positions on which he had been correct (such as his theory of the permanent revolution, which Lenin accepted in action in 1917).
That is, he examined his relations with Lenin in their totality, and assigned the different parts of their proper sphere and rank. Objectively viewed, the earlier disagreements were far outweighed by the later agreements. If this was not the case, the agreements could never have taken place. The subordinate, transitory character of the disagreements was demonstrated by everything that happened later, including the close and loyal collaboration between Trotsky and Lenin from 1917 on. Lenin himself testified to this by observing that no one had been a better Bolshevik than Trotsky after he joined.
Deutscher’s view
Deutscher, however, is not satisfied with this method or this evaluation, although he does not challenge it directly and in places even pays lip-service to it. In the guise of objective historian he devotes a great deal of space to the early differences &8211; as much space, or more, as he gives to the later agreements between Trotsky and Lenin. The result is to make the differences and the agreements assume an equal importance on the historical scale.
We all know that it is possible to tell a lie while using strictly truthful words, depending on the tone, the arrangement of the words, the words omitted, etc. In the same way Deutscher, even if everything he writes on the differences is factually correct, lends himself to what can only be called a historical distortion &8211; the kind which the Stalinists, who dislike Deutscher on other grounds, can only welcome.
In part, as we have explained, Deutscher does this in an effort to establish his superior “objectivity” over Trotsky. But there is another and more important reason &8211; a political reason &8211; for the emphasis he puts on Trotsky’s early differences with Bolshevism.
And that is the fact that he obviously half-sympathizes with the criticism of Bolshevism that Trotsky later rejected and attacked.
His own sympathies
Naturally Deutscher doesn’t express his sympathies openly and honestly. No, he suggests indirectly to the reader what he finds inconvenient to state directly. But the suggestions are unmistakable. Trotsky’s polemics against Bolshevism are evaluated by Deutscher as “Acute and venomous,” as an “odd ... assortment of great ideas and petty polemical tricks, of subtle historical insights and fustian flourishes,” as “the faithful mirror of the future,” etc. He says the 1903 controversy “at its more advanced stage will become one of the major motifs” of the book; in fact, it is the major theme.
Now let’s examine that part of Trotsky’s polemics against Lenin which Deutscher regards as acute, great, subtle, a faithful mirror and so on. It is all summed up in a single sentence, written by Trotsky in 1904 in a pamphlet, Our Political Tasks, which reads as follows:
”Lenin’s methods lead to this; the party organization (the caucus) at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single ’dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”
Out of the millions of words Trotsky wrote in 40 years of steady literary output, this is the favorite sentence of all the renegades and opponents of Bolshevism, and they naturally use it against Trotsky as well as Lenin. Deutscher too is so fond of this sentence that he recurs to it repeatedly and uses it for the climax and conclusion on his last page.
The 1904 prediction
The 24-year old Trotsky, he marvels, “predicted” the post-revolution degeneration of the Bolshevik party with “uncanny clearsightedness,” his chief error being that it was Stalin (unknown in 1904) and not Lenin who became dictator over the party. The obvious implication here is that Trotsky should have stuck by his 1904 prediction instead of turning around and becoming a Bolshevik himself.
The trouble with this prediction was that it too was guilty of a form of “substitutism.” It sought to foresee the development of the Bolshevik party solely in abstract terms of its internal organizational procedures, to the neglect of the much more decisive effects on the party of concrete social-political developments in the class struggles outside the party.
The Bolshevik party did not degenerate after the revolution because Lenin had molded it into a highly disciplined organization &8211; in fact, the revolution would never have taken place unless he had done that &8211; but because the revolution, instead of being extended from Russia to the more industrially developed countries of Europe, was defeated in the years after World War I (with the aid of the treacherous Social Democrats) and confined to an economically and cultural weak and backward country.
If the revolution had been extended (and it would have been extended if the revolutionists in Germany and elsewhere had built in advance precisely the kind of party Lenin built in Russia), if the Soviet Union had been able to link its economy with that of more advanced countries, then the relation of forces inside the Bolshevik party would have been different, the party would have been able to escape or overcome the Stalinist degeneration, and it would have continued to function in the Same healthy democratic-centralist fashion that it did in its best and most creative years.
The differences
Thanks to his growing mastery of the Marxist method of analysis and to his own enlightening experience with the Bolsheviks, Trotsky came to see the inadequacy, narrowness and, abstractness of his 1904 prediction. He rejected it totally and fought untiringly against all the opponents of Marxism who sought to explain the degeneration of the Bolshevik party by its adoption of Lenin’s correct organizational principles rather than by the complex historical process that unfolded and crushed the party in the years of reaction after the revolution.
But Deutscher, in his own sly way, tries to patch up one of the main crutches in the arsenal of anti-Bolshevism. The difference between the writings of Trotsky and Deutscher is not only that Trotsky acts openly while Deutscher operates by innuendo, but that Trotsky defends Bolshevism while Deutscher seeks to discredit it. Further proof will be supplied in future articles.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2><h2>
</h2><h1>Wallace Candidate Sweeps Election</h1>
<h4>Isacson Victory Shows Disgust with Old Parties</h4>
<h3>(23 February 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_08" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 8</a>, 23 February 1948, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>NEW YORK, Feb. 18 – Clouds of gloom settled over Democratic Party national headquarters and the White House last night as their candidate for Congress from the 24th District in the Bronx went down to crushing defeat by the Wallace-endorsed candidate of the American Labor Party. This first electoral test for the Wallace movement strengthened the likelihood that Truman’s goose is cooked unless he is able to work out some deal with Wallace.</strong></p>
<p>The political wise-acres had marked down a victory for the Democrats as a sure thing in this district that has been controlled by Boss Flynn for decades. They even went in for speculation that anything less than 30% for the ALP candidate, Leo Isacson, would represent a moral setback for Wallace.</p>
<p><em>But Isacson got 56% of the 40,000 votes cast yesterday, against 31% for the Democrats, 9% for the Liberal Party, and 4% for the Republicans, The results in the previous election, in 1946, were 44% for the Democrats, 27% for the ALP, 19% for the Republicans and 10% for the Liberals.</em></p>
<p>Thus the ALP rolled up more votes than the other three parties combined, surprising even its own leaders: And while the results have given the Democratic machine the jitters, the Republicans are far from happy over them. For by dropping from 19% to 4% of the votes, the GOP has been reduced to the status of “fourth party” in this district.</p>
<p>Of course, the Bronx election results, while providing a test of sentiment, cannot be accepted as a completely accurate reflection of the national political picture. There happened to be a number of exceptional local factors in this case, most of them favorable to the Wallace movement.<br>
</p>
<h4>Exceptional Conditions</h4>
<p class="fst">For one thing, the vote was only about half the size of the one cast in 1946, and the proportion of Wallace votes would probably go down in a regular election. Another exceptional factor was “the heavy proportion of Jewish voters in this district, something like 50%. and this had an important effect because most Jewish voters are today highly incensed at the transparently two-faced role of the Truman administration on the Palestine issue. Furthermore, this district was the second biggest stronghold of the ALP in the state.</p>
<p>It has also been noted that New York City is the major stronghold of the Communist Party, which is the chief representative of the Wallace movement in the trade unions. The CP forces were able by concentrating their city-wide strength in this district to achieve an effect that would be impossible in a regular election.</p>
<p>All in all, however, the election results are definite proof that dissatisfaction with the two-party system is spreading; that Wallace’s break with the Democrats has enhanced his popularity; and that his candidacy can cut heavily into the normally Democratic and Republican vote.<br>
</p>
<h4>Desperate Situation</h4>
<p class="fst">The Democrats are now in a desperate situation; and sentiment is sure to grow among them for a deal to regain Wallace’s support. Such a deal entails enormous difficulties, however.</p>
<p><em>One of the Bronx campaign’s high points was Mayor O’Dwyer’s public appeal on Feb. 12 to “liberals like Henry Wallace” to reconsider the “serious blunder” of leaving the Democratic fold and “return and carry on their fight within the Democratic Party, side by side with us.”</em></p>
<p>It was notable in Wallace’s reply three days later that he did not explicitly reject this appeal, even though he continued his attacks on the Democratic Party. An estimate of future trends must take into account Wallace’s refusal to definitely commit himself against a return to the Democratic machine, because the future of the movement he leads depends largely on what he decides to do about this.</p>
<p><em>Drew Pearson reported on Feb. 13: “Henry Wallace has told friends that he would yank his third party out of the running if the Democrats nominate Eisenhower, Douglas, Judge Thurman Arnold or any other Roosevelt Democrat.”</em></p>
<p>Whatever happens in this respect – and the undemocratic nature of the Wallace movement deprives its members of the right to make the final decision – the ALP landslide in the Bronx has given a black eye not only to the two old parties but also to the Trumanite union bureaucrats who have been vying with each other in denunciations of Wallace.</p>
<p>In New York State they went so far as to split the ALP over this issue. But their attempts to prop up the crumbling two-party system appear to be backfiring on them, rather than on Wallace. If the Bronx election is any indication, the bureaucrats’ repudiation of Wallace, may be transformed into a political repudiation of <em>them</em> by the union members.<br>
</p>
<h4>Danger to Unions</h4>
<p class="fst">The union leaders are treading on thin ice and may very well be sucked down into the icy waters of defeat along with Truman. That would be poetic justice, but unfortunately it also represents a terrible danger for the union movement as a whole.</p>
<p><em>That is why the union members must not permit their leaders to carry through the criminal policy of spending millions of the workers’ hard-earned dollars in ‘campaigning for Truman. That is why they must do everything in their power to force the holding of a national United Labor Conference, representing AFL, CtO, Railroad and Independent unions, to work out a new political policy for the working class and to launch an independent Labor Party.</em></p>
<p>The Bronx elections results are proof that the situation is ripe for a Labor Party. If a party supported by only a part of the unions can beat the two old parties, no limits at all can be placed on the prospects of a national Labor Party based on the whole union movement!</p>
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Albert Parker
Wallace Candidate Sweeps Election
Isacson Victory Shows Disgust with Old Parties
(23 February 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 8, 23 February 1948, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NEW YORK, Feb. 18 – Clouds of gloom settled over Democratic Party national headquarters and the White House last night as their candidate for Congress from the 24th District in the Bronx went down to crushing defeat by the Wallace-endorsed candidate of the American Labor Party. This first electoral test for the Wallace movement strengthened the likelihood that Truman’s goose is cooked unless he is able to work out some deal with Wallace.
The political wise-acres had marked down a victory for the Democrats as a sure thing in this district that has been controlled by Boss Flynn for decades. They even went in for speculation that anything less than 30% for the ALP candidate, Leo Isacson, would represent a moral setback for Wallace.
But Isacson got 56% of the 40,000 votes cast yesterday, against 31% for the Democrats, 9% for the Liberal Party, and 4% for the Republicans, The results in the previous election, in 1946, were 44% for the Democrats, 27% for the ALP, 19% for the Republicans and 10% for the Liberals.
Thus the ALP rolled up more votes than the other three parties combined, surprising even its own leaders: And while the results have given the Democratic machine the jitters, the Republicans are far from happy over them. For by dropping from 19% to 4% of the votes, the GOP has been reduced to the status of “fourth party” in this district.
Of course, the Bronx election results, while providing a test of sentiment, cannot be accepted as a completely accurate reflection of the national political picture. There happened to be a number of exceptional local factors in this case, most of them favorable to the Wallace movement.
Exceptional Conditions
For one thing, the vote was only about half the size of the one cast in 1946, and the proportion of Wallace votes would probably go down in a regular election. Another exceptional factor was “the heavy proportion of Jewish voters in this district, something like 50%. and this had an important effect because most Jewish voters are today highly incensed at the transparently two-faced role of the Truman administration on the Palestine issue. Furthermore, this district was the second biggest stronghold of the ALP in the state.
It has also been noted that New York City is the major stronghold of the Communist Party, which is the chief representative of the Wallace movement in the trade unions. The CP forces were able by concentrating their city-wide strength in this district to achieve an effect that would be impossible in a regular election.
All in all, however, the election results are definite proof that dissatisfaction with the two-party system is spreading; that Wallace’s break with the Democrats has enhanced his popularity; and that his candidacy can cut heavily into the normally Democratic and Republican vote.
Desperate Situation
The Democrats are now in a desperate situation; and sentiment is sure to grow among them for a deal to regain Wallace’s support. Such a deal entails enormous difficulties, however.
One of the Bronx campaign’s high points was Mayor O’Dwyer’s public appeal on Feb. 12 to “liberals like Henry Wallace” to reconsider the “serious blunder” of leaving the Democratic fold and “return and carry on their fight within the Democratic Party, side by side with us.”
It was notable in Wallace’s reply three days later that he did not explicitly reject this appeal, even though he continued his attacks on the Democratic Party. An estimate of future trends must take into account Wallace’s refusal to definitely commit himself against a return to the Democratic machine, because the future of the movement he leads depends largely on what he decides to do about this.
Drew Pearson reported on Feb. 13: “Henry Wallace has told friends that he would yank his third party out of the running if the Democrats nominate Eisenhower, Douglas, Judge Thurman Arnold or any other Roosevelt Democrat.”
Whatever happens in this respect – and the undemocratic nature of the Wallace movement deprives its members of the right to make the final decision – the ALP landslide in the Bronx has given a black eye not only to the two old parties but also to the Trumanite union bureaucrats who have been vying with each other in denunciations of Wallace.
In New York State they went so far as to split the ALP over this issue. But their attempts to prop up the crumbling two-party system appear to be backfiring on them, rather than on Wallace. If the Bronx election is any indication, the bureaucrats’ repudiation of Wallace, may be transformed into a political repudiation of them by the union members.
Danger to Unions
The union leaders are treading on thin ice and may very well be sucked down into the icy waters of defeat along with Truman. That would be poetic justice, but unfortunately it also represents a terrible danger for the union movement as a whole.
That is why the union members must not permit their leaders to carry through the criminal policy of spending millions of the workers’ hard-earned dollars in ‘campaigning for Truman. That is why they must do everything in their power to force the holding of a national United Labor Conference, representing AFL, CtO, Railroad and Independent unions, to work out a new political policy for the working class and to launch an independent Labor Party.
The Bronx elections results are proof that the situation is ripe for a Labor Party. If a party supported by only a part of the unions can beat the two old parties, no limits at all can be placed on the prospects of a national Labor Party based on the whole union movement!
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>Randolph’s Testimony</h1>
<h3>(12 April 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_15" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 15</a>, 12 April 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">A. Philip Randolph’s testimony before the Senate. Armed Services Committee is a sign that the Negro struggle against Jim Crow is on the verge of passing from the stage of protest and indignation to the stage of mass action. The Senate members were angered and frightened by Randolph’s promise to call a mass “civil disobedience” movement if military Jim Crow is abolished. But what disturbed them even more was the knowledge that he was only expressing the mood of millions of Negroes.</p>
<p>The present spirit of Negro rebellion can be compared in some ways to the one that prevailed shortly before the U.S. entered World War II. Then, too, there was growing unrest, centering around the determination of the Negro masses to secure for themselves the democratic rights that they were told the war was being fought to secure for everyone else. Then, too, Randolph gave expression to their sentiments by launching the March on Washington Movement, aimed at abolishing Jim Crow in employment and the armed forces.</p>
<p>The march on Washington never came off because its leaders buckled under Roosevelt’s pressure, and cancelled the protest demonstration in return for the establishment of the war-time Fair Employment Practices Committee. That of course didn’t stop the Negro struggle, which continued in the form of resistance to Jim Crow attacks all through the war. Nevertheless, many Negroes at the same time suffered from the illusion that if they went along with the war, maybe things would improve afterward. The experience since the end of the war has dashed all such hopes to the ground. The lesson of the last seven years is clear and unmistakable: The Negro people don’t get a thing without fighting for it.</p>
<p>That is why the present situation, while it has some points of comparison with 1940–1941, is an expression of the fact that the Negro struggle stands on a higher plane than it did in the days of the March on Washington Movement. This time Randolph threatens not only mass action and opposition to the Jim Crow Jaws and regulations – as he did in 1941 – this time he also advocates outright defiance of those laws.</p>
<p>The new stage which the Negro struggle is entering will impose great responsibilities on both the Negro and white workers. Now is the time for a thorough discussion of these problems. Among Negroes of course the question is no longer: Should the Negro people fight against Jim Crow and all its defenders? That question has already been decided. The questions to be discussed now are: What is the best way to conduct this fight? What kind of leadership is needed to guide this fight to victory? How can the active support of the labor movement be won for this fight?</p>
<p>This discussion is already under way wherever Negroes meet. Coming issues of <strong>The Militant</strong> will report on the discussion as it is reflected in the Negro press, pnd organizations, and will present the viewpoint of this paper. Readers are invited to send in their opinions.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
Randolph’s Testimony
(12 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 15, 12 April 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A. Philip Randolph’s testimony before the Senate. Armed Services Committee is a sign that the Negro struggle against Jim Crow is on the verge of passing from the stage of protest and indignation to the stage of mass action. The Senate members were angered and frightened by Randolph’s promise to call a mass “civil disobedience” movement if military Jim Crow is abolished. But what disturbed them even more was the knowledge that he was only expressing the mood of millions of Negroes.
The present spirit of Negro rebellion can be compared in some ways to the one that prevailed shortly before the U.S. entered World War II. Then, too, there was growing unrest, centering around the determination of the Negro masses to secure for themselves the democratic rights that they were told the war was being fought to secure for everyone else. Then, too, Randolph gave expression to their sentiments by launching the March on Washington Movement, aimed at abolishing Jim Crow in employment and the armed forces.
The march on Washington never came off because its leaders buckled under Roosevelt’s pressure, and cancelled the protest demonstration in return for the establishment of the war-time Fair Employment Practices Committee. That of course didn’t stop the Negro struggle, which continued in the form of resistance to Jim Crow attacks all through the war. Nevertheless, many Negroes at the same time suffered from the illusion that if they went along with the war, maybe things would improve afterward. The experience since the end of the war has dashed all such hopes to the ground. The lesson of the last seven years is clear and unmistakable: The Negro people don’t get a thing without fighting for it.
That is why the present situation, while it has some points of comparison with 1940–1941, is an expression of the fact that the Negro struggle stands on a higher plane than it did in the days of the March on Washington Movement. This time Randolph threatens not only mass action and opposition to the Jim Crow Jaws and regulations – as he did in 1941 – this time he also advocates outright defiance of those laws.
The new stage which the Negro struggle is entering will impose great responsibilities on both the Negro and white workers. Now is the time for a thorough discussion of these problems. Among Negroes of course the question is no longer: Should the Negro people fight against Jim Crow and all its defenders? That question has already been decided. The questions to be discussed now are: What is the best way to conduct this fight? What kind of leadership is needed to guide this fight to victory? How can the active support of the labor movement be won for this fight?
This discussion is already under way wherever Negroes meet. Coming issues of The Militant will report on the discussion as it is reflected in the Negro press, pnd organizations, and will present the viewpoint of this paper. Readers are invited to send in their opinions.
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<h2>John F. Petrone</h2>
<h1>Wallace’s Campaign Book – A Typical<br>
Middle Class Panacea for “World Peace”</h1>
<h3>(26 April 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_17" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 17</a>, 26 April 1948, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Wallace’s new book <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> contains little that he hasn’t already said a dozen times in his speeches, and its price is really exorbitant, considering that it is really a pamphlet. Nevertheless, it serves a useful purpose by giving an even clearer picture than you can get from his individual speeches of the mixture of demagogy and confusion that he and his party are peddling to the American people.</p>
<p>The most important fact emerging from this book is the sincerity of Wallace’s desire to save the capitalist system. He correctly points out that “Roosevelt’s policies ... were usually the minimum necessary to save the situation for democratic capitalism in the United States. He was saving the reactionaries and tories from themselves, but they never knew it.”</p>
<p>And Wallace’s ambition is to continue Roosevelt’s job. It is within that framework that he condemns such policies of the bi-partisan coalition as the Truman Doctrine: “Continuing the Truman Doctrine,” he says, “is the surest way of committing a long, slow, painful national suicide in the most expensive way possible ...”</p>
<p>One has only to examine his main proposal for offering a deal to Stalin to see what a thin tactical line separates him from the other capitalists. If he was president, he says, he would approach Stalin and, along with the promise of a big political loan, he would let the Russians “know the points beyond which we cannot tolerate further Russian expansion – all of them.”</p>
<p>He would demand a “pledge by Russia not to expand either by direct coercion or by Russian-directed communistic infiltration beyond the agreed-on boundaries.” He would insist that Russia “join the United States in agreeing to certain limitations on the use of veto power over United Nations decisions.”</p>
<p>Wallace says, “I want to see a continuous and friendly competition between the two systems,” but the basis of this desire in his belief that “the capitalist democratic system of the United States has certain unique advantages.” Everybody knows what the most important of these advantages is – overwhelming superiority of economic power. Wallace wants to combine the use of the “friendly” approach with the use of American capitalism’s superior strength.</p>
<p><em>Again and again he reminds his fellow capitalists about the opportunities for “wise” investments and the juicy returns to be gotten by casting bread upon the waters.</em> “Under the program I have described there can be a great expansion of business and markets for the benefit of the United States, Britain and Russia as well as the Eastern European countries themselves.” He argues that at this time American interests can be better protected by his program, and far more cheaply, than by war.</p>
<p><em>And suppose he could not get from Stalin the concessions which he demands in return for the “friendly” approach?</em> He does not discuss that problem – but the implication is obvious. In that case, Wallace would point out that he had “exhausted” all the possibilities of peace and that there was now no alternative but the more aggressive method of Truman and Marshall. Even if he did not succeed in postponing the war which he fears may sound the death knell of capitalism, he would still be able to resume his role as mobilisier of mass support for another war for “democracy.”</p>
<p>This book expands on Wallace’s concept about the two kinds of capitalism – reactionary and progressive – that he pretends are possible in modern society. “Personally I believe in democratic progressive capitalism – not capitalism that degenerates into fascism, but capitalism that learns to serve the common man in abundance without depression and without war,” he says.</p>
<p><em>No use asking him where or when such a capitalism ever existed in the 20th century; liberal demagogy is not provided with such answers. No use in even trying to determine which of these two kinds of capitalism Wallace believes exists in the United States today; half of his remarks lead to the conclusion he thinks it’s reactionary, while the other half can be construed just as logically to mean he thinks it’s progressive.</em></p>
<p>Equally ludicrous is his program for combating monopoly: “We have no doctrinaire answer. In some cases the. great corporations must be bought by the government. Others must submit to regulation and planning on behalf of the general welfare. Still others should be run as cooperatives.” <em>The idea of turning U.S. Steel into a co-operative may strike some people as fantastically utopian; but it is no more fantastic, we must point out in all justice, than the idea of a capitalism “without depression and without war.”</em></p>
<p>Wallace is not a Stalinist; he makes that abundantly clear in the pages here where he dissociates himself from them. But he accepts and parrots a good many of the Stalinist slanders and arguments. On Page 50, for example, he repeats the Kremlin’s slanders about the Moscow Trials, referring to the defendants as “Nazi-Trotskyist conspirators.” <em>Three pages later, however, he admits that “Trotsky was an uncompromising leftist who wanted revolution as soon as possible in every capitalist country.”</em></p>
<p>But how could a man who wanted revolution in <em>every</em> capitalist country have conspired with the political representatives of German capitalism? Like most of the other contradictions abounding in Wallace’s book, this one is left floating in the air, flapping occasionally under the gusts of “progressive” rhetoric.</p>
<p>The Stalinist review of the book is perhaps worthy of as much comment as the book itself. The April 15 <strong>Daily Worker</strong> chides Wallace a little because while “he pictures the venality, corruption; violence and deceit of our ruling circles,” he “surrounds it with the shell of an illusory ‘progressive capitalism’ which can rescue it.”</p>
<p><em>But the point is that Wallace isn’t stating just his own philosophy here – he is stating the philosophy of his party, the same party that the Stalinists are pushing with all their might. And Wallace’s illusions about capitalism (lies would be a scientifically more accurate term) are not private quirks, but the very heart of the third party program which he and the Stalinists are trying to sell the American people.</em></p>
<p>Stalinist weasel-words must not be permitted to obscure the fact that a vote for Wallace is a vote for the defense of capitalism. Wallace insists on this point, and so do we. Let everyone understand this fact and take his stand accordingly in this year’s crucial election campaign.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h3>Note</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a>
<strong>Toward World Peace</strong> by Henry Wallace, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1948. 121 pages, $1.75.</p>
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John F. Petrone
Wallace’s Campaign Book – A Typical
Middle Class Panacea for “World Peace”
(26 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 17, 26 April 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Wallace’s new book [1] contains little that he hasn’t already said a dozen times in his speeches, and its price is really exorbitant, considering that it is really a pamphlet. Nevertheless, it serves a useful purpose by giving an even clearer picture than you can get from his individual speeches of the mixture of demagogy and confusion that he and his party are peddling to the American people.
The most important fact emerging from this book is the sincerity of Wallace’s desire to save the capitalist system. He correctly points out that “Roosevelt’s policies ... were usually the minimum necessary to save the situation for democratic capitalism in the United States. He was saving the reactionaries and tories from themselves, but they never knew it.”
And Wallace’s ambition is to continue Roosevelt’s job. It is within that framework that he condemns such policies of the bi-partisan coalition as the Truman Doctrine: “Continuing the Truman Doctrine,” he says, “is the surest way of committing a long, slow, painful national suicide in the most expensive way possible ...”
One has only to examine his main proposal for offering a deal to Stalin to see what a thin tactical line separates him from the other capitalists. If he was president, he says, he would approach Stalin and, along with the promise of a big political loan, he would let the Russians “know the points beyond which we cannot tolerate further Russian expansion – all of them.”
He would demand a “pledge by Russia not to expand either by direct coercion or by Russian-directed communistic infiltration beyond the agreed-on boundaries.” He would insist that Russia “join the United States in agreeing to certain limitations on the use of veto power over United Nations decisions.”
Wallace says, “I want to see a continuous and friendly competition between the two systems,” but the basis of this desire in his belief that “the capitalist democratic system of the United States has certain unique advantages.” Everybody knows what the most important of these advantages is – overwhelming superiority of economic power. Wallace wants to combine the use of the “friendly” approach with the use of American capitalism’s superior strength.
Again and again he reminds his fellow capitalists about the opportunities for “wise” investments and the juicy returns to be gotten by casting bread upon the waters. “Under the program I have described there can be a great expansion of business and markets for the benefit of the United States, Britain and Russia as well as the Eastern European countries themselves.” He argues that at this time American interests can be better protected by his program, and far more cheaply, than by war.
And suppose he could not get from Stalin the concessions which he demands in return for the “friendly” approach? He does not discuss that problem – but the implication is obvious. In that case, Wallace would point out that he had “exhausted” all the possibilities of peace and that there was now no alternative but the more aggressive method of Truman and Marshall. Even if he did not succeed in postponing the war which he fears may sound the death knell of capitalism, he would still be able to resume his role as mobilisier of mass support for another war for “democracy.”
This book expands on Wallace’s concept about the two kinds of capitalism – reactionary and progressive – that he pretends are possible in modern society. “Personally I believe in democratic progressive capitalism – not capitalism that degenerates into fascism, but capitalism that learns to serve the common man in abundance without depression and without war,” he says.
No use asking him where or when such a capitalism ever existed in the 20th century; liberal demagogy is not provided with such answers. No use in even trying to determine which of these two kinds of capitalism Wallace believes exists in the United States today; half of his remarks lead to the conclusion he thinks it’s reactionary, while the other half can be construed just as logically to mean he thinks it’s progressive.
Equally ludicrous is his program for combating monopoly: “We have no doctrinaire answer. In some cases the. great corporations must be bought by the government. Others must submit to regulation and planning on behalf of the general welfare. Still others should be run as cooperatives.” The idea of turning U.S. Steel into a co-operative may strike some people as fantastically utopian; but it is no more fantastic, we must point out in all justice, than the idea of a capitalism “without depression and without war.”
Wallace is not a Stalinist; he makes that abundantly clear in the pages here where he dissociates himself from them. But he accepts and parrots a good many of the Stalinist slanders and arguments. On Page 50, for example, he repeats the Kremlin’s slanders about the Moscow Trials, referring to the defendants as “Nazi-Trotskyist conspirators.” Three pages later, however, he admits that “Trotsky was an uncompromising leftist who wanted revolution as soon as possible in every capitalist country.”
But how could a man who wanted revolution in every capitalist country have conspired with the political representatives of German capitalism? Like most of the other contradictions abounding in Wallace’s book, this one is left floating in the air, flapping occasionally under the gusts of “progressive” rhetoric.
The Stalinist review of the book is perhaps worthy of as much comment as the book itself. The April 15 Daily Worker chides Wallace a little because while “he pictures the venality, corruption; violence and deceit of our ruling circles,” he “surrounds it with the shell of an illusory ‘progressive capitalism’ which can rescue it.”
But the point is that Wallace isn’t stating just his own philosophy here – he is stating the philosophy of his party, the same party that the Stalinists are pushing with all their might. And Wallace’s illusions about capitalism (lies would be a scientifically more accurate term) are not private quirks, but the very heart of the third party program which he and the Stalinists are trying to sell the American people.
Stalinist weasel-words must not be permitted to obscure the fact that a vote for Wallace is a vote for the defense of capitalism. Wallace insists on this point, and so do we. Let everyone understand this fact and take his stand accordingly in this year’s crucial election campaign.
* * *
Note
1.
Toward World Peace by Henry Wallace, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1948. 121 pages, $1.75.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(28 June 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_26" target="new">Vol. V No. 26</a>, 28 June 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The President’s Memorandum</h4>
<p class="fst">President Roosevelt’s memorandum on the question of Negro exclusion from the war industries deserves more study than has been given it. For it must be remembered that this is the first time in the almost nine years that he has been in the White House that Roosevelt has ever spoken an the question of the Negroes’ problems at all.</p>
<p>Everyone with any political understanding at all knows why Roosevelt made the statement at this time. It was intended to get the leaders of the. March-On-Washington Committee to call off the July 1 demonstration in the capitol.</p>
<p>First of all, it should be repeated that Roosevelt did not do anything to end industrial Jim Crowism. In his statement, he only approved the action of the Office of Production Management in sending a letter to all employers two months ago, asking them to “examine whether or not” their employment policies “make ample provision for the full utilization of available and competent Negro workers.” Everyone knows that nothing has happened since that time. Employers may have examined their policies, or they may not; but certainly Negroes have not gotten jobs as a result.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Negro Press Swallows It</h4>
<p class="fst">We make this point again because there has been so much confusion cast on the question by the major Negro newspapers. The <strong>Afro-American</strong>, for example, said: “President Orders Defense Jobs Open to All.” The <strong>Chicago Defender</strong>: “FDR Breaks Silence; Urges OPM to Smash Defense Job Race Ban; President, Stirred by Many Protests of Negroes, Takes Belated Action to End Employment Injustice.” The <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>: “‘JOBS FOR ALL’ – ROOSEVELT; Nation’s Chief Executive Orders OPM to Halt Discrimination in All U.S. Defense Industries.” As though to clinch the matter, the <strong>Courier</strong> head on the continuation of the story says: “Roosevelt Ends Industrial Bias.”</p>
<p>The plain and simple fact, of course, is that none of these headlines are correct. They are only another example of that gullibility that characterizes the Negro press when it comes to half-hearted promises and evasive statements thrown to them as crumbs.</p>
<p>The editor of <strong>The Militant</strong> correctly wrote last week that Roosevelt did not even speak out, let alone act, against the whole system of discrimination in industry. “With careful intent, Roosevelt’s words are: ‘in defense industries’, ‘in this present emergency’, ‘in defense production’.” Roosevelt presents the question of job Jim Crow in a “reasonable” manner, and summed up he means this:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“There is going to be a labor shortage, and employers will have to use Negroes in the end anyhow. Besides, this is an emergency, and we must make sacrifices, even to the extent of hiring some Negroes. This will not hurt the system of Jim Crowism, because it will last only for the emergency, and because in order to defend our Jim Crow democracy, we must use all the forces at our disposal. In addition, giving the Negroes a few jobs will serve to remove from us the stigma of preaching one thing for Europe and practicing the opposite here. I am not taking any steps to force employers to hire Negroes, I am only showing them how reasonable it would be.”</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>Roosevelt’s “Moral Authority”</h4>
<p class="fst">Nobody who reads his memorandum carefully can claim that Roosevelt does more than add his moral authority to the OPM’s request to relax a little the Jim Crow bars.</p>
<p>Whenever most employers are approached by Negro and labor organizations with the demand that they hire Negroes, they reply that they themselves have no objection to hiring them, but that their white employees do, and there would be “trouble” which might result in a reduction in production.</p>
<p>This is the bosses’ line. But what does the government, what does Roosevelt say?</p>
<p>In their treatment of the Negroes in that government department where the greatest number of Negroes are utilized, the armed forces, Roosevelt says the very same thing as the bosses! In the army and the navy, Negroes are segregated. In the army Negroes are all in separate regiments, there is no such thing as a mixed regiment where Negro and white soldiers march or work side by side. In the navy Negroes are permitted only in the mess department, and nowhere else. The continued maintenance of this Jim Crow system has been explained by Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Navy on the basis that “to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense.”</p>
<p>One can easily see from this how much Roosevelt’s moral authority on the question of Jim Crowism amounts to!</p>
<p>One can also judge Roosevelt’s memorandum as much by what it leaves out as by what it says. Roosevelt has many times been asked to put some teeth into the OPM’s letter. He could tell the War and Navy Departments to stop all government contracts to employers who discriminate in their employment policies. The result would be the immediate hiring of Negro workers by thousands of plants. These plants are run for one reason only: for private profit. If the government were in any way to threaten that private profit, the employers would drop their employment bars like pieces of hot iron.</p>
<p>But Roosevelt makes no such step. He is ready to send troops in to break strikes, but he isn’t willing to even threaten employers who refuse to hire Negroes.</p>
<p>The refrain may become monotonous, but it is none the less true: The bosses don’t “give” anything for nothing. Workers, Negro and white, win things that are worthwhile only by fighting for them.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(28 June 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 26, 28 June 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The President’s Memorandum
President Roosevelt’s memorandum on the question of Negro exclusion from the war industries deserves more study than has been given it. For it must be remembered that this is the first time in the almost nine years that he has been in the White House that Roosevelt has ever spoken an the question of the Negroes’ problems at all.
Everyone with any political understanding at all knows why Roosevelt made the statement at this time. It was intended to get the leaders of the. March-On-Washington Committee to call off the July 1 demonstration in the capitol.
First of all, it should be repeated that Roosevelt did not do anything to end industrial Jim Crowism. In his statement, he only approved the action of the Office of Production Management in sending a letter to all employers two months ago, asking them to “examine whether or not” their employment policies “make ample provision for the full utilization of available and competent Negro workers.” Everyone knows that nothing has happened since that time. Employers may have examined their policies, or they may not; but certainly Negroes have not gotten jobs as a result.
Negro Press Swallows It
We make this point again because there has been so much confusion cast on the question by the major Negro newspapers. The Afro-American, for example, said: “President Orders Defense Jobs Open to All.” The Chicago Defender: “FDR Breaks Silence; Urges OPM to Smash Defense Job Race Ban; President, Stirred by Many Protests of Negroes, Takes Belated Action to End Employment Injustice.” The Pittsburgh Courier: “‘JOBS FOR ALL’ – ROOSEVELT; Nation’s Chief Executive Orders OPM to Halt Discrimination in All U.S. Defense Industries.” As though to clinch the matter, the Courier head on the continuation of the story says: “Roosevelt Ends Industrial Bias.”
The plain and simple fact, of course, is that none of these headlines are correct. They are only another example of that gullibility that characterizes the Negro press when it comes to half-hearted promises and evasive statements thrown to them as crumbs.
The editor of The Militant correctly wrote last week that Roosevelt did not even speak out, let alone act, against the whole system of discrimination in industry. “With careful intent, Roosevelt’s words are: ‘in defense industries’, ‘in this present emergency’, ‘in defense production’.” Roosevelt presents the question of job Jim Crow in a “reasonable” manner, and summed up he means this:
“There is going to be a labor shortage, and employers will have to use Negroes in the end anyhow. Besides, this is an emergency, and we must make sacrifices, even to the extent of hiring some Negroes. This will not hurt the system of Jim Crowism, because it will last only for the emergency, and because in order to defend our Jim Crow democracy, we must use all the forces at our disposal. In addition, giving the Negroes a few jobs will serve to remove from us the stigma of preaching one thing for Europe and practicing the opposite here. I am not taking any steps to force employers to hire Negroes, I am only showing them how reasonable it would be.”
Roosevelt’s “Moral Authority”
Nobody who reads his memorandum carefully can claim that Roosevelt does more than add his moral authority to the OPM’s request to relax a little the Jim Crow bars.
Whenever most employers are approached by Negro and labor organizations with the demand that they hire Negroes, they reply that they themselves have no objection to hiring them, but that their white employees do, and there would be “trouble” which might result in a reduction in production.
This is the bosses’ line. But what does the government, what does Roosevelt say?
In their treatment of the Negroes in that government department where the greatest number of Negroes are utilized, the armed forces, Roosevelt says the very same thing as the bosses! In the army and the navy, Negroes are segregated. In the army Negroes are all in separate regiments, there is no such thing as a mixed regiment where Negro and white soldiers march or work side by side. In the navy Negroes are permitted only in the mess department, and nowhere else. The continued maintenance of this Jim Crow system has been explained by Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Navy on the basis that “to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense.”
One can easily see from this how much Roosevelt’s moral authority on the question of Jim Crowism amounts to!
One can also judge Roosevelt’s memorandum as much by what it leaves out as by what it says. Roosevelt has many times been asked to put some teeth into the OPM’s letter. He could tell the War and Navy Departments to stop all government contracts to employers who discriminate in their employment policies. The result would be the immediate hiring of Negro workers by thousands of plants. These plants are run for one reason only: for private profit. If the government were in any way to threaten that private profit, the employers would drop their employment bars like pieces of hot iron.
But Roosevelt makes no such step. He is ready to send troops in to break strikes, but he isn’t willing to even threaten employers who refuse to hire Negroes.
The refrain may become monotonous, but it is none the less true: The bosses don’t “give” anything for nothing. Workers, Negro and white, win things that are worthwhile only by fighting for them.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2><h2>
</h2><h1>Stalinists Plan to Build Wallace Movement –<br>
by United Front from Below</h1>
<h3>(9 February 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_06" target="new">Vol. XII No. 6</a>, 9 February 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The differences between independent labor political action and the Stalinist third party policy were clearly delineated in the speech made by Communist Party General Secretary Eugene Dennis at a mass meeting in New York on Jan. 15. This speech made it plain that while the CP is now attacking the two-party system, in line with the world-wide “left turn” ordered by the Kremlin, it is still fighting by every means at its command to prevent the mobilization of the workers as an independent class force in U.S. politics.</p>
<p>Any discussion of the CP’s present policy naturally raises the question of its previous opposition to the formation of a new party. Dennis “disposes” of that embarrassing issue as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“<em>It is a matter of public record that for many, many years the Communist Party, together with other advanced workers, pioneered for a new political alignment to free the working class and its popular allies from the two-party system of Big Business.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The truth is, of course, that “for many, many years” the Stalinists had been running up and down the country denouncing those workers who wanted a new party. They campaigned vigorously in 1944 for the election of Roosevelt and Truman: after that election, their members at the CIO convention reaffirmed their opposition to a third party as something that would divide the “forces of progress” in the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>Even as late as the 1946 elections they backed Truman’s candidates. At last month’s CIO Executive Board meeting, Murray, whose opposition to the Wallace movement is wholly reactionary, reminded the Stalinists, with malicious glee, of their own extensive hatchet work on behalf of the two-party system.</p>
<p>Dennis can’t publicly explain the real reason why the CP line changed, but it is well known. Stalin wants a pact with Truman, like the one he had with Hitler. And he is trying to get it by political pressure and blackmail. Dennis can’t admit this because to do so would be to admit that if a Stalin-Truman deal is worked out, the CP will again be waving the flag for the two-party system.</p>
<p>While the Stalinist line was thus changed and given a more radical appearance, its main function is still the bureaucratic manipulation of the American workers in the interests of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. The crass character of this manipulation is evident in the very manner in which the new line is being carried out.</p>
<p><em>First of all, Wallace is given the real domination of the movement. That gives the party a leader – acceptable to the Stalinists, even though he is an avowed defender of capitalism, because he too wants a deal with Stalin. But, of course, the party needs more than a leader if it is to achieve the Stalinists’ ends. So Dennis lays down the directive for the next steps:</em></p>
<p>The Stalinists, he declares, “must in the first place guarantee that the third party has a strong trade union base.” What does this mean – that the unions should get together in a conference, democratically discuss the ways and means to fight the two Wall Street parties, and strike out on the course of independent labor political action by setting up their own party? Not according to Dennis.<br>
</p>
<h4>Endorse – Not Control</h4>
<p class="fst">By a “strong trade union base” the Stalinists don’t mean that the unions should control the party, have the deciding voice in determining policy, candidates, leaders, structure, etc. Oh no, what they actually mean is that as many unions as possible should be gotten to endorse the party, finance it, do the bell-ringing and Jimmy Higgins work – just as the Stalinist-dominated unions did for the Democratic Party. Of course, the unions should be given greater representation than they got in the Democratic Party – how else can you get their support? But control, direction, the dominating influence – these are the last things in the world the Stalinists propose to let the unions have in their new party.</p>
<p><em>It is obvious that this flagrantly bureaucratic method – “Here it is, all worked out, take it or leave it” – will antagonize and repel many workers who are ready to break with the two old parties but don’t intend to be used as doormats by anyone. The main (if not the only) “trade union base” resulting from such a procedure will be the unions dominated by the Stalinists.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>United Front from Below</h4>
<p class="fst">But, Dennis consoles the members of the CP, everything is going to work out OK anyhow, because:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the present situation all who truly wish to advance working class unity see that the Wallace movement is based on and stimulates <em>the united front of struggle from below</em>. It is serving to unite not only the consistent advocates of a new people’s party and coalition, but also hundreds of thousands of rank and file workers in auto, steel, clothing and other important industries. Those who are genuinely interested in advancing working class unity will therefore help to build this united front of action from below ...”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>But what is the “united front from below?” Translated from Stalinism to English, it is a promise that workers can be won to the third party even if the organized labor movement is by-passed. True enough, this can be done to a limited extent.</em></p>
<p>But what you will have then is not a party representing and speaking for and controlled by the labor movement, but another party not controlled by labor to which workers happen to belong. Such a party may be manipulated to serve the political blackmail interests of Stalinism, but it cannot serve the interests of independent labor political action.</p>
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George Breitman
Stalinists Plan to Build Wallace Movement –
by United Front from Below
(9 February 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 6, 9 February 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The differences between independent labor political action and the Stalinist third party policy were clearly delineated in the speech made by Communist Party General Secretary Eugene Dennis at a mass meeting in New York on Jan. 15. This speech made it plain that while the CP is now attacking the two-party system, in line with the world-wide “left turn” ordered by the Kremlin, it is still fighting by every means at its command to prevent the mobilization of the workers as an independent class force in U.S. politics.
Any discussion of the CP’s present policy naturally raises the question of its previous opposition to the formation of a new party. Dennis “disposes” of that embarrassing issue as follows:
“It is a matter of public record that for many, many years the Communist Party, together with other advanced workers, pioneered for a new political alignment to free the working class and its popular allies from the two-party system of Big Business.”
The truth is, of course, that “for many, many years” the Stalinists had been running up and down the country denouncing those workers who wanted a new party. They campaigned vigorously in 1944 for the election of Roosevelt and Truman: after that election, their members at the CIO convention reaffirmed their opposition to a third party as something that would divide the “forces of progress” in the Democratic Party.
Even as late as the 1946 elections they backed Truman’s candidates. At last month’s CIO Executive Board meeting, Murray, whose opposition to the Wallace movement is wholly reactionary, reminded the Stalinists, with malicious glee, of their own extensive hatchet work on behalf of the two-party system.
Dennis can’t publicly explain the real reason why the CP line changed, but it is well known. Stalin wants a pact with Truman, like the one he had with Hitler. And he is trying to get it by political pressure and blackmail. Dennis can’t admit this because to do so would be to admit that if a Stalin-Truman deal is worked out, the CP will again be waving the flag for the two-party system.
While the Stalinist line was thus changed and given a more radical appearance, its main function is still the bureaucratic manipulation of the American workers in the interests of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. The crass character of this manipulation is evident in the very manner in which the new line is being carried out.
First of all, Wallace is given the real domination of the movement. That gives the party a leader – acceptable to the Stalinists, even though he is an avowed defender of capitalism, because he too wants a deal with Stalin. But, of course, the party needs more than a leader if it is to achieve the Stalinists’ ends. So Dennis lays down the directive for the next steps:
The Stalinists, he declares, “must in the first place guarantee that the third party has a strong trade union base.” What does this mean – that the unions should get together in a conference, democratically discuss the ways and means to fight the two Wall Street parties, and strike out on the course of independent labor political action by setting up their own party? Not according to Dennis.
Endorse – Not Control
By a “strong trade union base” the Stalinists don’t mean that the unions should control the party, have the deciding voice in determining policy, candidates, leaders, structure, etc. Oh no, what they actually mean is that as many unions as possible should be gotten to endorse the party, finance it, do the bell-ringing and Jimmy Higgins work – just as the Stalinist-dominated unions did for the Democratic Party. Of course, the unions should be given greater representation than they got in the Democratic Party – how else can you get their support? But control, direction, the dominating influence – these are the last things in the world the Stalinists propose to let the unions have in their new party.
It is obvious that this flagrantly bureaucratic method – “Here it is, all worked out, take it or leave it” – will antagonize and repel many workers who are ready to break with the two old parties but don’t intend to be used as doormats by anyone. The main (if not the only) “trade union base” resulting from such a procedure will be the unions dominated by the Stalinists.
United Front from Below
But, Dennis consoles the members of the CP, everything is going to work out OK anyhow, because:
“In the present situation all who truly wish to advance working class unity see that the Wallace movement is based on and stimulates the united front of struggle from below. It is serving to unite not only the consistent advocates of a new people’s party and coalition, but also hundreds of thousands of rank and file workers in auto, steel, clothing and other important industries. Those who are genuinely interested in advancing working class unity will therefore help to build this united front of action from below ...”
But what is the “united front from below?” Translated from Stalinism to English, it is a promise that workers can be won to the third party even if the organized labor movement is by-passed. True enough, this can be done to a limited extent.
But what you will have then is not a party representing and speaking for and controlled by the labor movement, but another party not controlled by labor to which workers happen to belong. Such a party may be manipulated to serve the political blackmail interests of Stalinism, but it cannot serve the interests of independent labor political action.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>1948 in Review – What’s Ahead for 1949</h4>
<h1>Promises Were Plentiful – But Negro Conditions Did Not Improve</h1>
<h3>(27 December 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_52" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 52</a>, 27 December 1948, p. 2.<br>
ranscribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The year’s most promising development in the field of Negro struggle was the Randolph-Reynolds “civil disobedience” challenge to Jim Crow in the armed forces. Properly led, it could have set on foot a movement of mass struggle against Negro oppression.</p>
<p>But it came to nothing. Randolph, afraid of a real mass movement that could not be manipulated bureaucratically, refused to try to organize the Negro people around a program of struggle and soon backed out of the fight in a most ignominious fashion. His alibi was that Truman’s vote-catching executive order against discrimination last summer was really a step to end segregation and would be followed by serious moves to abolish Jim Crow.</p>
<p><em>As events since then have proved, that was the No. 1 fairy tale of the year. Although Truman is boss of the armed forces, he refuses to end segregation there. Whatever changes he has made there or anywhere else have all been kept within the framework of the Jim Crow system. The same goes for the decisions of the Supreme Court, on which so many Negro leaders stake all their hopes for obtaining justice.</em></p>
<p>Thus, after the Court’s decision on Ada Sipuel Fisher, Negroes are still segregated in education. After the Court’s restrictive covenant decision, Negroes are still kept from buying or renting homes solely because of their color. After the Court’s rulings against the white primary, Negroes are still barred from the ballot in most Southern states.</p>
<p>The record of Congress is even more barren. Lynchings continue and this year, just as in all past years, no lyncher was convicted or punished for his crime. Job discrimination flourishes even in states where local FEPC laws exist. Rosa Lee Ingram and her children still languish in prison even though mass pressure saved them from the chair. <em>“The more things change, the more they are the same.”</em> In most respects this French proverb neatly describes the relationship between Negroes and American capitalist society today.</p>
<p>Like the working class generally in 1948, although perhaps to a lesser extent, the Negro people remained in the grip of illusions about the Democratic Party and particularly about its liberal wing. This was the year of the Big Wind in the sphere of civil rights, and as it ends many Negroes still think, or hope, that some real benefits may be blown their way. Little progress on a mass scale can be expected in the Negro struggle until these illusions are destroyed.</p>
<p>Destroyed they will be, and sooner than most people realize. Because, in spite of everything the Negro leaders and liberal Democrats will do to keep these illusions alive, capitalism cannot offer more than surface reforms to the Negro masses, because equality for the oppressed Negro minority can never be obtained in this country without a revolutionary reconstruction of the nation’s economic and social systems. The Negro masses will learn this fact through their own experience.</p>
<p><em>This educational process will be hastened in 1949 if the politically advanced Negroes persist in exposing the role of the liberal politicians and in mobilizing the Negro masses to make the Democrats deliver on their campaign promises without any delay.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
1948 in Review – What’s Ahead for 1949
Promises Were Plentiful – But Negro Conditions Did Not Improve
(27 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 2.
ranscribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The year’s most promising development in the field of Negro struggle was the Randolph-Reynolds “civil disobedience” challenge to Jim Crow in the armed forces. Properly led, it could have set on foot a movement of mass struggle against Negro oppression.
But it came to nothing. Randolph, afraid of a real mass movement that could not be manipulated bureaucratically, refused to try to organize the Negro people around a program of struggle and soon backed out of the fight in a most ignominious fashion. His alibi was that Truman’s vote-catching executive order against discrimination last summer was really a step to end segregation and would be followed by serious moves to abolish Jim Crow.
As events since then have proved, that was the No. 1 fairy tale of the year. Although Truman is boss of the armed forces, he refuses to end segregation there. Whatever changes he has made there or anywhere else have all been kept within the framework of the Jim Crow system. The same goes for the decisions of the Supreme Court, on which so many Negro leaders stake all their hopes for obtaining justice.
Thus, after the Court’s decision on Ada Sipuel Fisher, Negroes are still segregated in education. After the Court’s restrictive covenant decision, Negroes are still kept from buying or renting homes solely because of their color. After the Court’s rulings against the white primary, Negroes are still barred from the ballot in most Southern states.
The record of Congress is even more barren. Lynchings continue and this year, just as in all past years, no lyncher was convicted or punished for his crime. Job discrimination flourishes even in states where local FEPC laws exist. Rosa Lee Ingram and her children still languish in prison even though mass pressure saved them from the chair. “The more things change, the more they are the same.” In most respects this French proverb neatly describes the relationship between Negroes and American capitalist society today.
Like the working class generally in 1948, although perhaps to a lesser extent, the Negro people remained in the grip of illusions about the Democratic Party and particularly about its liberal wing. This was the year of the Big Wind in the sphere of civil rights, and as it ends many Negroes still think, or hope, that some real benefits may be blown their way. Little progress on a mass scale can be expected in the Negro struggle until these illusions are destroyed.
Destroyed they will be, and sooner than most people realize. Because, in spite of everything the Negro leaders and liberal Democrats will do to keep these illusions alive, capitalism cannot offer more than surface reforms to the Negro masses, because equality for the oppressed Negro minority can never be obtained in this country without a revolutionary reconstruction of the nation’s economic and social systems. The Negro masses will learn this fact through their own experience.
This educational process will be hastened in 1949 if the politically advanced Negroes persist in exposing the role of the liberal politicians and in mobilizing the Negro masses to make the Democrats deliver on their campaign promises without any delay.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>Dictatorship in the South</h1>
<h3>(May 1941)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi41_05" target="new">Vol. 2 No. 4</a>, May 1941, pp. 115–118.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Although the illusion that the Democratic Administration at Washington is their government may be accepted by many workers in the North today, a Negro would have to be very gullible to be taken in by it. The argument advanced by Northern democrats of the capitalized or uncapitalized variety that “After all, it is you, the people, who elect the government and therefore it is you who are responsible for the laws of this great democracy” cannot convince the millions of Negro sharecroppers and workers who are more or less openly denied the right to vote, both by law and by terrorism.</p>
<p>It took a long and bloody civil war, in which the bourgeois-Republican government had to militarize over 200,000 Negroes whom it had had no intention of freeing in the first place, before the Negro people were legally recognized as human beings with equal rights, even in respect to the ballot.</p>
<p>But, just as the right to vote was won by force and violence and the establishment of a Northern dictatorship over the South, so was it taken away. The Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations beat up and murdered the Negro voters in all the areas of the South where they could get away with it. By force and by corruption at the polls, the landlords began to recover full political power in one state after another in the 12 years following the end of the Civil War.</p>
<p>Finally, in 1876, the Republican industrialists of the North concluded an agreement with the Democratic landlords of the South, at the expense of the Negroes and poor whites. In return for four years’ more control of the White House, the Republicans removed the Northern troops from Southern territory and gave back complete control of the South to the land-holding ruling class that had conducted the war against the North.</p>
<p>The Fifteenth Amendment, however, remained on the books, and it was not possible in all places to mobilize sufficient forces to keep the Negroes from the ballot by violence alone. Ingenious lawyers were set to work by the ruling class to devise state legislation to disfranchise the Negro “legally.” Constitutional conventions were called in most of the southern states to enact these new devices into law. Mississippi showed the way; the other states that followed “improved” on the Mississippi model, which accomplished its purpose without violating the written word of the Federal Constitution.</p>
<p>The principal devices for disfranchising the Negro adopted at that time, most of which have been carried over to the present day, are the following: the payment of poll or other taxes before registration can take place, literacy qualifications, property qualifications, the “grandfather clause.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Virginia – A Mirror of “Democracy”</h4>
<p class="fst">A typical example of the proceedings of these state conventions may be found in the Virginia convention of 1901, at which Carter Glass, “Unreconstructed Rebel” and Roosevelt’s dear friend, made his first bid for fame.</p>
<p>The Negro had been almost completely disfranchised in Virginia, by that time. But the ruling class, fearing a future alliance at the polls between white and Negro sharecroppers and small farmers, called this convention to “protect and guarantee” white supremacy, that is to say, to legalize the disfranchisement of the Negro, and through it, of many whites as well.</p>
<p>Glass, one of the leading advocates of the $1.50 poll tax, was loud in his promises to the delegates that the poor whites would not be affected by it. He spent most of his energy explaining the advantages of adopting his own “understanding clause” in addition to the poll tax. Under this, a Negro applicant who wants to vote and has already paid his poll tax, can be disqualified if he cannot “understand” some selected clauses of the constitution, and “explain them to the satisfaction of the white election official.” In some states, as Roscoe Conklin Simmons of the <strong>Chicago Defender</strong> puts it, these questions may be “something like this: ‘What is the difference between a pure democracy and governments described in the Federalist’.”</p>
<p>In this way, <em>any</em> Negro may be kept from the ballot in a “legal” way, and indeed many a Negro of college education in the South has been found who couldn’t explain these things to the “satisfaction” of the officials.</p>
<p>Glass took the floor to point with pride to</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... the uncontroverted fact that the article of suffrage which the convention will today adopt does not necessarily deprive a single white man of the ballot, but will inevitably oust from the existing electorate four-fifths of the Negro voters. That was the purpose of the convention; that will be its achievement.”</p>
<p class="fst">When someone asked if the Negro was not being deprived of his vote by fraud and discrimination, Glass answered:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“By fraud, no; by discrimination, yes. But it will be discrimination within the letter of the law, and not in violation of the law. Discrimination! Why that is precisely what we propose; that exactly is what this convention was elected for – to discriminate to the very extremity permissible under the limitations of the Federal Constitution with a view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate ... As has been said, we have accomplished our purpose strictly within the limitations of the Federal Constitution by legislating against the characteristics of the black race, and not against the ‘race, color or previous condition’ of the people themselves. It is a fine discrimination, indeed, that we have practiced in the fabrication of this plan.”</p>
<p class="fst">While the delegates may have agreed that this was a “fine” discrimination, they were not sure that the poor white farmers might not understand that they too could be barred in great numbers from the ballot and therefore vote against this constitution, so the convention agreed not to submit it to the voters. Like Mississippi’s, the new Virginia constitution was just proclaimed in effect, and left at that.</p>
<p>That the fears of the small farmers and sharecroppers had been justified was shown at the very next election. Of a population of 1,854,184 in the 1900 presidential election, 264,095, or 14.2% had voted. In 1904, after the new constitution went into effect, the total vote was 129,111 – or less than half the vote of 1900, which had already been much lower than the national average because of the terror employed against Negro voters.</p>
<p>It is interesting to note that Virginia is supposed to be one of the more advanced and liberal southern states, being one of the old border states. Nevertheless, although its population increased over 800,000 from 1900 to 1940, and its voting population increased by more than 80,000 in the same period, it has never regained to this day the same percentage of voting population it had in 1900 prior to the proclamation of the new constitution. In the 1940 presidential election, only 12.9% of the people were permitted into the polls.<br>
</p>
<h4>Devices of Disfranchisement</h4>
<p class="fst">In many states clauses were adopted which were supposed to guarantee to the poor or the unlettered whites that they would not be discriminated against by such things as literacy and “understanding” tests. Among these was the “grandfather clause,” which was finally declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1914, when many other substitutes for it had already been found and put into practice. This clause gave the voting right to those who themselves or whose parents had had it prior to a certain date. The date set in each case was 1861 or earlier, before the slaves had been freed. It accorded permanent registration without tax or other qualifications, and was designed to eradicate the suspicion of the poor whites that they, too, would be disfranchised.</p>
<p>This clause, however, was never very widely used. In his book, <strong>Race, Class and Party</strong>, Paul Lewinson quotes the fears of an Alabama newspaper that there were “large numbers of Negroes, who perhaps would not be unable to establish legitimacy of birth, but who could nevertheless easily establish the identity of white fathers and grandfathers” and thus win a vote. But it is certain that the southern landlords were not sorry to see this law wiped off the books, for with it went the bother of troubling about a large section of the poor white vote.</p>
<p>Another measure designed to gain support of the illiterate whites was the property qualification which is still used in some states as an alternative to literacy tests. In Alabama, for example, 40 acres of land or $300 worth of property, in Georgia, 40 acres of land or $500 of property, entitle an individual to a vote. Possession of this property permits admitted illiterates the right to vote.</p>
<p>While many variants of the old devices are still in use, even though court rulings have sometimes made it necessary to streamline them, the two main legal devices of present day usage are the poll tax and the white primary laws.</p>
<p>The poll tax legislation was quite frankly intended, as were the other devices, to strike at the “characteristics” of the Negro people, both real and assumed, as a means of getting around the amendments to the federal constitution that prohibit discrimination because of race or color. And the Supreme Court did not find in it any violation of the 14th Amendment because it could find “nothing in the text of the provision that could possibly be said to expressly discriminate because of race or color.” In other words, according to the court, the fact that the Negroes, because of their economic status, could not or did not pay the poll tax was not the fault of the statute, and therefore could not be held against the statute.</p>
<p>The three main “characteristics” of the Negro, on which the southern legislators based their device of disfranchisment, were his “poverty,” his “laziness,” and his habit of being “notoriously careless about keeping receipts of any kind.” Actually, it was only the first that really characterized the average Negro in the South; the others were added as trimmings for “white supremacy.”</p>
<p>Certainly, to the average Negro sharecropper, the sum of $1.00 to $3.00 a year is not a light consideration. Payment of such a poll tax is a heavy price for what is not yet the right to vote but only the right to <em>register</em> to vote, as will be shown later in discussing the white primary. Allan A. Michie and Frank Ryhlick, in their book <strong>Dixie Demagogues</strong>, say of the Texas poll tax:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The $1.75 poll tax seems small, but, to hundreds of thousands of impoverished whites, Mexicans and Negroes, it represents food for another week or a new pair of shoes for one of the children.”</p>
<p class="fst">Only a rare individual would deprive his family of $1.75, when it means so much, for the privilege of paying a poll tax which by itself gives no guarantee of a vote.</p>
<p>In many poll-tax states, not only is payment of the poll tax for the current year required, but payment of all accumulated poll taxes for previous years as well! Moreover, in Georgia, for example, penalties are attached to late payment of the tax amounting to a 7% interest fee and a collection fee. It is easy to understand why, once a sharecropper falls behind in payment of his tax, it is almost impossible for him <em>ever</em> to catch up again. His disfranchisement becomes practically permanent.</p>
<p>In most states the legislators took advantage of the second “characteristic” of “laziness” by setting the date for payment of the poll tax a good many months before the elections or the primaries. Since the Negro was “lazy,” they figured, he would never bother to pay his tax so long before elections.</p>
<p>In Texas, the tax must be paid on or before January 31. “That is winter, even in Texas,” Michie and Ryhlick point out, “when conditions are hardest and the primaries are several months off. Even if a citizen gets excited over the election later in the year, he cannot enfranchise himself under any provision.”</p>
<p>The third “characteristic,” keeping receipts, may seem trivial, but it is not really so. Not only is payment of the poll tax made mandatory, but producing the receipt for it before registration or election officials. In the long period between payment of the poll tax and the elections, many people may lose their receipts. Election officials may then exclude Negroes from registration, while admitting to the polls their white political friends who hadn’t paid the tax by the simple expedient of forgetting to ask for it.</p>
<p>The poll tax money is also craftily used to bribe the white voters into acquiescence. Of the $1.75 collected in Texas, $1.50 goes to the state and $.25 to the county. $1.00 of the state’s share goes into the school fund, and the demagogues offer the masses of disfranchised workers this alternative: either keep up the poll tax or ruin the school system of the state and deprive your children of all opportunity to get an education.<br>
</p>
<h4>The “Democratic Primary”</h4>
<p class="fst">While the poll tax denies millions of both Negroes and whites the right to vote, the “white primary,” or “Democratic primary,” as it is sometimes called, is a measure much more clearly aimed at the Negro alone.</p>
<p>This measure was invented to hold back the few Negroes who manage to get past the other barriers of poll tax, literacy, understanding, property, etc. Under present conditions in the South, it is more effective than the others, because while the overcoming of the other obstacles depends to a very small extent upon the position of the individual, the white primary applies to the Negro people as a whole and excludes them as such.</p>
<p>This device is based upon the idea that a political party has the right to determine who shall belong to it and who shall participate in its primary elections which select its candidates and determine its policies. Under it, the party’s state or county committees may and do decide that no Negro of whatever political viewpoint is eligible for membership or participation in the primaries, at the same time that thousands of white Republicans are freely admitted to vote in all its primary elections.</p>
<p>This situation prevails only because the South, like Germany, Italy and other totalitarian places, suffers under one-party rule. The Republican Party doesn’t amount to two cents there, and the Democratic ticket alone wins the elections. To be able to vote in the regular elections under these conditions without having voted in the primaries is useless, as the real elections in the South take place in the Democratic primaries, where campaigning is heated and places fiercely contested for. It is well known that far more people vote in the Democratic primaries than in the regular elections for all parties. Most people don’t bother to go to the polls for regular elections because the winning candidate has already been chosen and the issues settled in the primaries. Casting a vote for the Republican Party in the South is like casting it into the Atlantic, and minority parties can’t even get on the ballot.</p>
<p>Under the white primary device, therefore, the Negro who has passed all other tests is given the right to vote only for those candidates and platforms which have been decided in a white man’s primary, from which he has already been excluded.</p>
<p>It is understandable why most Negroes don’t bother to go through all the other obstacles to voting. It is not surprising that they don’t want to spend from $1 to $3 for the useless right to vote for candidates whom they had no part in choosing, or for candidates who are certain to be defeated. It is no wonder that <strong>The Waco Messenger</strong> in January of this year, while complaining bitterly about the indifference of the average Negro voter to the approaching deadline for payment of the poll tax, was able, in attempting to correct this attitude, only to point to “other elections,” such as those for the school board and the city commission, where there are no primaries (and no very important questions are settled).</p>
<p>Just as the poll tax has been taken to the courts, so the white primary is being contested there too. Leo Alilunas, in his <em>Legal Restrictions on the Negro in Politics</em>, in <strong>The Journal of Negro History</strong>, April 1940, has correctly summed up the attitude of the courts to date:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The expedient adopted by the Democratic party in the various states has been recognized by the judiciary, both state and federal, as being constitutional, and not in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The judiciary has ruled that a party, being a voluntary organization, is competent to determine its personnel.”<br>
</p>
<h4>The Stronghold of Reaction</h4>
<p class="fst">Now what is the effect of these measures on political life in the South, and, through the South, on the Nation? First of all, it means that the masses of people, Negro and white, have no method of registering protests at the polls against anything or anyone. Secondly, it means that they play no more part in southern government than do the inhabitants of Alaska. Thirdly, it means that the political and state machinery of the South belong to the ruling class just as completely and openly as the land and factory machinery belong to them. Fourthly, it means that the South sends to Congress, year after year, the most reactionary political figures in the nation, who feel no pressure whatsoever from those whom they are supposed to represent, and who play a role in Washington legislation far out of proportion to the number of people who elected them.</p>
<p>An examination of voting percentages during the 1940 presidential elections shows clearly what kind of democracy exists in those southern states whose representatives are the staunchest defenders of the President’s program for a “war for democracy.”</p>
<table align="center" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
<tbody><tr>
<th valign="top">
<p class="smc">State</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="14">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th valign="top">
<p class="smc">Percentage of<br>
Population That<br>
Voted in 1940</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">South Carolina</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 5.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Mississippi</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Georgia</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Arkansas</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.3</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Alabama</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.4</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Virginia</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Louisiana</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">15.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Texas</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">16.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Tennessee</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">North Carolina</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">23.3</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Florida</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">25.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Kentucky</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">34.1</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Oklahoma</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">35.3</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">As compared with these states, Illinois got a 53.4% vote. Other states in the northern, eastern and western sections of the country ranged down from that figure through the 50’s and 40’s. The national average was 35%. That is to say, only 2 of the 13 southern states came anywhere near the national average, which, it must be remembered, is lowered precisely by these southern states.</p>
<p>By restricting the right of franchise to the ruling class and its middle class retainers, the “representatives of the people” in the South are able to return to the same seat in Congress again and again. The turn-over from the South being much smaller than the other states, where greater electoral participation by the masses succeeds in sweeping unpopular officials out of office more quickly, southern politicians usually have greater seniority than others.</p>
<p>As a result, they have a stranglehold on important and strategic positions in all the leading committees of Congress, where they faithfully serve those whom they really represent, the big business and land interests. Not only are they able to use these positions to kill in committee measures of special interest to the South, such as anti-lynch legislation, but to unite with reactionary groups from other states to hold up national wage and hour legislation, WPA and housing appropriations, etc.</p>
<p>This year, for example, as the <strong>Norfolk Journal and Guide</strong> put it,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We have this situation as a result of the self-perpetuating poll tax dynasties ... 17 out of 33 chairmanships in the Senate and 18 out of 48 chairmanships in the House will be filled by men from 13 out of the 48 states. In addition, this minority group of states will furnish the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader and the leader of the Democratic caucus.”</p>
<p class="fst">Men from little more than one-quarter of the states will be chairmen of more than half the Senate committees and more than one-third of the House Committees! The reader of history will be struck immediately by the similarity between the situation existing just before the Civil War, when the South by counting three-fifths of the slaves toward its population was able to wield an undue influence in both houses, and the present situation when the South is getting representation for all the millions of Negro and white farm hands and wage slaves who can’t vote any more than could the Negro slaves of 80 years ago.<br>
</p>
<h4>Proposed Remedies</h4>
<p class="fst">Besides taking the issue of the poll tax to the courts, attempts have been made to repeal it by legislation. The attempts have included a bill to prohibit the collection of the tax as a requirement for voting in elections for members of Congress, the Senate and the President of the United States (the Geyer Bill which would end the poll tax for federal elections, but not touch it in state elections), a bill “to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments” that would base representation in Congress from the states on the basis of the total number of votes cast in the last general election, instead of on the population (the Marcantonio bill, which would give the Bourbons the choice of letting the masses vote or having their representation in Congress cut); and bills in the various state legislatures to abolish the poll tax altogether.</p>
<p>All these bills are worthy of support, although it is interesting to observe the extremely varied motives of their sponsors. Geyer, a California Democrat, wants to sweep the southern Democrats out of their prominent and often dominating position in the party and win undisputed control of it for his own wing, gain Negro support for the Democrats in the non-southern states, and perhaps avert explosions which may be brewing among the southern masses. It is unlikely that his proposal will be accepted by Roosevelt when he is today forced to lean so heavily for passage of his war bills on these same southern congressmen who are elected only because of the poll tax and similar measures.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a man like Senator Bilbo of Mississippi, also favors abolition of the poll tax in his state. He is one of the South’s most rabid Negro-baiting demagogues, who has advocated sending all the Negroes back to Africa. He wants to restore the right of the poor white farmers to vote in order to provide the mass base for a continuation in office of fakers like himself who pretend to represent the interests of the southern white farmers against the attacks of Wall Street and Big Business.</p>
<p>While the passage of the Geyer bill or one like it is certainly necessary, it is an illusion to believe that mere adoption of such a measure will to any substantial degree change the situation, especially as regards the Negro.</p>
<p>For, over and above all these legislative and statutory restrictions, stands the open threat of violence and terrorism by the night-riding landlords and their vigilantes. It must be remembered they were able to secure passage of these anti-democratic measures only by terrorizing and intimidating the Negro and confusing the poor white masses, and that they have been able to maintain the present status only by the threat (and use) of the mob, the rope and the torch.</p>
<p>The Negro people will be able to win back their voting and civil rights only when they are prepared to fight and take them. Passage of a poll-tax bill will not be a substitute for such preparations, as can be seen by looking again at the 1940 voting percentages of Florida and North Carolina which abolished the poll tax in recent years.</p>
<p>Negroes got a measure of democracy in the South for the first time after the Civil War through the establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship that protected them for a while against southern reaction. By force and violence and agreement with the Republican capitalists of the North, the southern ruling class recaptured power and destroyed the Negro’s democratic rights. Only by the struggle for establishment of a new dictatorship, this time of the exploited working class aided by the oppressed farmers and sharecroppers will a new period of real democracy be inaugurated in which the Negro will not simply regain his rights but be integrated as an equal in the brotherhood of all the toilers.</p>
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Albert Parker
Dictatorship in the South
(May 1941)
From Fourth International, Vol. 2 No. 4, May 1941, pp. 115–118.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Although the illusion that the Democratic Administration at Washington is their government may be accepted by many workers in the North today, a Negro would have to be very gullible to be taken in by it. The argument advanced by Northern democrats of the capitalized or uncapitalized variety that “After all, it is you, the people, who elect the government and therefore it is you who are responsible for the laws of this great democracy” cannot convince the millions of Negro sharecroppers and workers who are more or less openly denied the right to vote, both by law and by terrorism.
It took a long and bloody civil war, in which the bourgeois-Republican government had to militarize over 200,000 Negroes whom it had had no intention of freeing in the first place, before the Negro people were legally recognized as human beings with equal rights, even in respect to the ballot.
But, just as the right to vote was won by force and violence and the establishment of a Northern dictatorship over the South, so was it taken away. The Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations beat up and murdered the Negro voters in all the areas of the South where they could get away with it. By force and by corruption at the polls, the landlords began to recover full political power in one state after another in the 12 years following the end of the Civil War.
Finally, in 1876, the Republican industrialists of the North concluded an agreement with the Democratic landlords of the South, at the expense of the Negroes and poor whites. In return for four years’ more control of the White House, the Republicans removed the Northern troops from Southern territory and gave back complete control of the South to the land-holding ruling class that had conducted the war against the North.
The Fifteenth Amendment, however, remained on the books, and it was not possible in all places to mobilize sufficient forces to keep the Negroes from the ballot by violence alone. Ingenious lawyers were set to work by the ruling class to devise state legislation to disfranchise the Negro “legally.” Constitutional conventions were called in most of the southern states to enact these new devices into law. Mississippi showed the way; the other states that followed “improved” on the Mississippi model, which accomplished its purpose without violating the written word of the Federal Constitution.
The principal devices for disfranchising the Negro adopted at that time, most of which have been carried over to the present day, are the following: the payment of poll or other taxes before registration can take place, literacy qualifications, property qualifications, the “grandfather clause.”
Virginia – A Mirror of “Democracy”
A typical example of the proceedings of these state conventions may be found in the Virginia convention of 1901, at which Carter Glass, “Unreconstructed Rebel” and Roosevelt’s dear friend, made his first bid for fame.
The Negro had been almost completely disfranchised in Virginia, by that time. But the ruling class, fearing a future alliance at the polls between white and Negro sharecroppers and small farmers, called this convention to “protect and guarantee” white supremacy, that is to say, to legalize the disfranchisement of the Negro, and through it, of many whites as well.
Glass, one of the leading advocates of the $1.50 poll tax, was loud in his promises to the delegates that the poor whites would not be affected by it. He spent most of his energy explaining the advantages of adopting his own “understanding clause” in addition to the poll tax. Under this, a Negro applicant who wants to vote and has already paid his poll tax, can be disqualified if he cannot “understand” some selected clauses of the constitution, and “explain them to the satisfaction of the white election official.” In some states, as Roscoe Conklin Simmons of the Chicago Defender puts it, these questions may be “something like this: ‘What is the difference between a pure democracy and governments described in the Federalist’.”
In this way, any Negro may be kept from the ballot in a “legal” way, and indeed many a Negro of college education in the South has been found who couldn’t explain these things to the “satisfaction” of the officials.
Glass took the floor to point with pride to
“... the uncontroverted fact that the article of suffrage which the convention will today adopt does not necessarily deprive a single white man of the ballot, but will inevitably oust from the existing electorate four-fifths of the Negro voters. That was the purpose of the convention; that will be its achievement.”
When someone asked if the Negro was not being deprived of his vote by fraud and discrimination, Glass answered:
“By fraud, no; by discrimination, yes. But it will be discrimination within the letter of the law, and not in violation of the law. Discrimination! Why that is precisely what we propose; that exactly is what this convention was elected for – to discriminate to the very extremity permissible under the limitations of the Federal Constitution with a view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate ... As has been said, we have accomplished our purpose strictly within the limitations of the Federal Constitution by legislating against the characteristics of the black race, and not against the ‘race, color or previous condition’ of the people themselves. It is a fine discrimination, indeed, that we have practiced in the fabrication of this plan.”
While the delegates may have agreed that this was a “fine” discrimination, they were not sure that the poor white farmers might not understand that they too could be barred in great numbers from the ballot and therefore vote against this constitution, so the convention agreed not to submit it to the voters. Like Mississippi’s, the new Virginia constitution was just proclaimed in effect, and left at that.
That the fears of the small farmers and sharecroppers had been justified was shown at the very next election. Of a population of 1,854,184 in the 1900 presidential election, 264,095, or 14.2% had voted. In 1904, after the new constitution went into effect, the total vote was 129,111 – or less than half the vote of 1900, which had already been much lower than the national average because of the terror employed against Negro voters.
It is interesting to note that Virginia is supposed to be one of the more advanced and liberal southern states, being one of the old border states. Nevertheless, although its population increased over 800,000 from 1900 to 1940, and its voting population increased by more than 80,000 in the same period, it has never regained to this day the same percentage of voting population it had in 1900 prior to the proclamation of the new constitution. In the 1940 presidential election, only 12.9% of the people were permitted into the polls.
Devices of Disfranchisement
In many states clauses were adopted which were supposed to guarantee to the poor or the unlettered whites that they would not be discriminated against by such things as literacy and “understanding” tests. Among these was the “grandfather clause,” which was finally declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1914, when many other substitutes for it had already been found and put into practice. This clause gave the voting right to those who themselves or whose parents had had it prior to a certain date. The date set in each case was 1861 or earlier, before the slaves had been freed. It accorded permanent registration without tax or other qualifications, and was designed to eradicate the suspicion of the poor whites that they, too, would be disfranchised.
This clause, however, was never very widely used. In his book, Race, Class and Party, Paul Lewinson quotes the fears of an Alabama newspaper that there were “large numbers of Negroes, who perhaps would not be unable to establish legitimacy of birth, but who could nevertheless easily establish the identity of white fathers and grandfathers” and thus win a vote. But it is certain that the southern landlords were not sorry to see this law wiped off the books, for with it went the bother of troubling about a large section of the poor white vote.
Another measure designed to gain support of the illiterate whites was the property qualification which is still used in some states as an alternative to literacy tests. In Alabama, for example, 40 acres of land or $300 worth of property, in Georgia, 40 acres of land or $500 of property, entitle an individual to a vote. Possession of this property permits admitted illiterates the right to vote.
While many variants of the old devices are still in use, even though court rulings have sometimes made it necessary to streamline them, the two main legal devices of present day usage are the poll tax and the white primary laws.
The poll tax legislation was quite frankly intended, as were the other devices, to strike at the “characteristics” of the Negro people, both real and assumed, as a means of getting around the amendments to the federal constitution that prohibit discrimination because of race or color. And the Supreme Court did not find in it any violation of the 14th Amendment because it could find “nothing in the text of the provision that could possibly be said to expressly discriminate because of race or color.” In other words, according to the court, the fact that the Negroes, because of their economic status, could not or did not pay the poll tax was not the fault of the statute, and therefore could not be held against the statute.
The three main “characteristics” of the Negro, on which the southern legislators based their device of disfranchisment, were his “poverty,” his “laziness,” and his habit of being “notoriously careless about keeping receipts of any kind.” Actually, it was only the first that really characterized the average Negro in the South; the others were added as trimmings for “white supremacy.”
Certainly, to the average Negro sharecropper, the sum of $1.00 to $3.00 a year is not a light consideration. Payment of such a poll tax is a heavy price for what is not yet the right to vote but only the right to register to vote, as will be shown later in discussing the white primary. Allan A. Michie and Frank Ryhlick, in their book Dixie Demagogues, say of the Texas poll tax:
“The $1.75 poll tax seems small, but, to hundreds of thousands of impoverished whites, Mexicans and Negroes, it represents food for another week or a new pair of shoes for one of the children.”
Only a rare individual would deprive his family of $1.75, when it means so much, for the privilege of paying a poll tax which by itself gives no guarantee of a vote.
In many poll-tax states, not only is payment of the poll tax for the current year required, but payment of all accumulated poll taxes for previous years as well! Moreover, in Georgia, for example, penalties are attached to late payment of the tax amounting to a 7% interest fee and a collection fee. It is easy to understand why, once a sharecropper falls behind in payment of his tax, it is almost impossible for him ever to catch up again. His disfranchisement becomes practically permanent.
In most states the legislators took advantage of the second “characteristic” of “laziness” by setting the date for payment of the poll tax a good many months before the elections or the primaries. Since the Negro was “lazy,” they figured, he would never bother to pay his tax so long before elections.
In Texas, the tax must be paid on or before January 31. “That is winter, even in Texas,” Michie and Ryhlick point out, “when conditions are hardest and the primaries are several months off. Even if a citizen gets excited over the election later in the year, he cannot enfranchise himself under any provision.”
The third “characteristic,” keeping receipts, may seem trivial, but it is not really so. Not only is payment of the poll tax made mandatory, but producing the receipt for it before registration or election officials. In the long period between payment of the poll tax and the elections, many people may lose their receipts. Election officials may then exclude Negroes from registration, while admitting to the polls their white political friends who hadn’t paid the tax by the simple expedient of forgetting to ask for it.
The poll tax money is also craftily used to bribe the white voters into acquiescence. Of the $1.75 collected in Texas, $1.50 goes to the state and $.25 to the county. $1.00 of the state’s share goes into the school fund, and the demagogues offer the masses of disfranchised workers this alternative: either keep up the poll tax or ruin the school system of the state and deprive your children of all opportunity to get an education.
The “Democratic Primary”
While the poll tax denies millions of both Negroes and whites the right to vote, the “white primary,” or “Democratic primary,” as it is sometimes called, is a measure much more clearly aimed at the Negro alone.
This measure was invented to hold back the few Negroes who manage to get past the other barriers of poll tax, literacy, understanding, property, etc. Under present conditions in the South, it is more effective than the others, because while the overcoming of the other obstacles depends to a very small extent upon the position of the individual, the white primary applies to the Negro people as a whole and excludes them as such.
This device is based upon the idea that a political party has the right to determine who shall belong to it and who shall participate in its primary elections which select its candidates and determine its policies. Under it, the party’s state or county committees may and do decide that no Negro of whatever political viewpoint is eligible for membership or participation in the primaries, at the same time that thousands of white Republicans are freely admitted to vote in all its primary elections.
This situation prevails only because the South, like Germany, Italy and other totalitarian places, suffers under one-party rule. The Republican Party doesn’t amount to two cents there, and the Democratic ticket alone wins the elections. To be able to vote in the regular elections under these conditions without having voted in the primaries is useless, as the real elections in the South take place in the Democratic primaries, where campaigning is heated and places fiercely contested for. It is well known that far more people vote in the Democratic primaries than in the regular elections for all parties. Most people don’t bother to go to the polls for regular elections because the winning candidate has already been chosen and the issues settled in the primaries. Casting a vote for the Republican Party in the South is like casting it into the Atlantic, and minority parties can’t even get on the ballot.
Under the white primary device, therefore, the Negro who has passed all other tests is given the right to vote only for those candidates and platforms which have been decided in a white man’s primary, from which he has already been excluded.
It is understandable why most Negroes don’t bother to go through all the other obstacles to voting. It is not surprising that they don’t want to spend from $1 to $3 for the useless right to vote for candidates whom they had no part in choosing, or for candidates who are certain to be defeated. It is no wonder that The Waco Messenger in January of this year, while complaining bitterly about the indifference of the average Negro voter to the approaching deadline for payment of the poll tax, was able, in attempting to correct this attitude, only to point to “other elections,” such as those for the school board and the city commission, where there are no primaries (and no very important questions are settled).
Just as the poll tax has been taken to the courts, so the white primary is being contested there too. Leo Alilunas, in his Legal Restrictions on the Negro in Politics, in The Journal of Negro History, April 1940, has correctly summed up the attitude of the courts to date:
“The expedient adopted by the Democratic party in the various states has been recognized by the judiciary, both state and federal, as being constitutional, and not in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The judiciary has ruled that a party, being a voluntary organization, is competent to determine its personnel.”
The Stronghold of Reaction
Now what is the effect of these measures on political life in the South, and, through the South, on the Nation? First of all, it means that the masses of people, Negro and white, have no method of registering protests at the polls against anything or anyone. Secondly, it means that they play no more part in southern government than do the inhabitants of Alaska. Thirdly, it means that the political and state machinery of the South belong to the ruling class just as completely and openly as the land and factory machinery belong to them. Fourthly, it means that the South sends to Congress, year after year, the most reactionary political figures in the nation, who feel no pressure whatsoever from those whom they are supposed to represent, and who play a role in Washington legislation far out of proportion to the number of people who elected them.
An examination of voting percentages during the 1940 presidential elections shows clearly what kind of democracy exists in those southern states whose representatives are the staunchest defenders of the President’s program for a “war for democracy.”
State
Percentage of
Population That
Voted in 1940
South Carolina
5.2
Mississippi
8.0
Georgia
10.0
Arkansas
10.3
Alabama
10.4
Virginia
12.9
Louisiana
15.7
Texas
16.2
Tennessee
17.9
North Carolina
23.3
Florida
25.7
Kentucky
34.1
Oklahoma
35.3
As compared with these states, Illinois got a 53.4% vote. Other states in the northern, eastern and western sections of the country ranged down from that figure through the 50’s and 40’s. The national average was 35%. That is to say, only 2 of the 13 southern states came anywhere near the national average, which, it must be remembered, is lowered precisely by these southern states.
By restricting the right of franchise to the ruling class and its middle class retainers, the “representatives of the people” in the South are able to return to the same seat in Congress again and again. The turn-over from the South being much smaller than the other states, where greater electoral participation by the masses succeeds in sweeping unpopular officials out of office more quickly, southern politicians usually have greater seniority than others.
As a result, they have a stranglehold on important and strategic positions in all the leading committees of Congress, where they faithfully serve those whom they really represent, the big business and land interests. Not only are they able to use these positions to kill in committee measures of special interest to the South, such as anti-lynch legislation, but to unite with reactionary groups from other states to hold up national wage and hour legislation, WPA and housing appropriations, etc.
This year, for example, as the Norfolk Journal and Guide put it,
“We have this situation as a result of the self-perpetuating poll tax dynasties ... 17 out of 33 chairmanships in the Senate and 18 out of 48 chairmanships in the House will be filled by men from 13 out of the 48 states. In addition, this minority group of states will furnish the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader and the leader of the Democratic caucus.”
Men from little more than one-quarter of the states will be chairmen of more than half the Senate committees and more than one-third of the House Committees! The reader of history will be struck immediately by the similarity between the situation existing just before the Civil War, when the South by counting three-fifths of the slaves toward its population was able to wield an undue influence in both houses, and the present situation when the South is getting representation for all the millions of Negro and white farm hands and wage slaves who can’t vote any more than could the Negro slaves of 80 years ago.
Proposed Remedies
Besides taking the issue of the poll tax to the courts, attempts have been made to repeal it by legislation. The attempts have included a bill to prohibit the collection of the tax as a requirement for voting in elections for members of Congress, the Senate and the President of the United States (the Geyer Bill which would end the poll tax for federal elections, but not touch it in state elections), a bill “to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments” that would base representation in Congress from the states on the basis of the total number of votes cast in the last general election, instead of on the population (the Marcantonio bill, which would give the Bourbons the choice of letting the masses vote or having their representation in Congress cut); and bills in the various state legislatures to abolish the poll tax altogether.
All these bills are worthy of support, although it is interesting to observe the extremely varied motives of their sponsors. Geyer, a California Democrat, wants to sweep the southern Democrats out of their prominent and often dominating position in the party and win undisputed control of it for his own wing, gain Negro support for the Democrats in the non-southern states, and perhaps avert explosions which may be brewing among the southern masses. It is unlikely that his proposal will be accepted by Roosevelt when he is today forced to lean so heavily for passage of his war bills on these same southern congressmen who are elected only because of the poll tax and similar measures.
On the other hand, a man like Senator Bilbo of Mississippi, also favors abolition of the poll tax in his state. He is one of the South’s most rabid Negro-baiting demagogues, who has advocated sending all the Negroes back to Africa. He wants to restore the right of the poor white farmers to vote in order to provide the mass base for a continuation in office of fakers like himself who pretend to represent the interests of the southern white farmers against the attacks of Wall Street and Big Business.
While the passage of the Geyer bill or one like it is certainly necessary, it is an illusion to believe that mere adoption of such a measure will to any substantial degree change the situation, especially as regards the Negro.
For, over and above all these legislative and statutory restrictions, stands the open threat of violence and terrorism by the night-riding landlords and their vigilantes. It must be remembered they were able to secure passage of these anti-democratic measures only by terrorizing and intimidating the Negro and confusing the poor white masses, and that they have been able to maintain the present status only by the threat (and use) of the mob, the rope and the torch.
The Negro people will be able to win back their voting and civil rights only when they are prepared to fight and take them. Passage of a poll-tax bill will not be a substitute for such preparations, as can be seen by looking again at the 1940 voting percentages of Florida and North Carolina which abolished the poll tax in recent years.
Negroes got a measure of democracy in the South for the first time after the Civil War through the establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship that protected them for a while against southern reaction. By force and violence and agreement with the Republican capitalists of the North, the southern ruling class recaptured power and destroyed the Negro’s democratic rights. Only by the struggle for establishment of a new dictatorship, this time of the exploited working class aided by the oppressed farmers and sharecroppers will a new period of real democracy be inaugurated in which the Negro will not simply regain his rights but be integrated as an equal in the brotherhood of all the toilers.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Wallace Veto Power Shows Basic<br>
Weakness of 3rd Party Movement</h1>
<h3>(12 January 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_02" target="new">Vol. XII No. 2</a>, 12 January 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Both in the labor movement and in top capitalist circles there is a great deal of speculation over the question: Will Wallace stick to his third party candidacy for president, or will he throw in the towel after the Republican and Democratic conventions in June?</p>
<p>In a press conference on the same day that he announced his candidacy, Wallace said he would withdraw “should either of the major parties become definitely a peace party before the election.” Under this formula, Wallace leaves the door wide open. As Arthur Krock points out in the Jan. 4 <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Since he reserves to himself the right to conclude whether or not the Republicans or the Democrats have become the ‘peace party,’ he can base withdrawal on conviction or expediency, and expedient decisions occur frequently in his public record. A few words in either party platform, or any differences on foreign policy between the Republican candidate for President and Mr. Truman, can easily serve him as a bridge after the major national conventions are held ...</em></p>
<p class="quote">“He could then, reverting to a very recent position, announce that his immediate purpose had been served and that an independent candidacy this year could not further advance it.”</p>
<p class="fst">Krock, who is an opponent of Wallace, expresses the belief that Wallace probably “will not finish the race.” This opinion is apparently shared by some of Wallace’s followers.</p>
<p>At the Albany meeting of the New York State CIO Executive Board on Jan. 5, which voted against the, endorsement of Wallace, the <strong>Times</strong> reports:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“On both sides [of the dispute over Wallace] considerable skepticism was expressed about whether Mr. Wallace would actually run. Several left-wingers [Wallace supporters] said his primary aim was to. increase the ‘bargaining power’ of those opposed to the policies of the Truman Administration and the Republican Party.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Not having inside information about Wallace’s intentions, we cannot predict with any certainty what his course will be. From what we know of Wallace, we would say that he is not sure himself.</p>
<p>But what is most significant about this question right now is the light it throws on the irresponsible and undemocratic nature of the Wallace movement. <em>Wallace says yes, and there is a third party campaign. Wallace says no, and the whole third party campaign blows up. The rank and file have nothing to say, one way or another.</em> Wallace’s one-man veto power, creating the possibility of a betrayal of his followers’ aspirations, is one of the most objectionable features of his movement.</p>
<p>This illumines the deep-going differences between a Labor Party and the movement Wallace is attempting to build. A Labor Party, based on the unions, would be responsible to duly elected bodies representing its membership. The members could participate in shaping policies, selecting officers and naming candidates.</p>
<p><em>The Wallace movement, in contrast, is being constructed on the fuehrer principle. Wallace loftily invites his supporters to send him suggestions and proposals – but they have no voice in making decisions.</em></p>
<p>The workers, who have fought so militantly to establish democratic processes and rank and file control in the modern mass production unions, will want at least as much democracy in the party they propose to build. That is why they will reject all one-man leader organizations and build on the tested foundations of democracy and control from the ranks.</p>
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George Breitman
Wallace Veto Power Shows Basic
Weakness of 3rd Party Movement
(12 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 2, 12 January 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Both in the labor movement and in top capitalist circles there is a great deal of speculation over the question: Will Wallace stick to his third party candidacy for president, or will he throw in the towel after the Republican and Democratic conventions in June?
In a press conference on the same day that he announced his candidacy, Wallace said he would withdraw “should either of the major parties become definitely a peace party before the election.” Under this formula, Wallace leaves the door wide open. As Arthur Krock points out in the Jan. 4 N.Y. Times:
“Since he reserves to himself the right to conclude whether or not the Republicans or the Democrats have become the ‘peace party,’ he can base withdrawal on conviction or expediency, and expedient decisions occur frequently in his public record. A few words in either party platform, or any differences on foreign policy between the Republican candidate for President and Mr. Truman, can easily serve him as a bridge after the major national conventions are held ...
“He could then, reverting to a very recent position, announce that his immediate purpose had been served and that an independent candidacy this year could not further advance it.”
Krock, who is an opponent of Wallace, expresses the belief that Wallace probably “will not finish the race.” This opinion is apparently shared by some of Wallace’s followers.
At the Albany meeting of the New York State CIO Executive Board on Jan. 5, which voted against the, endorsement of Wallace, the Times reports:
“On both sides [of the dispute over Wallace] considerable skepticism was expressed about whether Mr. Wallace would actually run. Several left-wingers [Wallace supporters] said his primary aim was to. increase the ‘bargaining power’ of those opposed to the policies of the Truman Administration and the Republican Party.”
Not having inside information about Wallace’s intentions, we cannot predict with any certainty what his course will be. From what we know of Wallace, we would say that he is not sure himself.
But what is most significant about this question right now is the light it throws on the irresponsible and undemocratic nature of the Wallace movement. Wallace says yes, and there is a third party campaign. Wallace says no, and the whole third party campaign blows up. The rank and file have nothing to say, one way or another. Wallace’s one-man veto power, creating the possibility of a betrayal of his followers’ aspirations, is one of the most objectionable features of his movement.
This illumines the deep-going differences between a Labor Party and the movement Wallace is attempting to build. A Labor Party, based on the unions, would be responsible to duly elected bodies representing its membership. The members could participate in shaping policies, selecting officers and naming candidates.
The Wallace movement, in contrast, is being constructed on the fuehrer principle. Wallace loftily invites his supporters to send him suggestions and proposals – but they have no voice in making decisions.
The workers, who have fought so militantly to establish democratic processes and rank and file control in the modern mass production unions, will want at least as much democracy in the party they propose to build. That is why they will reject all one-man leader organizations and build on the tested foundations of democracy and control from the ranks.
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<h2>Anthony Massini</h2><h2>
</h2><h1>The Bosses, Not the Workers,<br>
Prevent Rise in Production</h1>
<h3>(10 January 1942)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/index.htm#m42_02" target="new">Vol 6 No. 2</a>, 10 January 1942, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The enemies of labor, the representatives of big business and the captains of industry, have all seized upon the war situation, and the needs of the war machine for war supplies, as justification of repressive measures against the unions.</p>
<p>They argue as follows: The Axis has had a headstart in the production of the instruments of war. This war can be won only by all-out production. Nothing must be permitted to interfere with that production. Above everything else, strikes must be prevented, for they are an aid; and comfort to Hitler.</p>
<p>Of course, the employers would never think of placing the blame for strikes where it actually belongs: on themselves. Workers don’t want strikes, and never have, even before the war. All they want is improvement of their conditions, higher wages to meet the rising cost of living, job security, etc. It is only when the bosses refuse to meet the workers’ just demands and the workers see that they cannot get them met any other way, that strikes take place.</p>
<p>But even if workers were crazy and liked to strike for the fun of it, and even if the bosses were not responsible for strikes, still their argument is based on hypocrisy from beginning to end. <i>For the fact is that the greatest threat to increased production in this country comes from the capitalists themselves.</i><br>
</p>
<h4>War Has Not Changed the Bosses</h4>
<p class="fst">The captains of industry have never been willing to produce anything unless they could make a profit from it. They have been the first to admit they are not in business for the fun of it. In peace time they never hesitate to shut down their factories and throw the workers out into the street if they don’t make a certain percentage of profit. <i>It would be foolish to think that they have changed just because war is declared.</i></p>
<p>A few months ago I.F. Stone, journalist in Washington, wrote a book called <b>Business As Usual</b> which demonstrated in a lot of detail that, despite the emergency declared by Roosevelt and the knowledge that United States entry into the war was inevitable, the leading industrialists and their representatives in the government, the dollar-a-year men, were still motivated exclusively by the desire for profits, and were exceedingly unwillingly to take any steps that might interfere with their chances to pile up profits during either this period or after the war.</p>
<p>If anyone wants new evidence that the bosses and their representatives in the government have not changed in this respect just because of the formal declaration of war, we offer the following story told by Samuel Grafton in the <b>New York Post</b>, Dec. 27:<br>
</p>
<h4>How the Bosses Sabotage War Production</h4>
<p class="fst">The chief of the materials division of the OPM, William L. Batt, has been trying to get Congress “to provide funds for building the Douglas Dam on the French Broad River in Tennessee, a honey of a dam, because it cart be finished in time for 1943 aluminum production, in the summer of which year it would come roaring in with 1,000,000,000 kilowatt hours, allowing us to up our aluminum perhaps 100,000,000 pounds per year.”</p>
<p>But, says Grafton, Congress won’t do it. “The House Appropriations Committee has mysteriously taken the money for this item right out of the recent deficiency bill. No dam, says the committee.”</p>
<p>And the reason is that “to build this dam would necessitate flooding 12,000 acres of farmland, which happens to be keyed with a nearby canning industry.” And because “one small bracket of the canning industry” might lose some money if the land was flooded, the friends of the canning industry are seeing to it that no dam is built, regardless of the effect it will have on the war machine which so urgently requires aluminum.</p>
<p>(Imagine what would happen today if the aluminum workers through a strike were to hold up 100,000,000 pounds of aluminum!)</p>
<p>This incident of the dam is not an exception, but an example, which is being duplicated in a thousand different ways in all sections of industry.</p>
<p>But does this mean, I am sure some people will ask, that I claim that the bosses don’t care if Hitler wins the war? Not at all. Of course the bosses don’t want Hitler to win. They want the United States government to win so that they can be sure of continuing to make profits not only in this country but throughout the world. <i>And that is what makes their failure in achieving all-out production all the more significant!</i></p>
<p>For even though, to safeguard their own interests, they want to win the war, they are so concerned about making profits now that they are unable, though abstractly willing, to so run industry that maximum production will be insured! <i>This constitutes a far stronger indictment of their methods than if they didn't want to win the war.</i><br>
</p>
<h4>What a Workers and Farmers Government Would Do</h4>
<p class="fst">No Workers and Farmers Government would tolerate such anarchy and sabotage in production — least of all, in time of war — as is tolerated in Washington today. A Workers and Farmers Government would quickly take steps to remove control of industry from people who arc concerned primarily with enriching themselves. It would take the profits out of war production and place the control of industry and production in the hands of democratically-elected committees of the workers, to be operated in the interests of the majority of the people, in war and peace.</p>
<ul>
<li>The best way to answer the attacks of the bosses on the labor movement is to show that it is the bosses and their greed for profits, not the workers, who are the real menace to all-out production.<br>
</li>
<li>The best way to assure continued production by labor is to force the bosses to grant labor’s just demands.<br>
</li>
<li>The best way to increase production is to have the government put an end to profiteering in the war industries and take over the factories and have the workers operate them.<br>
</li>
<li>The best way to assure that the government will take over the industries is to join the fight for a Workers and Farmers Government.</li>
</ul>
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Anthony Massini
The Bosses, Not the Workers,
Prevent Rise in Production
(10 January 1942)
From The Militant, Vol 6 No. 2, 10 January 1942, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The enemies of labor, the representatives of big business and the captains of industry, have all seized upon the war situation, and the needs of the war machine for war supplies, as justification of repressive measures against the unions.
They argue as follows: The Axis has had a headstart in the production of the instruments of war. This war can be won only by all-out production. Nothing must be permitted to interfere with that production. Above everything else, strikes must be prevented, for they are an aid; and comfort to Hitler.
Of course, the employers would never think of placing the blame for strikes where it actually belongs: on themselves. Workers don’t want strikes, and never have, even before the war. All they want is improvement of their conditions, higher wages to meet the rising cost of living, job security, etc. It is only when the bosses refuse to meet the workers’ just demands and the workers see that they cannot get them met any other way, that strikes take place.
But even if workers were crazy and liked to strike for the fun of it, and even if the bosses were not responsible for strikes, still their argument is based on hypocrisy from beginning to end. For the fact is that the greatest threat to increased production in this country comes from the capitalists themselves.
War Has Not Changed the Bosses
The captains of industry have never been willing to produce anything unless they could make a profit from it. They have been the first to admit they are not in business for the fun of it. In peace time they never hesitate to shut down their factories and throw the workers out into the street if they don’t make a certain percentage of profit. It would be foolish to think that they have changed just because war is declared.
A few months ago I.F. Stone, journalist in Washington, wrote a book called Business As Usual which demonstrated in a lot of detail that, despite the emergency declared by Roosevelt and the knowledge that United States entry into the war was inevitable, the leading industrialists and their representatives in the government, the dollar-a-year men, were still motivated exclusively by the desire for profits, and were exceedingly unwillingly to take any steps that might interfere with their chances to pile up profits during either this period or after the war.
If anyone wants new evidence that the bosses and their representatives in the government have not changed in this respect just because of the formal declaration of war, we offer the following story told by Samuel Grafton in the New York Post, Dec. 27:
How the Bosses Sabotage War Production
The chief of the materials division of the OPM, William L. Batt, has been trying to get Congress “to provide funds for building the Douglas Dam on the French Broad River in Tennessee, a honey of a dam, because it cart be finished in time for 1943 aluminum production, in the summer of which year it would come roaring in with 1,000,000,000 kilowatt hours, allowing us to up our aluminum perhaps 100,000,000 pounds per year.”
But, says Grafton, Congress won’t do it. “The House Appropriations Committee has mysteriously taken the money for this item right out of the recent deficiency bill. No dam, says the committee.”
And the reason is that “to build this dam would necessitate flooding 12,000 acres of farmland, which happens to be keyed with a nearby canning industry.” And because “one small bracket of the canning industry” might lose some money if the land was flooded, the friends of the canning industry are seeing to it that no dam is built, regardless of the effect it will have on the war machine which so urgently requires aluminum.
(Imagine what would happen today if the aluminum workers through a strike were to hold up 100,000,000 pounds of aluminum!)
This incident of the dam is not an exception, but an example, which is being duplicated in a thousand different ways in all sections of industry.
But does this mean, I am sure some people will ask, that I claim that the bosses don’t care if Hitler wins the war? Not at all. Of course the bosses don’t want Hitler to win. They want the United States government to win so that they can be sure of continuing to make profits not only in this country but throughout the world. And that is what makes their failure in achieving all-out production all the more significant!
For even though, to safeguard their own interests, they want to win the war, they are so concerned about making profits now that they are unable, though abstractly willing, to so run industry that maximum production will be insured! This constitutes a far stronger indictment of their methods than if they didn't want to win the war.
What a Workers and Farmers Government Would Do
No Workers and Farmers Government would tolerate such anarchy and sabotage in production — least of all, in time of war — as is tolerated in Washington today. A Workers and Farmers Government would quickly take steps to remove control of industry from people who arc concerned primarily with enriching themselves. It would take the profits out of war production and place the control of industry and production in the hands of democratically-elected committees of the workers, to be operated in the interests of the majority of the people, in war and peace.
The best way to answer the attacks of the bosses on the labor movement is to show that it is the bosses and their greed for profits, not the workers, who are the real menace to all-out production.
The best way to assure continued production by labor is to force the bosses to grant labor’s just demands.
The best way to increase production is to have the government put an end to profiteering in the war industries and take over the factories and have the workers operate them.
The best way to assure that the government will take over the industries is to join the fight for a Workers and Farmers Government.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>Keep an Eye on Congress</h1>
<h3>(7 June 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_23" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 23</a>, 7 June 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Keep your eye on Congress during the next two weeks. That’s when the Democrats and Republicans will put on their bi-annual football game with civil rights bills demanded by the Negro and labor movements. The game generally ends in a tie, so far as these two parties are concerned; the bills get buried in the muck of capitalist duplicity; and Negroes and unionists are left on the sidelines, with no greater satisfaction than the right to hiss.</p>
<p>(And even that right is now being threatened by the Mundt Bill.)</p>
<p>It’s the same old routine of big promises and bigger double-crosses. That goes for the Democrats and Republicans who pretend to be friends of civil rights just as much as it goes for the Southern Democrats who make no bones about their devotion to Jim Crow.</p>
<p>It’s many months now since Truman made his bid for the Negro vote by endorsing the proposals of his civil rights committee. It’s many months now since he promised to issue an executive order eliminating discrimination in federal employment. But, as we predicted, nothing has come of it. Truman didn’t introduce a single bill into Congress, saying he would leave that to the members of Congress, although he followed an entirely opposite procedure on such measures as the aid-to-Greece bill and the Marshall Plan. And, of course, he still refuses to make even a down-payment on his promises by issuing an order, as commander-in-chief, to abolish segregation in the armed forces.</p>
<p>The Republicans have played pretty much the same slimy game. Again and again they promised that if they got control of Congress they would pass the anti-Jim Crow bills. Now they have a clear majority of Congress. But all they have done is stall and maneuver and postpone votes on the civil rights bill until only a few weeks are left for action in Congress. This naturally plays right into the hands of the Southern Democrats, for whom it will be much easier to stage an effective filibuster now than it would have been six or twelve months ago.</p>
<p>Now the Republicans say that at best they can deliver on only one of the promised bills, and even that is in doubt because they have it way down at the bottom of the agenda. The Senate Judiciary Committee had charge of an anti-lynching bill for 17 months, but never managed to get around to sending it to a vote in the Senate. Yet, inside of 24 hours this same Republican-controlled committee sprang to life in order to hold hearings on the Mundt Bill – whose aim is to promote the lynching of civil rights altogether. And Senator Ball tries to pass the buck by saying it will be the fault of the Democrats if no civil rights bills are passed.</p>
<p>This is the time to remember something that happened at the end of June, 1947, when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Act. At that time a few liberal Senators tried to stage a filibuster to hold up final action on the bill. The Senate immediately went into around-the-clock sessions and quickly smashed that filibuster. And Senator Kenneth Wherry, the GOP party whip, exultantly declared: “This demonstrates you can crack a filibuster whenever a majority is determined to do it.”</p>
<p>Never was a truer word spoken. All of the civil rights bills could have been passed by now if the Republicans had been “determined to do it.” The fact that they weren’t passed and are not likely to be passed this year puts the finger on the Republicans, as well as on the Democrats, as friends of the Jim Crow system. Keep your eye on the capitalist parties now, and show what you think about them by voting for the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party in November.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
Keep an Eye on Congress
(7 June 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 23, 7 June 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Keep your eye on Congress during the next two weeks. That’s when the Democrats and Republicans will put on their bi-annual football game with civil rights bills demanded by the Negro and labor movements. The game generally ends in a tie, so far as these two parties are concerned; the bills get buried in the muck of capitalist duplicity; and Negroes and unionists are left on the sidelines, with no greater satisfaction than the right to hiss.
(And even that right is now being threatened by the Mundt Bill.)
It’s the same old routine of big promises and bigger double-crosses. That goes for the Democrats and Republicans who pretend to be friends of civil rights just as much as it goes for the Southern Democrats who make no bones about their devotion to Jim Crow.
It’s many months now since Truman made his bid for the Negro vote by endorsing the proposals of his civil rights committee. It’s many months now since he promised to issue an executive order eliminating discrimination in federal employment. But, as we predicted, nothing has come of it. Truman didn’t introduce a single bill into Congress, saying he would leave that to the members of Congress, although he followed an entirely opposite procedure on such measures as the aid-to-Greece bill and the Marshall Plan. And, of course, he still refuses to make even a down-payment on his promises by issuing an order, as commander-in-chief, to abolish segregation in the armed forces.
The Republicans have played pretty much the same slimy game. Again and again they promised that if they got control of Congress they would pass the anti-Jim Crow bills. Now they have a clear majority of Congress. But all they have done is stall and maneuver and postpone votes on the civil rights bill until only a few weeks are left for action in Congress. This naturally plays right into the hands of the Southern Democrats, for whom it will be much easier to stage an effective filibuster now than it would have been six or twelve months ago.
Now the Republicans say that at best they can deliver on only one of the promised bills, and even that is in doubt because they have it way down at the bottom of the agenda. The Senate Judiciary Committee had charge of an anti-lynching bill for 17 months, but never managed to get around to sending it to a vote in the Senate. Yet, inside of 24 hours this same Republican-controlled committee sprang to life in order to hold hearings on the Mundt Bill – whose aim is to promote the lynching of civil rights altogether. And Senator Ball tries to pass the buck by saying it will be the fault of the Democrats if no civil rights bills are passed.
This is the time to remember something that happened at the end of June, 1947, when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Act. At that time a few liberal Senators tried to stage a filibuster to hold up final action on the bill. The Senate immediately went into around-the-clock sessions and quickly smashed that filibuster. And Senator Kenneth Wherry, the GOP party whip, exultantly declared: “This demonstrates you can crack a filibuster whenever a majority is determined to do it.”
Never was a truer word spoken. All of the civil rights bills could have been passed by now if the Republicans had been “determined to do it.” The fact that they weren’t passed and are not likely to be passed this year puts the finger on the Republicans, as well as on the Democrats, as friends of the Jim Crow system. Keep your eye on the capitalist parties now, and show what you think about them by voting for the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party in November.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Question of Alliances in Negro Freedom Struggle</h1>
<h3>(Winter 1965)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr65win" target="new">Vol.25 No.1</a>, Winter 1965, pp.21-23.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">As much as any tendency in this country, the Socialist Workers Party has attempted to understand and explain how much the Negro people, although a minority, can accomplish through struggle on their own, alone and unaided if necessary. (See the SWP’s 1963 convention resolution, <strong>Freedom Now: The New Stage in the Struggle for Negro Emancipation</strong>, and <em>How a Minority Can Change Society</em>.) At the same time we have always believed and stated that in order to win genuine and complete equality the Negroes will need powerful and reliable allies, at home as well as abroad.</p>
<p>But not all alliances are good.</p>
<p>Recognition of this fact is the chief virtue of an article about the problem of Negro-white alliances, <em>The Negro Revolt: The Push Beyond Liberalism</em>, by Sam Bottone in <strong>New Politics</strong>, Summer, 1964. Bottone is a member of the Socialist Party’s national committee and evidently a member of one of its left wings since he opposed support of Johnson. His views on the Negro struggle are unorthodox in his party; another SP leader, Paul Feldman, attacking Bottone’s position on Johnson in the Oct. 15 <strong>New America</strong>, needles him this way:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Does Bottone support the Freedom Now Party? ... His articles on the civil rights movement hover on the brink, but he has not publicly, to my knowledge, taken the plunge.”</p>
<p class="fst">“The question of Negro-white alliances,” writes Bottone, “is of vital importance and in the long run, the success of the civil rights movement will hinge on the alliances it develops.” With this we concur, provided that the phrase “in the long run” is not overlooked. He continues:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Three distinct strategies on this question have begun to emerge: 1) the Negro-labor-liberal alliance is the movement’s most immediate need and must be achieved at almost any cost, even the sacrifice of the movement’s militancy and, if necessary, the weapons [demonstrations, direct action, etc.] which brought it into being; 2) the Negro-labor-liberal alliance is a fraud; the Negro must achieve his freedom by his own efforts, rejecting entangling alliances; 3) the Negro-labor-liberal alliance must be forged on the civil rights movement’s own terms, not by sinking to the level of current liberalism but by pushing the labor movement beyond liberalism.”</p>
<p class="fst">Bottone is opposed to Strategies No.1 and 2, and favors No.3. We think we know what he means by No.3, but his formulation is rather confusing. He says he wants a Negro-labor-liberal alliance, but he doesn’t want it at “the level of current liberalism.” Jokes could be made at his expense: Does he want an alliance at the level of past liberalism or future liberalism? Is he silly enough to think that liberalism is capable of becoming its radical opposite, or that if it did, it should still be called liberalism? We doubt that, judging by the generally critical appraisal of liberalism elsewhere in his article.</p>
<p>Then why does he include the liberals in the kind of alliance he favors? What he actually wants, if we read him correctly, is a Negro-labor alliance supported by other sections of the population, with the labor component of that alliance pushed “beyond liberalism,” which is labor’s present ideology. In short, an alliance of the Negro movement with a radicalized labor movement, that is, a labor movement considerably different from the one that now exists. We shall return to this point after considering his remarks about Strategy No.2.<br>
</p>
<h4>Rustin Tendency</h4>
<p class="fst">On Strategy 1, Bottone is at his best. Here he is writing about the predominant position of his own party, although he refers to it as the “Bayard Rustin tendency.” (It is also essentially the position of the Communist Party, the labor bureaucracy and various middle-class radical groupings.)</p>
<p>Rustin, as Bottone notes, is one of the most influential figures in the civil rights movement. He “has considerable influence with Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and sections of CORE and SNCC” (and also the Reuther section of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, sections of the pacifist movement, etc.) Rustin has “long been identified with militant and radical views,” but he now expresses “a distinct political tendency in the civil rights movement whose appeal is militant and radical in rhetoric, but quite the contrary when put into action ... His views illustrate how seemingly radical conceptions can have a conservative influence and lead away from building and strengthening a militant movement.”</p>
<p>Bottone documents his indictment, showing that on a wide range of incidents and issues Rustin has become a foremost opponent of militant actions that might embarrass or antagonize white liberals and labor leaders. This is hardly a new position in the Negro movement. But Rustin presents it in the following modern, sophisticated, pseudo-radical dress:</p>
<p>The civil rights movement has now gone as far as it can on its own; its economic and social objectives can be won only if fundamental changes are made in society; such changes can be made only through a realignment of the political structure into consistently liberal and conservative parties; and only a Negro-labor-liberal alliance can bring about such a realignment. But you can’t get allies by doing things they don’t like. So you must stop doing such things, and limit yourselves only to things they approve of.</p>
<p>Don’t call this Uncle Tomism, call it Bayard Rustinism. Whatever it’s called, this policy would, in Bottone’s words, disarm the civil rights movement “ideologically in the face of the enemy, who would transform it into a pale appendage of liberalism and the Democratic Party.” Not only would, but has, with few exceptions.</p>
<p>Much less satisfactory is Bottone’s treatment of Strategy No.2 (“the Negro-labor-liberal alliance is a fraud; the Negro must achieve his freedom by his own efforts, avoiding entangling alliances”). This position he attributes to “various separatist and black nationalist tendencies in the Negro movement” and to “‘left’ political tendencies” “operating on their fringes.”</p>
<p>In the first place, the way he presents this position is neither clear nor adequate. If somebody wants to avoid entangling (impeding, obstructive) alliances, does that mean he is opposed to all alliances, to non-entangling alliances?<br>
</p>
<h4>Unrelated Groups</h4>
<p class="fst">Some Negro tendencies are undoubtedly opposed to all Negro-white alliances now and forever; others are opposed to harmful alliances, like Strategy No. 1, but are open, by implication at least, to other kinds, to useful and helpful alliances, if not now then later. Lumping together different and unrelated groups under Strategy 2 – Black Muslims, Freedom Now Party, <strong>Liberator</strong>, Socialist Workers Party, <strong>Monthly Review</strong>, Progressive Labor Movement, Revolutionary Action Movement or RAM, – merely because they have some similarities, may make it easier for Bottone to dismiss them all, but it prevents clarification of the alliance question.</p>
<p>We don’t have room here to discuss all the groups Bottone takes up under Strategy 2. Some of them are really irrelevant; the Muslims do not engage in politics at all, and RAM, in its own ultra-leftist way, similarly has no time for such mundane activity as the Freedom Now Party’s efforts to organize the Negro people in political opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties.</p>
<p>But let us discuss the FNP, which is relevant to the question of political alliances. Bottone locates it “somewhere to the left” of the Muslims as one of the “separatist and black nationalist” groups expressing a new “ideological militancy which rejects integrationist goals as conservative.”</p>
<p>It would have helped if Bottone had defined some of these terms, instead of assuming that everyone accepts the same definitions. For example, what does “separatist” mean to him? That the FNP wants to separate the Negro people into a nation of their own? No unit of the FNP anywhere has taken that position. Does it mean that the FNP seeks to organize the Negroes <em>independently</em>, in their own party? This of course is its primary aim, but independent is a better and more precise word to describe it than separatist. (<em>Bottone seems to feel Negro political “separatism” is bad; does he also think Negro political independence is bad?</em>)</p>
<p>And what does he mean by “reject integrationist goals”? That FNP members are opposed to desegregation of everything everywhere? Or that they do not aim at assimilation into the present society? Desegregation and assimilation are not the same thing, although both words unfortunately are widely used as synonyms for “integration.” If I, or Bottone, fight to end racist segregation and discrimination and at the same time express the belief that Negroes will never get equality in a capitalist society, does that make us rejectors of integrationist goals? Bottone is a long way from clarifying things about the FNP that are closely connected with the question of alliances.<br>
</p>
<h4>FNP Program</h4>
<p class="fst">This becomes even clearer when he declares, “The program of the Freedom Now Party is ‘radical’: it rejects the existing parties and calls for the nationalization of basic industries.” Bottone is plainly ignorant of the fact that the FNP groups scattered throughout the country have never had a national convention and have never adopted a program. The FNP’s only state convention so far was in Michigan, and all it adopted was a brief, general, state platform, with no reference whatever to nationalization of industry.</p>
<p>The FNP is therefore in an incipient stage, its program still in the process of being worked out and far from being adopted. It doesn’t even call itself radical as yet, although by rejecting the existing parties and proposing a political alternative for the Negro people it surely occupies an objectively radical position in the American political spectrum. (<em>We leave it to Bottone to explain why he insists on using quotation marks around “radical” when he talks of the FNP, as he does when he describes the SWP as “left.”</em>)</p>
<p>Continuing his remarks about the FNP, Bottone says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Its focus is on building an organized Negro political power which can pressure the white power structure into granting the Negro economic and cultural freedom. But the FNP rejects any relationship to other social forces in American society, and therefore ends up with the idea that the Negro community, if organized around something like the FNP, has sufficient power to win its demands from a hostile and inherently racist white society. The very nature of this approach pushes the FNP toward separatist solutions.” It is premature, we repeat, to speak of the FNP “ending up” with an idea when it is virtually starting to formulate its program and strategy. Some members may “reject any relationship to other social forces in American society.”</p>
<p class="fst">Others don’t; and still others are trying to decide what relationships to other forces are possible, now or in the future, before deciding whether or not to reject them. (<em>Does Bottone really think that Negroes breaking with the capitalist parties, breaking to the left of them, would really reject any relationship to a mass revolutionary working class movement fighting for a program that included the eradication of racism?</em>)</p>
<p>Similarly, some FNP members may be sure that an independently organized Negro community does have the power, by itself, to win its demands from this society; others may not be sure but want to test the validity of this proposition by organizing and fighting and letting the answer be given through the outcome of struggle. (Not at all a bad way to find an answer.) At any rate, nobody knows at this point what the FNP, when constituted on a national basis and with an adopted program, will decide about such questions.<br>
</p>
<h4>All-Negro Party</h4>
<p class="fst">Bottone isn’t only weak on the facts about the FNP, he is deficient in his grasp of the whole concept. This becomes manifest when he says: “An all-Negro party makes sense only if the movement rejects integrationist goals and seeks economic, political and cultural separation from white society.” But saying so doesn’t make it so. Let us check the correctness of Bottone’s statement about the “only” thing that would make sense of an all-Negro party by imagining we are listening to a discussion between an agitator for a Negro party and another Negro he is trying to convince.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> We want genuine equality in this country.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> You mean integration?</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> We don’t mean what they call integration in the North today. We mean full freedom, where we have the same rights and opportunities as anybody else. But call it what you like. To get it, mighty big changes have to be made. Right?</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> Right.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> But we’ve learned from long and sad experience that the Democrats and Republicans are our enemies, political agents of our oppressors. So we need a new party really dedicated to our freedom. We have also learned from experience that we can’t trust white or white-dominated groups. Very few whites seem to want a new party anyway. So we’ve got to organize ourselves and all other Negroes into a party of our own. That way we can have a party controlled by ourselves and won’t have to worry about it selling us out to the white power structure.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> Our people have been brain-washed so bad it will be hard convincing them to build such a party.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> Everything worth doing is hard, but we think it can be done. Why don’t you pitch in and help us?</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> But what are you going to do after you get a lot of Negroes in your party? What can 10 percent of the population do by ourselves?</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> Ten percent can do a lot. In areas where we are a majority, and they are many because of segregated housing, a mass Negro party could elect its own city, county, state and congressional representatives. They wouldn’t owe their election to the Democrats or Republicans but to the black community, so we would control them. For the first time we would have real representatives in office, who could speak and act for us without divided allegiances and without having to get permission from the major parties, the liberals or the labor leaders.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> But we’d still be a minority. A: Sure, but in a much different and much better position than now. By solidly organizing a decisive part of the Negro community into our own party, we will have some real, undiluted political power for the first time. Meanwhile, the other side will be weaker.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> What do you mean? A: When Negroes walk out of the Democratic Party, it will be weaker. Without the Negro vote it won’t be the majority party, it won’t be able to win elections, it will begin to come apart. The unions’ ties to the Democrats will be strained and, if it can’t win elections, broken. The whole political structure will be scrambled up merely by our getting together in our own party.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> But won’t we still be a minority?</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> Yes, but I keep telling you, we’ll be in a better position than ever before because we will have some real political power, which we’ll be able to use for bargaining and negotiating purposes.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>B:</strong> Bargaining and negotiating with whom?</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>A:</strong> With any “other social forces” that are willing to work together with us on our “own terms,” formally or informally, temporarily or permanently.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="c">* * *</p>
<p class="fst">Doesn’t this concept of an all-Negro party, which is held and has been expressed by at least some FNP members, make as much “sense” as Bottone’s dictum that such a party <em>must</em> reject integrationist goals and seek separation? We are not saying that this concept will or should shape the strategy ultimately decided on by the FNP forces; we are saying only that it is perfectly compatible with the organization of an all-black party. Bottone is a prisoner of rigid, formalistic, undialectical categories. (“Integration” through “separation” seems impossible where thinking is frozen this way.) This becomes painfully clear when Bottone discusses the organizational structure of the political alliance needed to destroy racism in this country. He says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The civil rights movement must express itself through a political party which fights uncompromisingly for its goals, a party free of ties to <em>status quo</em> forces. This is not and cannot be the Democratic Party. Nor can it be, as some have proposed, an all-Negro party. It must be a party which all working people can support and in which they can participate actively and democratically; a party which translates the demands of the civil rights movement in a broad economic and social program which will shape and guide the future of the entire nation.”</p>
<p class="fst">On the whole, very good. We have only one but. Why must there be a political party, one political party and only one, to accomplish what he wants? Who has ordained, on earth or in heaven, that this job can be done only by one party? Why can’t there be two or more than two parties, an <em>alliance of parties</em> as well as of social forces – and why can’t one of these be a party built by the Negro people, having their confidence, and maintained by them as a safeguard against sellout until such time as they no longer need fear one?<br>
</p>
<h4>Unions Default</h4>
<p class="fst">If the union movement had done its job 25 years or even 10 years ago, if it had created an independent labor party fully committed among other things to the struggle for Negro equality, then it is possible, even likely, that the Negro people would have flocked to its banner as they did to the CIO in its early days, and the question of a black party might never have come up historically. But the unions defaulted, they clung to the Democratic Party, they did everything they could to keep the Negroes in the same trap. And they are still doing this today.</p>
<p>That is why the FNP arose and strives to become a national party. It may turn out that the FNP, through its example of independence and through the effects it will have on the Democratic-labor coalition if it is successful in tearing the Negroes away from that coalition, will be a major factor stimulating the unions into long-overdue entry onto the road of independent labor political action. This surely is not a logical impossibility.</p>
<p>Bottone’s Strategy 3, if we interpreted it correctly as well as charitably, calls for a Negro alliance with a radicalized labor movement, attracting the support of other forces willing to accept the leadership of that kind of alliance. But there is no such labor movement yet, unfortunately. The labor movement today is not pushed “beyond liberalism,” but stuck deep in the quagmire of liberalism. So what does Bottone advise militant Negroes to do in this situation?</p>
<p>Does he advise them to <em>WAIT</em>, to wait politically until the labor movement begins to move? That of course is what the liberals in and out of the labor movement advise and insist. Or does he advise the Negroes to go ahead and organize themselves politically?</p>
<p>That is just what the FNP is trying to do, at a time when strong and acceptable allies are not in sight. If he can unfreeze his thinking a little, Bottone surely should be able to see that the organization of a mass FNP, disrupting the present coalition around the Democratic Party, is precisely one of the factors that will push the labor movement beyond liberalism and toward the kind of alliance he wants.</p>
<p>One of the most encouraging developments of recent years has been the way some Negroes have freed themselves from fetishes about “separation,” “integration,” “two-party system,” etc. The result has been the unleashing of political creativity and initiative, which this country so badly needs. It is time for white radicals to overcome their fear of being ridiculed as white “black nationalists” and get rid of some fetishes of their own. The result here too would be refreshing and productive all along the line.</p>
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George Breitman
Question of Alliances in Negro Freedom Struggle
(Winter 1965)
From International Socialist Review, Vol.25 No.1, Winter 1965, pp.21-23.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
As much as any tendency in this country, the Socialist Workers Party has attempted to understand and explain how much the Negro people, although a minority, can accomplish through struggle on their own, alone and unaided if necessary. (See the SWP’s 1963 convention resolution, Freedom Now: The New Stage in the Struggle for Negro Emancipation, and How a Minority Can Change Society.) At the same time we have always believed and stated that in order to win genuine and complete equality the Negroes will need powerful and reliable allies, at home as well as abroad.
But not all alliances are good.
Recognition of this fact is the chief virtue of an article about the problem of Negro-white alliances, The Negro Revolt: The Push Beyond Liberalism, by Sam Bottone in New Politics, Summer, 1964. Bottone is a member of the Socialist Party’s national committee and evidently a member of one of its left wings since he opposed support of Johnson. His views on the Negro struggle are unorthodox in his party; another SP leader, Paul Feldman, attacking Bottone’s position on Johnson in the Oct. 15 New America, needles him this way:
“Does Bottone support the Freedom Now Party? ... His articles on the civil rights movement hover on the brink, but he has not publicly, to my knowledge, taken the plunge.”
“The question of Negro-white alliances,” writes Bottone, “is of vital importance and in the long run, the success of the civil rights movement will hinge on the alliances it develops.” With this we concur, provided that the phrase “in the long run” is not overlooked. He continues:
“Three distinct strategies on this question have begun to emerge: 1) the Negro-labor-liberal alliance is the movement’s most immediate need and must be achieved at almost any cost, even the sacrifice of the movement’s militancy and, if necessary, the weapons [demonstrations, direct action, etc.] which brought it into being; 2) the Negro-labor-liberal alliance is a fraud; the Negro must achieve his freedom by his own efforts, rejecting entangling alliances; 3) the Negro-labor-liberal alliance must be forged on the civil rights movement’s own terms, not by sinking to the level of current liberalism but by pushing the labor movement beyond liberalism.”
Bottone is opposed to Strategies No.1 and 2, and favors No.3. We think we know what he means by No.3, but his formulation is rather confusing. He says he wants a Negro-labor-liberal alliance, but he doesn’t want it at “the level of current liberalism.” Jokes could be made at his expense: Does he want an alliance at the level of past liberalism or future liberalism? Is he silly enough to think that liberalism is capable of becoming its radical opposite, or that if it did, it should still be called liberalism? We doubt that, judging by the generally critical appraisal of liberalism elsewhere in his article.
Then why does he include the liberals in the kind of alliance he favors? What he actually wants, if we read him correctly, is a Negro-labor alliance supported by other sections of the population, with the labor component of that alliance pushed “beyond liberalism,” which is labor’s present ideology. In short, an alliance of the Negro movement with a radicalized labor movement, that is, a labor movement considerably different from the one that now exists. We shall return to this point after considering his remarks about Strategy No.2.
Rustin Tendency
On Strategy 1, Bottone is at his best. Here he is writing about the predominant position of his own party, although he refers to it as the “Bayard Rustin tendency.” (It is also essentially the position of the Communist Party, the labor bureaucracy and various middle-class radical groupings.)
Rustin, as Bottone notes, is one of the most influential figures in the civil rights movement. He “has considerable influence with Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and sections of CORE and SNCC” (and also the Reuther section of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, sections of the pacifist movement, etc.) Rustin has “long been identified with militant and radical views,” but he now expresses “a distinct political tendency in the civil rights movement whose appeal is militant and radical in rhetoric, but quite the contrary when put into action ... His views illustrate how seemingly radical conceptions can have a conservative influence and lead away from building and strengthening a militant movement.”
Bottone documents his indictment, showing that on a wide range of incidents and issues Rustin has become a foremost opponent of militant actions that might embarrass or antagonize white liberals and labor leaders. This is hardly a new position in the Negro movement. But Rustin presents it in the following modern, sophisticated, pseudo-radical dress:
The civil rights movement has now gone as far as it can on its own; its economic and social objectives can be won only if fundamental changes are made in society; such changes can be made only through a realignment of the political structure into consistently liberal and conservative parties; and only a Negro-labor-liberal alliance can bring about such a realignment. But you can’t get allies by doing things they don’t like. So you must stop doing such things, and limit yourselves only to things they approve of.
Don’t call this Uncle Tomism, call it Bayard Rustinism. Whatever it’s called, this policy would, in Bottone’s words, disarm the civil rights movement “ideologically in the face of the enemy, who would transform it into a pale appendage of liberalism and the Democratic Party.” Not only would, but has, with few exceptions.
Much less satisfactory is Bottone’s treatment of Strategy No.2 (“the Negro-labor-liberal alliance is a fraud; the Negro must achieve his freedom by his own efforts, avoiding entangling alliances”). This position he attributes to “various separatist and black nationalist tendencies in the Negro movement” and to “‘left’ political tendencies” “operating on their fringes.”
In the first place, the way he presents this position is neither clear nor adequate. If somebody wants to avoid entangling (impeding, obstructive) alliances, does that mean he is opposed to all alliances, to non-entangling alliances?
Unrelated Groups
Some Negro tendencies are undoubtedly opposed to all Negro-white alliances now and forever; others are opposed to harmful alliances, like Strategy No. 1, but are open, by implication at least, to other kinds, to useful and helpful alliances, if not now then later. Lumping together different and unrelated groups under Strategy 2 – Black Muslims, Freedom Now Party, Liberator, Socialist Workers Party, Monthly Review, Progressive Labor Movement, Revolutionary Action Movement or RAM, – merely because they have some similarities, may make it easier for Bottone to dismiss them all, but it prevents clarification of the alliance question.
We don’t have room here to discuss all the groups Bottone takes up under Strategy 2. Some of them are really irrelevant; the Muslims do not engage in politics at all, and RAM, in its own ultra-leftist way, similarly has no time for such mundane activity as the Freedom Now Party’s efforts to organize the Negro people in political opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties.
But let us discuss the FNP, which is relevant to the question of political alliances. Bottone locates it “somewhere to the left” of the Muslims as one of the “separatist and black nationalist” groups expressing a new “ideological militancy which rejects integrationist goals as conservative.”
It would have helped if Bottone had defined some of these terms, instead of assuming that everyone accepts the same definitions. For example, what does “separatist” mean to him? That the FNP wants to separate the Negro people into a nation of their own? No unit of the FNP anywhere has taken that position. Does it mean that the FNP seeks to organize the Negroes independently, in their own party? This of course is its primary aim, but independent is a better and more precise word to describe it than separatist. (Bottone seems to feel Negro political “separatism” is bad; does he also think Negro political independence is bad?)
And what does he mean by “reject integrationist goals”? That FNP members are opposed to desegregation of everything everywhere? Or that they do not aim at assimilation into the present society? Desegregation and assimilation are not the same thing, although both words unfortunately are widely used as synonyms for “integration.” If I, or Bottone, fight to end racist segregation and discrimination and at the same time express the belief that Negroes will never get equality in a capitalist society, does that make us rejectors of integrationist goals? Bottone is a long way from clarifying things about the FNP that are closely connected with the question of alliances.
FNP Program
This becomes even clearer when he declares, “The program of the Freedom Now Party is ‘radical’: it rejects the existing parties and calls for the nationalization of basic industries.” Bottone is plainly ignorant of the fact that the FNP groups scattered throughout the country have never had a national convention and have never adopted a program. The FNP’s only state convention so far was in Michigan, and all it adopted was a brief, general, state platform, with no reference whatever to nationalization of industry.
The FNP is therefore in an incipient stage, its program still in the process of being worked out and far from being adopted. It doesn’t even call itself radical as yet, although by rejecting the existing parties and proposing a political alternative for the Negro people it surely occupies an objectively radical position in the American political spectrum. (We leave it to Bottone to explain why he insists on using quotation marks around “radical” when he talks of the FNP, as he does when he describes the SWP as “left.”)
Continuing his remarks about the FNP, Bottone says:
“Its focus is on building an organized Negro political power which can pressure the white power structure into granting the Negro economic and cultural freedom. But the FNP rejects any relationship to other social forces in American society, and therefore ends up with the idea that the Negro community, if organized around something like the FNP, has sufficient power to win its demands from a hostile and inherently racist white society. The very nature of this approach pushes the FNP toward separatist solutions.” It is premature, we repeat, to speak of the FNP “ending up” with an idea when it is virtually starting to formulate its program and strategy. Some members may “reject any relationship to other social forces in American society.”
Others don’t; and still others are trying to decide what relationships to other forces are possible, now or in the future, before deciding whether or not to reject them. (Does Bottone really think that Negroes breaking with the capitalist parties, breaking to the left of them, would really reject any relationship to a mass revolutionary working class movement fighting for a program that included the eradication of racism?)
Similarly, some FNP members may be sure that an independently organized Negro community does have the power, by itself, to win its demands from this society; others may not be sure but want to test the validity of this proposition by organizing and fighting and letting the answer be given through the outcome of struggle. (Not at all a bad way to find an answer.) At any rate, nobody knows at this point what the FNP, when constituted on a national basis and with an adopted program, will decide about such questions.
All-Negro Party
Bottone isn’t only weak on the facts about the FNP, he is deficient in his grasp of the whole concept. This becomes manifest when he says: “An all-Negro party makes sense only if the movement rejects integrationist goals and seeks economic, political and cultural separation from white society.” But saying so doesn’t make it so. Let us check the correctness of Bottone’s statement about the “only” thing that would make sense of an all-Negro party by imagining we are listening to a discussion between an agitator for a Negro party and another Negro he is trying to convince.
A: We want genuine equality in this country.
B: You mean integration?
A: We don’t mean what they call integration in the North today. We mean full freedom, where we have the same rights and opportunities as anybody else. But call it what you like. To get it, mighty big changes have to be made. Right?
B: Right.
A: But we’ve learned from long and sad experience that the Democrats and Republicans are our enemies, political agents of our oppressors. So we need a new party really dedicated to our freedom. We have also learned from experience that we can’t trust white or white-dominated groups. Very few whites seem to want a new party anyway. So we’ve got to organize ourselves and all other Negroes into a party of our own. That way we can have a party controlled by ourselves and won’t have to worry about it selling us out to the white power structure.
B: Our people have been brain-washed so bad it will be hard convincing them to build such a party.
A: Everything worth doing is hard, but we think it can be done. Why don’t you pitch in and help us?
B: But what are you going to do after you get a lot of Negroes in your party? What can 10 percent of the population do by ourselves?
A: Ten percent can do a lot. In areas where we are a majority, and they are many because of segregated housing, a mass Negro party could elect its own city, county, state and congressional representatives. They wouldn’t owe their election to the Democrats or Republicans but to the black community, so we would control them. For the first time we would have real representatives in office, who could speak and act for us without divided allegiances and without having to get permission from the major parties, the liberals or the labor leaders.
B: But we’d still be a minority. A: Sure, but in a much different and much better position than now. By solidly organizing a decisive part of the Negro community into our own party, we will have some real, undiluted political power for the first time. Meanwhile, the other side will be weaker.
B: What do you mean? A: When Negroes walk out of the Democratic Party, it will be weaker. Without the Negro vote it won’t be the majority party, it won’t be able to win elections, it will begin to come apart. The unions’ ties to the Democrats will be strained and, if it can’t win elections, broken. The whole political structure will be scrambled up merely by our getting together in our own party.
B: But won’t we still be a minority?
A: Yes, but I keep telling you, we’ll be in a better position than ever before because we will have some real political power, which we’ll be able to use for bargaining and negotiating purposes.
B: Bargaining and negotiating with whom?
A: With any “other social forces” that are willing to work together with us on our “own terms,” formally or informally, temporarily or permanently.
* * *
Doesn’t this concept of an all-Negro party, which is held and has been expressed by at least some FNP members, make as much “sense” as Bottone’s dictum that such a party must reject integrationist goals and seek separation? We are not saying that this concept will or should shape the strategy ultimately decided on by the FNP forces; we are saying only that it is perfectly compatible with the organization of an all-black party. Bottone is a prisoner of rigid, formalistic, undialectical categories. (“Integration” through “separation” seems impossible where thinking is frozen this way.) This becomes painfully clear when Bottone discusses the organizational structure of the political alliance needed to destroy racism in this country. He says:
“The civil rights movement must express itself through a political party which fights uncompromisingly for its goals, a party free of ties to status quo forces. This is not and cannot be the Democratic Party. Nor can it be, as some have proposed, an all-Negro party. It must be a party which all working people can support and in which they can participate actively and democratically; a party which translates the demands of the civil rights movement in a broad economic and social program which will shape and guide the future of the entire nation.”
On the whole, very good. We have only one but. Why must there be a political party, one political party and only one, to accomplish what he wants? Who has ordained, on earth or in heaven, that this job can be done only by one party? Why can’t there be two or more than two parties, an alliance of parties as well as of social forces – and why can’t one of these be a party built by the Negro people, having their confidence, and maintained by them as a safeguard against sellout until such time as they no longer need fear one?
Unions Default
If the union movement had done its job 25 years or even 10 years ago, if it had created an independent labor party fully committed among other things to the struggle for Negro equality, then it is possible, even likely, that the Negro people would have flocked to its banner as they did to the CIO in its early days, and the question of a black party might never have come up historically. But the unions defaulted, they clung to the Democratic Party, they did everything they could to keep the Negroes in the same trap. And they are still doing this today.
That is why the FNP arose and strives to become a national party. It may turn out that the FNP, through its example of independence and through the effects it will have on the Democratic-labor coalition if it is successful in tearing the Negroes away from that coalition, will be a major factor stimulating the unions into long-overdue entry onto the road of independent labor political action. This surely is not a logical impossibility.
Bottone’s Strategy 3, if we interpreted it correctly as well as charitably, calls for a Negro alliance with a radicalized labor movement, attracting the support of other forces willing to accept the leadership of that kind of alliance. But there is no such labor movement yet, unfortunately. The labor movement today is not pushed “beyond liberalism,” but stuck deep in the quagmire of liberalism. So what does Bottone advise militant Negroes to do in this situation?
Does he advise them to WAIT, to wait politically until the labor movement begins to move? That of course is what the liberals in and out of the labor movement advise and insist. Or does he advise the Negroes to go ahead and organize themselves politically?
That is just what the FNP is trying to do, at a time when strong and acceptable allies are not in sight. If he can unfreeze his thinking a little, Bottone surely should be able to see that the organization of a mass FNP, disrupting the present coalition around the Democratic Party, is precisely one of the factors that will push the labor movement beyond liberalism and toward the kind of alliance he wants.
One of the most encouraging developments of recent years has been the way some Negroes have freed themselves from fetishes about “separation,” “integration,” “two-party system,” etc. The result has been the unleashing of political creativity and initiative, which this country so badly needs. It is time for white radicals to overcome their fear of being ridiculed as white “black nationalists” and get rid of some fetishes of their own. The result here too would be refreshing and productive all along the line.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>City Hall No Friend of Newark’s Negroes</h1>
<h4>Both Political Machines Responsible for<br>
Jim Crow Practices in City Departments</h4>
<h3>(12 April 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_15" target="new">Vol. V No. 15</a>, 12 April 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Newark’s 45,000 colored people represent one-tenth of the city’s population. In every sense, they are the most exploited and oppressed people in the city.</p>
<p>They are locked out of most of the big industries, forced to serve as janitors or porters or as domestic workers. Only in some of the steel and allied factories are they hired; and then almost exclusively as laborers, doing the heavy and dirty work.</p>
<p>The big corporation, Public Service, which milks the public out of millions each year, refuses to hire them except in menial jobs such as cleaning toilets or digging ditches.</p>
<p>The Brewster Aircraft plant of Part Newark, invited here by the City Commission under very favorable tax and rent terms, refuses to hire a single colored laborer. Prudential insurance company, one of the biggest in the world, which gets millions from its colored clients, will not hire any.</p>
<p>Consequently, a large part of the colored people are forced onto the relief rolls, or, if they are a little more lucky, onto WPA jobs, at standards which make it practically impossible for them to bring their families up under healthy conditions. This explains why the ’flu and pneumonia epidemics each year start sooner and are more malignant in the colored neighborhoods than elsewhere.<br>
</p>
<h4>City Hall No Better</h4>
<p class="fst">The overwhelming majority of the city departments, although they are supposed to be conducted under civil service, maneuver to have only one or two, or no colored employees at all.</p>
<p>The City Hospital refuses to employ a single Negro doctor or nurse, although many are eligible and one fourth of the hospital’s patients are colored.</p>
<p>Thus the City Commission itself, including tire representatives of the Ellenstein-Franklin and the Byrne-Clee factions, help to propagate the theory of “white superiority,” and furnish the employers with an example of job Jim Crowism which the bosses are only too glad to point to and follow.<br>
</p>
<h4>Critical</h4>
<p class="fst">A survey of housing in Newark’s Third Ward three years ago brought to light a few of the facts on housing in those neighborhoods to which the colored workers have been segregated and from which it is so hard for them to escape.</p>
<p>Out of 2,010 homes that were inspected, it was found that 1,874 showed violations of the sanitary code. In addition, about 300 were declared to be “unfit for use,” about 800 were said to “need major repairs,” and close to 800 others were in need of “minor repairs.”</p>
<p>And yet the Department of Health, run by Commissioner Franklin who is desperately seeking the Negro vote, declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Economic conditions have persuaded this department to be somewhat lenient with the owners of the buildings insofar as ordering drastic alterations and improvements are concerned ... To overburden these property owners with expensive alterations is not a solution to the problem.”</p>
<p class="fst">In other words, Franklin, the self-advertised “champion of the underprivileged,” is really champion DECEIVER of the underprivileged, and “lenient” friend of the landlords who charge such high rents for unhealthy fire-traps maintained in open violation of the sanitary and building codes.<br>
</p>
<h4>Vicious Inequalities</h4>
<p class="fst">The colored workers’ economic problems are directly tied up with the problems of social equality. There can never be real economic equality for them as long as they are not permitted into certain places like others, for the Jim Crow bars in public places do their share in contributing to the idea that Negroes are inferior, which is used as the basis for denying them equal opportunity to jobs, relief, housing, etc.</p>
<p>A vicious Mason-Dixon line running through Newark confines the colored people to one or two areas. And even inside these areas they face insult and segregation every day in the year.</p>
<p>Just a few weeks ago five colored women went into the luncheonette owned by one Max Grundfast on the edge of the Third Ward. He demanded 40c for a cup of coffee, and then physically threw them out of the place, setting his dog and his son on them. Last week a man who tried to get a drink in a tavern in the same area was beaten up and thrown in jail under $1,000 bail. Theatres in this area refuse to permit Negroes to sit in the orchestra, selling tickets to them, only for the balcony, in violation of the weak New Jersey Civil Rights Act.</p>
<p class="c"><strong>(Next week: <a href="newark3.htm">The Role of the Colored “Leaders” in the Elections</a>)</strong></p>
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George Breitman
City Hall No Friend of Newark’s Negroes
Both Political Machines Responsible for
Jim Crow Practices in City Departments
(12 April 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 15, 12 April 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Newark’s 45,000 colored people represent one-tenth of the city’s population. In every sense, they are the most exploited and oppressed people in the city.
They are locked out of most of the big industries, forced to serve as janitors or porters or as domestic workers. Only in some of the steel and allied factories are they hired; and then almost exclusively as laborers, doing the heavy and dirty work.
The big corporation, Public Service, which milks the public out of millions each year, refuses to hire them except in menial jobs such as cleaning toilets or digging ditches.
The Brewster Aircraft plant of Part Newark, invited here by the City Commission under very favorable tax and rent terms, refuses to hire a single colored laborer. Prudential insurance company, one of the biggest in the world, which gets millions from its colored clients, will not hire any.
Consequently, a large part of the colored people are forced onto the relief rolls, or, if they are a little more lucky, onto WPA jobs, at standards which make it practically impossible for them to bring their families up under healthy conditions. This explains why the ’flu and pneumonia epidemics each year start sooner and are more malignant in the colored neighborhoods than elsewhere.
City Hall No Better
The overwhelming majority of the city departments, although they are supposed to be conducted under civil service, maneuver to have only one or two, or no colored employees at all.
The City Hospital refuses to employ a single Negro doctor or nurse, although many are eligible and one fourth of the hospital’s patients are colored.
Thus the City Commission itself, including tire representatives of the Ellenstein-Franklin and the Byrne-Clee factions, help to propagate the theory of “white superiority,” and furnish the employers with an example of job Jim Crowism which the bosses are only too glad to point to and follow.
Critical
A survey of housing in Newark’s Third Ward three years ago brought to light a few of the facts on housing in those neighborhoods to which the colored workers have been segregated and from which it is so hard for them to escape.
Out of 2,010 homes that were inspected, it was found that 1,874 showed violations of the sanitary code. In addition, about 300 were declared to be “unfit for use,” about 800 were said to “need major repairs,” and close to 800 others were in need of “minor repairs.”
And yet the Department of Health, run by Commissioner Franklin who is desperately seeking the Negro vote, declared:
“Economic conditions have persuaded this department to be somewhat lenient with the owners of the buildings insofar as ordering drastic alterations and improvements are concerned ... To overburden these property owners with expensive alterations is not a solution to the problem.”
In other words, Franklin, the self-advertised “champion of the underprivileged,” is really champion DECEIVER of the underprivileged, and “lenient” friend of the landlords who charge such high rents for unhealthy fire-traps maintained in open violation of the sanitary and building codes.
Vicious Inequalities
The colored workers’ economic problems are directly tied up with the problems of social equality. There can never be real economic equality for them as long as they are not permitted into certain places like others, for the Jim Crow bars in public places do their share in contributing to the idea that Negroes are inferior, which is used as the basis for denying them equal opportunity to jobs, relief, housing, etc.
A vicious Mason-Dixon line running through Newark confines the colored people to one or two areas. And even inside these areas they face insult and segregation every day in the year.
Just a few weeks ago five colored women went into the luncheonette owned by one Max Grundfast on the edge of the Third Ward. He demanded 40c for a cup of coffee, and then physically threw them out of the place, setting his dog and his son on them. Last week a man who tried to get a drink in a tavern in the same area was beaten up and thrown in jail under $1,000 bail. Theatres in this area refuse to permit Negroes to sit in the orchestra, selling tickets to them, only for the balcony, in violation of the weak New Jersey Civil Rights Act.
(Next week: The Role of the Colored “Leaders” in the Elections)
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>U.S. Aims at World Rule, Says Knox</h1>
<h3>Will “Police Seven Seas” for Next 100 Years</h3>
<h4>Admits This War Will Be Followed by Other<br>
Imperialist Struggles for World Domination</h4>
<h3>(11 October 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_41" target="new">Vol. V No. 41</a>, 11 October 1941, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>American imperialism does not have and cannot afford to have a perspective of peace after the defeat of Hitler in this war, for it must work for world domination and the assurance that this domination will be maintained for ‘a hundred years, at least,’ Secretary of the Navy Knox told the American Bar Association in Indianapolis on October 1.</strong></p>
<p>Knox’s warning that an American-British victory in World War II would not usher in a period of lasting peace but would be only the first step in the direction of world domination by the victorious powers, came in the course of a speech pleading for support of a naval expansion policy that would permit the United States, together with Great Britain, to “police the seven seas” after the war.</p>
<p>Knox, authoritative spokesman for the Administration, in this intimation of the imperialist war aims and problems of the American bosses, avoided much of the high sounding camouflage and talk about “four freedoms” employed by Roosevelt and Churchill to decorate their Eight Points.</p>
<p>America is already in the war, he said, and “the world has now grown so small, so interrelated, so interdependent that, try as we will, we cannot escape from this task” (of insuring American domination of the world).</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is by no means sufficient that we take those steps necessary to clear the sea lanes of the bandits which now infest them. We must do more than that. We must do our full share and more, to guarantee that they shall be kept clear of pirates in the future ... (It means) that the great law-abiding, peace-loving nations (United States and Great Britain) must take the power into their hands and keep it there for a long time to come to prevent the inauguration of. another world war ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>No Promise of Peace</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>Knox makes no promises that such a course will mean peace. As a matter of fact he strongly indicates that other wars will have to be fought by the master nations of the world if they want to maintain supremacy.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">“We will not engage in any idle dreams of a millennium. We are not going to stop all wars. But I am convinced we, for our own safety and protection, and for the maintenance of our way of life, shall have to provide an interregnum in which we will not only devote ourselves to the pursuit of peaceful aims, but provide the essential might to enforce such a peace on those who are not willing voluntarily to pursue such a course.</p>
<p class="quote">“If we must fight, <em>and mark this well, there will not be for many years to come a time when we may not have to fight</em>, then with modern weapons what they are, let us determine that we will fight elsewhere than our own soil ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Knox has no illusions that the victory of either the “democratic” or the fascist imperialists in this war will bring in any lasting period of peace. Nor does he pretend that any World War II edition of the League of Nations will do away with imperialist war or imperialist peace.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Sometime, somewhere, an international order may emerge which need not rely on force, but that time, unhappily, is a long way off.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“In the interim, a justly conducted, peace-loving force must intervene to save the world from self-destruction. The foundation of such a force, as I have indicated, must be the control of the seas by the United States and Great Britain ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>What “Freedom of the Seas” Means</h4>
<p class="fst">In this speech Knox dwelt at great length on the imperialist concept of “freedom of the seas,” and stressed its use not only as a slogan for complete entry into the war, but for world domination after the war.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The objective of all naval operations is control of maritime communications and the ability to preserve such communications for one’s own use, whether military or commercial, and to deny them to the enemy ...”</p>
<p class="quote">“I hope that what I have said does make for a better understanding of how vital to us is the principle of the freedom of the seas. This freedom means that the great historic highways of the nations are free for the use of all alike, on even terms, save only those activities which are designed to be hostile and aggressive ...”</p>
<p class="fst">“Freedom of the seas” is not an abstract principle for Knox and the capitalist class he represents. In their double talk it becomes monopoly of the seas by the United States and its satellites. The seas will be “free” to them, but they will be “controlled” for other nations whose activities “whether military or commercial” may be regarded as hostile or aggressive to the dominant powers. Thus, for example, the United States and Great Britain will be able to shut off the use of the seas to any nation that tries to compete with them commercially in any foreign market, for that would be regarded as hostile or aggressive.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Aggressor nations must not be allowed to deprive other powers of the free use of the seas upon which their lives and futures depend. This is the essence of the meaning of the principle of the freedom of the seas ...”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Nations which the American- Anglo controllers of the seas consider “aggressive” will not be permitted to deprive other nations of the use of seas – only the United States and Great Britain will be able to do that, says Knox.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who Will Run the World After the War</h4>
<p class="fst">And who else besides the United States and the British Empire will decide these questions when the second “war for democracy,” is over? Knox makes clear that no other nation will have any say in this matter unless it is completely subservient to the interests of American-Anglo imperialism. “Other nations of similar peaceful inclinations, <em>and lacking in aggressive designs</em>, could be joined to them, and thus the beginning would be made leading toward the restoration of international law ...”</p>
<p>Here then is the American version of the “Versailles Treaty” for World War II. Here is the program for which American imperialism is spending billions and preparing to enter the armed conflict. These are the conditions Knox referred to in his speech when he said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“When we have defeated Hitler, and destroyed this Nazi bid for world dominion, we must set up conditions which will prevent the rise of new Hitlers ...”</p>
<p class="fst">But Hitler was able to rise in post-war Germany precisely because of the efforts of the Allies to crush and dismember Germany. The economic destruction which Knox proposes for the rivals of American capitalism by its domination of the seas will in turn inevitably bring forth a new era of reaction and imperialist war. It is no wonder that Knox warns that American imperialism must be prepared to back up its war aims with “the essential might to enforce such a peace”:</p>
<p><em>Wars for boss profit followed by imperialist “peace” which will give way again to new wars – this is the perspective of American capitalism for the next hundred years. A true and lasting peace is indeed “a long way off” in the calculations of the warmongers in Washington.</em></p>
<p>Those who want to fight against the war must understand that Knox’s words describe the real war aims of the administration – that the talk about “democracy” and “war to end war” are only the sugar coating used to win support of the masses for a war that has no interest in democracy and no end in sight so long as the capitalist system remains.</p>
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George Breitman
U.S. Aims at World Rule, Says Knox
Will “Police Seven Seas” for Next 100 Years
Admits This War Will Be Followed by Other
Imperialist Struggles for World Domination
(11 October 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 41, 11 October 1941, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
American imperialism does not have and cannot afford to have a perspective of peace after the defeat of Hitler in this war, for it must work for world domination and the assurance that this domination will be maintained for ‘a hundred years, at least,’ Secretary of the Navy Knox told the American Bar Association in Indianapolis on October 1.
Knox’s warning that an American-British victory in World War II would not usher in a period of lasting peace but would be only the first step in the direction of world domination by the victorious powers, came in the course of a speech pleading for support of a naval expansion policy that would permit the United States, together with Great Britain, to “police the seven seas” after the war.
Knox, authoritative spokesman for the Administration, in this intimation of the imperialist war aims and problems of the American bosses, avoided much of the high sounding camouflage and talk about “four freedoms” employed by Roosevelt and Churchill to decorate their Eight Points.
America is already in the war, he said, and “the world has now grown so small, so interrelated, so interdependent that, try as we will, we cannot escape from this task” (of insuring American domination of the world).
“It is by no means sufficient that we take those steps necessary to clear the sea lanes of the bandits which now infest them. We must do more than that. We must do our full share and more, to guarantee that they shall be kept clear of pirates in the future ... (It means) that the great law-abiding, peace-loving nations (United States and Great Britain) must take the power into their hands and keep it there for a long time to come to prevent the inauguration of. another world war ...”
No Promise of Peace
Knox makes no promises that such a course will mean peace. As a matter of fact he strongly indicates that other wars will have to be fought by the master nations of the world if they want to maintain supremacy.
“We will not engage in any idle dreams of a millennium. We are not going to stop all wars. But I am convinced we, for our own safety and protection, and for the maintenance of our way of life, shall have to provide an interregnum in which we will not only devote ourselves to the pursuit of peaceful aims, but provide the essential might to enforce such a peace on those who are not willing voluntarily to pursue such a course.
“If we must fight, and mark this well, there will not be for many years to come a time when we may not have to fight, then with modern weapons what they are, let us determine that we will fight elsewhere than our own soil ...”
Knox has no illusions that the victory of either the “democratic” or the fascist imperialists in this war will bring in any lasting period of peace. Nor does he pretend that any World War II edition of the League of Nations will do away with imperialist war or imperialist peace.
“Sometime, somewhere, an international order may emerge which need not rely on force, but that time, unhappily, is a long way off.
“In the interim, a justly conducted, peace-loving force must intervene to save the world from self-destruction. The foundation of such a force, as I have indicated, must be the control of the seas by the United States and Great Britain ...”
What “Freedom of the Seas” Means
In this speech Knox dwelt at great length on the imperialist concept of “freedom of the seas,” and stressed its use not only as a slogan for complete entry into the war, but for world domination after the war.
“The objective of all naval operations is control of maritime communications and the ability to preserve such communications for one’s own use, whether military or commercial, and to deny them to the enemy ...”
“I hope that what I have said does make for a better understanding of how vital to us is the principle of the freedom of the seas. This freedom means that the great historic highways of the nations are free for the use of all alike, on even terms, save only those activities which are designed to be hostile and aggressive ...”
“Freedom of the seas” is not an abstract principle for Knox and the capitalist class he represents. In their double talk it becomes monopoly of the seas by the United States and its satellites. The seas will be “free” to them, but they will be “controlled” for other nations whose activities “whether military or commercial” may be regarded as hostile or aggressive to the dominant powers. Thus, for example, the United States and Great Britain will be able to shut off the use of the seas to any nation that tries to compete with them commercially in any foreign market, for that would be regarded as hostile or aggressive.
“Aggressor nations must not be allowed to deprive other powers of the free use of the seas upon which their lives and futures depend. This is the essence of the meaning of the principle of the freedom of the seas ...”
Nations which the American- Anglo controllers of the seas consider “aggressive” will not be permitted to deprive other nations of the use of seas – only the United States and Great Britain will be able to do that, says Knox.
Who Will Run the World After the War
And who else besides the United States and the British Empire will decide these questions when the second “war for democracy,” is over? Knox makes clear that no other nation will have any say in this matter unless it is completely subservient to the interests of American-Anglo imperialism. “Other nations of similar peaceful inclinations, and lacking in aggressive designs, could be joined to them, and thus the beginning would be made leading toward the restoration of international law ...”
Here then is the American version of the “Versailles Treaty” for World War II. Here is the program for which American imperialism is spending billions and preparing to enter the armed conflict. These are the conditions Knox referred to in his speech when he said:
“When we have defeated Hitler, and destroyed this Nazi bid for world dominion, we must set up conditions which will prevent the rise of new Hitlers ...”
But Hitler was able to rise in post-war Germany precisely because of the efforts of the Allies to crush and dismember Germany. The economic destruction which Knox proposes for the rivals of American capitalism by its domination of the seas will in turn inevitably bring forth a new era of reaction and imperialist war. It is no wonder that Knox warns that American imperialism must be prepared to back up its war aims with “the essential might to enforce such a peace”:
Wars for boss profit followed by imperialist “peace” which will give way again to new wars – this is the perspective of American capitalism for the next hundred years. A true and lasting peace is indeed “a long way off” in the calculations of the warmongers in Washington.
Those who want to fight against the war must understand that Knox’s words describe the real war aims of the administration – that the talk about “democracy” and “war to end war” are only the sugar coating used to win support of the masses for a war that has no interest in democracy and no end in sight so long as the capitalist system remains.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(14 June 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_24" target="new">Vol. V No. 24</a>, 14 June 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>His Friends Write to Roosevelt</h4>
<p class="fst">Not long ago an, open letter to President Roosevelt was published in the <strong>California Eagle</strong>, sighed by several members of the Randolph Committee sponsoring the July 1 March On Washington, including Randolph himself, Frank Crosswaith, Walter White, and others such as William Pickens and Elmer Carter.</p>
<p>“As persons who are sympathetic to your social and labor policies and friendly to your foreign policy of giving effective aid to Britain and her Allies,” they tell Roosevelt, they ask him to use his influence to help Negroes get jobs and equal rights. The letter as a whole is very friendly. Even in its last sentence, where a note of reproach might have entered, there is only a certain mournfulness as they state:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Those who practice or complacently tolerate race discrimination are not ‘all out’ believers in democracy; and we solemnly warn you and our fellow citizens that they will prove untrustworthy in the hour of democracy’s greatest trials.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>If it weren’t for the seriousness of the problems involved, you would certainly be forced to describe as comical this “friendly,” “solemn,” respectable letter. You would never think that this letter was addressed by Negroes to the man who after eight years in office has yet to utter a syllable one way or the other about the anti-lynch and poll tax bills!</em></p>
<p>I mention it, rather, to demonstrate an approach to the problem of destroying Jim Crowism, which must be studiously avoided by all class conscious and militant Negroes.</p>
<p>Here we do not refer to that servile tone employed by the misleaders, nor to their disgusting habit of lauding Roosevelt as “a great humanitarian and idealist” – but rather to the question of the general strategic approach.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>What The Uncle Toms Are Saying</h4>
<p class="fst">Observant Negroes must have noticed that every time the Uncle Toms discuss the question of the fight against Jim Crowism, they try to separate it off from all the other fights of the masses, they try to present the question of race discrimination as though it is the only, or the only important, problem to be solved.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This country,” they say, “is the finest in the world; this government is the finest in the world. There is only one thing wrong: Negroes are not given a fair and square deal.”</p>
<p class="fst">Following this line, they go on: “Because it is the best government, we must defend it, and we must support it in any war it enters. Not only is this necessary to us as patriotic Americans, but it has an added advantage in that we can more effectively appeal to the government for a fair deal, and in this way we will get concessions, and in the end, equal rights.”</p>
<p>In other words, the only thing wrong with American capitalism is Jim Crowism. Remove that, and although you leave everything else untouched, you will find paradise on earth. This is the theoretical basis for the general approach of the Negro misleaders.</p>
<p>But this is false through and through. The problems of the Negro workers would not be solved even under a capitalist system that was in some way magically cleansed of racial discrimination and segregation. The Negro masses would still have to contend with the questions of war, unemployment, fascism and all the other critical problems that the white workers face.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>The Real Fight Against Jim Crow</h4>
<p class="fst">No one should accuse us, on reading the above, of underestimating the paramount importance of the struggle against Jim Crowism. We are the first to declare that the workers must wipe it out in every nook and cranny of every institution, and we are proud to take our place in the militant struggle for full social, economic and political equality for the Negro people. As a matter of fact, we are the best fighters in this struggle precisely because of the fact that we understand clearly the connection between the roots and cause of Jim Crowism and the capitalist system which uses it to maintain itself and to oppress the divided masses.</p>
<p>The misleaders base themselves on the idea that it is possible to wipe out Jim Crowism gradually within the confines of capitalist rule. We base ourselves on the understanding that the struggle against Jim Crowism is an outstanding part of the wider struggle to replace capitalism with a socialist society. The misleaders pretend or believe that it is possible by peaceful means, petitions, respectable demonstrations and even flattery to win equality. We contend that Jim Crowism even in the North will not be wiped out until it is wiped out in the South, and that only a far-from-peaceful fight will destroy Jim Crowism in the South where most of the social, political and economic relations are based directly on the oppression of the Negro. In fact, we can safely say that only another Civil War will end the rule of the Southern Bourbons.</p>
<p>Actions flow from our basic concepts and theories. The actions of the misleaders are based on their concepts too. Real life is everyday proving how false they are, and we would not waste much time on them if it weren’t for this important fact: By isolating the struggle against Jim Crowism from all the other legitimate and necessary struggles of the masses, they are weakening the struggle against Jim Crowism itself.</p>
<p>We, on the other hand, because we recognize the fight against discrimination as part of the fight against capitalism, show on every occasion the interconnection between these struggles, so that we can mobilize the white workers side by side with the Negro workers for the solution of their joint problems. It is only in this way, unity of black and white, that capitalism and Jim Crowism can be overthrown.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(14 June 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 24, 14 June 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
His Friends Write to Roosevelt
Not long ago an, open letter to President Roosevelt was published in the California Eagle, sighed by several members of the Randolph Committee sponsoring the July 1 March On Washington, including Randolph himself, Frank Crosswaith, Walter White, and others such as William Pickens and Elmer Carter.
“As persons who are sympathetic to your social and labor policies and friendly to your foreign policy of giving effective aid to Britain and her Allies,” they tell Roosevelt, they ask him to use his influence to help Negroes get jobs and equal rights. The letter as a whole is very friendly. Even in its last sentence, where a note of reproach might have entered, there is only a certain mournfulness as they state:
“Those who practice or complacently tolerate race discrimination are not ‘all out’ believers in democracy; and we solemnly warn you and our fellow citizens that they will prove untrustworthy in the hour of democracy’s greatest trials.”
If it weren’t for the seriousness of the problems involved, you would certainly be forced to describe as comical this “friendly,” “solemn,” respectable letter. You would never think that this letter was addressed by Negroes to the man who after eight years in office has yet to utter a syllable one way or the other about the anti-lynch and poll tax bills!
I mention it, rather, to demonstrate an approach to the problem of destroying Jim Crowism, which must be studiously avoided by all class conscious and militant Negroes.
Here we do not refer to that servile tone employed by the misleaders, nor to their disgusting habit of lauding Roosevelt as “a great humanitarian and idealist” – but rather to the question of the general strategic approach.
What The Uncle Toms Are Saying
Observant Negroes must have noticed that every time the Uncle Toms discuss the question of the fight against Jim Crowism, they try to separate it off from all the other fights of the masses, they try to present the question of race discrimination as though it is the only, or the only important, problem to be solved.
“This country,” they say, “is the finest in the world; this government is the finest in the world. There is only one thing wrong: Negroes are not given a fair and square deal.”
Following this line, they go on: “Because it is the best government, we must defend it, and we must support it in any war it enters. Not only is this necessary to us as patriotic Americans, but it has an added advantage in that we can more effectively appeal to the government for a fair deal, and in this way we will get concessions, and in the end, equal rights.”
In other words, the only thing wrong with American capitalism is Jim Crowism. Remove that, and although you leave everything else untouched, you will find paradise on earth. This is the theoretical basis for the general approach of the Negro misleaders.
But this is false through and through. The problems of the Negro workers would not be solved even under a capitalist system that was in some way magically cleansed of racial discrimination and segregation. The Negro masses would still have to contend with the questions of war, unemployment, fascism and all the other critical problems that the white workers face.
The Real Fight Against Jim Crow
No one should accuse us, on reading the above, of underestimating the paramount importance of the struggle against Jim Crowism. We are the first to declare that the workers must wipe it out in every nook and cranny of every institution, and we are proud to take our place in the militant struggle for full social, economic and political equality for the Negro people. As a matter of fact, we are the best fighters in this struggle precisely because of the fact that we understand clearly the connection between the roots and cause of Jim Crowism and the capitalist system which uses it to maintain itself and to oppress the divided masses.
The misleaders base themselves on the idea that it is possible to wipe out Jim Crowism gradually within the confines of capitalist rule. We base ourselves on the understanding that the struggle against Jim Crowism is an outstanding part of the wider struggle to replace capitalism with a socialist society. The misleaders pretend or believe that it is possible by peaceful means, petitions, respectable demonstrations and even flattery to win equality. We contend that Jim Crowism even in the North will not be wiped out until it is wiped out in the South, and that only a far-from-peaceful fight will destroy Jim Crowism in the South where most of the social, political and economic relations are based directly on the oppression of the Negro. In fact, we can safely say that only another Civil War will end the rule of the Southern Bourbons.
Actions flow from our basic concepts and theories. The actions of the misleaders are based on their concepts too. Real life is everyday proving how false they are, and we would not waste much time on them if it weren’t for this important fact: By isolating the struggle against Jim Crowism from all the other legitimate and necessary struggles of the masses, they are weakening the struggle against Jim Crowism itself.
We, on the other hand, because we recognize the fight against discrimination as part of the fight against capitalism, show on every occasion the interconnection between these struggles, so that we can mobilize the white workers side by side with the Negro workers for the solution of their joint problems. It is only in this way, unity of black and white, that capitalism and Jim Crowism can be overthrown.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(4 January 1941)</h3>
<p> </p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa05_01" target="new">Vol. 5 No. 1</a>, 4 January 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">In an interesting series of articles in <strong>The Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, W. Robert Ming, Jr., Professor in the School of Law at Howard University, has dealt with the legal and technical aspects of the case of the <em>S.S. Philadelphia</em> sailors who were kicked out of the U.S. Navy because they signed a letter protesting intolerable Jim Crow conditions.</p>
<p>After demonstrating that the <em>Philadelphia</em> case shows how freedom of speech has been stolen from those in the Army and Navy, Professor Ming goes on to point out how much power this puts in the hands of the “brass hats.” If the public outside can’t get information about conditions in the armed forces from the only possible source – that is, from those inside – how can it possibly do anything to correct or improve those conditions? This means that if the soldiers can’t speak about conditions to the public, the officer caste can do just about anything it wants.</p>
<p>Professor Ming goes on to show that the officer caste has still another weapon to keep the mouths of conscripted soldiers shut, in addition to the power to discharge those who speak up. The right (“ephemeral though it be”) of a conscript to his former job depends on his getting a certificate from the Army “indicating satisfactory completion of the training course.” Under the present conscription set-up, a worker who would protest to the world outside, would certainly not get such a certificate. “This possibility of dual punishment places in the hands of the officers of this great peace-time army tremendous power without adequate controls and safeguards for the protection of the selectees.”<br>
</p>
<a name="pt1"></a>
<h4>Where the Criticism Falls Down</h4>
<p class="fst">But these articles in the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> are at their weakest point when the writer attempts to indicate how full rights for Negroes may be obtained and the right of freedom of speech and other civil liberties restored. For in his discussion of this, which is the key question, he limits himself to <em>legal</em> procedure and ignores the actual character of the courts and other institutions of the government.</p>
<p>How is the power of the officer caste to be limited? Operating under the Articles of War, they do just what they please, replying to criticism from the ranks with arrests and discharges, and to criticism from the outside with haughty contempt (the Philadelphia mess attendants were kicked out “in the best interests” of the Navy and themselves, says Rear Admiral Nimitz).</p>
<p><em>Says Professor Ming: “Practical solution of this problem created by the conflict between Army regimentation and civil liberty is possible. One simple device to secure the desired end would be to provide for review by civil courts, of actions by court martials or punishments inflicted on members of the armed forces by officers ...”</em></p>
<p>What are these civil courts anyhow? Fair and impartial; or the instrument of the ruling capitalist class? If Professor Ming doesn’t know from his own personal experience, let him ask workers who have been out on strike. Let him ask a poor man who has tried to sue a rich corporation. Or let him look up the decisions of the courts with regard to the Negro people, the courts’ approval of segregation in education and on trolley cars, their approval of the poll tax and the white , primary laws and the other legislation aimed at maintaining “white supremacy.”</p>
<p>If we consider here not the words about “justice” that are written into the laws, but really understand how they work, then we can understand that workers in the armed forces, colored or white, would get no better treatment from the civil courts than they do from the military. In fact, the consistent refusal of the civil courts to interfere with military decisions, is proof that they approve segregation, discrimination and denial of freedom of speech as practiced by the officer caste, and don’t want to interfere with it.</p>
<p>If you really want to abolish Jim Crowism, if you really want to protect the rights and improve the conditions of the soldiers and sailors, there can be no half-way measures: the officers will either have the power to do what they want, or they won’t. Either you go the whole hog and take control of military training away from the officer caste <em>completely</em> – or you waste your time and bat your head against a stone wall. Any program which falls short of military training under control of the workers themselves is one which leaves the reactionary officers with full power, and is therefore completely ineffective and useless.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2"></a>
<h4>A Correction</h4>
<p class="fst">In our pamphlet on the <em>Philadelphia</em> men, issued before their discharge, we feared because of the silence that surrounded the case that the boys would be framed-up in a court martial. We said, “The court martial, when it takes place, will be conducted behind closed doors. (The men) will not be permitted to use lawyers from the outside ...”</p>
<p>According to Professor Ming, however, this is not legally correct. His explanation not only clears up this point, but shows why the boys escaped court martial and even worse punishment than they received.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Public opinion was aroused (after news of the arrests leaked out) ... You know what the Navy did in the face of this public outcry. They turned down the recommendation (of court martial) of the captain of the <em>Philadelphia</em>. That was dangerous – if these men had been subjected to a general court martial they would have been entitled to the assistance of outside counsel, and a public hearing, a statement of charges, and the other protections which our legal system has devised for the safeguard of the defendants, even if they are members of the armed forces.</p>
<p class="quote">“Instead the ‘brass hats’ decided that these men should be discharged from the Navy – not ‘honorably’ ... but rather, they were to be given ‘undesirable discharges’.”/p>
</p><p class="link"> <br>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(4 January 1941)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 5 No. 1, 4 January 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In an interesting series of articles in The Pittsburgh Courier, W. Robert Ming, Jr., Professor in the School of Law at Howard University, has dealt with the legal and technical aspects of the case of the S.S. Philadelphia sailors who were kicked out of the U.S. Navy because they signed a letter protesting intolerable Jim Crow conditions.
After demonstrating that the Philadelphia case shows how freedom of speech has been stolen from those in the Army and Navy, Professor Ming goes on to point out how much power this puts in the hands of the “brass hats.” If the public outside can’t get information about conditions in the armed forces from the only possible source – that is, from those inside – how can it possibly do anything to correct or improve those conditions? This means that if the soldiers can’t speak about conditions to the public, the officer caste can do just about anything it wants.
Professor Ming goes on to show that the officer caste has still another weapon to keep the mouths of conscripted soldiers shut, in addition to the power to discharge those who speak up. The right (“ephemeral though it be”) of a conscript to his former job depends on his getting a certificate from the Army “indicating satisfactory completion of the training course.” Under the present conscription set-up, a worker who would protest to the world outside, would certainly not get such a certificate. “This possibility of dual punishment places in the hands of the officers of this great peace-time army tremendous power without adequate controls and safeguards for the protection of the selectees.”
Where the Criticism Falls Down
But these articles in the Pittsburgh Courier are at their weakest point when the writer attempts to indicate how full rights for Negroes may be obtained and the right of freedom of speech and other civil liberties restored. For in his discussion of this, which is the key question, he limits himself to legal procedure and ignores the actual character of the courts and other institutions of the government.
How is the power of the officer caste to be limited? Operating under the Articles of War, they do just what they please, replying to criticism from the ranks with arrests and discharges, and to criticism from the outside with haughty contempt (the Philadelphia mess attendants were kicked out “in the best interests” of the Navy and themselves, says Rear Admiral Nimitz).
Says Professor Ming: “Practical solution of this problem created by the conflict between Army regimentation and civil liberty is possible. One simple device to secure the desired end would be to provide for review by civil courts, of actions by court martials or punishments inflicted on members of the armed forces by officers ...”
What are these civil courts anyhow? Fair and impartial; or the instrument of the ruling capitalist class? If Professor Ming doesn’t know from his own personal experience, let him ask workers who have been out on strike. Let him ask a poor man who has tried to sue a rich corporation. Or let him look up the decisions of the courts with regard to the Negro people, the courts’ approval of segregation in education and on trolley cars, their approval of the poll tax and the white , primary laws and the other legislation aimed at maintaining “white supremacy.”
If we consider here not the words about “justice” that are written into the laws, but really understand how they work, then we can understand that workers in the armed forces, colored or white, would get no better treatment from the civil courts than they do from the military. In fact, the consistent refusal of the civil courts to interfere with military decisions, is proof that they approve segregation, discrimination and denial of freedom of speech as practiced by the officer caste, and don’t want to interfere with it.
If you really want to abolish Jim Crowism, if you really want to protect the rights and improve the conditions of the soldiers and sailors, there can be no half-way measures: the officers will either have the power to do what they want, or they won’t. Either you go the whole hog and take control of military training away from the officer caste completely – or you waste your time and bat your head against a stone wall. Any program which falls short of military training under control of the workers themselves is one which leaves the reactionary officers with full power, and is therefore completely ineffective and useless.
A Correction
In our pamphlet on the Philadelphia men, issued before their discharge, we feared because of the silence that surrounded the case that the boys would be framed-up in a court martial. We said, “The court martial, when it takes place, will be conducted behind closed doors. (The men) will not be permitted to use lawyers from the outside ...”
According to Professor Ming, however, this is not legally correct. His explanation not only clears up this point, but shows why the boys escaped court martial and even worse punishment than they received.
“Public opinion was aroused (after news of the arrests leaked out) ... You know what the Navy did in the face of this public outcry. They turned down the recommendation (of court martial) of the captain of the Philadelphia. That was dangerous – if these men had been subjected to a general court martial they would have been entitled to the assistance of outside counsel, and a public hearing, a statement of charges, and the other protections which our legal system has devised for the safeguard of the defendants, even if they are members of the armed forces.
“Instead the ‘brass hats’ decided that these men should be discharged from the Navy – not ‘honorably’ ... but rather, they were to be given ‘undesirable discharges’.”/p>
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(5 April 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_14" target="new">Vol. V No. 14</a>, 5 April 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>An Urgent Appeal</h4>
<p class="fst">The National Negro Department of the Socialist Workers Party is working at the present time, in conjunction with Pioneer Publishers, on a program of publications relating to problems of the Negro people.</p>
<p>We are sure that readers of <strong>The Militant</strong> who have displayed an interest in the articles on these questions printed in this paper will be interested in their speedy publication. One of the pamphlets now in preparation deals with the struggle to break down the Jim Crow bars against Negroes entering into the all-inclusive war industries in skilled and semi-skilled jobs.</p>
<p>Another, already completed and ready to go to press, is a revised version of the series of articles just concluded in this paper, <em>The Negro and The U.S. Army</em>, by Eugene Varlin. The revision of this excellent series of articles brings it up to date, explaining the present situation of the Negro in the armed forces.</p>
<p>The third pamphlet, which will be a long work, is a basic discussion of the Negro struggle, analyzing the situation from all angles and presenting the program of the Socialist Workers Party for the Negro struggle for equality.</p>
<p>These pamphlets, which will be of great help to workers who want an all-sided picture of the problems and needs of the Negro masses, will be ready for distribution as soon as we have the necessary money to bring them off the press. We are therefore making an appeal to all our readers to help us in this ambitious enterprise. We ask for contributions, and we ask for them as soon as possible. Readers who can give us $10.00 and readers who are able to donate only 25 cents – please help us get out this badly needed literature. Send all donations to this column, 116 University Pl., New York City.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Repeating 1917</h4>
<p class="fst">The war may not have taken exactly the same course this time as it did during 1914–1918, but the treatment of the Negro in the armed forces is so exactly the same that one might think the bureaucrats in control of the army were simply reading a history of what happened then and applying it today.</p>
<p>For example, there is the treatment of conscientious objectors.</p>
<p>Charles H. Houston, former Lieutenant of the 368th U.S. Infantry Regiment, in his series of articles called <em>Saving The World For ‘Democracy’</em>, which were printed in <strong>The Pittsburgh Courier</strong> last year, recalled the following about 1917:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There was one outstanding exception to the general pattern of segregation at Camp Meade (Maryland): white conscientious objectors were housed with Negro conscientious objectors in a barracks in the 368th Infantry area with an armed white guard over them.</p>
<p class="quote">“It must be remembered that the Army considered conscientious objectors as cowards and scum. In the case of white conscientious objectors at Camp Meade the camp command considered them too low to associate with the white soldiers; so it housed them with Negroes and stuck them in a Negro regimental area.</p>
<p class="quote">“The Army considered the white officers of our own regiment too good to share the same quarters or even live in the same area with us, their fellow Negro officers, but it could think of no greater degradation for white conscientious objectors than to house them with Negroes in a Negro regimental area.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">And now, in 1941, comes an announcement from Washington, via Major Campbell Johnson of the Selective Service Board, that there will be “no separate Negro camps for conscientious objectors” and that the camps being set up will serve for all objectors, Negro as well as white.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The most brazen statement of any boss receiving contracts from the federal government was the one made last week by J.H. Kindelberger, president and general manager of North American Aviation, Inc.:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Applications for jobs in the plant, where we will employ upward of ten thousand persons, will be received at the temporary Kansas City offices in the near future. We will receive applications from both white and Negro workers! However, the Negroes will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities ... While we are in complete sympathy with the Negro, it is against the company policy to employ them as mechanics or aircraft workers. We use none except white workers in the plant in Inglewood (California) and the plant in Dallas (Texas) and we intend to maintain the same policy in Kansas City. There will be some jobs as janitors for Negroes. Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them in the North American plant.”</p>
<p class="fst">You can imagine what the attitude of this company toward the Negro would be if it were not “in complete sympathy with the Negro”!</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">That the New York State Employment Service helps the bosses in discriminating against Negroes, Jews and Catholics was admitted by a spokesman of the Service in a discussion of the employment application blanks on which “Personal Description” is followed by several initials: “S M W – W N O – C P J,” meaning “Single, Married, Widower; White, Negro, Oriental; Catholic, Protestant, Jew.”</p>
<p>The spokesman tried to clear the Service of responsibility by saying: “It’s entirely the employers’ fault. You can’t legislate discrimination out of existence.”</p>
<p>It is true that it’s the employers’ fault, for it is they who want to know this information so they can discriminate. But that doesn’t excuse the Service for helping them!</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(5 April 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 14, 5 April 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
An Urgent Appeal
The National Negro Department of the Socialist Workers Party is working at the present time, in conjunction with Pioneer Publishers, on a program of publications relating to problems of the Negro people.
We are sure that readers of The Militant who have displayed an interest in the articles on these questions printed in this paper will be interested in their speedy publication. One of the pamphlets now in preparation deals with the struggle to break down the Jim Crow bars against Negroes entering into the all-inclusive war industries in skilled and semi-skilled jobs.
Another, already completed and ready to go to press, is a revised version of the series of articles just concluded in this paper, The Negro and The U.S. Army, by Eugene Varlin. The revision of this excellent series of articles brings it up to date, explaining the present situation of the Negro in the armed forces.
The third pamphlet, which will be a long work, is a basic discussion of the Negro struggle, analyzing the situation from all angles and presenting the program of the Socialist Workers Party for the Negro struggle for equality.
These pamphlets, which will be of great help to workers who want an all-sided picture of the problems and needs of the Negro masses, will be ready for distribution as soon as we have the necessary money to bring them off the press. We are therefore making an appeal to all our readers to help us in this ambitious enterprise. We ask for contributions, and we ask for them as soon as possible. Readers who can give us $10.00 and readers who are able to donate only 25 cents – please help us get out this badly needed literature. Send all donations to this column, 116 University Pl., New York City.
Repeating 1917
The war may not have taken exactly the same course this time as it did during 1914–1918, but the treatment of the Negro in the armed forces is so exactly the same that one might think the bureaucrats in control of the army were simply reading a history of what happened then and applying it today.
For example, there is the treatment of conscientious objectors.
Charles H. Houston, former Lieutenant of the 368th U.S. Infantry Regiment, in his series of articles called Saving The World For ‘Democracy’, which were printed in The Pittsburgh Courier last year, recalled the following about 1917:
“There was one outstanding exception to the general pattern of segregation at Camp Meade (Maryland): white conscientious objectors were housed with Negro conscientious objectors in a barracks in the 368th Infantry area with an armed white guard over them.
“It must be remembered that the Army considered conscientious objectors as cowards and scum. In the case of white conscientious objectors at Camp Meade the camp command considered them too low to associate with the white soldiers; so it housed them with Negroes and stuck them in a Negro regimental area.
“The Army considered the white officers of our own regiment too good to share the same quarters or even live in the same area with us, their fellow Negro officers, but it could think of no greater degradation for white conscientious objectors than to house them with Negroes in a Negro regimental area.”
* * *
And now, in 1941, comes an announcement from Washington, via Major Campbell Johnson of the Selective Service Board, that there will be “no separate Negro camps for conscientious objectors” and that the camps being set up will serve for all objectors, Negro as well as white.
* * *
The most brazen statement of any boss receiving contracts from the federal government was the one made last week by J.H. Kindelberger, president and general manager of North American Aviation, Inc.:
“Applications for jobs in the plant, where we will employ upward of ten thousand persons, will be received at the temporary Kansas City offices in the near future. We will receive applications from both white and Negro workers! However, the Negroes will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities ... While we are in complete sympathy with the Negro, it is against the company policy to employ them as mechanics or aircraft workers. We use none except white workers in the plant in Inglewood (California) and the plant in Dallas (Texas) and we intend to maintain the same policy in Kansas City. There will be some jobs as janitors for Negroes. Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them in the North American plant.”
You can imagine what the attitude of this company toward the Negro would be if it were not “in complete sympathy with the Negro”!
* * *
That the New York State Employment Service helps the bosses in discriminating against Negroes, Jews and Catholics was admitted by a spokesman of the Service in a discussion of the employment application blanks on which “Personal Description” is followed by several initials: “S M W – W N O – C P J,” meaning “Single, Married, Widower; White, Negro, Oriental; Catholic, Protestant, Jew.”
The spokesman tried to clear the Service of responsibility by saying: “It’s entirely the employers’ fault. You can’t legislate discrimination out of existence.”
It is true that it’s the employers’ fault, for it is they who want to know this information so they can discriminate. But that doesn’t excuse the Service for helping them!
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(6 September 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_36" target="new">Vol. V No. 36</a>, 6 September 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<p class="fst">According to William Patterson, a Negro representative of the Communist Party in Chicago, the Negro people are behind the war because it is a war against slavery just as much as the war of 1861, “This is our war,” he said at, a meeting on August 20. “Black America will play its part today just as it did in 1776 and again in 1861.”</p>
<p>Last week we refuted Patterson’s claims that the Negro people support the present war, and showed that since it is an imperialist war (not for democracy, but a fight between capitalist bandits over control of colonial markets and raw materials), the Negro people are correct in not supporting it. This week we want to discuss Patterson’s attempts to win Negro support for Roosevelt’s war plans by pretending that today’s imperialist war is like the wars of 1776 and 1861.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Wars the Negroes Supported</h4>
<p class="fst">The capitalist historians have always tried to play down the role of the Negro in those wars. They do this to bolster up their reactionary ideas that the Negro is inferior and incapable of playing any important role in society. More and more people, however, are learning the truth nowadays and beginning to understand what a tremendous part the Negro masses had in the construction and development of the American republic.</p>
<p>We do not have to argue the question as to whether the Revolutionary War of 1776 was progressive. Everybody knows that. A great revolutionary movement, it secured independence for the colonies from their oppressor, Great Britain, and resulted in the formation of the most democratic government at that time in the world. Like all great revolutions, it was carried on militantly, arms in hand. Progress was secured at the cost of much suffering and sacrifice. People who are afraid of revolutions today try to gloss over the fact that American bourgeois democracy was created only by violent struggle.</p>
<p><em>In this revolution, the Negro people played a glorious role. Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was among the very first to fall in it. Elsewhere, on all the fronts of the war, Negroes did not hesitate to give everything they had, even their lives. For their numbers the Negro people, freeman and slave, were as much responsible for the victory of the colonists as anyone else.</em></p>
<p>Not all the tasks of this revolution were accomplished in the 18th century, however. Feudalism still existed and had much power in the south, in the person of the landlord slave-owning class. The Civil War was the second American revolution, and it ended in the defeat of the south and the weakening and even destruction in most respects of feudal power in this country. It preserved the unity and independence of the nation, so that the capitalists could go forward with the economic development of the country. It destroyed chattel slavery and set the Negro people free.</p>
<p>Again the Negro people were in the thick of the battle, again they were on the side of progress and social revolution. Hundreds of thousands of colored troops fought and worked on the Northern side; their brothers in the south aided the Union forces as best they could. Lincoln and other Northern leaders admitted that without the Negro soldiers they would not have won the war.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>What About the War of 1917?</h4>
<p class="fst">Today the government and its lackeys, including the Stalinists, are using many of the same slogans employed in the two American revolutionary wars: for democracy, freedom, independence, against slavery, tyranny, dictatorship, etc. But the kind of war it is cannot be determined by what its supporters claim it is; for even Hitler knows how to use slogans in his own interests, even the slaveholders in the Civil War claimed that their war was in the interests of the slaves.</p>
<p>The Negro people in this country have already had an experience in wars and slogans which was very enlightening; that was in 1917.</p>
<p><em>And it is very significant that Patterson, who spoke about the war of 1941 and the wars of 80 and 165 years ago, had nothing to say about the war of 24 years ago, and the Negro role in and attitude toward that war.</em></p>
<p>For today’s war, so far as most workers are concerned, is a repetition of World War I, and the same kind of war. Patterson can’t mention it because the masses would immediately see through his stock phrases.</p>
<p>Again as in 1917 the capitalist class is conducting a war for its own profit. Workers are made to pay for it in money and blood. Negroes are Jim-Crowed in the armed forces and face a virtual blackout in industry. The outcome of the war will be the same for Negroes as after 1918, when they were lynched for daring to wear an Army uniform. (As a matter of fact already, even before we are in the war officially, the lynch spirit against Negro soldiers has been whipped up.)</p>
<p>This war will bring no improvement in conditions for the masses of the world, regardless of whether the Allies or the Axis powers win. Negroes in this country will get no benefits from a Roosevelt victory. They will have the same problems they had before the war, and probably worse.</p>
<p>The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were progressive, in the interests of the masses as well as the rising capitalist class. World War II, like World War I, is reactionary, in the interests only of capitalism decaying and in its death agonies. Negroes instinctively do not support it. Their instincts are healthy and correct.</p>
<p>These correct and revolutionary instincts of the Negro people must now be connected to an understanding of the kind of war they can and must support. This we intend to discuss week.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(6 September 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 36, 6 September 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
According to William Patterson, a Negro representative of the Communist Party in Chicago, the Negro people are behind the war because it is a war against slavery just as much as the war of 1861, “This is our war,” he said at, a meeting on August 20. “Black America will play its part today just as it did in 1776 and again in 1861.”
Last week we refuted Patterson’s claims that the Negro people support the present war, and showed that since it is an imperialist war (not for democracy, but a fight between capitalist bandits over control of colonial markets and raw materials), the Negro people are correct in not supporting it. This week we want to discuss Patterson’s attempts to win Negro support for Roosevelt’s war plans by pretending that today’s imperialist war is like the wars of 1776 and 1861.
Wars the Negroes Supported
The capitalist historians have always tried to play down the role of the Negro in those wars. They do this to bolster up their reactionary ideas that the Negro is inferior and incapable of playing any important role in society. More and more people, however, are learning the truth nowadays and beginning to understand what a tremendous part the Negro masses had in the construction and development of the American republic.
We do not have to argue the question as to whether the Revolutionary War of 1776 was progressive. Everybody knows that. A great revolutionary movement, it secured independence for the colonies from their oppressor, Great Britain, and resulted in the formation of the most democratic government at that time in the world. Like all great revolutions, it was carried on militantly, arms in hand. Progress was secured at the cost of much suffering and sacrifice. People who are afraid of revolutions today try to gloss over the fact that American bourgeois democracy was created only by violent struggle.
In this revolution, the Negro people played a glorious role. Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was among the very first to fall in it. Elsewhere, on all the fronts of the war, Negroes did not hesitate to give everything they had, even their lives. For their numbers the Negro people, freeman and slave, were as much responsible for the victory of the colonists as anyone else.
Not all the tasks of this revolution were accomplished in the 18th century, however. Feudalism still existed and had much power in the south, in the person of the landlord slave-owning class. The Civil War was the second American revolution, and it ended in the defeat of the south and the weakening and even destruction in most respects of feudal power in this country. It preserved the unity and independence of the nation, so that the capitalists could go forward with the economic development of the country. It destroyed chattel slavery and set the Negro people free.
Again the Negro people were in the thick of the battle, again they were on the side of progress and social revolution. Hundreds of thousands of colored troops fought and worked on the Northern side; their brothers in the south aided the Union forces as best they could. Lincoln and other Northern leaders admitted that without the Negro soldiers they would not have won the war.
What About the War of 1917?
Today the government and its lackeys, including the Stalinists, are using many of the same slogans employed in the two American revolutionary wars: for democracy, freedom, independence, against slavery, tyranny, dictatorship, etc. But the kind of war it is cannot be determined by what its supporters claim it is; for even Hitler knows how to use slogans in his own interests, even the slaveholders in the Civil War claimed that their war was in the interests of the slaves.
The Negro people in this country have already had an experience in wars and slogans which was very enlightening; that was in 1917.
And it is very significant that Patterson, who spoke about the war of 1941 and the wars of 80 and 165 years ago, had nothing to say about the war of 24 years ago, and the Negro role in and attitude toward that war.
For today’s war, so far as most workers are concerned, is a repetition of World War I, and the same kind of war. Patterson can’t mention it because the masses would immediately see through his stock phrases.
Again as in 1917 the capitalist class is conducting a war for its own profit. Workers are made to pay for it in money and blood. Negroes are Jim-Crowed in the armed forces and face a virtual blackout in industry. The outcome of the war will be the same for Negroes as after 1918, when they were lynched for daring to wear an Army uniform. (As a matter of fact already, even before we are in the war officially, the lynch spirit against Negro soldiers has been whipped up.)
This war will bring no improvement in conditions for the masses of the world, regardless of whether the Allies or the Axis powers win. Negroes in this country will get no benefits from a Roosevelt victory. They will have the same problems they had before the war, and probably worse.
The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were progressive, in the interests of the masses as well as the rising capitalist class. World War II, like World War I, is reactionary, in the interests only of capitalism decaying and in its death agonies. Negroes instinctively do not support it. Their instincts are healthy and correct.
These correct and revolutionary instincts of the Negro people must now be connected to an understanding of the kind of war they can and must support. This we intend to discuss week.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Why the Soviet Bureaucracy Is in Crisis</h1>
<h3>(22 June 1953)</h3>
<hr>
<p class="info">From <strong><em>The Militant</em></strong>, <a href="../../../newspape/themilitant/1953/v17n25-jun-22-1953-mil.pdf">Vol. 17 No. 25</a>, June 22, 1953.</p>
<hr>
<p class="fst">What has been happening in the Soviet Union since Stalin died? Why? What lies ahead? Isaac Deutscher’s new book (<em><a href="../../../../../archive/deutscher/1953/russiaafterstalin.htm">Russia: What Next?</a></em> Oxford University Press, 1953, 230 pp., $3) provides a convenient framework for examining the answers to these vital questions.</p>
<p>We have many profound differences with Deutscher, some of which were expressed in this paper’s review of his Stalin biography in 1949. But it must be recognized that he stands out conspicuously among the writers who are able to get books about the Soviet Union printed by capitalist publishers.</p>
<p>For one thing, Deutscher, who was expelled from the Polish Communist Party as an oppositionist in 1932, generally knows what he is writing about. He has a good grasp of Soviet history, fortified by a careful study of Leon Trotsky’s writings. His conclusions and interpretations are sometimes in conflict with the facts he presents, but he does not consciously hide or distort the facts. That alone makes him superior to most of the mob of present-day commentators on the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Moreover, he does not pander to the prejudices of capitalist opinion, often expressing views regarded as “subversive” in Washington, and he deals with serious questions, including some of Marxist theory. These positive qualities are displayed in his latest book, even though it was written hastily in the first few weeks after Stalin’s death.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Changes caused crisis</p>
<p class="fst">Deutscher believes that Stalinism has ended or is in the process of being liquidated in the Soviet Union. Not merely because of Stalin’s death, but because of the severe crisis of Stalinism which had been latent for some time and was only brought into the open by his death. This will not come as a new idea to readers of The Militant and the magazine Fourth International, which have regularly called attention to the deep-going crisis of Stalinism and the causes for it. But they will be interested in Deutscher’s analysis of this crisis.</p>
<p>It arose, he shows, because of changes in economic, social and political conditions inside and outside the Soviet Union. The conditions that made it possible for Stalin to come to power have altered decisively; that is why his successors cannot play the same role he did. Stalin tried to his last breath to maintain the Stalinist system, but it was beginning to break up under and around him. Ironically, as Deutscher notes, Stalin himself contributed to the changes that spelled the doom of Stalinism.</p>
<p>Stalin came to power because of two important factors: (1) the economic and cultural backwardness of the Soviet Union, aggravated by ruinous years of war and civil war; (2) the isolation of the first workers state as a result of the delays and defeats of the revolution in Europe, which the Bolshevik leaders had expected to link up with and strengthen the revolution in Russia. Trotsky explained many times how and why these conditions led to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and its eventual destruction by the privileged bureaucratic caste which opposed the revolutionary-internationalist, proletarian-democratic policies of Lenin.</p>
<p>But the Stalinist bureaucracy was beset by many contradictions. Russia’s poverty enabled Stalinism to come to power, but to remain in power and to preserve its privileges, which were threatened on one side by imperialism and on the other by the possibilities of revolt by the Soviet masses, it needed a strong economy. This meant industrialization.</p>
<p>Although a section of the bureaucracy tended toward the restoration of capitalism in the 20’s, Stalin knew that the Soviet people would never tolerate it, and after some wavering he set out to industrialize the <em>country</em> through the extension of nationalization and planning, the economic foundations of the workers state created under Lenin.</p>
<p>Deutscher realizes that Stalin’s methods were brutal and costly, and vitiated part of the results (he wrongly attributes the over all results to Stalin’s “historical function”). It evidently does not occur to him that Stalin’s methods delayed rather than promoted the process as a whole. Deutscher does not appreciate the decisive part played by the firm social foundations of the Russian revolution, but he is correct in noting that under Stalin’s regime great transformations took place.</p>
<p>From an industrially backward country the Soviet Union became the second industrial power in the world. Soviet Chicagos, Pittsburghs and Detroits sprouted into all corners of a vast land. Tens of millions of peasants were turned into industrial workers. Small farms were broken up, and more tens of millions became collective farmers, torn out of conservative self-sufficiency and thrust into awareness of their dependence on government policy. A large part of the population was urbanized, practically all of it was made literate. New habits were formed, new patterns of culture evolved. The superiority of planned economy was proved in practice (and Deutscher correctly emphasizes that planning rather than Stalin’s forced-labor system was the dominant factor in industrial progress).</p>
<p>What effects did all this have on the social and political consciousness of the Soviet people? Obviously, big ones. The soil out of which Stalinism grew was being destroyed. “Technology, planning, urbanization, and industrial expansion are the deadliest enemies” of Stalinism. A nation of 160 to 200 million was driven, in 25 years time, “to jump the chasm which separated the epoch of the wooden plow from that of the atomic pile. The jump is not yet completed ... All we know is that the process is in a very advanced stage. Russia may still be mired up to her ankles or to her knees in the epoch of primitive magic; but she is not plunged in it up to her neck and ears, as she was a quarter of a century ago.”<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">“Self-containment”</p>
<p class="fst">During the same time that the backwardness of Russia, in which Stalinism had its roots, was being overcome, drastic changes on the international scene were further altering the relations between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Soviet masses.</p>
<p>Stalin began his regime by announcing the doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Among other things this signaled the abandonment of Lenin’s internationalism and in the course of time the adoption of an actively counter-revolutionary policy in which Stalin sought to ward off imperialist attack by striving to prevent revolution abroad. Using current formulations, Deutscher calls Stalin’s foreign policy “self-containment” as opposed to Lenin’s policy of stimulating “liberation” of other countries from capitalism.</p>
<p>Stalin tried to maintain the international status quo. The world Stalinist movement served as border guards to promote the Kremlin’s foreign policy and diplomatic maneuvers, regardless of their disastrous s pus effects on the interests of the workers in the capitalist countries.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">The great saboteur</p>
<p class="fst">Deutscher knows and reviews all this. He is definitely not a Stalinist and would think it unjust to be called an apologist for Stalinism, but objectively that is what he shows himself to be when he discusses this phase of history. “Was Stalin then the great saboteur and betrayer of world revolution, as Trotsky saw him?” he asks. And his answer is:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Yes and no. He certainly did his best to destroy the potentialities for revolution abroad – in the name of the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution. But how real and important were those potentialities between the two world wars? Trotsky saw that period as one sequence of great but missed revolutionary opportunities. The historian of the period cannot be so sure about its latent possibilities. He can gauge only its actuality, not its potentiality. Stalin worked on the assumption that there was no chance of a communist victory in the West or in the East. If that was so, then he was sacrificing to the selfishness of Bolshevik Russia the shadow, not the substance, of world revolution. He believed that by building up the Soviet `citadel of socialism’ he was making the only contribution toward world revolution that could be made at the time. This conviction allowed him to treat the labor movements of the world with boundless cynicism and contempt.”</p>
<p class="fst">But a historian who declines to examine and pass judgment on the potentialities is not gauging the full actuality. Were the revolutionary possibilities real and important in Germany in 1923 and 1932, in China in the 1920’s, in Spain in 1936, etc.? Trotsky not only saw but showed the possibilities. Stalin saw them too, in his own way, and he sabotaged them.</p>
<p>Wasn’t Stalin’s intervention – actively against these revolutions – a major part of the actuality? Wasn’t his counter-revolutionary intervention more real than Deutscher’s hypotheses about what Stalin was thinking? Elsewhere Deutscher has praised Stalin for leading the war against Hitler to victory, but isn’t it just as important that Stalin’s policies helped Hitler to come to power and later to launch the war?</p>
<p>However, this basic flaw in Deutscher’s historical method does not prevent him from making a generally correct evaluation of the reasons why “in the last decade of his life Stalin struggled desperately and unavailingly to save his policy of self - containment, or what remained of it, from the tempest of the time.”</p>
<p>Stalin wanted and expected to keep Eastern Europe capitalist after the war. His policy of reparations and pillage in those countries during the first postwar years was certainly inconsistent with their later incorporation into the Soviet social system. But the imperialists offered him no choice, and after the Truman Doctrine of 1947 he was driven to take over Eastern Europe definitively to prevent it from being used as a base for war against the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in the world, “Stalin gravely underrated the revolutionary ferment which was to engulf Europe and Asia toward the end of the war and after.”. He thought he could control it through the Communist Parties, and he did in some countries. But in others, his “pawns” began to move on their own – in Yugoslavia, in China – and he was in no position to stop them. He tried to restrain Mao Tse-tung and Tito, but they were under pressure from the masses in their own countries as well as the Kremlin, and they went ahead to lead revolutions against regimes Stalin had directed them to collaborate with.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“He stared with incredulity and fear at the rising tides of revolution which threatened to wash away the rock of ‘socialism in one country’ on which he had built his temple. This so-called prophet of Marxism and Leninism appears at this moment as the most conservative statesman in the world ... Stalinist self-containment was subsequently wrecked, partly by forces beyond Stalin’s control and partly by Stalin himself.”</p>
<p class="fst">These revolutions changed the international relationship of forces. The Soviet Union’s isolation, a cause of Stalinism and a pretext for its continuation, was ended. The threat of imperialist attack, while still real, appeared in a different light when the Soviet bloc encompassed one-third of the world’s population.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Discontent grew</p>
<p class="fst">All this stored new dynamite under the Kremlin, and new discontent spread among the Soviet masses, who could see that the reasons which led them to tolerate the rigors of the Stalinist dictatorship before the war no longer-obtained after the war.</p>
<p>This discontent could not be expressed in clear political terms while Stalin was alive, but Deutscher shows that it was expressed indirectly during the last two or three years in the debates over the alleged imminent “transition from socialism to communism” and the theory of the withering away of the state. Stalin didn’t intend these debates for that purpose, but they were utilized widely to express the desire of the masses and a part of the bureaucracy for an end or relaxation of the dictatorship, for an improvement of living standards, protection against the political police, etc. Deutscher sees these disguised forms in which the masses raised their demands as signs that an explosion was brewing before Stalin died.</p>
<p>Deutscher’s explanation of the background of the present situation are the best parts of his book. Next week we will discuss other parts, especially his reasons for thinking that the Soviet Union is headed toward “an orderly winding up of Stalinism anti a gradual democratic evolution” under the leadership of the Soviet bureaucracy.</p>
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George Breitman
Why the Soviet Bureaucracy Is in Crisis
(22 June 1953)
From The Militant, Vol. 17 No. 25, June 22, 1953.
What has been happening in the Soviet Union since Stalin died? Why? What lies ahead? Isaac Deutscher’s new book (Russia: What Next? Oxford University Press, 1953, 230 pp., $3) provides a convenient framework for examining the answers to these vital questions.
We have many profound differences with Deutscher, some of which were expressed in this paper’s review of his Stalin biography in 1949. But it must be recognized that he stands out conspicuously among the writers who are able to get books about the Soviet Union printed by capitalist publishers.
For one thing, Deutscher, who was expelled from the Polish Communist Party as an oppositionist in 1932, generally knows what he is writing about. He has a good grasp of Soviet history, fortified by a careful study of Leon Trotsky’s writings. His conclusions and interpretations are sometimes in conflict with the facts he presents, but he does not consciously hide or distort the facts. That alone makes him superior to most of the mob of present-day commentators on the Soviet Union.
Moreover, he does not pander to the prejudices of capitalist opinion, often expressing views regarded as “subversive” in Washington, and he deals with serious questions, including some of Marxist theory. These positive qualities are displayed in his latest book, even though it was written hastily in the first few weeks after Stalin’s death.
Changes caused crisis
Deutscher believes that Stalinism has ended or is in the process of being liquidated in the Soviet Union. Not merely because of Stalin’s death, but because of the severe crisis of Stalinism which had been latent for some time and was only brought into the open by his death. This will not come as a new idea to readers of The Militant and the magazine Fourth International, which have regularly called attention to the deep-going crisis of Stalinism and the causes for it. But they will be interested in Deutscher’s analysis of this crisis.
It arose, he shows, because of changes in economic, social and political conditions inside and outside the Soviet Union. The conditions that made it possible for Stalin to come to power have altered decisively; that is why his successors cannot play the same role he did. Stalin tried to his last breath to maintain the Stalinist system, but it was beginning to break up under and around him. Ironically, as Deutscher notes, Stalin himself contributed to the changes that spelled the doom of Stalinism.
Stalin came to power because of two important factors: (1) the economic and cultural backwardness of the Soviet Union, aggravated by ruinous years of war and civil war; (2) the isolation of the first workers state as a result of the delays and defeats of the revolution in Europe, which the Bolshevik leaders had expected to link up with and strengthen the revolution in Russia. Trotsky explained many times how and why these conditions led to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and its eventual destruction by the privileged bureaucratic caste which opposed the revolutionary-internationalist, proletarian-democratic policies of Lenin.
But the Stalinist bureaucracy was beset by many contradictions. Russia’s poverty enabled Stalinism to come to power, but to remain in power and to preserve its privileges, which were threatened on one side by imperialism and on the other by the possibilities of revolt by the Soviet masses, it needed a strong economy. This meant industrialization.
Although a section of the bureaucracy tended toward the restoration of capitalism in the 20’s, Stalin knew that the Soviet people would never tolerate it, and after some wavering he set out to industrialize the country through the extension of nationalization and planning, the economic foundations of the workers state created under Lenin.
Deutscher realizes that Stalin’s methods were brutal and costly, and vitiated part of the results (he wrongly attributes the over all results to Stalin’s “historical function”). It evidently does not occur to him that Stalin’s methods delayed rather than promoted the process as a whole. Deutscher does not appreciate the decisive part played by the firm social foundations of the Russian revolution, but he is correct in noting that under Stalin’s regime great transformations took place.
From an industrially backward country the Soviet Union became the second industrial power in the world. Soviet Chicagos, Pittsburghs and Detroits sprouted into all corners of a vast land. Tens of millions of peasants were turned into industrial workers. Small farms were broken up, and more tens of millions became collective farmers, torn out of conservative self-sufficiency and thrust into awareness of their dependence on government policy. A large part of the population was urbanized, practically all of it was made literate. New habits were formed, new patterns of culture evolved. The superiority of planned economy was proved in practice (and Deutscher correctly emphasizes that planning rather than Stalin’s forced-labor system was the dominant factor in industrial progress).
What effects did all this have on the social and political consciousness of the Soviet people? Obviously, big ones. The soil out of which Stalinism grew was being destroyed. “Technology, planning, urbanization, and industrial expansion are the deadliest enemies” of Stalinism. A nation of 160 to 200 million was driven, in 25 years time, “to jump the chasm which separated the epoch of the wooden plow from that of the atomic pile. The jump is not yet completed ... All we know is that the process is in a very advanced stage. Russia may still be mired up to her ankles or to her knees in the epoch of primitive magic; but she is not plunged in it up to her neck and ears, as she was a quarter of a century ago.”
“Self-containment”
During the same time that the backwardness of Russia, in which Stalinism had its roots, was being overcome, drastic changes on the international scene were further altering the relations between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Soviet masses.
Stalin began his regime by announcing the doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Among other things this signaled the abandonment of Lenin’s internationalism and in the course of time the adoption of an actively counter-revolutionary policy in which Stalin sought to ward off imperialist attack by striving to prevent revolution abroad. Using current formulations, Deutscher calls Stalin’s foreign policy “self-containment” as opposed to Lenin’s policy of stimulating “liberation” of other countries from capitalism.
Stalin tried to maintain the international status quo. The world Stalinist movement served as border guards to promote the Kremlin’s foreign policy and diplomatic maneuvers, regardless of their disastrous s pus effects on the interests of the workers in the capitalist countries.
The great saboteur
Deutscher knows and reviews all this. He is definitely not a Stalinist and would think it unjust to be called an apologist for Stalinism, but objectively that is what he shows himself to be when he discusses this phase of history. “Was Stalin then the great saboteur and betrayer of world revolution, as Trotsky saw him?” he asks. And his answer is:
“Yes and no. He certainly did his best to destroy the potentialities for revolution abroad – in the name of the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution. But how real and important were those potentialities between the two world wars? Trotsky saw that period as one sequence of great but missed revolutionary opportunities. The historian of the period cannot be so sure about its latent possibilities. He can gauge only its actuality, not its potentiality. Stalin worked on the assumption that there was no chance of a communist victory in the West or in the East. If that was so, then he was sacrificing to the selfishness of Bolshevik Russia the shadow, not the substance, of world revolution. He believed that by building up the Soviet `citadel of socialism’ he was making the only contribution toward world revolution that could be made at the time. This conviction allowed him to treat the labor movements of the world with boundless cynicism and contempt.”
But a historian who declines to examine and pass judgment on the potentialities is not gauging the full actuality. Were the revolutionary possibilities real and important in Germany in 1923 and 1932, in China in the 1920’s, in Spain in 1936, etc.? Trotsky not only saw but showed the possibilities. Stalin saw them too, in his own way, and he sabotaged them.
Wasn’t Stalin’s intervention – actively against these revolutions – a major part of the actuality? Wasn’t his counter-revolutionary intervention more real than Deutscher’s hypotheses about what Stalin was thinking? Elsewhere Deutscher has praised Stalin for leading the war against Hitler to victory, but isn’t it just as important that Stalin’s policies helped Hitler to come to power and later to launch the war?
However, this basic flaw in Deutscher’s historical method does not prevent him from making a generally correct evaluation of the reasons why “in the last decade of his life Stalin struggled desperately and unavailingly to save his policy of self - containment, or what remained of it, from the tempest of the time.”
Stalin wanted and expected to keep Eastern Europe capitalist after the war. His policy of reparations and pillage in those countries during the first postwar years was certainly inconsistent with their later incorporation into the Soviet social system. But the imperialists offered him no choice, and after the Truman Doctrine of 1947 he was driven to take over Eastern Europe definitively to prevent it from being used as a base for war against the Soviet Union.
Elsewhere in the world, “Stalin gravely underrated the revolutionary ferment which was to engulf Europe and Asia toward the end of the war and after.”. He thought he could control it through the Communist Parties, and he did in some countries. But in others, his “pawns” began to move on their own – in Yugoslavia, in China – and he was in no position to stop them. He tried to restrain Mao Tse-tung and Tito, but they were under pressure from the masses in their own countries as well as the Kremlin, and they went ahead to lead revolutions against regimes Stalin had directed them to collaborate with.
“He stared with incredulity and fear at the rising tides of revolution which threatened to wash away the rock of ‘socialism in one country’ on which he had built his temple. This so-called prophet of Marxism and Leninism appears at this moment as the most conservative statesman in the world ... Stalinist self-containment was subsequently wrecked, partly by forces beyond Stalin’s control and partly by Stalin himself.”
These revolutions changed the international relationship of forces. The Soviet Union’s isolation, a cause of Stalinism and a pretext for its continuation, was ended. The threat of imperialist attack, while still real, appeared in a different light when the Soviet bloc encompassed one-third of the world’s population.
Discontent grew
All this stored new dynamite under the Kremlin, and new discontent spread among the Soviet masses, who could see that the reasons which led them to tolerate the rigors of the Stalinist dictatorship before the war no longer-obtained after the war.
This discontent could not be expressed in clear political terms while Stalin was alive, but Deutscher shows that it was expressed indirectly during the last two or three years in the debates over the alleged imminent “transition from socialism to communism” and the theory of the withering away of the state. Stalin didn’t intend these debates for that purpose, but they were utilized widely to express the desire of the masses and a part of the bureaucracy for an end or relaxation of the dictatorship, for an improvement of living standards, protection against the political police, etc. Deutscher sees these disguised forms in which the masses raised their demands as signs that an explosion was brewing before Stalin died.
Deutscher’s explanation of the background of the present situation are the best parts of his book. Next week we will discuss other parts, especially his reasons for thinking that the Soviet Union is headed toward “an orderly winding up of Stalinism anti a gradual democratic evolution” under the leadership of the Soviet bureaucracy.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Labor’s Stake in Newark Election</h1>
<h4>War Boom Brings Trade Union Struggles;<br>
Labor Must Also Fight Boss Parties</h4>
<h3>(8 March 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_10" target="new">Vol. V. No. 10</a>, 8 March 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="c">(<strong>George Breitman is the Socialist Workers Party’s candidate for City Commission in the Newark, N.J. election.)</strong></p>
<p class="fst">The war boom in northern New Jersey, which began just before the presidential election last November and has been growing stronger each month since then, has put tens of thousands of workers back to work and has just about exhausted the lists of skilled and semi-skilled labor in the area.</p>
<p>This boom has not only provided tremendous profits to the bosses, but it has also, despite the bosses’ desires, been a shot in the arm for the trade union movement, and has resulted in an intensified organization of the heavy industries in the area, which have received the bulk of the more than a billion dollars in government contracts so far awarded to the employers of what can no longer properly be called “the Garden State.”</p>
<p>Workers are signing up in one factory after another, several militant strikes led by the CIO have already taken place, and important struggles are just around the bend in several important union situations.</p>
<p>All this has shown that the workers are ready to fight for better conditions, in spite of the waves of propaganda for war and for a “national unity” that will leave the workers helpless in the grip of the bosses.</p>
<p>But the question is this: Will this revived spirit of workers’ militancy and confidence be confined to the purely trade union field in this next period before the declaration of war? Will the workers continue to fight their enemies on the economic field at the same time that they leave their power untouched on the political field? Or will they logically the electoral and political front, challenging the bosses’ power This question will be decided for the rich industrial area of north Jersey in the course of the current Newark City Commission campaign, the only important election scheduled here between now and, the official declaration of war.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The main functions of the City Commission are concerned with money – with raising it by taxes and expending it for things like WPA. schools, hospitals, health care, housing, etc. The <em>method</em> of taxation, the <em>emphasis</em> on where the money is spent, and the <em>policies</em> pursued in the various departments combine to determine the character of the regime at City Hall.<br>
</p>
<h4>Two Boss Factions</h4>
<p class="fst">There has never been complete unity among the big business interests of the city over these questions. This has been reflected in the formation of two main factions at City Hall and in the old party machines.</p>
<p>The elections in 1937, at a time when the labor movement was on the advance, gave a clear majority to the group headed by Mayor Ellenstein, who called himself head of Newark’s New Deal.</p>
<p>This group was composed of the re-elected members of the Commission: Ellenstein himself, a shrewd independent Democrat supported by many unions, Labor’s Non-Partisan League and (unofficially) by the Stalinists, mainly because of his ’37 slogan, “Keep Hague Out of Newark City Hall”; Pearce Franklin, Regular Republican and self-advertised “Champion of the Underprivileged” who made much of the fact that the relief and health administrations are included in his department; and Michael Duffy, a habitual drunken nonentity re-elected by his police and fire department supporters.</p>
<p>The other two elected, who united front against the predominant machine, were Vincent J. Murphy and Joseph Byrne. Murphy (who received the highest number of votes and dislikes the Ellenstein group because by precedent he should have become Mayor) is the secretary-treasurer of the State Federation of Labor, and was elected with the backing of trade unions, LNPL, and the Communist Party. The campaign literature put him forward as “trade unionist, veteran, banker.”</p>
<p>Byrne, wealthy insurance company head, was the only man on his slate of five candidates, called the “Citizens’ Ticket,” who managed to be elected. This ticket had been hand-picked by the County Democratic Committee and had the backing, of Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City.<br>
</p>
<h4>Byrne’s Record</h4>
<p class="fst">Although the Ellenstein group had a definite majority, Byrne began to build his bridges for the 1941 elections by picking as his central theme the ever-increasing tax rate (the $3.28 tax rate of 1933 had become $4.61 by 1938) and building himself up as the friend of “the taxpayer.”</p>
<p>Upon the death of Commissioner Duffy, Murphy refused to vote for any of Ellenstein’s nominees to fill the vacancy unless assured in advance that he would get Duffy’s department instead of his own unpopular finance department (really principled “labor” politics!). To this day, in. spite of hundreds of ballots, no fifth commissioner has been selected. The deadlock permitted Byrne to come to the front, because four votes are needed for appropriations. His course can be understood by an account of a few of his acts.</p>
<p>As soon as he was elected, he fired a large number of scrubwomen who had been employed to clean City Hall, and increased the burden on those whom he kept. Money had to be saved for the taxpayer, he said. For a long time he refused to vote for appropriations to finish the four swimming pools in the slum neighborhoods. He did not believe so much money should be “wasted.”</p>
<p>In 1938 he refused to vote for appropriations to continue the street repair projects which gave employment to about 10,000 WPA workers. He agreed with the reactionary Broad Street Association, of which he is a member, and the Chamber of Commerce, that it cost too much, and relief would be cheaper. He indulged in the worst kind of red-baiting in refusing to listen to the protests of the unemployed organizations against the mounting relief cuts.</p>
<p>To show his contempt for the labor movement, and his efficiency as a tax rate cutter, he overrode the decisions of his fellow Commissioners on two important city contracts a few week ago. Bids had been made for some city automobiles and for supplying milk for city institutions. The lowest bidders for each had been the Ford Motor Co. and the Newark Milk and Cream Co. The CIO protested the award of the contract to Ford because of Ford’s notorious anti-labor activities, and the AFL objected to the milk company because it had interfered with organization of its employees. The other three Commissioners, ears to the ground and aware of the nearness of elections, refused to award the contracts to them. Whereupon Byrne, claiming a law firm had told him he had the authority because the Department of Central Purchase was in his department, ignored the decision of the Commission and awarded the contracts on his own authority.</p>
<p>A bloc of the big business groups now being formed to win the elections in May has already selected Byrne as one of the two banner-bearers of an openly reactionary and anti-labor slate.</p>
<p class="c"><strong>(Next week: The other old party candidates)</strong></p>
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George Breitman
Labor’s Stake in Newark Election
War Boom Brings Trade Union Struggles;
Labor Must Also Fight Boss Parties
(8 March 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V. No. 10, 8 March 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
(George Breitman is the Socialist Workers Party’s candidate for City Commission in the Newark, N.J. election.)
The war boom in northern New Jersey, which began just before the presidential election last November and has been growing stronger each month since then, has put tens of thousands of workers back to work and has just about exhausted the lists of skilled and semi-skilled labor in the area.
This boom has not only provided tremendous profits to the bosses, but it has also, despite the bosses’ desires, been a shot in the arm for the trade union movement, and has resulted in an intensified organization of the heavy industries in the area, which have received the bulk of the more than a billion dollars in government contracts so far awarded to the employers of what can no longer properly be called “the Garden State.”
Workers are signing up in one factory after another, several militant strikes led by the CIO have already taken place, and important struggles are just around the bend in several important union situations.
All this has shown that the workers are ready to fight for better conditions, in spite of the waves of propaganda for war and for a “national unity” that will leave the workers helpless in the grip of the bosses.
But the question is this: Will this revived spirit of workers’ militancy and confidence be confined to the purely trade union field in this next period before the declaration of war? Will the workers continue to fight their enemies on the economic field at the same time that they leave their power untouched on the political field? Or will they logically the electoral and political front, challenging the bosses’ power This question will be decided for the rich industrial area of north Jersey in the course of the current Newark City Commission campaign, the only important election scheduled here between now and, the official declaration of war.
* * *
The main functions of the City Commission are concerned with money – with raising it by taxes and expending it for things like WPA. schools, hospitals, health care, housing, etc. The method of taxation, the emphasis on where the money is spent, and the policies pursued in the various departments combine to determine the character of the regime at City Hall.
Two Boss Factions
There has never been complete unity among the big business interests of the city over these questions. This has been reflected in the formation of two main factions at City Hall and in the old party machines.
The elections in 1937, at a time when the labor movement was on the advance, gave a clear majority to the group headed by Mayor Ellenstein, who called himself head of Newark’s New Deal.
This group was composed of the re-elected members of the Commission: Ellenstein himself, a shrewd independent Democrat supported by many unions, Labor’s Non-Partisan League and (unofficially) by the Stalinists, mainly because of his ’37 slogan, “Keep Hague Out of Newark City Hall”; Pearce Franklin, Regular Republican and self-advertised “Champion of the Underprivileged” who made much of the fact that the relief and health administrations are included in his department; and Michael Duffy, a habitual drunken nonentity re-elected by his police and fire department supporters.
The other two elected, who united front against the predominant machine, were Vincent J. Murphy and Joseph Byrne. Murphy (who received the highest number of votes and dislikes the Ellenstein group because by precedent he should have become Mayor) is the secretary-treasurer of the State Federation of Labor, and was elected with the backing of trade unions, LNPL, and the Communist Party. The campaign literature put him forward as “trade unionist, veteran, banker.”
Byrne, wealthy insurance company head, was the only man on his slate of five candidates, called the “Citizens’ Ticket,” who managed to be elected. This ticket had been hand-picked by the County Democratic Committee and had the backing, of Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City.
Byrne’s Record
Although the Ellenstein group had a definite majority, Byrne began to build his bridges for the 1941 elections by picking as his central theme the ever-increasing tax rate (the $3.28 tax rate of 1933 had become $4.61 by 1938) and building himself up as the friend of “the taxpayer.”
Upon the death of Commissioner Duffy, Murphy refused to vote for any of Ellenstein’s nominees to fill the vacancy unless assured in advance that he would get Duffy’s department instead of his own unpopular finance department (really principled “labor” politics!). To this day, in. spite of hundreds of ballots, no fifth commissioner has been selected. The deadlock permitted Byrne to come to the front, because four votes are needed for appropriations. His course can be understood by an account of a few of his acts.
As soon as he was elected, he fired a large number of scrubwomen who had been employed to clean City Hall, and increased the burden on those whom he kept. Money had to be saved for the taxpayer, he said. For a long time he refused to vote for appropriations to finish the four swimming pools in the slum neighborhoods. He did not believe so much money should be “wasted.”
In 1938 he refused to vote for appropriations to continue the street repair projects which gave employment to about 10,000 WPA workers. He agreed with the reactionary Broad Street Association, of which he is a member, and the Chamber of Commerce, that it cost too much, and relief would be cheaper. He indulged in the worst kind of red-baiting in refusing to listen to the protests of the unemployed organizations against the mounting relief cuts.
To show his contempt for the labor movement, and his efficiency as a tax rate cutter, he overrode the decisions of his fellow Commissioners on two important city contracts a few week ago. Bids had been made for some city automobiles and for supplying milk for city institutions. The lowest bidders for each had been the Ford Motor Co. and the Newark Milk and Cream Co. The CIO protested the award of the contract to Ford because of Ford’s notorious anti-labor activities, and the AFL objected to the milk company because it had interfered with organization of its employees. The other three Commissioners, ears to the ground and aware of the nearness of elections, refused to award the contracts to them. Whereupon Byrne, claiming a law firm had told him he had the authority because the Department of Central Purchase was in his department, ignored the decision of the Commission and awarded the contracts on his own authority.
A bloc of the big business groups now being formed to win the elections in May has already selected Byrne as one of the two banner-bearers of an openly reactionary and anti-labor slate.
(Next week: The other old party candidates)
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>How Stalinism Will Be Ended</h1>
<h3>(29 June 1953)</h3>
<hr>
<p class="info">From <strong><em>The Militant</em></strong>, <a href="../../../newspape/themilitant/1953/v17n26-jun-29-1953-mil.pdf">Vol. 17 No. 26</a>, June 29, 1953.</p>
<hr>
<p class="fst">In his funeral speech over Stalin, Premier Malenkov pledged that he would continue Stalin’s policies. But Isaac Deutscher (in his new book, <em>Russia: What Next?</em>) does not believe this is likely, except with regard to economic-social policy (planning, nationalization, etc.).</p>
<p>As evidence that the new regime has struck out on a non-Stalinist path, Deutscher points to step it took in its first weeks – re-organization of the party and government <em>machinery</em>, the amnesty, the promise to reform the penal cone, reversal of the doctors’ frame-up, price cuts, criticism of one-man autocracy, appeals for collective leadership, etc.</p>
<p>Now these acts do represent departures from some of the rigid bureaucratic practices associated with Stalin, and they are so viewed by the Soviet people. But do they mean that the Malenkov regime has instituted a decisive break with Stalinism?</p>
<p>Deutscher seems to think so although he states this view cautiously. He recognizes that the government was more or less forced, after Stalin’s death – for reasons explained in our article last week – to conciliate the Soviet people with measures to satisfy some of their aspirations and to keep them hoping for more concessions. He even writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“As one analyzes Malenkov’s first moves, one can almost hear him pleading in the inner circle of the Kremlin: Better to abolish the worst features of Stalinism from above than to wait until they are abolished from below.”</p>
<p class="fst">In other words, one of the basic motivations for the new measures is a fear that the Soviet people may move to overthrow the dictatorship, and a desire to head it off. But when these measures are viewed in this light, doesn’t it become clear that they are designed not to weaken the dictatorship but to strengthen it?</p>
<p>A dictatorship cleansed of some of its more repressive and irrational features might secure a broader base of support or tolerance than it did under Stalin, especially during the first stages, when the people are hopeful of change and the regime has a desperate need to consolidate its position. But it would remain a dictatorship just the <em>same</em>, wouldn’t it?</p>
<p>Deutscher, however, tends to stress only one side of the reasons for the new measures. That is because it is convenient for his theory, which amounts roughly to something like this:<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Sees tug of war </p>
<p class="fst">A tug of war has been going on inside the bureaucracy for some years. One section wants to “liberalize” and “rationalize” Stalinism; at home it wants to offer some concessions to the people to keep them from getting out of hand; abroad, it wants to offer some limited concessions to the imperialists in order to avert war, which it thinks can be postponed for a relatively long time.</p>
<p>Their opponents, Deutscher continues, are the die-hard Stalinists; who draw their strength from the political police (bitterly against any changes in the status quo at home) and from the army (whose leaders think war is inevitable and refuse to yield any concessions that might be of strategic value to the imperialists in the coming war). He views the doctor’s frame-up as a plot by the police, perhaps in collusion with the army, to weaken the reform forces.</p>
<p>Deutscher thinks the “liberalizers,” in the form of the Malenkov regime, now have the upper hand. He admits that Malenkov, because of his Stalinist training, may not want to go too far; that he does not want to destroy the police, but only to tame and control them; that he may reverse his path, or be overthrown by the die-hards, if the masses get out of hand or if there is a war; etc. But on the whole he suggests that the Malenkov regime represents the beginning of the reform of the Soviet bureaucracy.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Three variants</p>
<p>In his view, there are three variants:</p>
<p class="quoteb">1. A “relapse into Stalinism,” with the police back in the saddle. If this happens, he doesn’t think it would last long because the same factors that have been working to undermine Stalinism in recent years would operate to end its revival. Even if the police should unite with the generals to take over power, he believes this would mean a military dictatorship rather than the traditional form of Stalinism.</p>
<p class="quoteb">2. Military dictatorship. Deutscher thinks this is possible because of the generals’ demand for a tough policy in foreign affairs. He does not consider it probable unless the Malenkov regime proves unable to keep the people in line, and does not believe it would mean the restoration of capitalism.</p>
<p class="quoteb">3. “Democratic regeneration.” He sees this, on balance, as the most likely variant. He assumes that Malenkov wants to go at least part of the way in this direction, and that the masses would support his moves and give his regime the necessary stability within which it could initiate a return to proletarian democracy<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">How will it end?</p>
<p class="fst">Some of Deutscher’s arguments in support of this view are based on speculation pure and simple, which we can neither accept nor reject at this time. But we must reject his major conclusion, which flows from fatal defects in his analysis of Stalinism.</p>
<p>We agree that even while Stalin was alive the base of Stalinism was being undermined by Soviet economic and cultural progress and the spread of revolution throughout the world. We agree that the new regime, whatever its wishes, cannot rule in the same way that Stalin did. We agree that the end of Stalinism has begun (but not, as Deutscher implies in some places, that Stalinism is now a thing of the past). We also agree that the only real alternative to Stalinism in the Soviet Union is workers’ democracy. But we emphatically disagree with the contention that the end of Stalinism is going to come about as a result of a self-reform of the Soviet bureaucracy.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Nature of bureaucracy</p>
<p class="fst">What Deutscher doesn’t understand and slurs over is the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy as a special social stratum, a caste, whose interests clash with those of the workers and peasants. The bureaucracy did not usurp its privileges merely to enhance its prestige: it has material interests at stake which it will fight to the death to preserve against the workers and peasants who want a reduction of inequality in the sphere of consumption.</p>
<p>Consequently a harmonious reconciliation between the bureaucracy and the masses is not the easy possibility, even probability, that Deutscher airily assumes it to be. The bureaucrats are not going to relinquish their caste privileges until they have been defeated decisively by the working class.</p>
<p>This is not to deny that the downfall of the Soviet bureaucracy may be preceded by a split in its ranks, with one section perhaps going over to the people. But that is not the same thing as expecting a reform of the bureaucracy to lead to “an orderly winding up of Stalinism and a gradual democratic evolution.”</p>
<p>Another thing Deutscher doesn’t understand or accept is the Marxist analysis of the present state form in the Soviet Union as a Bonapartist dictatorship. Although Deutscher is acquainted with this analysis, first worked out by Trotsky, he acts as if he isn’t, and he doesn’t counterpose any other analysis. But he shows that he rejects it by defining Bonapartism almost exclusively as a purely military dictatorship, and talks about it only as a future danger.</p>
<p>This makes it easier for him to spin his theory about the approaching metamorphosis of the dictatorship into its opposite. But the Malenkov regime’s concessions to the people don’t change its character as a Bonapartist dictatorship; they only indicate that the dictatorship has been weakened. A weakened Bonapartist dictatorship, even when it waves the banner of “liberalization,” is still a Bonapartist dictatorship. And Bonapartist dictatorships generally have to be overthrown.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">What Trotsky sought</p>
<p class="fst">Deutscher’s illusions and runaway speculations even lead him to write:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the 1930’s Trotsky advocated a ‘limited political revolution’ against Stalinism. He saw it not as a full-fledged social upheaval but as an ‘administrative operation’ directed against the chiefs of the political police and a small clique terrorizing the nation. As so often, Trotsky was tragically ahead of his time and prophetic in his vision of the future, although he could not imagine that Stalin’s closest associates would act in accordance with his scheme. What Malenkov’s government is carrying out now is precisely the ‘limited revolution’ envisaged by Trotsky.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is a flagrant distortion of Trotsky’s views on the regeneration of the Soviet Union. We don’t know which article of Trotsky Deutscher is citing, or when it was written. The Stalin regime had not yet reached its fully totalitarian form in the early 30’s, when Trotsky thought it was still possible to reform the Comintern; it was not until the mid-30’s that Trotsky rounded out his analysis of Soviet Bonapartism and the measures required to get rid of it.</p><p class="sub">A political revolution</p>
<p>But Deutscher knows that toward the end of Trotsky’s life, and especially after the Moscow Trial purges, he never tired of advocating an “unlimited” political revolution against Stalinism. The revolution Trotsky advocated was of course not directed against the social system in the Soviet Union, which he defended to the end. What he worked for was a political revolution – against social inequality and political repression, for the regeneration of Soviet democracy and the legalization of Soviet parties.</p>
<p>In fact Trotsky went so far, in the 1938 Transitional Program, as to call on the workers “to drive the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy out of the Soviets” in the same sense that capitalist representatives were excluded from the original Soviets.</p>
<p>Anybody who equates such a revolution, which the bureaucracy would fight tooth and nail, with the “liberalization” measures taken by Malenkov and Co., is losing touch with reality or adapting himself to Soviet Bonapartism. In neither case can he render any service to the fight for Soviet democracy.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Socialist regeneration</p>
<p class="fst">The reality is this: The Soviet dictatorship is in the throes of a deep crisis. As a result, the bureaucracy has offered certain concessions to the workers to keep them from moving on their own. Instead of satisfying the workers for long, these concessions will encourage them to press for new demands (the East German political strike was a preview of what is going to happen in the Soviet bloc as a whole). The crisis will produce further divisions and conflicts among the bureaucracy which the workers will be able to use for their awn purposes. War may delay the process, but cannot abolish it. The Soviet Bonapartist dictatorship is doomed, as Trotsky predicted it would be doomed, by the spread of world revolution, and it will be replaced by the democratic power of the Soviet working class. The change will take place through a political revolution against the Kremlin regime, not through its reform. There is no other way to the socialist regeneration of the Soviet Union.</p>
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George Breitman
How Stalinism Will Be Ended
(29 June 1953)
From The Militant, Vol. 17 No. 26, June 29, 1953.
In his funeral speech over Stalin, Premier Malenkov pledged that he would continue Stalin’s policies. But Isaac Deutscher (in his new book, Russia: What Next?) does not believe this is likely, except with regard to economic-social policy (planning, nationalization, etc.).
As evidence that the new regime has struck out on a non-Stalinist path, Deutscher points to step it took in its first weeks – re-organization of the party and government machinery, the amnesty, the promise to reform the penal cone, reversal of the doctors’ frame-up, price cuts, criticism of one-man autocracy, appeals for collective leadership, etc.
Now these acts do represent departures from some of the rigid bureaucratic practices associated with Stalin, and they are so viewed by the Soviet people. But do they mean that the Malenkov regime has instituted a decisive break with Stalinism?
Deutscher seems to think so although he states this view cautiously. He recognizes that the government was more or less forced, after Stalin’s death – for reasons explained in our article last week – to conciliate the Soviet people with measures to satisfy some of their aspirations and to keep them hoping for more concessions. He even writes:
“As one analyzes Malenkov’s first moves, one can almost hear him pleading in the inner circle of the Kremlin: Better to abolish the worst features of Stalinism from above than to wait until they are abolished from below.”
In other words, one of the basic motivations for the new measures is a fear that the Soviet people may move to overthrow the dictatorship, and a desire to head it off. But when these measures are viewed in this light, doesn’t it become clear that they are designed not to weaken the dictatorship but to strengthen it?
A dictatorship cleansed of some of its more repressive and irrational features might secure a broader base of support or tolerance than it did under Stalin, especially during the first stages, when the people are hopeful of change and the regime has a desperate need to consolidate its position. But it would remain a dictatorship just the same, wouldn’t it?
Deutscher, however, tends to stress only one side of the reasons for the new measures. That is because it is convenient for his theory, which amounts roughly to something like this:
Sees tug of war
A tug of war has been going on inside the bureaucracy for some years. One section wants to “liberalize” and “rationalize” Stalinism; at home it wants to offer some concessions to the people to keep them from getting out of hand; abroad, it wants to offer some limited concessions to the imperialists in order to avert war, which it thinks can be postponed for a relatively long time.
Their opponents, Deutscher continues, are the die-hard Stalinists; who draw their strength from the political police (bitterly against any changes in the status quo at home) and from the army (whose leaders think war is inevitable and refuse to yield any concessions that might be of strategic value to the imperialists in the coming war). He views the doctor’s frame-up as a plot by the police, perhaps in collusion with the army, to weaken the reform forces.
Deutscher thinks the “liberalizers,” in the form of the Malenkov regime, now have the upper hand. He admits that Malenkov, because of his Stalinist training, may not want to go too far; that he does not want to destroy the police, but only to tame and control them; that he may reverse his path, or be overthrown by the die-hards, if the masses get out of hand or if there is a war; etc. But on the whole he suggests that the Malenkov regime represents the beginning of the reform of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Three variants
In his view, there are three variants:
1. A “relapse into Stalinism,” with the police back in the saddle. If this happens, he doesn’t think it would last long because the same factors that have been working to undermine Stalinism in recent years would operate to end its revival. Even if the police should unite with the generals to take over power, he believes this would mean a military dictatorship rather than the traditional form of Stalinism.
2. Military dictatorship. Deutscher thinks this is possible because of the generals’ demand for a tough policy in foreign affairs. He does not consider it probable unless the Malenkov regime proves unable to keep the people in line, and does not believe it would mean the restoration of capitalism.
3. “Democratic regeneration.” He sees this, on balance, as the most likely variant. He assumes that Malenkov wants to go at least part of the way in this direction, and that the masses would support his moves and give his regime the necessary stability within which it could initiate a return to proletarian democracy
How will it end?
Some of Deutscher’s arguments in support of this view are based on speculation pure and simple, which we can neither accept nor reject at this time. But we must reject his major conclusion, which flows from fatal defects in his analysis of Stalinism.
We agree that even while Stalin was alive the base of Stalinism was being undermined by Soviet economic and cultural progress and the spread of revolution throughout the world. We agree that the new regime, whatever its wishes, cannot rule in the same way that Stalin did. We agree that the end of Stalinism has begun (but not, as Deutscher implies in some places, that Stalinism is now a thing of the past). We also agree that the only real alternative to Stalinism in the Soviet Union is workers’ democracy. But we emphatically disagree with the contention that the end of Stalinism is going to come about as a result of a self-reform of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Nature of bureaucracy
What Deutscher doesn’t understand and slurs over is the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy as a special social stratum, a caste, whose interests clash with those of the workers and peasants. The bureaucracy did not usurp its privileges merely to enhance its prestige: it has material interests at stake which it will fight to the death to preserve against the workers and peasants who want a reduction of inequality in the sphere of consumption.
Consequently a harmonious reconciliation between the bureaucracy and the masses is not the easy possibility, even probability, that Deutscher airily assumes it to be. The bureaucrats are not going to relinquish their caste privileges until they have been defeated decisively by the working class.
This is not to deny that the downfall of the Soviet bureaucracy may be preceded by a split in its ranks, with one section perhaps going over to the people. But that is not the same thing as expecting a reform of the bureaucracy to lead to “an orderly winding up of Stalinism and a gradual democratic evolution.”
Another thing Deutscher doesn’t understand or accept is the Marxist analysis of the present state form in the Soviet Union as a Bonapartist dictatorship. Although Deutscher is acquainted with this analysis, first worked out by Trotsky, he acts as if he isn’t, and he doesn’t counterpose any other analysis. But he shows that he rejects it by defining Bonapartism almost exclusively as a purely military dictatorship, and talks about it only as a future danger.
This makes it easier for him to spin his theory about the approaching metamorphosis of the dictatorship into its opposite. But the Malenkov regime’s concessions to the people don’t change its character as a Bonapartist dictatorship; they only indicate that the dictatorship has been weakened. A weakened Bonapartist dictatorship, even when it waves the banner of “liberalization,” is still a Bonapartist dictatorship. And Bonapartist dictatorships generally have to be overthrown.
What Trotsky sought
Deutscher’s illusions and runaway speculations even lead him to write:
“In the 1930’s Trotsky advocated a ‘limited political revolution’ against Stalinism. He saw it not as a full-fledged social upheaval but as an ‘administrative operation’ directed against the chiefs of the political police and a small clique terrorizing the nation. As so often, Trotsky was tragically ahead of his time and prophetic in his vision of the future, although he could not imagine that Stalin’s closest associates would act in accordance with his scheme. What Malenkov’s government is carrying out now is precisely the ‘limited revolution’ envisaged by Trotsky.”
This is a flagrant distortion of Trotsky’s views on the regeneration of the Soviet Union. We don’t know which article of Trotsky Deutscher is citing, or when it was written. The Stalin regime had not yet reached its fully totalitarian form in the early 30’s, when Trotsky thought it was still possible to reform the Comintern; it was not until the mid-30’s that Trotsky rounded out his analysis of Soviet Bonapartism and the measures required to get rid of it.A political revolution
But Deutscher knows that toward the end of Trotsky’s life, and especially after the Moscow Trial purges, he never tired of advocating an “unlimited” political revolution against Stalinism. The revolution Trotsky advocated was of course not directed against the social system in the Soviet Union, which he defended to the end. What he worked for was a political revolution – against social inequality and political repression, for the regeneration of Soviet democracy and the legalization of Soviet parties.
In fact Trotsky went so far, in the 1938 Transitional Program, as to call on the workers “to drive the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy out of the Soviets” in the same sense that capitalist representatives were excluded from the original Soviets.
Anybody who equates such a revolution, which the bureaucracy would fight tooth and nail, with the “liberalization” measures taken by Malenkov and Co., is losing touch with reality or adapting himself to Soviet Bonapartism. In neither case can he render any service to the fight for Soviet democracy.
Socialist regeneration
The reality is this: The Soviet dictatorship is in the throes of a deep crisis. As a result, the bureaucracy has offered certain concessions to the workers to keep them from moving on their own. Instead of satisfying the workers for long, these concessions will encourage them to press for new demands (the East German political strike was a preview of what is going to happen in the Soviet bloc as a whole). The crisis will produce further divisions and conflicts among the bureaucracy which the workers will be able to use for their awn purposes. War may delay the process, but cannot abolish it. The Soviet Bonapartist dictatorship is doomed, as Trotsky predicted it would be doomed, by the spread of world revolution, and it will be replaced by the democratic power of the Soviet working class. The change will take place through a political revolution against the Kremlin regime, not through its reform. There is no other way to the socialist regeneration of the Soviet Union.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(26 April 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_17" target="new">Vol. V No. 17</a>, 26 April 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>Mass Action Against Jim Crow</h4>
<p class="fst">The N.A.A.C.P. picket lines “before the gates of industrial plants holding government defense contracts and refusing to hire colored workers,” scheduled to be held in 50 key cities on Saturday morning, April 26, with an estimated minimum of 33,000 people participating, is a step to be welcomed and supported.</p>
<p><em>The business of lobbying and waiting in government chambers hat in hand, and writing to Congressmen and the President, cannot do much toward breaking down the bars of industrial Jim Crowism. Talk is necessary, but it must be supplemented by action. The bosses read letters, and telegrams, the government departments meet with committees of 10 or 15 people – but it takes mass demonstrations involving thousands to show them that the Negro workers are not merely asking for their rights, they are DEMANDING them.</em></p>
<p>It is also gratifying to learn that A. Philip Randolph, head of the Pullman Porters Union, has not only called for, a march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington, but is also going ahead with plans to organize it.</p>
<p>Charley Cherokee of the <strong>Chicago Defender</strong> states that Randolph is “quietly” going ahead with his plans for the march. We doubt that “quiet” preparations will actually mobilize the Negro masses into action. What is required is a conference of militant Negro organizations to organize and conduct the affair. We don’t doubt that Randolph is seriously interested in making the march a successful turnout of the resentment of the Negro people, but we find it hard to believe that any one man, even one with the support which Randolph undoubtedly has, can by himself’ carry out the job.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Read Your Own Paper!</h4>
<p class="fst">Horace Cayton, labor editor of the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, this week struck out at those “race leaders” responsible for the Ford, situation, “which so nearly spelt the doom for Negroes in the new labor movement.” He says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“These ‘race men’ should be smoked out and made to take a position. There is no middle ground. In Detroit the Negro community, depending for employment on the automobile industry, must determine its attitude toward organized labor – no community organization can be impartial – they are either for or against ...”</p>
<p class="fst">We would suggest that Cayton read the Detroit edition of his paper, and an article from Detroit in the current issue of all its editions, written by John R. Williams, who says: “Both Mr. Marshall (Ford’s hatchet man) and Mr. Patterson (UAW organizer), along with thousands of other’s, have, congratulated <strong>The Courier</strong> for its impartial presentation of these issues ...”</p>
<p>The <strong>Courier</strong> too might have improved the situation which so nearly spelt the doom for Negroes in the new labor movement, if it had been less “impartial.” Cayton is right in saying there is no middle ground. If you weren’t with the union, then you weren’t with the best interests of the Negro workers. The workers needed support, not impartiality.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>Negroes and the Mediation Board</h4>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Chicago Defender</strong>, in commenting on the makeup of the National Mediation Board, deplores the appointment of George Harrison, head of the lily-white Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, who is well known for his anti-Negro bias, and the failure of Roosevelt to appoint a Negro to the Board even though the Negro people constitute one tenth of our population and a much greater proportion of the working class.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Under the circumstances,” say the <strong>Defender</strong>, “Negroes must abandon all hopes of being beneficiaries of impartial judgment, unless the administration cancels the Harrison appointment and substitutes a black man in his place.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>This is posing the question incorrectly. Certainly the Negro workers (and the white workers too) should rid themselves of illusions that they will get “impartial judgment” from this Board. They wont get it because there is no such thing. Either you are for the workers, or you are for the bosses.</em></p>
<p>The appointment of Harrison does serve to show how little Roosevelt considers the interests of the Negro workers. But his recall and the appointment of a Negro on the Board would not change the fundamental fact tht the Negro, like the labor representatives, would only serve as fig-leaf covering to the anti-labor, anti-Negro role of the Mediation Board.</p>
<p>Instead of calling for the appointment of a Negro to the Board, the Negro press should join <strong>The Militant</strong> in calling for the resignation of all the labor representatives from the Board and in telling them that their place is with the workers, Negro and white, on the picket lines.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h4>Jim Crow Squadron Boycotted</h4>
<p class="fst">In spite of all efforts to make the Jim Crow Air Corps Squadron at Tuskegee seem appetizing to the Negro people, there has been a definite boycott against the segregated set-up handed down front Washington to quiet the protests about discrimination.</p>
<p>The Associated Negro Press called on the colored newspapers to feature stories about the opportunities that lay in store for young men who want to fly.</p>
<p>The <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> ran an announcement on its editorial page. Mrs. Roosevelt had pictures of herself taken and printed in the Negro press, showing her preparing to go up in a plane with a Negro pilot.</p>
<p><em>And in spite of this high pressure drive, the ridiculously low figure of applicants permitted into the squadron has still not been filled. Qualified young men don’t like a Jim Crow squadron.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(26 April 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 17, 26 April 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Mass Action Against Jim Crow
The N.A.A.C.P. picket lines “before the gates of industrial plants holding government defense contracts and refusing to hire colored workers,” scheduled to be held in 50 key cities on Saturday morning, April 26, with an estimated minimum of 33,000 people participating, is a step to be welcomed and supported.
The business of lobbying and waiting in government chambers hat in hand, and writing to Congressmen and the President, cannot do much toward breaking down the bars of industrial Jim Crowism. Talk is necessary, but it must be supplemented by action. The bosses read letters, and telegrams, the government departments meet with committees of 10 or 15 people – but it takes mass demonstrations involving thousands to show them that the Negro workers are not merely asking for their rights, they are DEMANDING them.
It is also gratifying to learn that A. Philip Randolph, head of the Pullman Porters Union, has not only called for, a march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington, but is also going ahead with plans to organize it.
Charley Cherokee of the Chicago Defender states that Randolph is “quietly” going ahead with his plans for the march. We doubt that “quiet” preparations will actually mobilize the Negro masses into action. What is required is a conference of militant Negro organizations to organize and conduct the affair. We don’t doubt that Randolph is seriously interested in making the march a successful turnout of the resentment of the Negro people, but we find it hard to believe that any one man, even one with the support which Randolph undoubtedly has, can by himself’ carry out the job.
Read Your Own Paper!
Horace Cayton, labor editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, this week struck out at those “race leaders” responsible for the Ford, situation, “which so nearly spelt the doom for Negroes in the new labor movement.” He says:
“These ‘race men’ should be smoked out and made to take a position. There is no middle ground. In Detroit the Negro community, depending for employment on the automobile industry, must determine its attitude toward organized labor – no community organization can be impartial – they are either for or against ...”
We would suggest that Cayton read the Detroit edition of his paper, and an article from Detroit in the current issue of all its editions, written by John R. Williams, who says: “Both Mr. Marshall (Ford’s hatchet man) and Mr. Patterson (UAW organizer), along with thousands of other’s, have, congratulated The Courier for its impartial presentation of these issues ...”
The Courier too might have improved the situation which so nearly spelt the doom for Negroes in the new labor movement, if it had been less “impartial.” Cayton is right in saying there is no middle ground. If you weren’t with the union, then you weren’t with the best interests of the Negro workers. The workers needed support, not impartiality.
Negroes and the Mediation Board
The Chicago Defender, in commenting on the makeup of the National Mediation Board, deplores the appointment of George Harrison, head of the lily-white Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, who is well known for his anti-Negro bias, and the failure of Roosevelt to appoint a Negro to the Board even though the Negro people constitute one tenth of our population and a much greater proportion of the working class.
“Under the circumstances,” say the Defender, “Negroes must abandon all hopes of being beneficiaries of impartial judgment, unless the administration cancels the Harrison appointment and substitutes a black man in his place.”
This is posing the question incorrectly. Certainly the Negro workers (and the white workers too) should rid themselves of illusions that they will get “impartial judgment” from this Board. They wont get it because there is no such thing. Either you are for the workers, or you are for the bosses.
The appointment of Harrison does serve to show how little Roosevelt considers the interests of the Negro workers. But his recall and the appointment of a Negro on the Board would not change the fundamental fact tht the Negro, like the labor representatives, would only serve as fig-leaf covering to the anti-labor, anti-Negro role of the Mediation Board.
Instead of calling for the appointment of a Negro to the Board, the Negro press should join The Militant in calling for the resignation of all the labor representatives from the Board and in telling them that their place is with the workers, Negro and white, on the picket lines.
* * *
Jim Crow Squadron Boycotted
In spite of all efforts to make the Jim Crow Air Corps Squadron at Tuskegee seem appetizing to the Negro people, there has been a definite boycott against the segregated set-up handed down front Washington to quiet the protests about discrimination.
The Associated Negro Press called on the colored newspapers to feature stories about the opportunities that lay in store for young men who want to fly.
The Pittsburgh Courier ran an announcement on its editorial page. Mrs. Roosevelt had pictures of herself taken and printed in the Negro press, showing her preparing to go up in a plane with a Negro pilot.
And in spite of this high pressure drive, the ridiculously low figure of applicants permitted into the squadron has still not been filled. Qualified young men don’t like a Jim Crow squadron.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>The Prospects for Socialist Revolution</h1>
<h3>(10 May 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_19" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 19</a>, 10 May 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Any discussion of the workers’ political capacity to establish socialism must necessarily include an examination of the period from 1914 to the present day. But Jean Vannier’s survey of modern conditions and prospects for revolution (March <strong>Partisan Review</strong>) is just as biased and misleading as his treatment of historical trends, which we have discussed in previous articles.</p>
<p>According to Vannier, Marx’s fundamental hypothesis – that the workers can and must take power – seemed legitimate in the 19th century. <em>But now, he insists, it must be discarded because “the course of the proletariat has, for more than a third of a century, been increasingly erratic.” No one can deny that since 1914 the workers have suffered a number of cruel defeats and repressions at the hands of their capitalist enemies. But is that the whole story?</em><br>
</p>
<h4>A Revolutionary Epoch</h4>
<p class="fst">On the contrary, the last third of a century has also been the period when for the first time the workers as an independent fbrce engaged in large-scale attempts at revolution; it has been the most revolutionary epoch of all history, unequalled either in scope or intensity or length. This Was the period that saw the workers toppling capitalism in Russia and storming the revolutionary heights in a dozen other key countries, despite the inadequacy or; outright treachery of their leaders. Never before have the capitalists had so little confidence in the permanence of their system – and with good reason.</p>
<p><em>Vannier may be able to kid some of the <strong>Partisan Review</strong> readers into thinking that the workers are incapable of taking power because they do not march in a straight line from one victory to another. But serious people studying the events of this epoch know better. They recognize the last third of a century as essentially a period of test and experiment for a young revolutionary class; and they perceive in these events the irresistible striving of the workers for socialism, despite all the mistakes they make and the defeats they undergo.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Wrong Answer</h4>
<p class="fst">Vannier recalls that in 1850 Marx told the European workers: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international conflicts, not only in order to transform your circumstances but to transform yourselves and make yourselves fit for political power.” And then Vannier asks: “Is this process of political education still going on today? ... The answer is no.” That’s a flat answer, but not a true one.</p>
<p>It has taken the workers longer to gain power than Marx foresaw, but the civil wars and international conflicts in which the workers have the opportunity to learn great political lessons have neither ceased nor diminished. In fact they have become bigger and bigger, involving ever more of the world’s population. This provides the workers with greater, large-scale opportunities to learn. <em>The workers have still not attained an ideal state of “political capacity,” but they have learned from two world wars, for instance, that capitalism has nothing to offer them but mass misery. That is why in virtually every country of Europe today it is impossible for the openly capitalist parties to win the support of more than a small fraction of the working class.</em></p>
<p>What is the significance of the fact that since World War II the overwhelming majority of the European workers have rallied around parties – Stalinist and Social Democratic – which promise to institute socialism? It is a sign that the workers Want socialism and are trying to bring such parties to power. What is this if not part of the process of political education? It may be objected that the Stalinists and Social Democrats! betray their vows; they surely do.</p>
<p><em>But just as the Russian workers learned the truth about their treacherous leaders and substituted revolutionary leaders in the midst of the great explosions of 1917, so the workers will have further opportunities in the coming civil wars and international conflicts to draw correct conclusions about the treachery of their present leaders – if the revolutionary vanguard fulfills its mission of providing an alternative leadership to the class in periods of revolutionary crisis.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Phony Profundity</h4>
<p class="fst">After thus arbitrarily ruling out the possibility of further political education for the European workers, Vannier spices up his article with a “profound” economic argument: “Marx’s fundamental hypothesis would only regain a measure of reality if some notable development in Europe’s productive forces made the proletariat once more a cohesive body with a capacity for struggle and with faith in the future ... But such a possibility is extremely chimerical: European economy will not emerge from its quagmire for a long time to come.”</p>
<p>Of course it won’t, despite all the money Wall Street pumps into it. But since when does the possibility of revolution depend directly and automatically on a “notable” rise in capitalist productive forces? The Russian revolution took place in the midst of a ruinous war that had broken down production in a country that never had a very high productive level. The German revolution occurred in 1918 in a defeated nation, with production going down and not up. The Spanish civil war of 1936 found the workers’ fighting valiantly to establish socialism while they were in combat with the fascists, without any “notable” rise in the country’s productive capacity. Why then must the European workers now give up the hope of socialism until the miraculous advent of a capitalist regeneration?</p>
<p><em>In fact, the bankruptcy of capitalism, which is increasingly evident to the workers, is a vital factor in any consideration of revolutionary prospects. Vannier admits: “The bankruptcy of the European ruling classes is as complete as one could have imagined a hundred years ago. But if this fact is a necessary condition to. the seizure of power by the proletariat, it is by no means a sufficient condition. The question is not merely one of relative strength.” Naturally it’s not the only factor, but that is no reason to minimize it.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Relative Strength</h4>
<p class="fst">Relative strength plays an important part in any struggle. In judging the possibility of revolutionary success, it is necessary to weigh the political capacity of the workers, limited as it is, not against an ideal norm of capacity but against the political capacity of the ruling class, which itself suffers from limitations, the tendency to make mistakes, and growing debilitation. This point cannot be stressed too strongly because after all, one of the means by which the capitalists retain their rule is the propaganda they spread about the omnipotence of their system.</p>
<p>Furthermore, and this too bears repetition, the bankruptcy of capitalism creates conditions of permanent crisis and ferment, which m-turn generate new opportunities for the Marxists to win the, support of the working class and for the working class to take power. <em>This is one of the contradictions of capitalism that operate to the advantage of the working class and compensate for softie of the imperfections of that class. It is one of the sources of our optimism about Europe today, just as it is one of the sources of pessimism by many capitalist politicians about their ability to save their system in Europe.</em></p>
<p>The European workers are far from the “impotence’’ attributed to them by renegades like Vannier. The mass movements they built during and after the recent war and the magnificent strike struggles they have engaged in, despite their demoralizing leadership, are sufficient evidence of the vast reservoir of revolutionary energy stored up in this class. Vannier scratches the European workers off his list, denying they can ever take power. But on the one hand capitalism in Europe continues to reveal its bankruptcy, and on the other the Marxist vanguard in Europe, organized in the Fourth International, continues its job of educating and organizing the workers – together guaranteeing new attempts by the workers to take the fate of that battered continent into their own hands.<br>
</p>
<h4>The American Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">Having disposed of the European revolution, Vannier still has to deal with the rest of the world. How about America, for example? Ah yes, says Vannier, “the American proletariat, the most powerful , in the world ... has not yet given an accounting of itself. That is true enough. We do have an unknown quantity here.” (For the benefit of those who don’t know Vannier, we should state at this point that for this petty-bourgeois snob the American working class is indeed an “unknown quantity” – and not only the American working class.) <em>One might’ think that if Vannier realizes he is dealing with an unknown quantity he. would have the sense or the decency not to talk about it, or to reserve judgment on its chances of taking power. But that would be a vain expectation, for Vannier immediately adds that it wouldn’t be “very sensible” to expect the American workers to do what their European brothers have not yet done.</em></p>
<p>We do not have the space here to treat at length with the contradictions of American capitalism, the remarkable transformation of the American working class in recent years, the tremendous power lodged in that class – all of which point convincingly to victory for the socialist revolution in this country. (Readers are referred to documents on these questions which Vannier and his fellow renegades have never tried seriously to refute – the <em>Theses on the American Revolution</em> adopted by the 1946 convention of the Socialist Workers Party and the speech delivered at that convention by James P. Cannon, both reprinted in the Pioneer Publishers pamphlet, <strong>The Coming American Revolution</strong>.) At this time we can call attention to only one vital aspect of the total problem which Vannier tries hard to gloss over: the relation of the American to the European revolution.</p>
<p>Capitalism is a world system and, as recent UN figures graphically revealed, the U.S. is its only strong prop. The fate of the European revolution depends not only on the class struggle waged on that continent, but also on the class struggle here. For that is what will determine whether or not American capitalism will be able to extend effective counter-revolutionary aid to its European satellites, who are doomed to rapid extinction without such aid.</p>
<p><em>The nature of the relationship can be stated even more positively: Establish socialism in the U.S., and the rest of the world, including Europe, will quickly and inevitably follow suit. The question of the revolution in Europe cannot be regarded as definitively settled, therefore, even if one began by assuming that the European revolution will be retarded or defeated in ttie coming period. For the American working class is destined, by the very preponderance of American productive capacity, to play the decisive role in the world revolution.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Colonial Upsurge</h4>
<p class="fst">Vannier tries to isolate the political capacity of the European workers (“impotent”) from that of the American workers (“unknown quantity”). In just the same way his survey of world conditions during the last third of a century completely omits mention of one of the most revolutionary developments of all – the anti-imperialist eruption of the colonial world, embracing a majority of the globe’s population. <em>Vannier prefers to cover up this point, because the colonial upsurge deals deadly blows not only to the power of European and world capitalism, but also to Vannier’s analysis of the prospects for revolution in this period. His thesis about the workers’ incapacity to take power can evidently be “sustained” only by evasions, distortions and omissions.</em></p>
<p class="c"><strong><a href="renegades.html">(To be concluded next week)</a></strong></p>
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George Breitman
The Prospects for Socialist Revolution
(10 May 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 19, 10 May 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Any discussion of the workers’ political capacity to establish socialism must necessarily include an examination of the period from 1914 to the present day. But Jean Vannier’s survey of modern conditions and prospects for revolution (March Partisan Review) is just as biased and misleading as his treatment of historical trends, which we have discussed in previous articles.
According to Vannier, Marx’s fundamental hypothesis – that the workers can and must take power – seemed legitimate in the 19th century. But now, he insists, it must be discarded because “the course of the proletariat has, for more than a third of a century, been increasingly erratic.” No one can deny that since 1914 the workers have suffered a number of cruel defeats and repressions at the hands of their capitalist enemies. But is that the whole story?
A Revolutionary Epoch
On the contrary, the last third of a century has also been the period when for the first time the workers as an independent fbrce engaged in large-scale attempts at revolution; it has been the most revolutionary epoch of all history, unequalled either in scope or intensity or length. This Was the period that saw the workers toppling capitalism in Russia and storming the revolutionary heights in a dozen other key countries, despite the inadequacy or; outright treachery of their leaders. Never before have the capitalists had so little confidence in the permanence of their system – and with good reason.
Vannier may be able to kid some of the Partisan Review readers into thinking that the workers are incapable of taking power because they do not march in a straight line from one victory to another. But serious people studying the events of this epoch know better. They recognize the last third of a century as essentially a period of test and experiment for a young revolutionary class; and they perceive in these events the irresistible striving of the workers for socialism, despite all the mistakes they make and the defeats they undergo.
Wrong Answer
Vannier recalls that in 1850 Marx told the European workers: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international conflicts, not only in order to transform your circumstances but to transform yourselves and make yourselves fit for political power.” And then Vannier asks: “Is this process of political education still going on today? ... The answer is no.” That’s a flat answer, but not a true one.
It has taken the workers longer to gain power than Marx foresaw, but the civil wars and international conflicts in which the workers have the opportunity to learn great political lessons have neither ceased nor diminished. In fact they have become bigger and bigger, involving ever more of the world’s population. This provides the workers with greater, large-scale opportunities to learn. The workers have still not attained an ideal state of “political capacity,” but they have learned from two world wars, for instance, that capitalism has nothing to offer them but mass misery. That is why in virtually every country of Europe today it is impossible for the openly capitalist parties to win the support of more than a small fraction of the working class.
What is the significance of the fact that since World War II the overwhelming majority of the European workers have rallied around parties – Stalinist and Social Democratic – which promise to institute socialism? It is a sign that the workers Want socialism and are trying to bring such parties to power. What is this if not part of the process of political education? It may be objected that the Stalinists and Social Democrats! betray their vows; they surely do.
But just as the Russian workers learned the truth about their treacherous leaders and substituted revolutionary leaders in the midst of the great explosions of 1917, so the workers will have further opportunities in the coming civil wars and international conflicts to draw correct conclusions about the treachery of their present leaders – if the revolutionary vanguard fulfills its mission of providing an alternative leadership to the class in periods of revolutionary crisis.
Phony Profundity
After thus arbitrarily ruling out the possibility of further political education for the European workers, Vannier spices up his article with a “profound” economic argument: “Marx’s fundamental hypothesis would only regain a measure of reality if some notable development in Europe’s productive forces made the proletariat once more a cohesive body with a capacity for struggle and with faith in the future ... But such a possibility is extremely chimerical: European economy will not emerge from its quagmire for a long time to come.”
Of course it won’t, despite all the money Wall Street pumps into it. But since when does the possibility of revolution depend directly and automatically on a “notable” rise in capitalist productive forces? The Russian revolution took place in the midst of a ruinous war that had broken down production in a country that never had a very high productive level. The German revolution occurred in 1918 in a defeated nation, with production going down and not up. The Spanish civil war of 1936 found the workers’ fighting valiantly to establish socialism while they were in combat with the fascists, without any “notable” rise in the country’s productive capacity. Why then must the European workers now give up the hope of socialism until the miraculous advent of a capitalist regeneration?
In fact, the bankruptcy of capitalism, which is increasingly evident to the workers, is a vital factor in any consideration of revolutionary prospects. Vannier admits: “The bankruptcy of the European ruling classes is as complete as one could have imagined a hundred years ago. But if this fact is a necessary condition to. the seizure of power by the proletariat, it is by no means a sufficient condition. The question is not merely one of relative strength.” Naturally it’s not the only factor, but that is no reason to minimize it.
Relative Strength
Relative strength plays an important part in any struggle. In judging the possibility of revolutionary success, it is necessary to weigh the political capacity of the workers, limited as it is, not against an ideal norm of capacity but against the political capacity of the ruling class, which itself suffers from limitations, the tendency to make mistakes, and growing debilitation. This point cannot be stressed too strongly because after all, one of the means by which the capitalists retain their rule is the propaganda they spread about the omnipotence of their system.
Furthermore, and this too bears repetition, the bankruptcy of capitalism creates conditions of permanent crisis and ferment, which m-turn generate new opportunities for the Marxists to win the, support of the working class and for the working class to take power. This is one of the contradictions of capitalism that operate to the advantage of the working class and compensate for softie of the imperfections of that class. It is one of the sources of our optimism about Europe today, just as it is one of the sources of pessimism by many capitalist politicians about their ability to save their system in Europe.
The European workers are far from the “impotence’’ attributed to them by renegades like Vannier. The mass movements they built during and after the recent war and the magnificent strike struggles they have engaged in, despite their demoralizing leadership, are sufficient evidence of the vast reservoir of revolutionary energy stored up in this class. Vannier scratches the European workers off his list, denying they can ever take power. But on the one hand capitalism in Europe continues to reveal its bankruptcy, and on the other the Marxist vanguard in Europe, organized in the Fourth International, continues its job of educating and organizing the workers – together guaranteeing new attempts by the workers to take the fate of that battered continent into their own hands.
The American Workers
Having disposed of the European revolution, Vannier still has to deal with the rest of the world. How about America, for example? Ah yes, says Vannier, “the American proletariat, the most powerful , in the world ... has not yet given an accounting of itself. That is true enough. We do have an unknown quantity here.” (For the benefit of those who don’t know Vannier, we should state at this point that for this petty-bourgeois snob the American working class is indeed an “unknown quantity” – and not only the American working class.) One might’ think that if Vannier realizes he is dealing with an unknown quantity he. would have the sense or the decency not to talk about it, or to reserve judgment on its chances of taking power. But that would be a vain expectation, for Vannier immediately adds that it wouldn’t be “very sensible” to expect the American workers to do what their European brothers have not yet done.
We do not have the space here to treat at length with the contradictions of American capitalism, the remarkable transformation of the American working class in recent years, the tremendous power lodged in that class – all of which point convincingly to victory for the socialist revolution in this country. (Readers are referred to documents on these questions which Vannier and his fellow renegades have never tried seriously to refute – the Theses on the American Revolution adopted by the 1946 convention of the Socialist Workers Party and the speech delivered at that convention by James P. Cannon, both reprinted in the Pioneer Publishers pamphlet, The Coming American Revolution.) At this time we can call attention to only one vital aspect of the total problem which Vannier tries hard to gloss over: the relation of the American to the European revolution.
Capitalism is a world system and, as recent UN figures graphically revealed, the U.S. is its only strong prop. The fate of the European revolution depends not only on the class struggle waged on that continent, but also on the class struggle here. For that is what will determine whether or not American capitalism will be able to extend effective counter-revolutionary aid to its European satellites, who are doomed to rapid extinction without such aid.
The nature of the relationship can be stated even more positively: Establish socialism in the U.S., and the rest of the world, including Europe, will quickly and inevitably follow suit. The question of the revolution in Europe cannot be regarded as definitively settled, therefore, even if one began by assuming that the European revolution will be retarded or defeated in ttie coming period. For the American working class is destined, by the very preponderance of American productive capacity, to play the decisive role in the world revolution.
Colonial Upsurge
Vannier tries to isolate the political capacity of the European workers (“impotent”) from that of the American workers (“unknown quantity”). In just the same way his survey of world conditions during the last third of a century completely omits mention of one of the most revolutionary developments of all – the anti-imperialist eruption of the colonial world, embracing a majority of the globe’s population. Vannier prefers to cover up this point, because the colonial upsurge deals deadly blows not only to the power of European and world capitalism, but also to Vannier’s analysis of the prospects for revolution in this period. His thesis about the workers’ incapacity to take power can evidently be “sustained” only by evasions, distortions and omissions.
(To be concluded next week)
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>After Randolph Dropped the Negro March</h1>
<h4>Randolph Hailed Roosevelt’s Executive Order<br>
as the ‘Second Emancipation Proclamation’<br>
but It Didn’t Even Rate a Speech!</h4>
<h3>(12 July 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_28" target="new">Vol. V No. 28</a>, 12 July 1941, p. 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">A. Philip Randolph – and a few others consider Roosevelt’s executive order on Negroes and the war industries a “second Emancipation Proclamation.” But apparently Roosevelt doesn’t. He didn’t speak about it over the radio; you won’t see him reading the order in the newsreels; he didn’t even hold a press conference on the matter, as he does on almost everything else, small or big.</p>
<p>The capitalist press gave the order practically no publicity. (It would be interesting to find out how many newspapers south of the Mason-Dixon line even mentioned it).</p>
<p>Randolph had to speak about the order over the radio since Roosevelt wouldn’t. Hillman had to hold the press conference. Negroes had to wait for the Negro press to explain what the order was about, and those papers didn’t do a very good job at it either.</p>
<p>All this indicates very clearly how important Roosevelt considers this so-called “second Emancipation Proclamation.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h4>Negro Youth Blast Randolph’s Retreat</h4>
<p class="fst">Randolph had no trouble in getting his hand-picked national committee in charge of the March to approve its “postponement, but not cancellation.” But the national youth committee, which was not hand-picked, but was made up largely of delegates of different youth organizations, had a different attitude, and one which really represented the feelings of 95 per cent of the rank-and-file supporters of the March.</p>
<p><em>At a meeting called to consider Randolph’s report on why the March was being called off, the youth committee “voted 44 to 1 to repudiate the action of the national executive committee and to demand that the march be staged within 90 days.”</em> (<strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>)</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Chicago Defender</strong> tells of a typical rank-and-file supporter of the March:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“In Florida, a 77-year-old woman sold a member of the Office of Production Management staff a ‘jobless march button’ and swore that she was going to take part in the parade. She had money enough to carry her only as far as Savannah, Ga., which is about six or 700 miles short of her goal, but she was determined to get the rest of the distance and vowed she would make it if she had to walk.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">What a far cry this is from the attitude of some of the leaders of the March, who had only to get into a Pullman train or a plane, and who were just as determined to see that the March did not go through!</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">Horace R. Cayton, labor editor of the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, one of the speakers at the NAACP conference in Houston, describes a stirring speech by Robert Ming on the Negroes and the armed forces, and then says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In one very real sense it was a pity that they did not stop the meeting then, for A. Philip Randolph followed Ming. Randolph made an apologetic statement which finally led up to the fact that ‘they’ (I don’t know who ‘they’ were) had called off the march to Washington. His arguments concerning the reason for calling off the march, as I understood it, was because the President had issued an executive order setting up a board for the purpose of integrating Negroes into the defense program ...</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“It sounded pretty thin when he stated it in the Good Hope Baptist Church; it sounds even worse when I write it today. Randolph has a lot of explaining to do, and so have all the rest mixed up in the direction of the March – and he didn’t do it down here. Walter White, in the last mass meeting on Friday night, expressed his own dissatisfaction with the President’s order and pointed out its weaknesses. He also, however, justified the calling off of the march.”</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h4>How Roosevelt’s Order Looks in Practice</h4>
<p class="fst">The <strong>New Jersey Herald News</strong> states that Roosevelt order “will have little or no effect in New Jersey.” This seems certain if the conference between the Urban League and Glenn Gardiner, state director of defense training for OPM, means anything. It must be remembered that the first of the three points of the order provides that all governmental agencies “concerned with vocational and training programs for defense production shall take special measures appropriate to assure that such programs are administered without discrimination.”</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“This is a very deep-rooted sociological problem ... I am not very hopeful that it can be solved ‘just like that’,” said OPM spokesman Gardiner. “I can’t see that the President’s order will have any particular effect on our program. Our function is helping companies in their training of employees. It’s not for us to say who shall be hired.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“Naturally,” he went on, “whenever our opinion is asked, it is our duty to encourage employment with no discrimination, but it’s not up to us to take the initiative.</p>
<p class="quote">“The problem may solve itself when there’s a shortage of unskilled help, as well as skilled. It’s a tough problem, and the reason it’s tough is that everyone pussyfoots on it. I’m afraid attempts to pressure the thing in the emergency may not work out.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>And this is a statement from an OPM official AFTER the issuance of the so-called “second Emancipation Proclamation”! Far better than Randolph’s speeches, it indicates what the government is really going to do about Jim Crow in industry – nothing.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
After Randolph Dropped the Negro March
Randolph Hailed Roosevelt’s Executive Order
as the ‘Second Emancipation Proclamation’
but It Didn’t Even Rate a Speech!
(12 July 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 28, 12 July 1941, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A. Philip Randolph – and a few others consider Roosevelt’s executive order on Negroes and the war industries a “second Emancipation Proclamation.” But apparently Roosevelt doesn’t. He didn’t speak about it over the radio; you won’t see him reading the order in the newsreels; he didn’t even hold a press conference on the matter, as he does on almost everything else, small or big.
The capitalist press gave the order practically no publicity. (It would be interesting to find out how many newspapers south of the Mason-Dixon line even mentioned it).
Randolph had to speak about the order over the radio since Roosevelt wouldn’t. Hillman had to hold the press conference. Negroes had to wait for the Negro press to explain what the order was about, and those papers didn’t do a very good job at it either.
All this indicates very clearly how important Roosevelt considers this so-called “second Emancipation Proclamation.”
* * *
Negro Youth Blast Randolph’s Retreat
Randolph had no trouble in getting his hand-picked national committee in charge of the March to approve its “postponement, but not cancellation.” But the national youth committee, which was not hand-picked, but was made up largely of delegates of different youth organizations, had a different attitude, and one which really represented the feelings of 95 per cent of the rank-and-file supporters of the March.
At a meeting called to consider Randolph’s report on why the March was being called off, the youth committee “voted 44 to 1 to repudiate the action of the national executive committee and to demand that the march be staged within 90 days.” (Pittsburgh Courier)
* * *
The Chicago Defender tells of a typical rank-and-file supporter of the March:
“In Florida, a 77-year-old woman sold a member of the Office of Production Management staff a ‘jobless march button’ and swore that she was going to take part in the parade. She had money enough to carry her only as far as Savannah, Ga., which is about six or 700 miles short of her goal, but she was determined to get the rest of the distance and vowed she would make it if she had to walk.”
What a far cry this is from the attitude of some of the leaders of the March, who had only to get into a Pullman train or a plane, and who were just as determined to see that the March did not go through!
* * *
Horace R. Cayton, labor editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the speakers at the NAACP conference in Houston, describes a stirring speech by Robert Ming on the Negroes and the armed forces, and then says:
“In one very real sense it was a pity that they did not stop the meeting then, for A. Philip Randolph followed Ming. Randolph made an apologetic statement which finally led up to the fact that ‘they’ (I don’t know who ‘they’ were) had called off the march to Washington. His arguments concerning the reason for calling off the march, as I understood it, was because the President had issued an executive order setting up a board for the purpose of integrating Negroes into the defense program ...
“It sounded pretty thin when he stated it in the Good Hope Baptist Church; it sounds even worse when I write it today. Randolph has a lot of explaining to do, and so have all the rest mixed up in the direction of the March – and he didn’t do it down here. Walter White, in the last mass meeting on Friday night, expressed his own dissatisfaction with the President’s order and pointed out its weaknesses. He also, however, justified the calling off of the march.”
* * *
How Roosevelt’s Order Looks in Practice
The New Jersey Herald News states that Roosevelt order “will have little or no effect in New Jersey.” This seems certain if the conference between the Urban League and Glenn Gardiner, state director of defense training for OPM, means anything. It must be remembered that the first of the three points of the order provides that all governmental agencies “concerned with vocational and training programs for defense production shall take special measures appropriate to assure that such programs are administered without discrimination.”
“This is a very deep-rooted sociological problem ... I am not very hopeful that it can be solved ‘just like that’,” said OPM spokesman Gardiner. “I can’t see that the President’s order will have any particular effect on our program. Our function is helping companies in their training of employees. It’s not for us to say who shall be hired.
“Naturally,” he went on, “whenever our opinion is asked, it is our duty to encourage employment with no discrimination, but it’s not up to us to take the initiative.
“The problem may solve itself when there’s a shortage of unskilled help, as well as skilled. It’s a tough problem, and the reason it’s tough is that everyone pussyfoots on it. I’m afraid attempts to pressure the thing in the emergency may not work out.”
And this is a statement from an OPM official AFTER the issuance of the so-called “second Emancipation Proclamation”! Far better than Randolph’s speeches, it indicates what the government is really going to do about Jim Crow in industry – nothing.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>An American Story</h1>
<h3>(26 January 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_04" target="new">Vol. XII No. 4</a>, 26 January 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">This week we are going to devote our column to a story reported in the Jan. 16 issue of the <strong>Gary American</strong>, a Negro paper published in the Calumet steel mill region of Indiana, we are not going to draw any moral from this story, because we think most of our readers will be able to draw it for themselves. All we want to do is repeat that this is a story about Indiana, and not Georgia.</p>
<p>On New Year’s Eve a man was struck by a hit-and-run driver on Catalpa and Guthrie Streets in Chicago. The victim’s name was Paul Rybinski of 3637 Block Ave. Nobody knows who the driver was except the occupants of the car.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Because the gas station on that corner had no phone, an unidentified man who saw Rybinski struck was directed next door, 3612 Guthrie Street, to call for help," the <strong>Gary American</strong> story reports.</p>
<p class="quote">“Mrs. Katy Mason, who operates a beauty shop at that address, immediately called the police headquarters and informed them of the location and urgency of the accident.</p>
<p class="quote">“The intersection of Guthrie and Catalpa Streets is in a section of town which is heavily populated by colored people.</p>
<p class="quote">“‘Just a moment,’ the desk man answered Mrs. Mason, ‘I’ll give you the sergeant.’ She repeated the facts to the sergeant on duty.</p>
<p class="quote">“‘Is the man white or colored?’ the sergeant inquired bluntly.</p>
<p class="quote">“‘What difference does that make, he’s lying on the wet pavement, probably dying,’ Mrs. Mason snapped and hung up the receiver.</p>
<p class="quote">“Several minutes later a patrol wagon drew up alongside the knot of spectators who stood about the injured man debating whether to risk their own unskilled efforts to aid him or await professional attendants.</p>
<p class="quote">“’The patrol wagon driver shouldered through them, glanced briefly at the victim, and satisfied that the inert figure was not a Negro’s, inquired for the nearest available phone.</p>
<p class="quote">“‘They sent me,’ he remarked casually to the spectators, most of whom were colored, ‘to find out whether or not he’s a white man.’</p>
<p class="quote">“Then he went to the beauty shop phone and called for an ambulance to take the injured man to the hospital.”</p>
<p class="fst">Rybinski lay in the street “for more than 20 minutes after the accident was first reported by telephone.” When the ambulance arrived, he was “conveyed to St. Catherine’s Hospital and admitted at 5:35 p.m. He died at 10:40 p.m.”</p>
<p>The <strong>Gary American</strong>’s story concludes: “Paul Rybinski, age 57, is survived by his widow, and two daughters and a son.”</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
An American Story
(26 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 4, 26 January 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
This week we are going to devote our column to a story reported in the Jan. 16 issue of the Gary American, a Negro paper published in the Calumet steel mill region of Indiana, we are not going to draw any moral from this story, because we think most of our readers will be able to draw it for themselves. All we want to do is repeat that this is a story about Indiana, and not Georgia.
On New Year’s Eve a man was struck by a hit-and-run driver on Catalpa and Guthrie Streets in Chicago. The victim’s name was Paul Rybinski of 3637 Block Ave. Nobody knows who the driver was except the occupants of the car.
“Because the gas station on that corner had no phone, an unidentified man who saw Rybinski struck was directed next door, 3612 Guthrie Street, to call for help," the Gary American story reports.
“Mrs. Katy Mason, who operates a beauty shop at that address, immediately called the police headquarters and informed them of the location and urgency of the accident.
“The intersection of Guthrie and Catalpa Streets is in a section of town which is heavily populated by colored people.
“‘Just a moment,’ the desk man answered Mrs. Mason, ‘I’ll give you the sergeant.’ She repeated the facts to the sergeant on duty.
“‘Is the man white or colored?’ the sergeant inquired bluntly.
“‘What difference does that make, he’s lying on the wet pavement, probably dying,’ Mrs. Mason snapped and hung up the receiver.
“Several minutes later a patrol wagon drew up alongside the knot of spectators who stood about the injured man debating whether to risk their own unskilled efforts to aid him or await professional attendants.
“’The patrol wagon driver shouldered through them, glanced briefly at the victim, and satisfied that the inert figure was not a Negro’s, inquired for the nearest available phone.
“‘They sent me,’ he remarked casually to the spectators, most of whom were colored, ‘to find out whether or not he’s a white man.’
“Then he went to the beauty shop phone and called for an ambulance to take the injured man to the hospital.”
Rybinski lay in the street “for more than 20 minutes after the accident was first reported by telephone.” When the ambulance arrived, he was “conveyed to St. Catherine’s Hospital and admitted at 5:35 p.m. He died at 10:40 p.m.”
The Gary American’s story concludes: “Paul Rybinski, age 57, is survived by his widow, and two daughters and a son.”
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Candidate Explains Position of SWP<br>
to New Jersey Women Voters League</h1>
<h3>(17 August 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_34" target="new">Vol. X No. 34</a>, 24 August 1946, p. 8.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">NEWARK, N.J., Aug. 17 – George Breitman, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senator from New Jersey, today submitted the following answers to questions on foreign and domestic policy asked of Congressional candidates by the Voters’ Service of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey:</p>
<h4>Atomic Energy</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
1. If an international authority with power to control atomic energy (such as the one outlined in the Baruch report) can be established under the United Nations, would you favor a gradual transfer to it of our technical knowledge about the atomic bomb?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
The Socialist Workers Party’s main concern in atomic energy is seeing that it is used not for war, but for the peaceful development of the productive forces and medical research. Neither U.S. government monopoly nor the Baruch Plan will achieve that; in fact, both will leave control of atomic energy in the hands of the U.S. government, which is producing atomic bombs 24 hours a day. We seek control of atomic energy by the toiling people of the world, who alone can be depended on to prevent atomic warfare and destruction.</p>
<h4>Tariff</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
2 (a). What should be the position of this country regarding lowered U.S. tariffs as our contribution toward removing restrictions on the flow of international trade?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
We support abolition of all capitalist restrictions on international trade, including the tariff, The tariff is only one of the obstacles to the free exchange of commodities on a world scale. More important are the national boundary lines which stand is walls obstructing international commerce. We advocate the Socialist United States of the World as the only means to achieve international prosperity and the genuine brotherhood of man.</p>
<h4>Food</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
2 (b). What should be the position of this country regarding shipment of food to famine areas for the duration of the famine emergency?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
We strongly favor shipment of food to famine areas. To insure that distribution of such food is not used as a political weapon by Washington, we favor placing it under the control of committees representing the labor movement both in this country and the famine areas.</p>
<h4>Colonies</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
2 (c). What should be the position of this country regarding placing mandated territories (including our own Pacific Island bases) under trusteeship of the United Nations?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
We are opposed. “Trusteeship” and “mandates” are just fancy names to cover up foul imperialist policies. We demand immediate independence for all countries and all peoples under the political, economic or military domination of the U.S. or any of the other United Nations.</p>
<h4>Production</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
3. What measures do you believe will maintain production and employment in this country at their present high levels?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
Nationalization of the basic industries under the control of committees democratically elected by the workers in those industries. This measure will lead to a planned economy, which will not merely maintain production, but raise it to levels never reached in this country and will end unemployment altogether.</p>
<h4>Housing</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
4. What is your position on (a) Government housing for lowest income groups, including programs for slum clearance? (b) Federal encouragement of housing for middle income groups?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
We vigorously support legislation toward this end. We favor taking the 18 billion dollars a year now being spent for military preparations and using it to finance such a housing program.</p>
<h4>Price Rises</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>QUESTION:<br>
4 (c) What is your position on measures to check inflation?</strong></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>ANSWER:</strong><br>
To protect the working people against rising prices, we advocate the sliding scale of wages, an escalator wage clause in all union contracts to provide automatic wage increases to meet the rising cost of living. We also favor applying this principle to all fixed incomes – such as unemployed workers and veterans, people living on pensions, students un[<i>text missing</i>]de. the GI Bill of Rights, etc.</p>
<p>To effectively control prices, we advocate consumers committees – composed of housewives, workers, farmers, small businessmen – empowered to fix and police prices.</p>
<p>To combat profiteering, we advocate nationalization of the food industries, which have been extorting price rises, and their operations under workers’ control.</p>
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George Breitman
Candidate Explains Position of SWP
to New Jersey Women Voters League
(17 August 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 34, 24 August 1946, p. 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NEWARK, N.J., Aug. 17 – George Breitman, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senator from New Jersey, today submitted the following answers to questions on foreign and domestic policy asked of Congressional candidates by the Voters’ Service of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey:
Atomic Energy
QUESTION:
1. If an international authority with power to control atomic energy (such as the one outlined in the Baruch report) can be established under the United Nations, would you favor a gradual transfer to it of our technical knowledge about the atomic bomb?
ANSWER:
The Socialist Workers Party’s main concern in atomic energy is seeing that it is used not for war, but for the peaceful development of the productive forces and medical research. Neither U.S. government monopoly nor the Baruch Plan will achieve that; in fact, both will leave control of atomic energy in the hands of the U.S. government, which is producing atomic bombs 24 hours a day. We seek control of atomic energy by the toiling people of the world, who alone can be depended on to prevent atomic warfare and destruction.
Tariff
QUESTION:
2 (a). What should be the position of this country regarding lowered U.S. tariffs as our contribution toward removing restrictions on the flow of international trade?
ANSWER:
We support abolition of all capitalist restrictions on international trade, including the tariff, The tariff is only one of the obstacles to the free exchange of commodities on a world scale. More important are the national boundary lines which stand is walls obstructing international commerce. We advocate the Socialist United States of the World as the only means to achieve international prosperity and the genuine brotherhood of man.
Food
QUESTION:
2 (b). What should be the position of this country regarding shipment of food to famine areas for the duration of the famine emergency?
ANSWER:
We strongly favor shipment of food to famine areas. To insure that distribution of such food is not used as a political weapon by Washington, we favor placing it under the control of committees representing the labor movement both in this country and the famine areas.
Colonies
QUESTION:
2 (c). What should be the position of this country regarding placing mandated territories (including our own Pacific Island bases) under trusteeship of the United Nations?
ANSWER:
We are opposed. “Trusteeship” and “mandates” are just fancy names to cover up foul imperialist policies. We demand immediate independence for all countries and all peoples under the political, economic or military domination of the U.S. or any of the other United Nations.
Production
QUESTION:
3. What measures do you believe will maintain production and employment in this country at their present high levels?
ANSWER:
Nationalization of the basic industries under the control of committees democratically elected by the workers in those industries. This measure will lead to a planned economy, which will not merely maintain production, but raise it to levels never reached in this country and will end unemployment altogether.
Housing
QUESTION:
4. What is your position on (a) Government housing for lowest income groups, including programs for slum clearance? (b) Federal encouragement of housing for middle income groups?
ANSWER:
We vigorously support legislation toward this end. We favor taking the 18 billion dollars a year now being spent for military preparations and using it to finance such a housing program.
Price Rises
QUESTION:
4 (c) What is your position on measures to check inflation?
ANSWER:
To protect the working people against rising prices, we advocate the sliding scale of wages, an escalator wage clause in all union contracts to provide automatic wage increases to meet the rising cost of living. We also favor applying this principle to all fixed incomes – such as unemployed workers and veterans, people living on pensions, students un[text missing]de. the GI Bill of Rights, etc.
To effectively control prices, we advocate consumers committees – composed of housewives, workers, farmers, small businessmen – empowered to fix and police prices.
To combat profiteering, we advocate nationalization of the food industries, which have been extorting price rises, and their operations under workers’ control.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>Both Parties Uphold Army Jim Crow</h1>
<h4>Senators Approve Negro Segregation by a Vote of 67–7</h4>
<h3>(14 June 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_24" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 24</a>, 14 June 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The civil rights bills, long demanded by the labor and Negro movements, finally reached the floor of the Senate on June 8 in the form of amendments to the proposed conscription bill, and were promptly voted down by an overwhelming majority of both Republicans and Democrats. The only “concession” that was adopted was of such minor significance that the Southern Democrats did not even bother to stage a filibuster.</strong></p>
<p>Thus the Republicans have a clause which they will wave as proof of their friendship for the Negro people, and the Southern Democrats have a real victory which will guarantee continuation of the Jim Crow system. All the Negro people and the labor movement have is added proof that both capitalist parties in Congress are foes of civil liberties.</p>
<p><em>The civil rights riders to the draft bill were introduced by Sen. William Langer (R-N.D.), and had the general support of Negro and labor groups. They would have outlawed racial discrimination in the armed forces; barred discrimination in interstate travel of troops; established federal , penalties for lynching of servicemen; prevented draftees from training against their will in Jim Crow states; penalized discrimination against troops in hotel accommodations, etc.; denied contracts from the armed services to employers practicing Jim Crow employment policies; and prohibited the collection of poll taxes as a condition for draftees’ voting.</em></p>
<p>All these amendments, except the last, were tabled or defeated by a bi-partisan vote. Most of the Republicans and most of the non-Southern Democrats claimed that they were not against the civil lights measures as such, but wanted them to be considered separately from the draft bill.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Fraud</h4>
<p class="fst">However, this alibi was shown to be a fraud when the Republicans switched their line on the. final amendment and voted for the anti-poll tax clause, which was adopted by 37–35. The Democrats protested that the Republicans had thereby violated a “general understanding” that both parties would co-operate in killing all the amendments.</p>
<p><em>The amendment on the poll tax was the most harmless of the lot. It did not outlaw the poll tax as such, but only as it related to servicemen, and only for the two year duration of the draft bill. A majority of the seven poll tax states already practice such a procedure on their own. That was why the Republicans selected it to use as campaign ammunition.</em></p>
<p>The bi-partisan opponents of the Langer amendments kept repeating that civil rights bills should be permitted to “stand on their own feet.” But that is just what is being prevented by the united action of both parties, who are keeping the major civil rights bills bottled up in committee.</p>
<p>The so-called liberal Senator Wayne Morse (R-Ore.), who also voted against the amendments, had the effrontery to blame the American people for the pro-Jim Crow stand of the capitalist parties: “Neither the people nor the Congress are ready for these amendments.” He said that some day they would be passed but he didn’t know if he would live long enough to see it.</p>
<p><em>If the working people depend on men like Morse, then we surely will never live to see adequate civil rights legislation enacted by Congress. But the hypocrisy and cynical maneuvers of both parties are tearing the veils from the eyes of the people, and teaching them” the necessity to build a party of their own. The next big step in the fight for civil rights is the building of a powerful Labor Party, based on the unions and Negro organizations. The establishment of such a party is one of the major objectives of the Socialist Workers Party.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
Both Parties Uphold Army Jim Crow
Senators Approve Negro Segregation by a Vote of 67–7
(14 June 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 24, 14 June 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The civil rights bills, long demanded by the labor and Negro movements, finally reached the floor of the Senate on June 8 in the form of amendments to the proposed conscription bill, and were promptly voted down by an overwhelming majority of both Republicans and Democrats. The only “concession” that was adopted was of such minor significance that the Southern Democrats did not even bother to stage a filibuster.
Thus the Republicans have a clause which they will wave as proof of their friendship for the Negro people, and the Southern Democrats have a real victory which will guarantee continuation of the Jim Crow system. All the Negro people and the labor movement have is added proof that both capitalist parties in Congress are foes of civil liberties.
The civil rights riders to the draft bill were introduced by Sen. William Langer (R-N.D.), and had the general support of Negro and labor groups. They would have outlawed racial discrimination in the armed forces; barred discrimination in interstate travel of troops; established federal , penalties for lynching of servicemen; prevented draftees from training against their will in Jim Crow states; penalized discrimination against troops in hotel accommodations, etc.; denied contracts from the armed services to employers practicing Jim Crow employment policies; and prohibited the collection of poll taxes as a condition for draftees’ voting.
All these amendments, except the last, were tabled or defeated by a bi-partisan vote. Most of the Republicans and most of the non-Southern Democrats claimed that they were not against the civil lights measures as such, but wanted them to be considered separately from the draft bill.
A Fraud
However, this alibi was shown to be a fraud when the Republicans switched their line on the. final amendment and voted for the anti-poll tax clause, which was adopted by 37–35. The Democrats protested that the Republicans had thereby violated a “general understanding” that both parties would co-operate in killing all the amendments.
The amendment on the poll tax was the most harmless of the lot. It did not outlaw the poll tax as such, but only as it related to servicemen, and only for the two year duration of the draft bill. A majority of the seven poll tax states already practice such a procedure on their own. That was why the Republicans selected it to use as campaign ammunition.
The bi-partisan opponents of the Langer amendments kept repeating that civil rights bills should be permitted to “stand on their own feet.” But that is just what is being prevented by the united action of both parties, who are keeping the major civil rights bills bottled up in committee.
The so-called liberal Senator Wayne Morse (R-Ore.), who also voted against the amendments, had the effrontery to blame the American people for the pro-Jim Crow stand of the capitalist parties: “Neither the people nor the Congress are ready for these amendments.” He said that some day they would be passed but he didn’t know if he would live long enough to see it.
If the working people depend on men like Morse, then we surely will never live to see adequate civil rights legislation enacted by Congress. But the hypocrisy and cynical maneuvers of both parties are tearing the veils from the eyes of the people, and teaching them” the necessity to build a party of their own. The next big step in the fight for civil rights is the building of a powerful Labor Party, based on the unions and Negro organizations. The establishment of such a party is one of the major objectives of the Socialist Workers Party.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro March on Washington</h1>
<h3>(June 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi41_06" target="new">Vol. 2 No. 5</a>, June 1941, pp. 154–156.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">A committee of prominent Negroes, headed by A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, is now engaged in furthering a march on Washington, which is scheduled to take place on July 1st.</p>
<p>Randolph has correctly described the national industrial and military situation:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The whole National Defense Set-up reeks and stinks with race prejudice, hatred and discrimination ...</p>
<p class="quote">“Responsible committees of Negroes who seek to intercede in behalf of the Negro being accorded the simple right to work in industries and on jobs serving National Defense and to serve in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, are given polite assurance that Negroes will .he given a fair deal. But it all ends there. Nothing is actually done to stop discrimination.</p>
<p class="quote">“It seems to be apparent that even when well-meaning, responsible, top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification and evasion.”</p>
<p class="fst">Randolph has had to recognize the impotence and weaknesses of the current Negro leadership and their methods, even though he has many words of praise for them:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Evidently, the regular, normal and respectable method of conferences and petitions, while proper and ought to be continued as conditions warrant, certainly don’t work. They don’t do the job.”</p>
<p class="fst">And, on the same theme, in another article:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Negroes cannot stop discrimination in National Defense with conferences of leaders and the intelligentsia alone. While conferences have merit, they won’t get desired results by themselves.”</p>
<p class="fst">Randolph states the need for organization and action by the Negro masses:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses. Power does not even rest with the masses as such. Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definite purpose.”</p>
<p class="fst">And then he calls for action in the form of a march of 10,000 Negroes to Washington:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“On to Washington, ten thousand black Americans! Let them swarm from every hamlet, village and town; from the highways and byways, out of the churches, lodges, homes, schools, mills, mines, factories and fields. Let them come in automobiles, buses, trains, trucks and on foot. Let them come though the winds blow and the rains beat against them, when the date is set. We shall not call upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone. This is our fight and we must see it through. If it costs money to finance a march on Washington, let Negroes pay for it. If any sacrifices are to be made for Negro rights in national defense, let Negroes make them. If Negroes fail this chance for work, for freedom and training, it may never come again. Let the Negro masses speak!”<br>
</p>
<h4>Why We Support the March</h4>
<p class="fst">The Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist movement in this country, was among the first to hail the progressive character of the proposal to march on Washington.</p>
<p>It should be obvious, however, that our support of a march on Washington does not depend on any of Randolph’s ideas at all. We support a militant action, not Randolph’s reasons for it. We do this in the same way that we would support a strike of the union of which Randolph is president, in spite of our sharp differences with Randolph on many basic questions.</p>
<p>That is to say, our support of the march, while full and wholehearted, is not uncritical. We feel it our duty, as part of our fight for full social, economic and political equality for the Negroes, to indicate mistakes and shortcomings where we see them, and to urge Negro militants to correct them.</p>
<p>Randolph says again and again in his articles: “Let the masses speak.” But the masses had nothing to say about the composition of the Committee or its functions. This Committee has taken on itself the sole right of determining the slogans to be used and the work to be done in Washington.</p>
<p>A representative conference should have been called together before the final plans were adopted. At such a conference, representatives of different organizations that want to participate in the march could have worked out policy and strategy and elected a leading committee. This would have enabled participating organizations to help work out the policy, instead of putting them in a position, as Randolph has done, where they have only the choice of carrying out the Randolph Committee’s decisions or just not participating. Such a conference would have increased not only the publicity for the march, but it would also have improved the morale of those participating. The Negro workers would then really have felt that this was <em>their</em> march; something that is not truly accomplished by the mere device of excluding white workers.</p>
<p>Nor can Randolph object that “there wasn’t time for that; we’d have wasted valuable time.” This is not true. There was plenty of time for it between the time Randolph first presented the proposal in January and the time the hand-picked Committee issued the call in May.</p>
<p>Furthermore, at the time this is written, during the first week in June, less than a month before the march is to take place, there is no evidence that the masses, even on the eastern seaboard, have yet been reached and aroused by the organizers of the march. Most workers haven’t even heard about it.</p>
<p>It is to be hoped that, in spite of the slow beginning, the masses and especially the workers in the trade unions, will be mobilized to support the march during the weeks that still remain. The Socialist Workers Party is doing what it can to influence advanced workers to participate in this action. But if the march fails because of lack of support from the workers, it will be directly attributable to the bureaucratic organization of the whole affair.</p>
<p>In spite of many militant words, the Committee’s <em>Call To Negro America</em> suffers from the same half-heartedness that has characterized the other attempts by “respectable” Negro leaders to win concessions.</p>
<p>Certainly one of the key questions to be faced by any movement is the question of the war and the capitalist demand for “National Unity.” The exploiters mean that the workers should stop asking for higher wages and better conditions until the war is over. For the Negroes “National Unity” means suspension of the fight for equal rights until after the war is over.</p>
<p>The Randolph Committee has no forthright answer to this question. Instead, it says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But what of national unity? We believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens to jobs in national defense and the armed forces, arid in all other institutions and endeavors in America. We condemn all dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi and Communist. We are loyal, patriotic Americans, all.</p>
<p class="quote">“But, if American democracy will not defend its defenders; if American democracy will not protect its protectors; if American democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color; if American democracy will not insure equality of opportunity, freedom and justice to its citizens, black and white, it is a hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand.”</p>
<p class="fst">Why all those ifs? Don’t the Committee’s members know very well what is going on? Is there any real doubt in their minds as to exactly what is happening to the Negro? Hidden behind the ifs is a potential surrender of the fight for the rights of the Negro people. The bosses will think: “Never fear; this. is only another bunch of people who are urging us to be good, but who are pledging their loyalty in advance.”</p>
<p>Because the Committee is afraid to take an out-and-out position on this question, it weakens the effectiveness of the march. There can be only one correct answer to “National Unity”: unity of the Negroes with the white worker against their common enemy and exploiter.</p>
<p>This is not the only instance of the Call for the march making concessions to the ideas looked on with favor by the ruling class. In another place it says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“However we sternly counsel against violence and ill-considered and intemperate action and the abuse of power. Mass power, like physical, when misdirected, is more harmful than helpful.</p>
<p class="quote">“We summon you to mass action that is orderly and lawful, but aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom.</p>
<p class="quote">“Crispus Attucks marched and died as a martyr for American independence. Nat Turner, Demark Vesy, Gabriel, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought bled and died for the emancipation of Negro slaves and the preservation of American democracy.”</p>
<p class="fst">Our criticism of this section of the Call should not be mistaken to mean that the Socialist Workers Party is in favor of “ill-considered and intemperate action” or anything of the kind. Not at all.</p>
<p>But who is served by this reassurance that everything is going to be nice and respectable and within the “lawful” bounds established by the ruling class and its anti-labor, Jim Crow legislatures and courts?</p>
<p>If we are going to talk about history, let us talk about it correctly. Did King George the Third think that Crispus Attucks’ action was “lawful”? Did the slaveholders of Virginia think that Nat Turner was “orderly”?</p>
<p>The trouble is that the Randolph Committee members are too much concerned about what the powers that be may think about them. And as long as that is true, they lead a halfhearted fight, in spite of all their talk about agressiveness and militancy.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Shall the Marchers Demand?</h4>
<p class="fst">The central demand of the Committee is that Roosevelt issue an executive order abolishing discrimination in all government departments, the armed forces and on all jobs holding government contracts. This Roosevelt will be asked to do when he is asked to address the marchers. The local demonstrations are supposed to ask their city councils to memorialize the president to issue such an order.</p>
<p>To fully understand this proposal, one should read the article written by Randolph himself, explaining the theory behind this demand. Printed in the April 12th <strong>Afro-American</strong>, it began this way:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“President Roosevelt can issue an executive order tomorrow to abolish discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marine, and on all defense contracts awarded by the Federal Government, on account of race or color, <em>and discriminations against colored people would promptly end</em>.” (Our emphasis).</p>
<p class="fst">If Randolph’s statement means anything at all, it means that discrimination and segregation continue to exist in the government, the armed forces and in industry, only because the President hasn’t issued an order abolishing discrimination and segregation.</p>
<p>Can Randolph really believe that? He must know that Jim Crowism does not depend for its existence on the lack of executive orders abolishing it. Jim Crowism exists because it serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class to keep the working class divided and split along racial lines.</p>
<p>We are ready to support the Randolph Committee’s demand for President Roosevelt to issue an executive order abolishing discrimination. To force him to issue such an order would be a step forward in the struggle for abolition of racial discrimination. But only a step. Roosevelt’s executive order would not be so very much more weighty than the laws and rulings and orders already on the books prohibiting discrimination. In spite of them, Jim Crow rides high.</p>
<p>Randolph should recall one of the statements he made when he first called for the march:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... even when ... top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy, and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification, and evasion.”</p>
<p class="fst">How can Randolph square his January statement with his statement in April that a presidential decree would “promptly” end discrimination?</p>
<p>An executive order abolishing discrimination would remain largely on paper, as long as control of industry, military training and the government remain in the hands of the enemies of the Negroes.</p>
<p>A movement that denies these facts or tries to ignore them cannot successfully lead the struggle for full equality. A movement that shuts its eyes or refuses to open them is good only for sleeping.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Workers, Black and White, Must Control</h4>
<p class="fst">Negroes must fight for more than a presidential executive order. They must fight for a program that will take control out of the hands of the enemies of the Negro people.</p>
<p>Employers controlling the war industries won’t hire Negroes? Then have the government take those industries over, and let them be managed and operated without discrimination by committees elected by the workers!</p>
<p>Negroes need military training in this epoch when all major questions are decided arms in hand. But the army bureaucrats are bitterly anti-Negro and determined to “keep them in their place.” Therefore, Negroes must join the fight for military training, financed by the government but under control of the trade unions, based on full equality for the Negroes!</p>
<p>The government and the capitalist parties aid the bosses in segregating and discriminating against the Negro people, refusing to pass such elementary legislation as punishing lynching and granting the Negroes in the South the right to vote. Therefore aid in the formation of an independent labor party pledged to carry on the Negroes’ struggles. An independent labor party pledged to establish a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government that would create a new society that would forever abolish poverty, war and racial discrimination!</p>
<p>Such a program, aimed at putting control of their destiny into the hands of the workers themselves, black and white – in military training, in industry, in politics – this <em>must</em> become the program of the militant Negro workers. This is the road to jobs and equality.</p>
<p>The Negro misleaders will say that this program is impractical and Utopian. That is what Uncle Tom said about freedom for the slaves.</p>
<p>But the fighting program we propose is infinitely more realistic than expecting Roosevelt – the partner of the Southern Democrats, ally of the British Empire which oppresses Negroes on every continent – to abolish discrimination.</p>
<p>The Socialist Workers Party supports the march on Washington. We call on the negro workers to bring forward in the march a really militant program. If this is done, the march on Washington, whatever its immediate results, would serve to be an important stage in the fight to change the world.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro March on Washington
(June 1941)
From Fourth International, Vol. 2 No. 5, June 1941, pp. 154–156.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A committee of prominent Negroes, headed by A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, is now engaged in furthering a march on Washington, which is scheduled to take place on July 1st.
Randolph has correctly described the national industrial and military situation:
“The whole National Defense Set-up reeks and stinks with race prejudice, hatred and discrimination ...
“Responsible committees of Negroes who seek to intercede in behalf of the Negro being accorded the simple right to work in industries and on jobs serving National Defense and to serve in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, are given polite assurance that Negroes will .he given a fair deal. But it all ends there. Nothing is actually done to stop discrimination.
“It seems to be apparent that even when well-meaning, responsible, top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification and evasion.”
Randolph has had to recognize the impotence and weaknesses of the current Negro leadership and their methods, even though he has many words of praise for them:
“Evidently, the regular, normal and respectable method of conferences and petitions, while proper and ought to be continued as conditions warrant, certainly don’t work. They don’t do the job.”
And, on the same theme, in another article:
“Negroes cannot stop discrimination in National Defense with conferences of leaders and the intelligentsia alone. While conferences have merit, they won’t get desired results by themselves.”
Randolph states the need for organization and action by the Negro masses:
“Power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses. Power does not even rest with the masses as such. Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definite purpose.”
And then he calls for action in the form of a march of 10,000 Negroes to Washington:
“On to Washington, ten thousand black Americans! Let them swarm from every hamlet, village and town; from the highways and byways, out of the churches, lodges, homes, schools, mills, mines, factories and fields. Let them come in automobiles, buses, trains, trucks and on foot. Let them come though the winds blow and the rains beat against them, when the date is set. We shall not call upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone. This is our fight and we must see it through. If it costs money to finance a march on Washington, let Negroes pay for it. If any sacrifices are to be made for Negro rights in national defense, let Negroes make them. If Negroes fail this chance for work, for freedom and training, it may never come again. Let the Negro masses speak!”
Why We Support the March
The Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist movement in this country, was among the first to hail the progressive character of the proposal to march on Washington.
It should be obvious, however, that our support of a march on Washington does not depend on any of Randolph’s ideas at all. We support a militant action, not Randolph’s reasons for it. We do this in the same way that we would support a strike of the union of which Randolph is president, in spite of our sharp differences with Randolph on many basic questions.
That is to say, our support of the march, while full and wholehearted, is not uncritical. We feel it our duty, as part of our fight for full social, economic and political equality for the Negroes, to indicate mistakes and shortcomings where we see them, and to urge Negro militants to correct them.
Randolph says again and again in his articles: “Let the masses speak.” But the masses had nothing to say about the composition of the Committee or its functions. This Committee has taken on itself the sole right of determining the slogans to be used and the work to be done in Washington.
A representative conference should have been called together before the final plans were adopted. At such a conference, representatives of different organizations that want to participate in the march could have worked out policy and strategy and elected a leading committee. This would have enabled participating organizations to help work out the policy, instead of putting them in a position, as Randolph has done, where they have only the choice of carrying out the Randolph Committee’s decisions or just not participating. Such a conference would have increased not only the publicity for the march, but it would also have improved the morale of those participating. The Negro workers would then really have felt that this was their march; something that is not truly accomplished by the mere device of excluding white workers.
Nor can Randolph object that “there wasn’t time for that; we’d have wasted valuable time.” This is not true. There was plenty of time for it between the time Randolph first presented the proposal in January and the time the hand-picked Committee issued the call in May.
Furthermore, at the time this is written, during the first week in June, less than a month before the march is to take place, there is no evidence that the masses, even on the eastern seaboard, have yet been reached and aroused by the organizers of the march. Most workers haven’t even heard about it.
It is to be hoped that, in spite of the slow beginning, the masses and especially the workers in the trade unions, will be mobilized to support the march during the weeks that still remain. The Socialist Workers Party is doing what it can to influence advanced workers to participate in this action. But if the march fails because of lack of support from the workers, it will be directly attributable to the bureaucratic organization of the whole affair.
In spite of many militant words, the Committee’s Call To Negro America suffers from the same half-heartedness that has characterized the other attempts by “respectable” Negro leaders to win concessions.
Certainly one of the key questions to be faced by any movement is the question of the war and the capitalist demand for “National Unity.” The exploiters mean that the workers should stop asking for higher wages and better conditions until the war is over. For the Negroes “National Unity” means suspension of the fight for equal rights until after the war is over.
The Randolph Committee has no forthright answer to this question. Instead, it says:
“But what of national unity? We believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens to jobs in national defense and the armed forces, arid in all other institutions and endeavors in America. We condemn all dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi and Communist. We are loyal, patriotic Americans, all.
“But, if American democracy will not defend its defenders; if American democracy will not protect its protectors; if American democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color; if American democracy will not insure equality of opportunity, freedom and justice to its citizens, black and white, it is a hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand.”
Why all those ifs? Don’t the Committee’s members know very well what is going on? Is there any real doubt in their minds as to exactly what is happening to the Negro? Hidden behind the ifs is a potential surrender of the fight for the rights of the Negro people. The bosses will think: “Never fear; this. is only another bunch of people who are urging us to be good, but who are pledging their loyalty in advance.”
Because the Committee is afraid to take an out-and-out position on this question, it weakens the effectiveness of the march. There can be only one correct answer to “National Unity”: unity of the Negroes with the white worker against their common enemy and exploiter.
This is not the only instance of the Call for the march making concessions to the ideas looked on with favor by the ruling class. In another place it says:
“However we sternly counsel against violence and ill-considered and intemperate action and the abuse of power. Mass power, like physical, when misdirected, is more harmful than helpful.
“We summon you to mass action that is orderly and lawful, but aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom.
“Crispus Attucks marched and died as a martyr for American independence. Nat Turner, Demark Vesy, Gabriel, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought bled and died for the emancipation of Negro slaves and the preservation of American democracy.”
Our criticism of this section of the Call should not be mistaken to mean that the Socialist Workers Party is in favor of “ill-considered and intemperate action” or anything of the kind. Not at all.
But who is served by this reassurance that everything is going to be nice and respectable and within the “lawful” bounds established by the ruling class and its anti-labor, Jim Crow legislatures and courts?
If we are going to talk about history, let us talk about it correctly. Did King George the Third think that Crispus Attucks’ action was “lawful”? Did the slaveholders of Virginia think that Nat Turner was “orderly”?
The trouble is that the Randolph Committee members are too much concerned about what the powers that be may think about them. And as long as that is true, they lead a halfhearted fight, in spite of all their talk about agressiveness and militancy.
What Shall the Marchers Demand?
The central demand of the Committee is that Roosevelt issue an executive order abolishing discrimination in all government departments, the armed forces and on all jobs holding government contracts. This Roosevelt will be asked to do when he is asked to address the marchers. The local demonstrations are supposed to ask their city councils to memorialize the president to issue such an order.
To fully understand this proposal, one should read the article written by Randolph himself, explaining the theory behind this demand. Printed in the April 12th Afro-American, it began this way:
“President Roosevelt can issue an executive order tomorrow to abolish discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marine, and on all defense contracts awarded by the Federal Government, on account of race or color, and discriminations against colored people would promptly end.” (Our emphasis).
If Randolph’s statement means anything at all, it means that discrimination and segregation continue to exist in the government, the armed forces and in industry, only because the President hasn’t issued an order abolishing discrimination and segregation.
Can Randolph really believe that? He must know that Jim Crowism does not depend for its existence on the lack of executive orders abolishing it. Jim Crowism exists because it serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class to keep the working class divided and split along racial lines.
We are ready to support the Randolph Committee’s demand for President Roosevelt to issue an executive order abolishing discrimination. To force him to issue such an order would be a step forward in the struggle for abolition of racial discrimination. But only a step. Roosevelt’s executive order would not be so very much more weighty than the laws and rulings and orders already on the books prohibiting discrimination. In spite of them, Jim Crow rides high.
Randolph should recall one of the statements he made when he first called for the march:
“... even when ... top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy, and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification, and evasion.”
How can Randolph square his January statement with his statement in April that a presidential decree would “promptly” end discrimination?
An executive order abolishing discrimination would remain largely on paper, as long as control of industry, military training and the government remain in the hands of the enemies of the Negroes.
A movement that denies these facts or tries to ignore them cannot successfully lead the struggle for full equality. A movement that shuts its eyes or refuses to open them is good only for sleeping.
The Workers, Black and White, Must Control
Negroes must fight for more than a presidential executive order. They must fight for a program that will take control out of the hands of the enemies of the Negro people.
Employers controlling the war industries won’t hire Negroes? Then have the government take those industries over, and let them be managed and operated without discrimination by committees elected by the workers!
Negroes need military training in this epoch when all major questions are decided arms in hand. But the army bureaucrats are bitterly anti-Negro and determined to “keep them in their place.” Therefore, Negroes must join the fight for military training, financed by the government but under control of the trade unions, based on full equality for the Negroes!
The government and the capitalist parties aid the bosses in segregating and discriminating against the Negro people, refusing to pass such elementary legislation as punishing lynching and granting the Negroes in the South the right to vote. Therefore aid in the formation of an independent labor party pledged to carry on the Negroes’ struggles. An independent labor party pledged to establish a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government that would create a new society that would forever abolish poverty, war and racial discrimination!
Such a program, aimed at putting control of their destiny into the hands of the workers themselves, black and white – in military training, in industry, in politics – this must become the program of the militant Negro workers. This is the road to jobs and equality.
The Negro misleaders will say that this program is impractical and Utopian. That is what Uncle Tom said about freedom for the slaves.
But the fighting program we propose is infinitely more realistic than expecting Roosevelt – the partner of the Southern Democrats, ally of the British Empire which oppresses Negroes on every continent – to abolish discrimination.
The Socialist Workers Party supports the march on Washington. We call on the negro workers to bring forward in the march a really militant program. If this is done, the march on Washington, whatever its immediate results, would serve to be an important stage in the fight to change the world.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Wartime Crimes of Big Business</h1>
<h3>(December 1943)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi43_12" target="new">Vol.4 No.11</a>, December 1943, pp.337-342.<br>
To see the <em>original</em> October 1, 1943 pamphlet this article was taken from, <a href="crimes.pdf">click here</a><br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<p class="fst">Big Business spouts patriotic speeches about “the boys
in the foxholes” every time the workers ask for a wage increase to meet
the rising cost of living. But Big Business patriotism is only a
hypocritical cloak for self-interest. Profits always come first with
the capitalists — even during a war which they want to win. To get
profits and more profits they do not even hesitate to endanger the
lives of the men in the armed forces of this country and its allies.
Here is the proof:</p>
<p class="fst">On Jan. 17, 1943 — more than a year after Pearl Harbor —
the <em>S.S. Schenectady</em> snapped in half and sank off the West
Coast, only a few hours after it had been delivered to the Maritime
Commission. The American Bureau of Shipping reported the sinking was
due to the steel plate on the ship which was “brittle” and “more like
cast iron than steel.” The US Senate’s Truman Investigating Committee
took over the case and at a hearing before this body in Washington on
March 23, 1943, the truth came out: The defective steel had been
supplied by the Carnegie-Illinois Corporation, subsidiary of the giant
United States Steel Corporation, whose officials had willfully and
consciously delivered faulty material to the Navy, Maritime Commission
and Lend-Lease administration and had falsified the steel test records
to cover up their tracks.</p>
<p>Testimony before the Truman Committee showed that the faking of
tests had covered at least 28,000 tons of substandard plate; that minor
officials and employes who had complained to their superiors about the
faking of tests had had their “ears pinned back”; that high corporation
officials “instead of cooperating (with the Truman Committee) ...
attempted to delay and obstruct the investigation.” US Steel officials
naturally “deplored” the situation, describing it as “so unnecessary,”
and tried to put the blame on “a few individuals” with good intentions
who had grown “lax.” This alibi, however, was decisively rejected by a
federal grand jury in Pittsburgh in May, which refused to indict four
individual employees offered as scapegoats and indicted the
Carnegie-Illinois Corporation itself.</p>
<p>Equally indifferent to the murderous effects of its frauds was the
Anaconda Wire and Cable Company whose Marion, Ind., plant (financed by
the government) was indicted on Dec. 21, 1942 for conspiring to sell
the government defective communication and other combat wire, although
its officials “well knew at all times” that use of such wire would
“endanger the lives of men in the military service of the USA.” The
Pawtucket, R.I., plant of the company was indicted a month later on
similar charges.</p>
<p>The company was shown to have gone to great lengths to devise
ingenious machinery for escaping government tests of its defective wire
and thus getting the wire accepted for use by the armed forces of the
United States, Soviet Union and Britain. Senator Kilgore has pointed
out:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The batteries on all our warships, including the
anti-aircraft guns, are fired, controlled, aimed and ranges set, over
this self-same cable, and if the cable is defective, the ship is
helpless against aircraft attack. Also, the safety and success of the
entire land combat forces are frequently dependent on messages sent
overland by these self-same cables.”</p>
<p class="fst">The government charged that the conspiracy began about
Nov. 1, 1940 and continued up to Oct. 1, 1942. Commenting on this,
Senator Bone said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The fact that we were suddenly plunged into a deadly
war did not in any wise induce the defendants to change the criminal
practices outlined in the complaint. After Pearl Harbor, and while the
boys were dying on the battlefields. Anaconda and its officials
continued their sordid work of defrauding the government by furnishing
faulty cable.”</p>
<p class="fst">Bone also declared the cable was “so defective that the
persons deliberately creating the defects would be brought before a
firing squad if they had done this in the war zones.” Attorney General
Biddle called it “one of the most reprehensible cases of defrauding the
government and endangering the lives of American soldiers and sailors
ever to come to the attention of the Department of Justice.”</p>
<p>But it was no more reprehensible than the case of the Wright
Aeronautical Corporation, subsidiary of the huge Curtiss-Wright
Corporation, holder of the second largest war contracts in the country.
Wright’s Lockland, O., plant (financed by the government) was accused
by the Truman Committee in July 1943 of falsifying tests on airplane
engines, destroying records, forging inspection reports, changing
tolerances allowed on parts, skipping inspection operations, etc.
Inspectors who complained were intimidated or transferred. These
activities were aided, abetted and covered up by Army inspectors and
important Army officials influenced by the corporation. The result,
according to the committee’s report, was:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Engines were built and sold to the government which
were leaking gasoline ... Unsafe material has been discovered In
completed engines ready for delivery. The company’s own reports from
its field representatives indicate that these parts had failed in a
substantial number of cases. A substantial number of airplanes using
this engine have had crashes in which engine failures were involved ...
More than 25% of the engines built at the plant have consistently
failed in one or more major parts during a three-hour test run. Spare
parts were shipped without praper inspection ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Accused of exaggerating the gravity of conditions at the
Lockland plant, Truman retorted:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The facts are that they were turning out phony
engines and I have no doubt a lot of kids in training planes have been
killed as a result. The Committee was conservative in its report, in
order to prevent too much alarm over the situation.”</p>
<p class="fst">A number of other and smaller companies were accused of
the same crime during 1943: the Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation of
Detroit, charged with fraud for willfully violating specifications for
engine castings used in Rolls Royce airplanes; the Sandusky Foundry and
Machinery Company of Sandusky, O., whose officials pleaded guilty to
faking tests on propellor sleeves used on Navy vessels; the National
Bronze and Aluminum Company of Cleveland, convicted for selling the
government defective sand and aluminum mold castings which are used in
combat planes; the Antonelli Fireworks Company of Spencerport, N.Y.,
indicted for deliberately selling the Army faulty hand grenades and
incendiary bombs; the Collyer Insulated Wire Company of Rhode Island,
indicted for conspiring to avoid government inspection and deliver
defective wire and cable.<br>
</p>
<h4>Biddle’s Admissions</h4>
<p class="fst">Nor does this exhaust the list. In a speech in Chicago
on Aug. 23, 1943, Attorney General Biddle reported that Big Business
frauds in this war are “much bigger than they were in 1917 or 1918”; he
declared that 123 federal indictments had already been filed, with
1,279 investigations pending. Biddle did not indicate how many of these
indictments and investigations involve fraud endangering the lives of
servicemen, but there can be no doubt that a substantial number do.</p>
<p>In this same speech Biddle noted that so far 71 cases have been
disposed of, with convictions or other penalties in about 90% of the
cases. But, he complained, in many cases the offenders had gotten off
with extremely light penalties. If anything, that was an
understatement. While a few of the smaller companies have not gotten
off scot free and some of their officials have even been given prison
sentences, the great majority of offenders — and particularly the
powerful ones — have escaped thus far with at most a mere slap on the
wrist. Typical was the trial in Fort Wayne, Ind., June, 1943, of the
Anaconda Wire and Cable Marion plant:</p>
<p class="fst">“The most obnoxious fraud ever presented to a court of
the United States!” That was how a prosecuting attorney described the
Anaconda case. “Revolting” was the comment by Federal Judge Thomas W.
Slick, who presided at the trial. Nevertheless, not a single one of the
indicted Anaconda officials spent an hour in jail for their crimes.
Some were fined and given prison sentences, but the judge ordered the
suspension of the prison sentences upon payment of ridiculously light
fines. Anaconda attorneys at the trial volunteered the information that
the company had made $46,000 from the frauds, but the total fines
imposed by Judge Slick came to $31,000. Thus, even after paying these
fines the company had a tidy margin of profit from its criminal
activities!</p>
<p>The company got away so easily by pleading <em>nolo contendere</em>,
that is, not contesting the charges and throwing itself on the mercy of
the court. Its lawyers admitted “technical guilt” but not “moral
guilt”; they explained their reluctance to go before a trial jury on
the ground that such a course “would have impeded the war effort.” The
court, as has been shown, was exceedingly merciful. The judge explained
the suspension of prison terms by saying he felt the guilty officials
“could better serve the war effort by going back to work”; he did not
say whether he meant the same kind of work for which they had been
indicted. The judge also asserted that this disposition of the case
would “stop anything of a similar nature elsewhere” — a view shared by
almost no one else. Thus, the first important trial for wartime fraud
endangering the armed forces indicated that Big Business can get away
with murder.</p>
<p>“But,” some people say, “these are the crimes of individual
corporations, and Big Business as a whole should not be blamed for
them.” This is the position taken among others by AFL president William
Green and CIO secretary James Carey. Contemptible as this argument is —
especially from trade union leaders who are supposed to defend the
interests of the workers against their Big Business enemies — it
deserves an answer.</p>
<p>First, it must be remembered that US Steel and Curtiss-Wright are
not two-bit businesses unrelated to the rest of industry. On the
contrary, they are among the most powerful groups in American Big
Business, being two of the 25 companies which hold 50% of the war
contracts, and they are controlled by the same financial interests that
dominate the national economy. Check the names of their chief
stockholders and boards of directors and you will find listed the same
respected bankers and industrialists who top the list of America’s
Sixty Families.</p>
<p>Second, let it be noted that the revelations of these wartime crimes
have not evoked a single word of criticism or denunciation from a
single important capitalist in this country. The employers’
associations, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of
Commerce — all have been as silent as the tomb, none has even implied
that there is anything reprehensible in frauds that deliberately
endanger servicemen’s lives. This silence speaks volumes more than a
million consciously deceptive statements by cowards like Green and
Carey, for it indicates that the basic outlook of the corporations
caught in the act is shared by Big Business as a whole.<br>
</p>
<h4>Cynical Whitewash</h4>
<p class="fst">Third, there is the behavior of the capitalist press,
which reaps fortunes from the big patriotic advertisements inserted in
their pages by the powerful corporations (and paid for out of the
taxpayers’ money). For every line they have devoted to incomplete and
confusing accounts of the war frauds, they have printed ten lines
whitewashing the corporations and trying to smear the Truman Committee.
When used at all, the stories of the wartime frauds have been relegated
for the most part to the inside pages where they will not attract the
same attention as the huge headlines and editorials denouncing the
miners and other workers forced to strike in order to secure a living
wage. This is not because the capitalist press fails to recognize news
when it sees it; rather it is because the press recognizes that these
crimes are a damning indictment of all capitalists.</p>
<p>Fourth, and most revealing, there is the following evidence about
the steel and aircraft industries as a whole: A few days after the
Truman Committee hearing on US Steel had been concluded, the steel
barons began to talk about a threatening decline of 35% in national
steel production. “Lower production prospects are due to the
demoralizing fear the Senate inquiry has instilled into <em>every</em>
steel plant,” said the <strong>Pittsburgh Post Gazette</strong>, on
Apr. 16, 1943. These reports — inspired by the steel corporations in an
attempt to get the Truman Committee to lay off — showed that the entire
steel industry feared such investigations. The only logical explanation
for this fear is that other steel corporations besides US Steel are
engaged in illegal production practices.</p>
<p>Similarly, when the capitalist press was trying to blame the Truman
Committee for an 85% decline in shipment of finished airplane engines
at Wright’s Lockland plant in the period between April and August,
1943, it was shown that Curtiss-Wright was not the only company
panic-stricken by the prospect of investigation:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Leading industrialists and production experts the
country over are carefully watching the case,...” the <strong>New York
Times</strong>, reported on Sept. 2. “The extent to which other
companies and other plants of the Curtiss-Wright group have been
affected by what happened at Lockland is difficult to estimate. Many
other concerns are said to be worrying, however, lest they run into
similar situations ...”</p>
<p class="fst">But why should they be worrying if they are not guilty
of the same crimes as Curtiss-Wright? Their apprehension is good reason
for concluding that the Truman Committee investigations have scratched
only the surface of Big Business crimes in this war and that further
investigation would involve all the other big monopolies and
corporations.<br>
</p>
<h4>True to Form</h4>
<p class="fst">The sale of defective war material has shocked some
people more than the other wartime activities of the corporations
because it is so openly cynical and in such flagrant contrast to the
high-minded sentiments spread over the newspaper advertisements. As a
result there is a tendency to look upon this practice as something
exceptional and unrelated to the general policies of capitalism. But at
bottom it is no different in kind from the other “scandals” perpetrated
by Big Business every day in the year.</p>
<p>The explanation for the policies and activities of the monopolies
and corporations is always to be found in the profit motive. No
employer keeps his factory running unless there is profit to be made
from it. This is as true in wartime as in peacetime, with only one
difference: in wartime there is usually more profit to be made and the
capitalists, maddened by greed, sweep aside all restraints and
obstacles in the way of ever greater profits. Rare indeed is the case
of an employer who has said: “I have got enough.” The tendency of the
ruling class is always to go after more and more. Billions are being
made on war contracts, but even the most powerful corporations do not
disdain to pick up a few millions extra by manufacturing substandard
products and then palming off the defective material as the article for
which they are being paid such generous prices.</p>
<p>But in what sense does this differ from the normal practices of
capitalism? In peacetime Big Business’ concern for profits and profits
alone often results in the shutting of the factories. The hardships
this brings to the whole working class, the undernourishment it visits
on millions of children, the diseases that follow in its wake, surely
take as heavy a toll of human life and well-being as the war frauds.
Who will say which is worse? Who will contend that the cause is
different?</p>
<p>What about war profiteering? The people were solemnly assured that
there would be no war millionaires this time. Yet profits were bigger
in 1942, after the payment of taxes, than they were during the last war
or in the boom year of 1929. And they were 14% higher during the first
six months of 1943 than during the same period in 1942, according to a
report by the Department of Commerce. Which scandal is more detestable
— the war frauds or the war profiteering which will place heavy burdens
on all the masses and act as a drag on their living standards for years
to come? And who will deny the connection between the two?</p>
<p>No, the Big Business “scandals” of this war do not begin and end
with their cynical disregard for the safety of the servicemen. They
began long ago, they touch on every aspect of the war program and they
vitally affect the rights and conditions of every worker.</p>
<p>Ask the sailors at Pearl Harbor and they will tell you what they
think about the manufacturers who sold the Japanese warlords the scrap
metal used to make the bombs that were dropped upon them.</p>
<p>Ask the marines in the malaria-infested South Pacific jungles what
they think about the capitalists who restricted the production of
quinine and other drugs so that they could maintain high prices for
these products.</p>
<p>Ask the aviators and the merchant marine men, who survived the
sinking of their ships what they think About rubber barons and oil
magnates whose demand for monopoly control of rubber in the post-war
period impeded the production of synthetic rubber necessary to build
rafts and other life-saving equipment.<br>
</p>
<h4>Critical Shortages</h4>
<p class="fst">There are shortages of aluminum, binoculars, critical
chemicals, magnesium, tetracene, dyestuffs, tungsten carbide, etc., all
important materials in wartime. The reason? Because Standard Oil, du
Pont, General Electric, ALCOA, General Motors and the other big
corporations formed cartels with their fellow monopolists in Germany,
Britain, France, Japan, etc., for the purpose of restricting
production, maintaining monopoly and raising prices. More lives have
been lost in this war because of these cartel deals than because of the
sale of defective material.</p>
<p>Other shortages affecting the war program can be traced directly to
the fact that the big corporations have hogged the great majority of
the government’s war contracts. As Assistant Attorney General Tom C.
Clark has reported:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“At the start of the war program in this country
175,000 companies provided 70% of the nation’s manufacturing output,
while today, two and a half years later, the ratio has been reversed to
the point where 100 corporations hold 70% of the war and essential
civilian contracts. This group, he declared, has obtained the bulk of
the fourteen billion dollars worth o! new plants built at government
expense.” (<strong>New York Times</strong>, April 23, 1943.)</p>
<p class="fst">As a result many small plants have been driven to the
wall; with them disappeared their productive capacity, while many of
the new plants remain partly unused and unproductive. A typical example
of how the monopolists impede production is the shipbuilding industry,
where the revolutionary Higgins assembly-line production program was
strangled because it was considered a competitive threat to the
position of powerful companies like Bethlehem Steel.</p>
<p>Other wartime blessings for which the workers can think Big Business
are: the speedup, which resulted in 1942 in a greater number of
casualties on the industrial front than on the military front; an
artificially created manpower shortage — due to labor hoarding by the
manufacturers and big agricultural interests, discrimination against
Negro and women workers, managerial inefficiency — which is used to
justify freezing the workers to low-paid jobs; an aggravation of the
housing crisis in many war production centers, resulting in increased
sickness, disease, child delinquency and disruption of family life;
food shortages designed to force price rises. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1" target="_blank">[1]</a></p>
<p>Big Business could not get away with all this if there were a
government in Washington seriously interested in stopping it. But the
government is itself the outstanding advocate of capitalism. The
government is well aware of the attitude of Big Business, as was shown
in Monograph No.26, <strong>Economic Power and Political Pressure</strong>,
issued by the government’s Temporary National Economic Committee in
November, 1940, and stating in part:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Speaking bluntly, the government and the public are
‘over a barrel’ when it comes to dealing with business in time of war
or other crisis. Business refuses to work, except on terms which it
dictates. It controls the natural resources, the liquid assets, the
strategic position in the country’s economic structure, and its
technical equipment and knowledge of processes. The experience of the
World War, now apparently being repeated, indicates that business will
use this control only if it is ‘paid properly.’ In effect, this is
blackmail, not too fully disguised.”</p>
<p class="fst">Blackmail it may be, but the government has given in to
it without complaint or rancor. It has given the employers the greatest
profits in their history; and to pay for these profits, it has piled
one scandalous tax bill after another on the masses, frozen wages and
jobs, prohibited strikes, prevented effective price control, abolished
all limits on big salaries. Big Business has no reason to complain that
it is not being “paid properly,” according to its own lights. To make
doubly sure that they don’t muff any opportunities, the corporations
have offered and the government has appointed a considerable number of
dollar-a-year men to head the most important wartime agencies and
posts. Even the New Deal Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes
admitted on July 21, 1943, that “it is the business men who are running
the war.” And while running it, they see to it that the interests of
the corporations are well protected.<br>
</p>
<h4>Government Cooperation</h4>
<p class="fst">Even after Pearl Harbor the government was still trying
to get industry to discontinue illegal practices hampering war
production. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold complained in his
report to Congress on Jan. 3, 1942, about:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... the attitude of powerful private groups
dominating basic industries who have feared to expand their production
because expansion would endanger their future control of industry ...
There is not an organized basic industry in the United States which has
not been restricting production by some device or other in order to
avoid what they call the ‘ruinous overproduction after the war’.”</p>
<p class="fst">The government pleaded with the corporations to
cooperate, to discontinue their cartel deals and violations of the
anti-trust laws, and to let other companies use their patents for war
production; the corporations flatly refused. Early in 1942 the
government — in order to prevent the complete breakdown of the war
program, that is, in order to protect the interests of the capitalist
class as a whole — was finally compelled to institute a series of suits
against a number of monopolies, making public the damning facts about
which the government had been aware for many years.</p>
<p>The corporations had been caught red-handed. But the government,
once having gotten their promise to permit the use of the patents
during the war, dropped the charges and let these corporations escape
virtually unpunished. Standard Oil, for example, whose restriction of
synthetic rubber production had blocked the whole war production
program, was permitted to plead <em>nolo contendere</em> and was given
a $50,000 fine (which amounts to about the average profit this
corporation makes every hour). The other corporations got away even
more easily. To make the government’s attitude unmistakably clear,
Arnold, Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of Navy Knox
wrote Roosevelt on March 20, 1942, in the midst of the public
revelations about the cartels, and said that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... some of the pending court investigations, suits
and prosecutions under the anti-trust statutes by the Department of
Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war
materials. ... In those cases we believe that continuing such
prosecutions at this time will be contrary to the national interest and
security.”</p>
<p class="fst">This was some more “blackmail,” a threat to hold up on
production if the prosecutions were continued, with government
officials covering up for the corporations. Rosevelt answered: “I
approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me ...” Thus,
punishment of the corporations for violating the laws has been
postponed to some remote future in the post-war period, if then.</p>
<p>The same course has been followed in connection with the defective
war material cases. Reluctantly the government has been compelled to
prosecute in a few of the more flagrant cases, but each time high
government representatives have stepped forward to make light of the
corporation crimes.</p>
<p>The War Production Board held a closed meeting on the US Steel case,
but its only outcome was a statement by WPB chairman Donald Nelson
deploring a “more than usual” vigilance on the part of steel plant
inspectors and a WPB telegram to several steel companies urging them
not to lean over backwards while seeking “unattainable perfection” in
meeting production specifications. Other key government spokesmen
issued statements implying that there was no need to worry about the
practices of US Steel.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Must Act</h4>
<p class="fst">When a wave of protest arose after the Truman
Investigation of Curtiss-Wright, Undersecretary of War Patterson, while
not daring to deny the truth of Truman’s charges, nevertheless issued a
statement asserting that conditions at the Lockland plant were “much
less sensational than some of the inferences drawn in recently
published statements.” An Army investigation board under Lt. General
William S. Knudsen also had to admit the Truman Committee charges were
accurate but sought to minimize their importance. Both these and other
government officials seemed more concerned in. quieting public
indignation than in taking measures against the Curtiss-Wright
criminals.</p>
<p>And during the period between Anaconda Wire and Cable’s indictment
and trial, the Offices of the Inspector of Navy Material in New York
and Cincinnati went out of their way to commend Anaconda for its “good
workmanship” and to announce that it was being considered for an “E”
award. During this same period Army and Navy procurement officials
showed how little concerned they were about the corporation’s
malpractices by awarding Anaconda’s Marion plant almost $4,000,000 in
additional business.</p>
<p>The trade union and liberal press have protested against most of the
Big Business crimes and have often criticized government officials for
their behavior. But they continue to regard each of the crimes and
whitewash moves as a unique incident, isolated from all the others and
caused by bungling or some other bad quality of individual capitalists
and government officials. That is one reason why the union leaders and
liberals are unable to work out a program to effectively combat such
crimes.</p>
<p>The workers who are seriously concerned about the present situation
must take another approach. They must learn to look at all the crimes
of capitalism together as a whole and to understand that each
individual “scandal” is part of and flows from the biggest scandal of
all — Big Business domination not only of the war program but of the
whole national economy. They must recognize that Big Business could not
get away with its crimes were it not for the collusion or at best
indifference of the government officials. Only on this basis can they
determine on effective countermeasures. For Big Business will not
voluntarily change its methods, and the administration and Congress
will not and cannot make the punishment fit the crime. If anything is
to be done, it will have to be done by the labor movement.</p>
<p>Whatever else one may conclude from these government actions, it is
safe to say that they do not have the effect of strongly discouraging
war frauds.</p>
<p>Some people have suggested the passage of legislation imposing the
death penalty on manufacturers whose fraudulent practices endanger the
lives of the men in the armed forces. A bill providing this penalty or
a million dollar fine has even been introduced into Congress. It is
hard to imagine the present Congress — which is the servant, body and
soul, of the big corporations — ever adopting legislation to punish
them. The members of the administration who have been rushing into
print to defend the corporations accused of fraud likewise have no
interest in seeing such a bill passed.</p>
<p>Because its adoption would undoubtedly have the effect of
discouraging many corporations from continuing their murderous frauds,
a Socialist Workers Party member of Congress would vote for this bill.
But as he did so, he would warn the workers that its passage alone
could not put an end to the crimes of Big Business for it would not do
away with the basic causes of such crimes: the profit motive and the
corporations’ domination over the means of production.</p>
<p>To get to the root of the problem, the Socialist Workers Party
advocates that the ownership and control of industry be taken out of
the hands of the capitalists. This course of action will be regarded by
Big Business as far more drastic than any bill providing the death
penalty and it will be fought by them with every weapon they have, but
it is the only practical answer to capitalist mismanagement of industry.</p>
<p>At its June 1943 meeting in Toronto, the international executive
board of the United Auto Workers, CIO, drew up a series of proposals
designed to ensure full employment in the post-war period. One of these
called for government ownership after the war of “monopolistic
industries and of industries strategically essential to the national
safety.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Why Postpone?</h4>
<p class="fst">This is a sound idea, and offers the key to the solution
not only of unemployment, as nationalized production has shown in the
Soviet Union, but also of the criminal practices of the capitalist
class. Let industry be owned by the government and operated under the
control of committees democratically elected by the workers. The profit
motive would be removed, and with it would be removed the incentive to
produce and sell dangerously defective products. The costs of
production would be lowered and the workers’ committees, having no
interest in exacting profits from the blood of the soldiers, would
guarantee production and honest testing in the interests of the masses
of the people.</p>
<p>The UAW executive board proposes post-war government ownership of
industry. But why wait until the war is over? The contents of this
pamphlet demonstrate that Big Business domination of industry menaces
the welfare and safety of the masses in wartime as much as if not more
than in peacetime. The war may last a long time, and so long as Big
Business is in control, the number of victims of capitalist greed will
continue to mount. Meanwhile the big corporations are using the war
itself to smash thousands of smaller businesses and to tighten their
own grip on industry. The longer the workers wait, the harder it may
prove to expropriate the capitalists. The time to act is now.</p>
<p>It will not be easy to put this program into effect. Union men and
women who have had to strike for a wage increase of even five cents an
hour know how vindictively the employers resist every challenge to
their profits; capitalist ferocity will be multiplied a hundred times
when the workers try to take the factories away from them. The daily
press and radio commentators will become frenzied in their
denunciations and incitations to violence against the workers; all the
instruments of capitalist propaganda will be turned on full blast to
bolster the myth that production cannot continue without the capitalist
coupon-clippers, that society cannot function without parasitic
exploiters. And, of course, the capitalists will be aided throughout in
this campaign by their political parties and their agents in the
government.</p>
<p>The question of who is to own and operate industry is a political
problem. To make the change that is necessary the workers will have to
conduct a political struggle against Big Business. The employers
already have their political organizations, the Republican and
Democratic Parties, and to fight them successfully the workers will
have to create a political organization of their own. The capitalist
parties are last-ditch supporters of the system of private property and
private profit which enables the employers to do what they wish with
the means of production. The workers need a party which will be just as
firmly devoted to the program of government ownership and workers’
control of industry. That means an independent labor party, based on
the trade unions and running its own labor candidates in elections.</p>
<p>The present government has already shown where it stands on this
question. The billions of dollars worth of factories, properties and
equipment now owned by the government are going to be turned over at
bargain prices after the war to the employers, who will use them to
swell their profits and to further strengthen their monopoly control.
That is why the workers and their party must fight for the creation of
a new kind of government, one which will aid, not oppose the struggle
for government ownership and workers’ control, a Workers’ and Farmers’
Government.</p>
<p>The wartime production crimes have torn away the mask from the
rapaciously greedy countenance of Big Business. Now the working people
must tear out of the capitalists’ hands the power to continue their
criminal activities.</p>
<p class="date"><em>October 1, 1943</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1" target="_blank">1.</a> The full story
of shortages deliberately created by the food corporations is told in <strong>Your
Standard of Living — What Is Happening To It</strong> by C. Charles,
Pioneer Publishers, New York 1942.</p>
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George Breitman
Wartime Crimes of Big Business
(December 1943)
From Fourth International, Vol.4 No.11, December 1943, pp.337-342.
To see the original October 1, 1943 pamphlet this article was taken from, click here
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Big Business spouts patriotic speeches about “the boys
in the foxholes” every time the workers ask for a wage increase to meet
the rising cost of living. But Big Business patriotism is only a
hypocritical cloak for self-interest. Profits always come first with
the capitalists — even during a war which they want to win. To get
profits and more profits they do not even hesitate to endanger the
lives of the men in the armed forces of this country and its allies.
Here is the proof:
On Jan. 17, 1943 — more than a year after Pearl Harbor —
the S.S. Schenectady snapped in half and sank off the West
Coast, only a few hours after it had been delivered to the Maritime
Commission. The American Bureau of Shipping reported the sinking was
due to the steel plate on the ship which was “brittle” and “more like
cast iron than steel.” The US Senate’s Truman Investigating Committee
took over the case and at a hearing before this body in Washington on
March 23, 1943, the truth came out: The defective steel had been
supplied by the Carnegie-Illinois Corporation, subsidiary of the giant
United States Steel Corporation, whose officials had willfully and
consciously delivered faulty material to the Navy, Maritime Commission
and Lend-Lease administration and had falsified the steel test records
to cover up their tracks.
Testimony before the Truman Committee showed that the faking of
tests had covered at least 28,000 tons of substandard plate; that minor
officials and employes who had complained to their superiors about the
faking of tests had had their “ears pinned back”; that high corporation
officials “instead of cooperating (with the Truman Committee) ...
attempted to delay and obstruct the investigation.” US Steel officials
naturally “deplored” the situation, describing it as “so unnecessary,”
and tried to put the blame on “a few individuals” with good intentions
who had grown “lax.” This alibi, however, was decisively rejected by a
federal grand jury in Pittsburgh in May, which refused to indict four
individual employees offered as scapegoats and indicted the
Carnegie-Illinois Corporation itself.
Equally indifferent to the murderous effects of its frauds was the
Anaconda Wire and Cable Company whose Marion, Ind., plant (financed by
the government) was indicted on Dec. 21, 1942 for conspiring to sell
the government defective communication and other combat wire, although
its officials “well knew at all times” that use of such wire would
“endanger the lives of men in the military service of the USA.” The
Pawtucket, R.I., plant of the company was indicted a month later on
similar charges.
The company was shown to have gone to great lengths to devise
ingenious machinery for escaping government tests of its defective wire
and thus getting the wire accepted for use by the armed forces of the
United States, Soviet Union and Britain. Senator Kilgore has pointed
out:
“The batteries on all our warships, including the
anti-aircraft guns, are fired, controlled, aimed and ranges set, over
this self-same cable, and if the cable is defective, the ship is
helpless against aircraft attack. Also, the safety and success of the
entire land combat forces are frequently dependent on messages sent
overland by these self-same cables.”
The government charged that the conspiracy began about
Nov. 1, 1940 and continued up to Oct. 1, 1942. Commenting on this,
Senator Bone said:
“The fact that we were suddenly plunged into a deadly
war did not in any wise induce the defendants to change the criminal
practices outlined in the complaint. After Pearl Harbor, and while the
boys were dying on the battlefields. Anaconda and its officials
continued their sordid work of defrauding the government by furnishing
faulty cable.”
Bone also declared the cable was “so defective that the
persons deliberately creating the defects would be brought before a
firing squad if they had done this in the war zones.” Attorney General
Biddle called it “one of the most reprehensible cases of defrauding the
government and endangering the lives of American soldiers and sailors
ever to come to the attention of the Department of Justice.”
But it was no more reprehensible than the case of the Wright
Aeronautical Corporation, subsidiary of the huge Curtiss-Wright
Corporation, holder of the second largest war contracts in the country.
Wright’s Lockland, O., plant (financed by the government) was accused
by the Truman Committee in July 1943 of falsifying tests on airplane
engines, destroying records, forging inspection reports, changing
tolerances allowed on parts, skipping inspection operations, etc.
Inspectors who complained were intimidated or transferred. These
activities were aided, abetted and covered up by Army inspectors and
important Army officials influenced by the corporation. The result,
according to the committee’s report, was:
“Engines were built and sold to the government which
were leaking gasoline ... Unsafe material has been discovered In
completed engines ready for delivery. The company’s own reports from
its field representatives indicate that these parts had failed in a
substantial number of cases. A substantial number of airplanes using
this engine have had crashes in which engine failures were involved ...
More than 25% of the engines built at the plant have consistently
failed in one or more major parts during a three-hour test run. Spare
parts were shipped without praper inspection ...”
Accused of exaggerating the gravity of conditions at the
Lockland plant, Truman retorted:
“The facts are that they were turning out phony
engines and I have no doubt a lot of kids in training planes have been
killed as a result. The Committee was conservative in its report, in
order to prevent too much alarm over the situation.”
A number of other and smaller companies were accused of
the same crime during 1943: the Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation of
Detroit, charged with fraud for willfully violating specifications for
engine castings used in Rolls Royce airplanes; the Sandusky Foundry and
Machinery Company of Sandusky, O., whose officials pleaded guilty to
faking tests on propellor sleeves used on Navy vessels; the National
Bronze and Aluminum Company of Cleveland, convicted for selling the
government defective sand and aluminum mold castings which are used in
combat planes; the Antonelli Fireworks Company of Spencerport, N.Y.,
indicted for deliberately selling the Army faulty hand grenades and
incendiary bombs; the Collyer Insulated Wire Company of Rhode Island,
indicted for conspiring to avoid government inspection and deliver
defective wire and cable.
Biddle’s Admissions
Nor does this exhaust the list. In a speech in Chicago
on Aug. 23, 1943, Attorney General Biddle reported that Big Business
frauds in this war are “much bigger than they were in 1917 or 1918”; he
declared that 123 federal indictments had already been filed, with
1,279 investigations pending. Biddle did not indicate how many of these
indictments and investigations involve fraud endangering the lives of
servicemen, but there can be no doubt that a substantial number do.
In this same speech Biddle noted that so far 71 cases have been
disposed of, with convictions or other penalties in about 90% of the
cases. But, he complained, in many cases the offenders had gotten off
with extremely light penalties. If anything, that was an
understatement. While a few of the smaller companies have not gotten
off scot free and some of their officials have even been given prison
sentences, the great majority of offenders — and particularly the
powerful ones — have escaped thus far with at most a mere slap on the
wrist. Typical was the trial in Fort Wayne, Ind., June, 1943, of the
Anaconda Wire and Cable Marion plant:
“The most obnoxious fraud ever presented to a court of
the United States!” That was how a prosecuting attorney described the
Anaconda case. “Revolting” was the comment by Federal Judge Thomas W.
Slick, who presided at the trial. Nevertheless, not a single one of the
indicted Anaconda officials spent an hour in jail for their crimes.
Some were fined and given prison sentences, but the judge ordered the
suspension of the prison sentences upon payment of ridiculously light
fines. Anaconda attorneys at the trial volunteered the information that
the company had made $46,000 from the frauds, but the total fines
imposed by Judge Slick came to $31,000. Thus, even after paying these
fines the company had a tidy margin of profit from its criminal
activities!
The company got away so easily by pleading nolo contendere,
that is, not contesting the charges and throwing itself on the mercy of
the court. Its lawyers admitted “technical guilt” but not “moral
guilt”; they explained their reluctance to go before a trial jury on
the ground that such a course “would have impeded the war effort.” The
court, as has been shown, was exceedingly merciful. The judge explained
the suspension of prison terms by saying he felt the guilty officials
“could better serve the war effort by going back to work”; he did not
say whether he meant the same kind of work for which they had been
indicted. The judge also asserted that this disposition of the case
would “stop anything of a similar nature elsewhere” — a view shared by
almost no one else. Thus, the first important trial for wartime fraud
endangering the armed forces indicated that Big Business can get away
with murder.
“But,” some people say, “these are the crimes of individual
corporations, and Big Business as a whole should not be blamed for
them.” This is the position taken among others by AFL president William
Green and CIO secretary James Carey. Contemptible as this argument is —
especially from trade union leaders who are supposed to defend the
interests of the workers against their Big Business enemies — it
deserves an answer.
First, it must be remembered that US Steel and Curtiss-Wright are
not two-bit businesses unrelated to the rest of industry. On the
contrary, they are among the most powerful groups in American Big
Business, being two of the 25 companies which hold 50% of the war
contracts, and they are controlled by the same financial interests that
dominate the national economy. Check the names of their chief
stockholders and boards of directors and you will find listed the same
respected bankers and industrialists who top the list of America’s
Sixty Families.
Second, let it be noted that the revelations of these wartime crimes
have not evoked a single word of criticism or denunciation from a
single important capitalist in this country. The employers’
associations, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of
Commerce — all have been as silent as the tomb, none has even implied
that there is anything reprehensible in frauds that deliberately
endanger servicemen’s lives. This silence speaks volumes more than a
million consciously deceptive statements by cowards like Green and
Carey, for it indicates that the basic outlook of the corporations
caught in the act is shared by Big Business as a whole.
Cynical Whitewash
Third, there is the behavior of the capitalist press,
which reaps fortunes from the big patriotic advertisements inserted in
their pages by the powerful corporations (and paid for out of the
taxpayers’ money). For every line they have devoted to incomplete and
confusing accounts of the war frauds, they have printed ten lines
whitewashing the corporations and trying to smear the Truman Committee.
When used at all, the stories of the wartime frauds have been relegated
for the most part to the inside pages where they will not attract the
same attention as the huge headlines and editorials denouncing the
miners and other workers forced to strike in order to secure a living
wage. This is not because the capitalist press fails to recognize news
when it sees it; rather it is because the press recognizes that these
crimes are a damning indictment of all capitalists.
Fourth, and most revealing, there is the following evidence about
the steel and aircraft industries as a whole: A few days after the
Truman Committee hearing on US Steel had been concluded, the steel
barons began to talk about a threatening decline of 35% in national
steel production. “Lower production prospects are due to the
demoralizing fear the Senate inquiry has instilled into every
steel plant,” said the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, on
Apr. 16, 1943. These reports — inspired by the steel corporations in an
attempt to get the Truman Committee to lay off — showed that the entire
steel industry feared such investigations. The only logical explanation
for this fear is that other steel corporations besides US Steel are
engaged in illegal production practices.
Similarly, when the capitalist press was trying to blame the Truman
Committee for an 85% decline in shipment of finished airplane engines
at Wright’s Lockland plant in the period between April and August,
1943, it was shown that Curtiss-Wright was not the only company
panic-stricken by the prospect of investigation:
“Leading industrialists and production experts the
country over are carefully watching the case,...” the New York
Times, reported on Sept. 2. “The extent to which other
companies and other plants of the Curtiss-Wright group have been
affected by what happened at Lockland is difficult to estimate. Many
other concerns are said to be worrying, however, lest they run into
similar situations ...”
But why should they be worrying if they are not guilty
of the same crimes as Curtiss-Wright? Their apprehension is good reason
for concluding that the Truman Committee investigations have scratched
only the surface of Big Business crimes in this war and that further
investigation would involve all the other big monopolies and
corporations.
True to Form
The sale of defective war material has shocked some
people more than the other wartime activities of the corporations
because it is so openly cynical and in such flagrant contrast to the
high-minded sentiments spread over the newspaper advertisements. As a
result there is a tendency to look upon this practice as something
exceptional and unrelated to the general policies of capitalism. But at
bottom it is no different in kind from the other “scandals” perpetrated
by Big Business every day in the year.
The explanation for the policies and activities of the monopolies
and corporations is always to be found in the profit motive. No
employer keeps his factory running unless there is profit to be made
from it. This is as true in wartime as in peacetime, with only one
difference: in wartime there is usually more profit to be made and the
capitalists, maddened by greed, sweep aside all restraints and
obstacles in the way of ever greater profits. Rare indeed is the case
of an employer who has said: “I have got enough.” The tendency of the
ruling class is always to go after more and more. Billions are being
made on war contracts, but even the most powerful corporations do not
disdain to pick up a few millions extra by manufacturing substandard
products and then palming off the defective material as the article for
which they are being paid such generous prices.
But in what sense does this differ from the normal practices of
capitalism? In peacetime Big Business’ concern for profits and profits
alone often results in the shutting of the factories. The hardships
this brings to the whole working class, the undernourishment it visits
on millions of children, the diseases that follow in its wake, surely
take as heavy a toll of human life and well-being as the war frauds.
Who will say which is worse? Who will contend that the cause is
different?
What about war profiteering? The people were solemnly assured that
there would be no war millionaires this time. Yet profits were bigger
in 1942, after the payment of taxes, than they were during the last war
or in the boom year of 1929. And they were 14% higher during the first
six months of 1943 than during the same period in 1942, according to a
report by the Department of Commerce. Which scandal is more detestable
— the war frauds or the war profiteering which will place heavy burdens
on all the masses and act as a drag on their living standards for years
to come? And who will deny the connection between the two?
No, the Big Business “scandals” of this war do not begin and end
with their cynical disregard for the safety of the servicemen. They
began long ago, they touch on every aspect of the war program and they
vitally affect the rights and conditions of every worker.
Ask the sailors at Pearl Harbor and they will tell you what they
think about the manufacturers who sold the Japanese warlords the scrap
metal used to make the bombs that were dropped upon them.
Ask the marines in the malaria-infested South Pacific jungles what
they think about the capitalists who restricted the production of
quinine and other drugs so that they could maintain high prices for
these products.
Ask the aviators and the merchant marine men, who survived the
sinking of their ships what they think About rubber barons and oil
magnates whose demand for monopoly control of rubber in the post-war
period impeded the production of synthetic rubber necessary to build
rafts and other life-saving equipment.
Critical Shortages
There are shortages of aluminum, binoculars, critical
chemicals, magnesium, tetracene, dyestuffs, tungsten carbide, etc., all
important materials in wartime. The reason? Because Standard Oil, du
Pont, General Electric, ALCOA, General Motors and the other big
corporations formed cartels with their fellow monopolists in Germany,
Britain, France, Japan, etc., for the purpose of restricting
production, maintaining monopoly and raising prices. More lives have
been lost in this war because of these cartel deals than because of the
sale of defective material.
Other shortages affecting the war program can be traced directly to
the fact that the big corporations have hogged the great majority of
the government’s war contracts. As Assistant Attorney General Tom C.
Clark has reported:
“At the start of the war program in this country
175,000 companies provided 70% of the nation’s manufacturing output,
while today, two and a half years later, the ratio has been reversed to
the point where 100 corporations hold 70% of the war and essential
civilian contracts. This group, he declared, has obtained the bulk of
the fourteen billion dollars worth o! new plants built at government
expense.” (New York Times, April 23, 1943.)
As a result many small plants have been driven to the
wall; with them disappeared their productive capacity, while many of
the new plants remain partly unused and unproductive. A typical example
of how the monopolists impede production is the shipbuilding industry,
where the revolutionary Higgins assembly-line production program was
strangled because it was considered a competitive threat to the
position of powerful companies like Bethlehem Steel.
Other wartime blessings for which the workers can think Big Business
are: the speedup, which resulted in 1942 in a greater number of
casualties on the industrial front than on the military front; an
artificially created manpower shortage — due to labor hoarding by the
manufacturers and big agricultural interests, discrimination against
Negro and women workers, managerial inefficiency — which is used to
justify freezing the workers to low-paid jobs; an aggravation of the
housing crisis in many war production centers, resulting in increased
sickness, disease, child delinquency and disruption of family life;
food shortages designed to force price rises. [1]
Big Business could not get away with all this if there were a
government in Washington seriously interested in stopping it. But the
government is itself the outstanding advocate of capitalism. The
government is well aware of the attitude of Big Business, as was shown
in Monograph No.26, Economic Power and Political Pressure,
issued by the government’s Temporary National Economic Committee in
November, 1940, and stating in part:
“Speaking bluntly, the government and the public are
‘over a barrel’ when it comes to dealing with business in time of war
or other crisis. Business refuses to work, except on terms which it
dictates. It controls the natural resources, the liquid assets, the
strategic position in the country’s economic structure, and its
technical equipment and knowledge of processes. The experience of the
World War, now apparently being repeated, indicates that business will
use this control only if it is ‘paid properly.’ In effect, this is
blackmail, not too fully disguised.”
Blackmail it may be, but the government has given in to
it without complaint or rancor. It has given the employers the greatest
profits in their history; and to pay for these profits, it has piled
one scandalous tax bill after another on the masses, frozen wages and
jobs, prohibited strikes, prevented effective price control, abolished
all limits on big salaries. Big Business has no reason to complain that
it is not being “paid properly,” according to its own lights. To make
doubly sure that they don’t muff any opportunities, the corporations
have offered and the government has appointed a considerable number of
dollar-a-year men to head the most important wartime agencies and
posts. Even the New Deal Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes
admitted on July 21, 1943, that “it is the business men who are running
the war.” And while running it, they see to it that the interests of
the corporations are well protected.
Government Cooperation
Even after Pearl Harbor the government was still trying
to get industry to discontinue illegal practices hampering war
production. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold complained in his
report to Congress on Jan. 3, 1942, about:
“... the attitude of powerful private groups
dominating basic industries who have feared to expand their production
because expansion would endanger their future control of industry ...
There is not an organized basic industry in the United States which has
not been restricting production by some device or other in order to
avoid what they call the ‘ruinous overproduction after the war’.”
The government pleaded with the corporations to
cooperate, to discontinue their cartel deals and violations of the
anti-trust laws, and to let other companies use their patents for war
production; the corporations flatly refused. Early in 1942 the
government — in order to prevent the complete breakdown of the war
program, that is, in order to protect the interests of the capitalist
class as a whole — was finally compelled to institute a series of suits
against a number of monopolies, making public the damning facts about
which the government had been aware for many years.
The corporations had been caught red-handed. But the government,
once having gotten their promise to permit the use of the patents
during the war, dropped the charges and let these corporations escape
virtually unpunished. Standard Oil, for example, whose restriction of
synthetic rubber production had blocked the whole war production
program, was permitted to plead nolo contendere and was given
a $50,000 fine (which amounts to about the average profit this
corporation makes every hour). The other corporations got away even
more easily. To make the government’s attitude unmistakably clear,
Arnold, Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of Navy Knox
wrote Roosevelt on March 20, 1942, in the midst of the public
revelations about the cartels, and said that
“... some of the pending court investigations, suits
and prosecutions under the anti-trust statutes by the Department of
Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war
materials. ... In those cases we believe that continuing such
prosecutions at this time will be contrary to the national interest and
security.”
This was some more “blackmail,” a threat to hold up on
production if the prosecutions were continued, with government
officials covering up for the corporations. Rosevelt answered: “I
approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me ...” Thus,
punishment of the corporations for violating the laws has been
postponed to some remote future in the post-war period, if then.
The same course has been followed in connection with the defective
war material cases. Reluctantly the government has been compelled to
prosecute in a few of the more flagrant cases, but each time high
government representatives have stepped forward to make light of the
corporation crimes.
The War Production Board held a closed meeting on the US Steel case,
but its only outcome was a statement by WPB chairman Donald Nelson
deploring a “more than usual” vigilance on the part of steel plant
inspectors and a WPB telegram to several steel companies urging them
not to lean over backwards while seeking “unattainable perfection” in
meeting production specifications. Other key government spokesmen
issued statements implying that there was no need to worry about the
practices of US Steel.
Labor Must Act
When a wave of protest arose after the Truman
Investigation of Curtiss-Wright, Undersecretary of War Patterson, while
not daring to deny the truth of Truman’s charges, nevertheless issued a
statement asserting that conditions at the Lockland plant were “much
less sensational than some of the inferences drawn in recently
published statements.” An Army investigation board under Lt. General
William S. Knudsen also had to admit the Truman Committee charges were
accurate but sought to minimize their importance. Both these and other
government officials seemed more concerned in. quieting public
indignation than in taking measures against the Curtiss-Wright
criminals.
And during the period between Anaconda Wire and Cable’s indictment
and trial, the Offices of the Inspector of Navy Material in New York
and Cincinnati went out of their way to commend Anaconda for its “good
workmanship” and to announce that it was being considered for an “E”
award. During this same period Army and Navy procurement officials
showed how little concerned they were about the corporation’s
malpractices by awarding Anaconda’s Marion plant almost $4,000,000 in
additional business.
The trade union and liberal press have protested against most of the
Big Business crimes and have often criticized government officials for
their behavior. But they continue to regard each of the crimes and
whitewash moves as a unique incident, isolated from all the others and
caused by bungling or some other bad quality of individual capitalists
and government officials. That is one reason why the union leaders and
liberals are unable to work out a program to effectively combat such
crimes.
The workers who are seriously concerned about the present situation
must take another approach. They must learn to look at all the crimes
of capitalism together as a whole and to understand that each
individual “scandal” is part of and flows from the biggest scandal of
all — Big Business domination not only of the war program but of the
whole national economy. They must recognize that Big Business could not
get away with its crimes were it not for the collusion or at best
indifference of the government officials. Only on this basis can they
determine on effective countermeasures. For Big Business will not
voluntarily change its methods, and the administration and Congress
will not and cannot make the punishment fit the crime. If anything is
to be done, it will have to be done by the labor movement.
Whatever else one may conclude from these government actions, it is
safe to say that they do not have the effect of strongly discouraging
war frauds.
Some people have suggested the passage of legislation imposing the
death penalty on manufacturers whose fraudulent practices endanger the
lives of the men in the armed forces. A bill providing this penalty or
a million dollar fine has even been introduced into Congress. It is
hard to imagine the present Congress — which is the servant, body and
soul, of the big corporations — ever adopting legislation to punish
them. The members of the administration who have been rushing into
print to defend the corporations accused of fraud likewise have no
interest in seeing such a bill passed.
Because its adoption would undoubtedly have the effect of
discouraging many corporations from continuing their murderous frauds,
a Socialist Workers Party member of Congress would vote for this bill.
But as he did so, he would warn the workers that its passage alone
could not put an end to the crimes of Big Business for it would not do
away with the basic causes of such crimes: the profit motive and the
corporations’ domination over the means of production.
To get to the root of the problem, the Socialist Workers Party
advocates that the ownership and control of industry be taken out of
the hands of the capitalists. This course of action will be regarded by
Big Business as far more drastic than any bill providing the death
penalty and it will be fought by them with every weapon they have, but
it is the only practical answer to capitalist mismanagement of industry.
At its June 1943 meeting in Toronto, the international executive
board of the United Auto Workers, CIO, drew up a series of proposals
designed to ensure full employment in the post-war period. One of these
called for government ownership after the war of “monopolistic
industries and of industries strategically essential to the national
safety.”
Why Postpone?
This is a sound idea, and offers the key to the solution
not only of unemployment, as nationalized production has shown in the
Soviet Union, but also of the criminal practices of the capitalist
class. Let industry be owned by the government and operated under the
control of committees democratically elected by the workers. The profit
motive would be removed, and with it would be removed the incentive to
produce and sell dangerously defective products. The costs of
production would be lowered and the workers’ committees, having no
interest in exacting profits from the blood of the soldiers, would
guarantee production and honest testing in the interests of the masses
of the people.
The UAW executive board proposes post-war government ownership of
industry. But why wait until the war is over? The contents of this
pamphlet demonstrate that Big Business domination of industry menaces
the welfare and safety of the masses in wartime as much as if not more
than in peacetime. The war may last a long time, and so long as Big
Business is in control, the number of victims of capitalist greed will
continue to mount. Meanwhile the big corporations are using the war
itself to smash thousands of smaller businesses and to tighten their
own grip on industry. The longer the workers wait, the harder it may
prove to expropriate the capitalists. The time to act is now.
It will not be easy to put this program into effect. Union men and
women who have had to strike for a wage increase of even five cents an
hour know how vindictively the employers resist every challenge to
their profits; capitalist ferocity will be multiplied a hundred times
when the workers try to take the factories away from them. The daily
press and radio commentators will become frenzied in their
denunciations and incitations to violence against the workers; all the
instruments of capitalist propaganda will be turned on full blast to
bolster the myth that production cannot continue without the capitalist
coupon-clippers, that society cannot function without parasitic
exploiters. And, of course, the capitalists will be aided throughout in
this campaign by their political parties and their agents in the
government.
The question of who is to own and operate industry is a political
problem. To make the change that is necessary the workers will have to
conduct a political struggle against Big Business. The employers
already have their political organizations, the Republican and
Democratic Parties, and to fight them successfully the workers will
have to create a political organization of their own. The capitalist
parties are last-ditch supporters of the system of private property and
private profit which enables the employers to do what they wish with
the means of production. The workers need a party which will be just as
firmly devoted to the program of government ownership and workers’
control of industry. That means an independent labor party, based on
the trade unions and running its own labor candidates in elections.
The present government has already shown where it stands on this
question. The billions of dollars worth of factories, properties and
equipment now owned by the government are going to be turned over at
bargain prices after the war to the employers, who will use them to
swell their profits and to further strengthen their monopoly control.
That is why the workers and their party must fight for the creation of
a new kind of government, one which will aid, not oppose the struggle
for government ownership and workers’ control, a Workers’ and Farmers’
Government.
The wartime production crimes have torn away the mask from the
rapaciously greedy countenance of Big Business. Now the working people
must tear out of the capitalists’ hands the power to continue their
criminal activities.
October 1, 1943
Footnote
1. The full story
of shortages deliberately created by the food corporations is told in Your
Standard of Living — What Is Happening To It by C. Charles,
Pioneer Publishers, New York 1942.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>An ’Objective’ Biographer ‘Restores’ Leon Trotsky</h1>
<h3>(5 April 1954)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../newspape/themilitant/1954/v18n14-apr-05-1954-mil.pdf" target="new">Vol. 18 No. 13</a>, 29 March 1954.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the <strong> Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) in 2012</strong>.<br>
<strong>Copyleft:</strong> Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the <a href="../../../../../admin/legal/cc/by-sa.htm">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0</a>.</p>
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<p class="fst">In the preface to his new book, <em>The Prophet Armed,</em> Isaac Deutscher undertakes to explain why he wrote the biography of Leon Trotsky, of which this volume is the first half.</p>
<p class="quoteb">”For nearly thirty years,” he says, “the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky’s name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor ... The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.”</p>
<p class="fst">To counteract the lies of Stalinism and the neglect of Western historians &8211; this is indeed a worthy and commendable aim. But there are many ways of accomplishing it. One way would be to reprint the many works of Trotsky himself, including his autobiography, and to get printed in English for the first time his many works, that have never been translated. After all, Trotsky was among other things a literary genius.</p>
<p>Couldn’t Deutscher have prevailed on some publisher to do this, and couldn’t he have used his influence as a “Russian expert” to start a campaign along these lines, even perhaps a money-raising program for such publication?</p>
<p>Whether such a thought ever occurred to him, Deutscher does not say. But he admits to feeling a trifle “apologetic” for covering material that Trotsky himself wrote about so voluminously, “for after a close and critical examination I still find Trotsky’s <em>My Life</em> as scrupulously truthful as any work of this kind can be. Nevertheless ...” (This is Deutscher’s favorite technique: every statement that can be construed as favorable must be followed at once, wherever possible, by a “Nevertheless” or a “But.” That is the very essence of “objectivity” in the eyes of his liberal admirers.)</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Nevertheless, it remains an apologia produced in the middle of the losing battle its author fought against Stalin.” An “apologia” – that sounds bad, not the kind of thing any self-respecting “objective” person writes. Furthermore, an apologia produced in the middle of a battle in which the author was involved. That also doesn’t sound too good &8211; everyone knows how hard it is to avoid subjectivity in the middle of a life-and-death battle &8211; and detracts considerably from the favorable effect of the admission that Trotsky was scrupulously truthful in his autobiography.</p>
<p class="quote">“In its pages,” Deutscher continues, “the living Trotsky wrestled with his tomb-robbers. To wholesale Stalinist denigration he responded with a peculiar act of self-defense which savored of self-glorification.”</p>
<p class="fst">We will return in a short while to the “self-glorification” charge, although we must admit that we have been utterly unable to figure out what “peculiar act” Deutscher is talking about. Anyhow, his next lines are:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“He did not and could not satisfactorily explain the change in the climate of the revolution which made his defeat both possible and inevitable; and his account of the intrigues by which a narrow-minded, ‘usurpatory’, and malignant bureaucracy ousted him from power is obviously inadequate.”</p>
<p class="fst">Here we must pause to examine another of Deutscher’s cute little tricks. Trotsky, he says, didn’t and couldn’t explain why Stalinism triumphed. Is that true? No, it is one of the biggest falsehoods of the year. Then how could Deutscher hope to get away with it? Because he is very cleverly referring to <em>My Life</em>, written in 1929, and expecting that most readers will take it to be a reference to all of Trotsky’s writings.</p>
<p>Trotsky began the explanation in the 1920’s, that is, when Stalinism was coming to power in the Bolshevik party, and part of it is contained in <em>My Life</em>. Then Trotsky continued and completed the job of uncovering the international and domestic social, economic and political causes for the rise and victory of Stalinism in several of the most important of his books during the next eleven years. Here we need cite only <em>The Revolution Betrayed</em>, <em>Stalin</em>, and <em>In Defense of Marxism</em>.</p>
<p>No one in the whole wide world did more than Trotsky to clarify the Soviet degeneration; this was one of his greatest contributions to Marxist theory. Deutscher himself unwittingly testifies to this fact on almost every page he writes, for almost everything he writes on this subject is borrowed from Trotsky’s analysis (a stronger word than “borrowed” could be used because he usually borrows without giving credit to the: source) &8211; so much so, that he is sometimes mistaken for a “Trotskyist” by uncritical readers who do not realize that he bowdlerizes and distorts most of what he borrows so that it will serve his anti-Trotskyist purposes.</p>
<p>Deutscher, we repeat, adds nothing or nothing of value to Trotsky’s analysis, but he is not above using a device to make it appear that he, Deutscher, supplying the theoretical explanations that Trotsky “did not and could not” satisfactorily make. (The Stalinists, as we can see, are not the only ones in the tomb-robbing business. But at least they don’t make the pretense of “restoring” Trotsky’s reputation.)</p>
<p>His critique continues:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In <em>My Life</em> Trotsky sought to vindicate himself in terms imposed upon him by Stalin and by the whole ideological situation of Bolshevism in the 1920s, that is in terms of the Lenin cult. Stalin had denounced him as Lenin’s inveterate enemy, and Trotsky was consequently anxious to prove his complete devotion to, and his agreement with, Lenin. His devotion to Lenin after 1917 was undoubtedly genuine, and the points of agreement between them were numerous and important. Nevertheless ...”</p>
<p class="fst">In other words, Trotsky, who was a Leninist from 1917 on, and the outstanding defender of Bolshevism from Lenin’s death to his own, refuted Stalin’s lies by telling the plain truth. After Trotsky became a Bolshevik, he regarded Lenin as his comrade, teacher and leader, and acted accordingly. He never was a hand-raiser, and he had no more use for cults than Lenin had. He generally reached the same conclusions as Lenin during their six years of collaboration in the Soviet leadership, because they had a common approach to problems; when in the course of discussion they differed, Trotsky the not hesitate to express his opinions frankly in the Bolshevik tradition. He never concealed the truth about his differences with Lenin before 1917, or after; they are there in black and white for everyone to read in his books.</p>
<p class="quoteb">”Nevertheless, Trotsky blurred the sharp outlines and the importance of his controversies with Lenin between 1903 and 1917, and also of later differences.”</p>
<p class="fst">By this Deutscher really means that he and Trotsky have different evaluations of the significance of Trotsky’s differences with Lenin. What those differences are, whose evaluation is correct and the political meaning of Deutscher’s evaluation will be dealt with in next week’s article.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But,” he continues, “another and much stranger consequence of the fact that Trotsky made his apologia in terms of the Lenin cult was that in some crucial points he belittled his own role in comparison with Lenin’s, a feat extremely rare in autobiographical literature. This applies especially to the account of the part he played in the October uprising and the creation of the Red Army, where he detracted from his awn merits in order not to appear as Lenin’s detractor, Free from loyalties to any cult, I have attempted to restore the historical balance.”</p>
<p class="fst">Thus Trotsky, accused on the previous page of some unnamed “peculiar act of self-defense which savored of self-glorification,” is here indicted for the opposite sin of belittling himself. How fortunate the modern age is in having this even-handed dispenser of justice to set Trotsky straight on both these distortions!</p>
<p>After this shocking exposure, in which Trotsky is caught, red-handed and barefaced, actually attributing the first place in the leadership of the Russian revolution to Lenin (just as Engels attributed the primary in their collaboration to Marx), how can anyone doubt any longer that Deutscher is more “objective” than Trotsky? And how can anyone now doubt that Deutscher was driven to write this book by the stern necessities of historical balance?<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Free from what?</p>
<p class="fst">But amusement over these ludicrous pretensions should not lead us to overlook the serious side of Deutscher’s preface &8211; namely, his assertion of freedom from “loyalties to any cult,” including “the Lenin cult.”</p>
<p>In his book on Stalin, Deutscher also used this expression, “the Lenin cult.” In the context there it referred to Stalin’s disloyal, factional misuse of Lenin’s mantle to silence and crush the opponents of Stalinism. Understood in this sense &8211; as the Stalinist perversion of Leninism – the term was not wholly objectionable.</p>
<p>But now Deutscher seems to be giving it a broader meaning (or maybe he is only explaining the meaning he originally had in mind) when he uses the term against Trotsky as well as Stalin. Since Trotsky was genuinely a Leninist, and not one who twisted quotations from Lenin to mask an anti-Leninist policy, Deutscher’s declaration of independence from “the Lenin cult” must be understood as his declaration of independence from Leninism itself.</p>
<p>This judgment is supported by many other passages in the book, and we will return to it in a future article. Up to now Deutscher has been careful not to state explicitly the standpoint from which he approaches his trilogy and, so far as we know, he has not answered anywhere the stupid claims of stupid reviewers that he is a “Leninist” or “Trotskyist.” His present declaration is useful because it helps the reader in “placing” Deutscher’s true standpoint.</p>
<p>This is a matter not only of historical but also of current political importance. Deutscher’s books can be better understood if we bear in mind that right now, while the struggle against the Stalinist perversion of Leninism is still being waged in and out of the Soviet Union, Deutscher declares his freedom of all “cults,” that is, of all groups engaged in the struggle, including the Leninists.</p>
<p class="c"><a href="deutscher-trotsky-3.htm"><strong>(To be continued)</strong></a></p>
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George Breitman
An ’Objective’ Biographer ‘Restores’ Leon Trotsky
(5 April 1954)
From The Militant, Vol. 18 No. 13, 29 March 1954.
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Fahlgren for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) in 2012.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2012. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.
In the preface to his new book, The Prophet Armed, Isaac Deutscher undertakes to explain why he wrote the biography of Leon Trotsky, of which this volume is the first half.
”For nearly thirty years,” he says, “the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky’s name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor ... The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.”
To counteract the lies of Stalinism and the neglect of Western historians &8211; this is indeed a worthy and commendable aim. But there are many ways of accomplishing it. One way would be to reprint the many works of Trotsky himself, including his autobiography, and to get printed in English for the first time his many works, that have never been translated. After all, Trotsky was among other things a literary genius.
Couldn’t Deutscher have prevailed on some publisher to do this, and couldn’t he have used his influence as a “Russian expert” to start a campaign along these lines, even perhaps a money-raising program for such publication?
Whether such a thought ever occurred to him, Deutscher does not say. But he admits to feeling a trifle “apologetic” for covering material that Trotsky himself wrote about so voluminously, “for after a close and critical examination I still find Trotsky’s My Life as scrupulously truthful as any work of this kind can be. Nevertheless ...” (This is Deutscher’s favorite technique: every statement that can be construed as favorable must be followed at once, wherever possible, by a “Nevertheless” or a “But.” That is the very essence of “objectivity” in the eyes of his liberal admirers.)
“Nevertheless, it remains an apologia produced in the middle of the losing battle its author fought against Stalin.” An “apologia” – that sounds bad, not the kind of thing any self-respecting “objective” person writes. Furthermore, an apologia produced in the middle of a battle in which the author was involved. That also doesn’t sound too good &8211; everyone knows how hard it is to avoid subjectivity in the middle of a life-and-death battle &8211; and detracts considerably from the favorable effect of the admission that Trotsky was scrupulously truthful in his autobiography.
“In its pages,” Deutscher continues, “the living Trotsky wrestled with his tomb-robbers. To wholesale Stalinist denigration he responded with a peculiar act of self-defense which savored of self-glorification.”
We will return in a short while to the “self-glorification” charge, although we must admit that we have been utterly unable to figure out what “peculiar act” Deutscher is talking about. Anyhow, his next lines are:
“He did not and could not satisfactorily explain the change in the climate of the revolution which made his defeat both possible and inevitable; and his account of the intrigues by which a narrow-minded, ‘usurpatory’, and malignant bureaucracy ousted him from power is obviously inadequate.”
Here we must pause to examine another of Deutscher’s cute little tricks. Trotsky, he says, didn’t and couldn’t explain why Stalinism triumphed. Is that true? No, it is one of the biggest falsehoods of the year. Then how could Deutscher hope to get away with it? Because he is very cleverly referring to My Life, written in 1929, and expecting that most readers will take it to be a reference to all of Trotsky’s writings.
Trotsky began the explanation in the 1920’s, that is, when Stalinism was coming to power in the Bolshevik party, and part of it is contained in My Life. Then Trotsky continued and completed the job of uncovering the international and domestic social, economic and political causes for the rise and victory of Stalinism in several of the most important of his books during the next eleven years. Here we need cite only The Revolution Betrayed, Stalin, and In Defense of Marxism.
No one in the whole wide world did more than Trotsky to clarify the Soviet degeneration; this was one of his greatest contributions to Marxist theory. Deutscher himself unwittingly testifies to this fact on almost every page he writes, for almost everything he writes on this subject is borrowed from Trotsky’s analysis (a stronger word than “borrowed” could be used because he usually borrows without giving credit to the: source) &8211; so much so, that he is sometimes mistaken for a “Trotskyist” by uncritical readers who do not realize that he bowdlerizes and distorts most of what he borrows so that it will serve his anti-Trotskyist purposes.
Deutscher, we repeat, adds nothing or nothing of value to Trotsky’s analysis, but he is not above using a device to make it appear that he, Deutscher, supplying the theoretical explanations that Trotsky “did not and could not” satisfactorily make. (The Stalinists, as we can see, are not the only ones in the tomb-robbing business. But at least they don’t make the pretense of “restoring” Trotsky’s reputation.)
His critique continues:
“In My Life Trotsky sought to vindicate himself in terms imposed upon him by Stalin and by the whole ideological situation of Bolshevism in the 1920s, that is in terms of the Lenin cult. Stalin had denounced him as Lenin’s inveterate enemy, and Trotsky was consequently anxious to prove his complete devotion to, and his agreement with, Lenin. His devotion to Lenin after 1917 was undoubtedly genuine, and the points of agreement between them were numerous and important. Nevertheless ...”
In other words, Trotsky, who was a Leninist from 1917 on, and the outstanding defender of Bolshevism from Lenin’s death to his own, refuted Stalin’s lies by telling the plain truth. After Trotsky became a Bolshevik, he regarded Lenin as his comrade, teacher and leader, and acted accordingly. He never was a hand-raiser, and he had no more use for cults than Lenin had. He generally reached the same conclusions as Lenin during their six years of collaboration in the Soviet leadership, because they had a common approach to problems; when in the course of discussion they differed, Trotsky the not hesitate to express his opinions frankly in the Bolshevik tradition. He never concealed the truth about his differences with Lenin before 1917, or after; they are there in black and white for everyone to read in his books.
”Nevertheless, Trotsky blurred the sharp outlines and the importance of his controversies with Lenin between 1903 and 1917, and also of later differences.”
By this Deutscher really means that he and Trotsky have different evaluations of the significance of Trotsky’s differences with Lenin. What those differences are, whose evaluation is correct and the political meaning of Deutscher’s evaluation will be dealt with in next week’s article.
“But,” he continues, “another and much stranger consequence of the fact that Trotsky made his apologia in terms of the Lenin cult was that in some crucial points he belittled his own role in comparison with Lenin’s, a feat extremely rare in autobiographical literature. This applies especially to the account of the part he played in the October uprising and the creation of the Red Army, where he detracted from his awn merits in order not to appear as Lenin’s detractor, Free from loyalties to any cult, I have attempted to restore the historical balance.”
Thus Trotsky, accused on the previous page of some unnamed “peculiar act of self-defense which savored of self-glorification,” is here indicted for the opposite sin of belittling himself. How fortunate the modern age is in having this even-handed dispenser of justice to set Trotsky straight on both these distortions!
After this shocking exposure, in which Trotsky is caught, red-handed and barefaced, actually attributing the first place in the leadership of the Russian revolution to Lenin (just as Engels attributed the primary in their collaboration to Marx), how can anyone doubt any longer that Deutscher is more “objective” than Trotsky? And how can anyone now doubt that Deutscher was driven to write this book by the stern necessities of historical balance?
Free from what?
But amusement over these ludicrous pretensions should not lead us to overlook the serious side of Deutscher’s preface &8211; namely, his assertion of freedom from “loyalties to any cult,” including “the Lenin cult.”
In his book on Stalin, Deutscher also used this expression, “the Lenin cult.” In the context there it referred to Stalin’s disloyal, factional misuse of Lenin’s mantle to silence and crush the opponents of Stalinism. Understood in this sense &8211; as the Stalinist perversion of Leninism – the term was not wholly objectionable.
But now Deutscher seems to be giving it a broader meaning (or maybe he is only explaining the meaning he originally had in mind) when he uses the term against Trotsky as well as Stalin. Since Trotsky was genuinely a Leninist, and not one who twisted quotations from Lenin to mask an anti-Leninist policy, Deutscher’s declaration of independence from “the Lenin cult” must be understood as his declaration of independence from Leninism itself.
This judgment is supported by many other passages in the book, and we will return to it in a future article. Up to now Deutscher has been careful not to state explicitly the standpoint from which he approaches his trilogy and, so far as we know, he has not answered anywhere the stupid claims of stupid reviewers that he is a “Leninist” or “Trotskyist.” His present declaration is useful because it helps the reader in “placing” Deutscher’s true standpoint.
This is a matter not only of historical but also of current political importance. Deutscher’s books can be better understood if we bear in mind that right now, while the struggle against the Stalinist perversion of Leninism is still being waged in and out of the Soviet Union, Deutscher declares his freedom of all “cults,” that is, of all groups engaged in the struggle, including the Leninists.
(To be continued)
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<h2>Anthony Massini</h2>
<h1>C.P. Begins New Lynch Campaign<br>
in Cleveland</h1>
<h3>(14 March 1942)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/index.htm#m42_11" target="new">Vol. VI No. 11</a>, 14 March 1942, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Stalinist frame-up artists are at work again. Their aim is to incite lynch violence against all militant workers who oppose their treacherous policies, and to create the kind of atmosphere in which they can undertake physical attacks against their working-class opponents. Their method is to slander these opponents as “agents of Hitler’’.</p>
<p>The leaflet distributed by the Stalinists in Cleveland last week and reproduced on this page is a typical example of how their lynch campaign operates.</p>
<p>The Stalinists in that city have been infuriated for some time by the regular distribution of <b>The Militant</b> at a large factory and the favorable response to the paper of the workers in the factory. The distribution of a paper which tells the truth about the war interferes with the attempts of the Stalinists – in the name of “national unity against Hitler” – to suppress all militant action by the workers against the bosses’ attacks.</p>
<p>The Stalinists threatened the distributors with violence, and they urged the workers to refuse to accept the paper, to tear it up and throw it into the face of the distributors. When neither of these methods proved successful, they issued the leaflet, <em>We Accuse Hitler’s Agents At Your Gates</em>, an incitement to mob violence and reactionary prejudices in the tradition made famous by the Nazis.</p>
<p>They charge the Trotskyists in this leaflet with concentrating on “spreading seeds of confusion among the laboring, people, for the purpose of disorganizing our fight against the Axis powers,” and with trying “to sabotage the war effort, mainly by creating disunity and conflict in the labor movement.” The “proof” they offer is distorted references to and quotations torn out of context from recent issues of <b>The Militant</b>.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Way to Defeat Hitler</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>“Here is the proof”,</em> they say:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“In the February 7th issue of <b>The Militant</b> – (1) A frontpage editorial says that the way to defeat Hitler is to overthrow the governments of the United States and Great Britain. The destruction of the Hitlerite government is NOT urged.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The title of the editorial referred to was: <em>How to Destroy One of Hitler’s Chief Weapons</em>. It pointed out how Hitler kept the German people in subjection by playing on their fear of a second Versailles Treaty to crush and dismember Germany in the event of an Allied victory. The editorial said that there is</p>
<p class="quoteb">“a way to destroy this weapon of Hitler. <em>There is a way to arouse the German masses to revolutionary struggle against their fascist oppressors.</em> That way is by the establishment of Workers’ and Farmers’ Governments in Britain and the United States ...</p>
<p class="quote">“Hitler then would have no success in holding the threat of another Versailles over the German people, because one of the first acts of a Workers’ and Farmers Government in this country would be to renounce all policies or agreements aimed at oppressing or penalizing the German masses ...</p>
<p class="quote">“One of the first acts of Workers’ and Farmers’ Governments in Britain and this country would be to call on – and to aid – the German masses to overthrow Hitler, establish their own government representing their own interests, and join with them in the creation of a World Socialist Federation which by abolishing the economic basis for national antagonisms would be able to build a world of security and peace for all.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>The Stalinist charge that “the destruction of the Hitlerite government is NOT urged is thus a crude lie.” The “proof” that the Trotskyists are “Hitler’s agents” turns out on examination to be a program for overthrowing Hitlerism.</em></p>
<p>The Stalinists lie about this program because it is so sharply opposed to their own “way to defeat Hitler.” <em>They refuse</em> to call on the German masses to make their socialist revolution; they endorse the Atlantic Charter which promises in effect another Versailles Treaty, the fear of which is Hitler’s strongest weapon against the German revolution; they have no program to offer to the German masses who are in the last analysis the force which will overthrow Hitler.</p>
<p>The second “proof” of the Stalinists that the Trotskyists are Hitler’s agents:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Another editorial, entitled <b>CIO Wage Demands</b>, calls for the ousting of the elected leaders of CIO unions ... In the February 14th issue of <b>The Militant</b> there is another attack on labor unity: ‘The defense of the workers’ interests demands a repudiation of the present leadership and its servile policies ...”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The editorial and article referred to <em>endorsed</em> the demands of the CIO, for wage increases and union security. At the same time they sharply criticized the national leaders of the CIO. Why? Because they issued no program for securing these demands; because what they “mean by ‘fight’ is to throw the demands of the CIO workers into the lap of the War Labor Board”; because their no-strike policy, decided upon behind the backs of the rank-and-file, paralyzes the struggle of the workers against rising prices, etc.</p>
<p>The editorial said: “The workers can have no confidence in such officials. The union ranks want officers who will lead them in genuine struggle against the present serious threat to their rights and living standards ... Above all, the strike weapon must not be surrendered ... The rank-and-file owe it to themselves to elect as their leaders those who put the interests of the workers before everything else.”</p>
<p><em>The charge about “ousting of elected officials” is clearly a distortion of a call to the workers to elect officials who will fight for their interests. The Stalinists don’t like it because they want the union leaders to place the interests of the war machine above everything else. What the Stalinists mean by “labor unity” today is unquestioning acceptance of every proposal advanced by the union leaders, even when those policies are contrary to the Workers’ interests and decided on bureaucratically behind the back of the workers.</em></p>
<p>The Trotskyist trade union policy is the opposite of the Stalinist policy, as expounded by Roy Hudson, their trade union expert, in the <b>Daily Worker</b>, March 3: <em>“Strikes Help Hitler,”</em> he said, <em>“because they hinder the war.”</em> The Stalinists say that the Trotskyists’ support of the right to strike makes them “Hitler’s agents.” Well, that’s exactly what the die-hard open shoppers of Little Steel and the poll-tax congressmen like Smith of Virginia say not only of the Trotskyists, but of every worker who tries to’ make trade unionism something more than a rubber stamp for the bosses.</p>
<p>The third “proof” of the Stalinists:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Presenting the Trotskyists’ attitude toward the war, James P. Cannon, National Secretary, attempts to drive a wedge between the United Nations by falsely characterizing the war effort of the United States and Britain as imperialist in character.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Cannon’s <em>Statement On the War</em> was a Marxist analysis of the causes of the second world war, reprinted by <b>The Militant</b> from the January 1942 issue of <b>Fourth International</b>. The statement declared that “Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot.” The characterization of the war of the capitalist countries “as an imperialist war” was “determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist – oppressing other nations or peoples – or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.”</p>
<p>But Cannon’s statement drew a sharp distinction between its characterization of the war conducted by the capitalist states and the war conducted by the Soviet Union and China!</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, is to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a <em>progressive</em> war.”</p>
<p class="fst">The statement also characterized China’s war against Japan as progressive because it is “a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke.”</p>
<p>This analysis of the difference between the Soviet Union and China on the one hand and the capitalist countries on the other is what the Stalinists call driving “a wedge between the United Nations.” They do not dare to discuss Cannon’s analysis of these differences; they do not want the workers to think about these differences; they attack all those who remind the workers that the Soviet system is different from the capitalist system.</p>
<p>The Stalinists only last June themselves were loudly characterizing the war as imperialist. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, they say, the character of the war “changed”; “ the imperialist war of Britain”, for example, was changed into “a just war”. This is like saying that the British ruling class was fighting a war for markets and raw materials and the right to exploit the colonies on June 21, and then because of Hitler’s invasion it suddenly began on June 23 to fight for something entirely different. When it comes to “spreading seeds of confusion,” the Stalinists have no competitors.</p>
<p>Realizing that their “proof” will be rejected as slanders by anyone who has read the articles they refer to, the Stalinists seek to strengthen their charges by repeating old Stalinist slanders against the Trotskyists in other countries. But here again the falsity of their charges is apparent to anyone who knows even a little about Trotskyism and Stalinism.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The Trotskyists” says the leaflet, “... were convicted by the Russian government at the Moscow trials for Fifth Column work in behalf of German and Japanese imperialism.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">In 1936–37 the Stalinists were trying to get an alliance with Britain and the United States. Everyone in the labor movement who opposed their policies was labelled by them as an “agent of German and Japanese imperialism.”</p>
<p>In the Moscow trials and the purges which followed them in this period,. Stalin murdered the Old Bolsheviks who helped to found the Soviet Union and whose only crime was that they criticized the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet bureaucracy which Stalin heads and asked for a return to the workers’ democracy which had been established under Lenin, The Moscow trials were rejected by world, public opinion at that time as frame-ups.</p>
<p><em>In 1939 Stalin made his pact with Hitler and gave him a free hand to go ahead in Europe. The slanders of the Stalinists against the Trotskyists underwent an abrupt change. Now instead of accusing the Trotskyists of being German and Japanese agents, they called them “agents of Anglo-American imperialism.” The Trotskyists had not changed; only Stalin’s alliance had changed.</em></p>
<p>When Hitler broke the pact last summer, the Stalinist lies about the. Trotskyists changed once again. Again they become “agents of German and Japanese imperialism,” although the Trotskyists remained what they always were, uncompromising defenders of the first workers’ state in spite of the Stalinist regime, and opponents of the Stalinist regime because its policies have helped to undermine the defense, of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“They attempted to wreck the development of unity among the Chinese people,” the leaflet continues.</em></p>
<p class="fst">In fact, the Chinese Trotskyists have bravely fought and died in the struggle against the Japanese invaders, have urged the Chinese masses to adopt the revolutionary policy which would drive Japanese imperialism out of their country.</p>
<p>These charges against them come furthermore from the Stalinists who signed a non-aggression pact with Japan less than a year ago, recognizing Japan’s conquest of Manchukuo, and virtually giving the go-ahead signal to Japan in China.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“They made common cause with Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the destruction of the Spanish Republic. They helped torpedo the French Popular Front Government, thus paving the way for Hitler’s bandit armies.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">This lie about “paving the way” for Hitler comes from the Stalinists who supported the People’s Front that suppressed and demoralized the French working class and destroyed the workers’ power that could have defeated Hitler; from the Stalinists whose GPU agents murdered the Spanish revolutionists, collaborated with the Spanish capitalists to put down the revolution in blood and made easier the victory of Franco.</p>
<p>Stalinism fears free discussion in the labor movement just as it fears democracy in the Soviet Union, and it is ever on the lookout for opportunities to destroy its working class opponents by slander, incitations to mob violence and outright assassination.</p>
<p>The Stalinist lynch campaign is not confined to the Trotskyists alone. They have accused Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party of wanting “the defeat of the United States in the fight against. Hitler”; they have accused Louis Nelson, manager of Knitgoods Local 155 of the I.L.G.W.U., of carrying on “fifth column activities” and following an “anti-U.S.” line; they have charged Harry Lundeberg, leader of the AFL seamen’s union, with being “anti-democratic” and of sabotaging the war program. And by their declaration that “strikes help Hitler”, it is easy to see that they are prepared to extend these slanders to every force in the working class that wants to protect the interests of the workers in the war.</p>
<p><em>Stalinism is the syphilis of the labor movement. Just as the spread of syphilis is not checked by “not speaking about it,” so will Stalinist lynch campaigns not be checked by an ostrich policy, which makes them bolder and gives them the opportunity to finish off their opponents one by one. The labor movement – to protest its independent existence, its struggle for better conditions, its freedom of speech, its right to differ with the policies of the Communist Party – must speak up now and conduct an all-out fight against the lynch provocations of the Stalinists.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="cp"></a>
<h3>Cleveland C.P. Leaflet</h3>
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<img src="cleveland_files/cleveland-1.jpg" alt="C.P. Leaflet" align="bottom" width="555" height="725">
<p class="smc"><b>Above is a reproduction of the Stalinist leaflet issued in Cleveland last week. Note the advertisement for a meeting on the bottom, in which the authors of this leaflet inciting lynch violence against the Trotskyists plead, “Let Freedom Ring for Earl Browder.”</b></p>
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Anthony Massini
C.P. Begins New Lynch Campaign
in Cleveland
(14 March 1942)
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 11, 14 March 1942, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Stalinist frame-up artists are at work again. Their aim is to incite lynch violence against all militant workers who oppose their treacherous policies, and to create the kind of atmosphere in which they can undertake physical attacks against their working-class opponents. Their method is to slander these opponents as “agents of Hitler’’.
The leaflet distributed by the Stalinists in Cleveland last week and reproduced on this page is a typical example of how their lynch campaign operates.
The Stalinists in that city have been infuriated for some time by the regular distribution of The Militant at a large factory and the favorable response to the paper of the workers in the factory. The distribution of a paper which tells the truth about the war interferes with the attempts of the Stalinists – in the name of “national unity against Hitler” – to suppress all militant action by the workers against the bosses’ attacks.
The Stalinists threatened the distributors with violence, and they urged the workers to refuse to accept the paper, to tear it up and throw it into the face of the distributors. When neither of these methods proved successful, they issued the leaflet, We Accuse Hitler’s Agents At Your Gates, an incitement to mob violence and reactionary prejudices in the tradition made famous by the Nazis.
They charge the Trotskyists in this leaflet with concentrating on “spreading seeds of confusion among the laboring, people, for the purpose of disorganizing our fight against the Axis powers,” and with trying “to sabotage the war effort, mainly by creating disunity and conflict in the labor movement.” The “proof” they offer is distorted references to and quotations torn out of context from recent issues of The Militant.
The Way to Defeat Hitler
“Here is the proof”, they say:
“In the February 7th issue of The Militant – (1) A frontpage editorial says that the way to defeat Hitler is to overthrow the governments of the United States and Great Britain. The destruction of the Hitlerite government is NOT urged.”
The title of the editorial referred to was: How to Destroy One of Hitler’s Chief Weapons. It pointed out how Hitler kept the German people in subjection by playing on their fear of a second Versailles Treaty to crush and dismember Germany in the event of an Allied victory. The editorial said that there is
“a way to destroy this weapon of Hitler. There is a way to arouse the German masses to revolutionary struggle against their fascist oppressors. That way is by the establishment of Workers’ and Farmers’ Governments in Britain and the United States ...
“Hitler then would have no success in holding the threat of another Versailles over the German people, because one of the first acts of a Workers’ and Farmers Government in this country would be to renounce all policies or agreements aimed at oppressing or penalizing the German masses ...
“One of the first acts of Workers’ and Farmers’ Governments in Britain and this country would be to call on – and to aid – the German masses to overthrow Hitler, establish their own government representing their own interests, and join with them in the creation of a World Socialist Federation which by abolishing the economic basis for national antagonisms would be able to build a world of security and peace for all.”
The Stalinist charge that “the destruction of the Hitlerite government is NOT urged is thus a crude lie.” The “proof” that the Trotskyists are “Hitler’s agents” turns out on examination to be a program for overthrowing Hitlerism.
The Stalinists lie about this program because it is so sharply opposed to their own “way to defeat Hitler.” They refuse to call on the German masses to make their socialist revolution; they endorse the Atlantic Charter which promises in effect another Versailles Treaty, the fear of which is Hitler’s strongest weapon against the German revolution; they have no program to offer to the German masses who are in the last analysis the force which will overthrow Hitler.
The second “proof” of the Stalinists that the Trotskyists are Hitler’s agents:
“Another editorial, entitled CIO Wage Demands, calls for the ousting of the elected leaders of CIO unions ... In the February 14th issue of The Militant there is another attack on labor unity: ‘The defense of the workers’ interests demands a repudiation of the present leadership and its servile policies ...”
The editorial and article referred to endorsed the demands of the CIO, for wage increases and union security. At the same time they sharply criticized the national leaders of the CIO. Why? Because they issued no program for securing these demands; because what they “mean by ‘fight’ is to throw the demands of the CIO workers into the lap of the War Labor Board”; because their no-strike policy, decided upon behind the backs of the rank-and-file, paralyzes the struggle of the workers against rising prices, etc.
The editorial said: “The workers can have no confidence in such officials. The union ranks want officers who will lead them in genuine struggle against the present serious threat to their rights and living standards ... Above all, the strike weapon must not be surrendered ... The rank-and-file owe it to themselves to elect as their leaders those who put the interests of the workers before everything else.”
The charge about “ousting of elected officials” is clearly a distortion of a call to the workers to elect officials who will fight for their interests. The Stalinists don’t like it because they want the union leaders to place the interests of the war machine above everything else. What the Stalinists mean by “labor unity” today is unquestioning acceptance of every proposal advanced by the union leaders, even when those policies are contrary to the Workers’ interests and decided on bureaucratically behind the back of the workers.
The Trotskyist trade union policy is the opposite of the Stalinist policy, as expounded by Roy Hudson, their trade union expert, in the Daily Worker, March 3: “Strikes Help Hitler,” he said, “because they hinder the war.” The Stalinists say that the Trotskyists’ support of the right to strike makes them “Hitler’s agents.” Well, that’s exactly what the die-hard open shoppers of Little Steel and the poll-tax congressmen like Smith of Virginia say not only of the Trotskyists, but of every worker who tries to’ make trade unionism something more than a rubber stamp for the bosses.
The third “proof” of the Stalinists:
“Presenting the Trotskyists’ attitude toward the war, James P. Cannon, National Secretary, attempts to drive a wedge between the United Nations by falsely characterizing the war effort of the United States and Britain as imperialist in character.”
Cannon’s Statement On the War was a Marxist analysis of the causes of the second world war, reprinted by The Militant from the January 1942 issue of Fourth International. The statement declared that “Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot.” The characterization of the war of the capitalist countries “as an imperialist war” was “determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist – oppressing other nations or peoples – or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.”
But Cannon’s statement drew a sharp distinction between its characterization of the war conducted by the capitalist states and the war conducted by the Soviet Union and China!
“We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, is to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.”
The statement also characterized China’s war against Japan as progressive because it is “a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke.”
This analysis of the difference between the Soviet Union and China on the one hand and the capitalist countries on the other is what the Stalinists call driving “a wedge between the United Nations.” They do not dare to discuss Cannon’s analysis of these differences; they do not want the workers to think about these differences; they attack all those who remind the workers that the Soviet system is different from the capitalist system.
The Stalinists only last June themselves were loudly characterizing the war as imperialist. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, they say, the character of the war “changed”; “ the imperialist war of Britain”, for example, was changed into “a just war”. This is like saying that the British ruling class was fighting a war for markets and raw materials and the right to exploit the colonies on June 21, and then because of Hitler’s invasion it suddenly began on June 23 to fight for something entirely different. When it comes to “spreading seeds of confusion,” the Stalinists have no competitors.
Realizing that their “proof” will be rejected as slanders by anyone who has read the articles they refer to, the Stalinists seek to strengthen their charges by repeating old Stalinist slanders against the Trotskyists in other countries. But here again the falsity of their charges is apparent to anyone who knows even a little about Trotskyism and Stalinism.
“The Trotskyists” says the leaflet, “... were convicted by the Russian government at the Moscow trials for Fifth Column work in behalf of German and Japanese imperialism.”
In 1936–37 the Stalinists were trying to get an alliance with Britain and the United States. Everyone in the labor movement who opposed their policies was labelled by them as an “agent of German and Japanese imperialism.”
In the Moscow trials and the purges which followed them in this period,. Stalin murdered the Old Bolsheviks who helped to found the Soviet Union and whose only crime was that they criticized the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet bureaucracy which Stalin heads and asked for a return to the workers’ democracy which had been established under Lenin, The Moscow trials were rejected by world, public opinion at that time as frame-ups.
In 1939 Stalin made his pact with Hitler and gave him a free hand to go ahead in Europe. The slanders of the Stalinists against the Trotskyists underwent an abrupt change. Now instead of accusing the Trotskyists of being German and Japanese agents, they called them “agents of Anglo-American imperialism.” The Trotskyists had not changed; only Stalin’s alliance had changed.
When Hitler broke the pact last summer, the Stalinist lies about the. Trotskyists changed once again. Again they become “agents of German and Japanese imperialism,” although the Trotskyists remained what they always were, uncompromising defenders of the first workers’ state in spite of the Stalinist regime, and opponents of the Stalinist regime because its policies have helped to undermine the defense, of the Soviet Union.
“They attempted to wreck the development of unity among the Chinese people,” the leaflet continues.
In fact, the Chinese Trotskyists have bravely fought and died in the struggle against the Japanese invaders, have urged the Chinese masses to adopt the revolutionary policy which would drive Japanese imperialism out of their country.
These charges against them come furthermore from the Stalinists who signed a non-aggression pact with Japan less than a year ago, recognizing Japan’s conquest of Manchukuo, and virtually giving the go-ahead signal to Japan in China.
“They made common cause with Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the destruction of the Spanish Republic. They helped torpedo the French Popular Front Government, thus paving the way for Hitler’s bandit armies.”
This lie about “paving the way” for Hitler comes from the Stalinists who supported the People’s Front that suppressed and demoralized the French working class and destroyed the workers’ power that could have defeated Hitler; from the Stalinists whose GPU agents murdered the Spanish revolutionists, collaborated with the Spanish capitalists to put down the revolution in blood and made easier the victory of Franco.
Stalinism fears free discussion in the labor movement just as it fears democracy in the Soviet Union, and it is ever on the lookout for opportunities to destroy its working class opponents by slander, incitations to mob violence and outright assassination.
The Stalinist lynch campaign is not confined to the Trotskyists alone. They have accused Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party of wanting “the defeat of the United States in the fight against. Hitler”; they have accused Louis Nelson, manager of Knitgoods Local 155 of the I.L.G.W.U., of carrying on “fifth column activities” and following an “anti-U.S.” line; they have charged Harry Lundeberg, leader of the AFL seamen’s union, with being “anti-democratic” and of sabotaging the war program. And by their declaration that “strikes help Hitler”, it is easy to see that they are prepared to extend these slanders to every force in the working class that wants to protect the interests of the workers in the war.
Stalinism is the syphilis of the labor movement. Just as the spread of syphilis is not checked by “not speaking about it,” so will Stalinist lynch campaigns not be checked by an ostrich policy, which makes them bolder and gives them the opportunity to finish off their opponents one by one. The labor movement – to protest its independent existence, its struggle for better conditions, its freedom of speech, its right to differ with the policies of the Communist Party – must speak up now and conduct an all-out fight against the lynch provocations of the Stalinists.
* * *
Cleveland C.P. Leaflet
Above is a reproduction of the Stalinist leaflet issued in Cleveland last week. Note the advertisement for a meeting on the bottom, in which the authors of this leaflet inciting lynch violence against the Trotskyists plead, “Let Freedom Ring for Earl Browder.”
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Churchill and Gallacher</h1>
<h4>They Mirror the Relations Between<br>
the Kremlin and the ‘Democracies’</h4>
<h3>(20 September 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_38" target="new">Vol. V No. 38</a>, 20 September 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">On September 11 a discussion took place in the House of Commons in London which, brief though it was, shed a lot of light on the Churchill government’s attitude toward the Soviet Union and on the relations between the Stalinists and the “democratic” imperialists.</p>
<p>It revolved around the recent charge by Jack Tanner, leader of the Engineers Union, that Colonel J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon, Churchill’s Minister of Aircraft Production, had expressed the hope that the Red Army and the German Army would exterminate each other and thus enable British imperialism to regain its dominant position on the continent.</p>
<p>William Gallacher, lone Stalinist member of the House of Commons, asked Prime Minister Churchill if such a statement represented his government’s attitude.</p>
<p>Churchill replied that not only did it not reflect his government’s attitude, but that the Minister’s remarks, made at a “private gathering”, did not reflect, as reported, the attitudee of Colonel Moore-Brabazon either.</p>
<p>The capitalist press and the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> have been content to accept this as a denial of the charge that Moore-Brabazon and the Churchill government would like to see the Red Army as well as Hitler’s army, destroyed in the war.<br>
</p>
<h4>Churchill Really Evaded the Question</h4>
<p class="fst">But actually, as the subsequent discussion showed, Churchill was not denying this charge, he wasmnonly evading it. All that he was denying agreement with was a particular statement and the formulation of that statement.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I happen to know what the views of my right honorable friend are,” he continued, “because on the day Hitler attacked Russia I told him on the telephone what line I was going to take, and he enthusiastically assented.</p>
<p class="quote">“Moreover, my right honorable friend has been all the while ardently at work sending hundreds of fighter aircraft to Russia, many of which have already reached there.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“Although the phrasing of what he said at a private gathering, taken out of its context, might be misconstrued, I am satisfied that he was and is in fullest accord with this government’s policy. Otherwise I should not have appointed him.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Churchill concluded by saying that he was “astonished that anyone could have taken the mischievous action of making this a sensation, which does nothing but harm to Russia as well as Britain and leads to suspicion between those whose fortunes are linked together.”</p>
<p>Churchill was annoyed that the whole question had been brought into the open by Tanner: he doesn’t want anyone getting suspicious about his war policy.</p>
<p>Since Churchill had denied that even Moore-Brabazon stood for the anti-Soviet policy with which he was charged, a Laborite, Emmanuel Shinwell, arose to ask Churchill if he would state whether Moore-Brabazon had admitted making the statement attributed to him.</p>
<p><em>“I think that would not be helpful to the general interest,” was Churchill’s interesting reply.</em></p>
<p>Churchill had said that Moore-Brabazon’s statement might be “misconstrued” if “taken out of its context.” What was it that Moore-Brabazon said that might be misconstrued this way? Just what was the context from which it was taken ? Why does Churchill think it would not be “helpful</p>
<p>to the general interest to state exactly what his Minister’s statement was? The fact that he does not quote the actual statement made is very significant. The likelihood is that it cannot be repeated without being construed in just the way that Tanner did!</p>
<p>And the maker of this statement which does not bear repetition, remember, “was and is in the fullest accord with this government’s policy”!<br>
</p>
<h4>Churchill’s Evidence</h4>
<p class="fst">Churchill attempts to make up for not quoting Moore-Brabazon’s statement by pointing to what Moore-Brabazon has been doing: that is, he has been at work sending hundreds of planes to the Soviet Union, “many of which have already reached there.”</p>
<p>This “material evidence” of what Moore-Brabazon has been doing is cited by Churchill as proof that Moore-Brabazon could not possibly be a supporter of the policy attributed to him. But this is only another and a more artful way of evading the question. <em>For the sending of aircraft to the Soviet Union is not at all incompatible with the policy of so conducting the war that both the Soviet and the Germa’n Armies will be destroyed and Britain left in a position to dictate its own terms after the war.</em></p>
<p>As a. matter of fact, at this stage of the war, it is perfectly compatible. At this stage, where the Soviet Union can use all the aid it gets, the only logical way from the viewpoint of the British imperialists to carry out a policy of fighting the most immediate danger, the Nazi army, and at the same time preventing the Red Army from winning a definite victory, is by giving some aid to the Soviet Union – some aid, enough to continue the war and weaken Germany, but not enough to permit the Soviet Union to win. This is the policy now being carried out by the “democratic” imperialists.</p>
<p>And the great crime of the Stalinists is precisely that they do not expose this policy of Churchill, but hide it and call on the workers to support him because for his own purposes he sends the USSR a little aid.</p>
<p>Gallacher sensed the evasion, though he did not care to expose it, and he asked another question. He asked if Churchill was prepared to “clear out all those in the government who are not 100 per cent behind the Soviet Union.”</p>
<p>This was too much for Churchill. He does not intend to give the Stalinists anything but the privilege of supporting his policies. This privilege certainly does hot extend as far as permitting them to help form those policies. As for this demand of Gallacher – it would mean clearing out the whole government, including Churchill himself, for the only thing that that government is 100 per cent behind is the interests of British imperialism. If those interests include for the time being a little aid to the Soviet Union in return for a breathing spell from Hitler, as well as political support by the Stalinists – all right.</p>
<p>But 100 per cent or even 2 per cent support of the Soviet Union is impossible for the forces represented by Churchill who hates the workers’ state as much today as he did 22 years ago when he led the interventionist attacks against it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Churchill’s Rebuff</h4>
<p class="fst">So he answered “coldly” and with contempt: “I do not think that I should be prepared to receive guidance in policy or conduct from an honorable gentleman who, it is notorious, has to change his opinions whenever he is ordered to by a body outside this country.”</p>
<p>Whereupon Gallacher lost his temper and blurted out some truths about this red-baiter. Demanding a withdrawal of this “insulting remark,” he cried out: <em>“It is a dirty, cowardly, rotten action on the part of the Prime Minister. It is the action of a blackguard. It is a foul and dirty lie.”</em></p>
<p>But when Gallacher had time to think it over, he realized that he had not been following the Stalinist line of supporting and covering up Churchill, so he got down on his knees and ate humble pie.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“After very deep reflection about what occurred this morning,” he said, “I want to apologize to you, sir, and to the House for the offensive words I used when I put to you my point of order, and I want to make a complete withdrawal of the offensive remarks made and directed toward the Prime Minister.”</p>
<p class="fst">In this incident is reflected not only Churchill’s, but the Kremlin’s political line as well. Churchill hates the Soviet Union and will make no concessions to it that will conflict with the interests of the capitalist class he represents. The Stalinists know this, although they will not admit it to the workers, and in return for the aid and promises of aid which Churchill gives them, they conceal Churchill’s role and aims, and call on the British and American workers to support his imperialist war.</p>
<p>Class conscious workers who want to defend the Soviet Union can support the political line of neither. Instead, they must concentrate on continuing the class struggle in their own country and fighting for an independent working class defense of the USSR.</p>
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George Breitman
Churchill and Gallacher
They Mirror the Relations Between
the Kremlin and the ‘Democracies’
(20 September 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 38, 20 September 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
On September 11 a discussion took place in the House of Commons in London which, brief though it was, shed a lot of light on the Churchill government’s attitude toward the Soviet Union and on the relations between the Stalinists and the “democratic” imperialists.
It revolved around the recent charge by Jack Tanner, leader of the Engineers Union, that Colonel J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon, Churchill’s Minister of Aircraft Production, had expressed the hope that the Red Army and the German Army would exterminate each other and thus enable British imperialism to regain its dominant position on the continent.
William Gallacher, lone Stalinist member of the House of Commons, asked Prime Minister Churchill if such a statement represented his government’s attitude.
Churchill replied that not only did it not reflect his government’s attitude, but that the Minister’s remarks, made at a “private gathering”, did not reflect, as reported, the attitudee of Colonel Moore-Brabazon either.
The capitalist press and the Daily Worker have been content to accept this as a denial of the charge that Moore-Brabazon and the Churchill government would like to see the Red Army as well as Hitler’s army, destroyed in the war.
Churchill Really Evaded the Question
But actually, as the subsequent discussion showed, Churchill was not denying this charge, he wasmnonly evading it. All that he was denying agreement with was a particular statement and the formulation of that statement.
“I happen to know what the views of my right honorable friend are,” he continued, “because on the day Hitler attacked Russia I told him on the telephone what line I was going to take, and he enthusiastically assented.
“Moreover, my right honorable friend has been all the while ardently at work sending hundreds of fighter aircraft to Russia, many of which have already reached there.
“Although the phrasing of what he said at a private gathering, taken out of its context, might be misconstrued, I am satisfied that he was and is in fullest accord with this government’s policy. Otherwise I should not have appointed him.”
Churchill concluded by saying that he was “astonished that anyone could have taken the mischievous action of making this a sensation, which does nothing but harm to Russia as well as Britain and leads to suspicion between those whose fortunes are linked together.”
Churchill was annoyed that the whole question had been brought into the open by Tanner: he doesn’t want anyone getting suspicious about his war policy.
Since Churchill had denied that even Moore-Brabazon stood for the anti-Soviet policy with which he was charged, a Laborite, Emmanuel Shinwell, arose to ask Churchill if he would state whether Moore-Brabazon had admitted making the statement attributed to him.
“I think that would not be helpful to the general interest,” was Churchill’s interesting reply.
Churchill had said that Moore-Brabazon’s statement might be “misconstrued” if “taken out of its context.” What was it that Moore-Brabazon said that might be misconstrued this way? Just what was the context from which it was taken ? Why does Churchill think it would not be “helpful
to the general interest to state exactly what his Minister’s statement was? The fact that he does not quote the actual statement made is very significant. The likelihood is that it cannot be repeated without being construed in just the way that Tanner did!
And the maker of this statement which does not bear repetition, remember, “was and is in the fullest accord with this government’s policy”!
Churchill’s Evidence
Churchill attempts to make up for not quoting Moore-Brabazon’s statement by pointing to what Moore-Brabazon has been doing: that is, he has been at work sending hundreds of planes to the Soviet Union, “many of which have already reached there.”
This “material evidence” of what Moore-Brabazon has been doing is cited by Churchill as proof that Moore-Brabazon could not possibly be a supporter of the policy attributed to him. But this is only another and a more artful way of evading the question. For the sending of aircraft to the Soviet Union is not at all incompatible with the policy of so conducting the war that both the Soviet and the Germa’n Armies will be destroyed and Britain left in a position to dictate its own terms after the war.
As a. matter of fact, at this stage of the war, it is perfectly compatible. At this stage, where the Soviet Union can use all the aid it gets, the only logical way from the viewpoint of the British imperialists to carry out a policy of fighting the most immediate danger, the Nazi army, and at the same time preventing the Red Army from winning a definite victory, is by giving some aid to the Soviet Union – some aid, enough to continue the war and weaken Germany, but not enough to permit the Soviet Union to win. This is the policy now being carried out by the “democratic” imperialists.
And the great crime of the Stalinists is precisely that they do not expose this policy of Churchill, but hide it and call on the workers to support him because for his own purposes he sends the USSR a little aid.
Gallacher sensed the evasion, though he did not care to expose it, and he asked another question. He asked if Churchill was prepared to “clear out all those in the government who are not 100 per cent behind the Soviet Union.”
This was too much for Churchill. He does not intend to give the Stalinists anything but the privilege of supporting his policies. This privilege certainly does hot extend as far as permitting them to help form those policies. As for this demand of Gallacher – it would mean clearing out the whole government, including Churchill himself, for the only thing that that government is 100 per cent behind is the interests of British imperialism. If those interests include for the time being a little aid to the Soviet Union in return for a breathing spell from Hitler, as well as political support by the Stalinists – all right.
But 100 per cent or even 2 per cent support of the Soviet Union is impossible for the forces represented by Churchill who hates the workers’ state as much today as he did 22 years ago when he led the interventionist attacks against it.
Churchill’s Rebuff
So he answered “coldly” and with contempt: “I do not think that I should be prepared to receive guidance in policy or conduct from an honorable gentleman who, it is notorious, has to change his opinions whenever he is ordered to by a body outside this country.”
Whereupon Gallacher lost his temper and blurted out some truths about this red-baiter. Demanding a withdrawal of this “insulting remark,” he cried out: “It is a dirty, cowardly, rotten action on the part of the Prime Minister. It is the action of a blackguard. It is a foul and dirty lie.”
But when Gallacher had time to think it over, he realized that he had not been following the Stalinist line of supporting and covering up Churchill, so he got down on his knees and ate humble pie.
“After very deep reflection about what occurred this morning,” he said, “I want to apologize to you, sir, and to the House for the offensive words I used when I put to you my point of order, and I want to make a complete withdrawal of the offensive remarks made and directed toward the Prime Minister.”
In this incident is reflected not only Churchill’s, but the Kremlin’s political line as well. Churchill hates the Soviet Union and will make no concessions to it that will conflict with the interests of the capitalist class he represents. The Stalinists know this, although they will not admit it to the workers, and in return for the aid and promises of aid which Churchill gives them, they conceal Churchill’s role and aims, and call on the British and American workers to support his imperialist war.
Class conscious workers who want to defend the Soviet Union can support the political line of neither. Instead, they must concentrate on continuing the class struggle in their own country and fighting for an independent working class defense of the USSR.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(7 June 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_23" target="new">Vol. V No. 23</a>, 7 June 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The Negro March On Washington</h4>
<p class="fst">Last week, in our discussion of the proposed march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington on July 1, we indicated our support of the undertaking and called attention to the fact that the most important consideration in the march had to be the demands made by the marchers when they got there.</p>
<p>We discussed the proposal of the Negro Committee handling the march preparations; it intends to ask a presidential decree abolishing discrimination in employment and the armed forces. We explained how this was based on A. Philip, Randolph’s theory that Roosevelt could issue such an order tomorrow, “and discriminations against colored people would promptly end.”</p>
<p><em>We support the demand, that Roosevelt should issue an executive order against discrimination. But we definitely do not believe that discrimination would end if Roosevelt issued the order. We support this demand because it would help the fight against specific cases of Jim Crowism, but do not believe it would by itself abolish Jim Crowism.</em></p>
<p>In support of our position, we want to recall one of the statements made by A. Philip Randolph in the article in which he first called for the march. It should be remembered that this, statement of his was advanced as a <em>reason</em> for holding the march. Printed in January, it said:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“It seems to be apparent that even when well-meaning, responsible, top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification and evasion.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">To this he should have added that the Negro-hating, labor-hating employers in industry know very well how to avoid laws and rulings when it serves their purpose.</p>
<p>How does Randolph square this statement of his in January with the one he made in April that a presidential decree would “promptly” end discrimination?<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>What Randolph Leaves Out</h4>
<p class="fst">He doesn’t, and he doesn’t try to. He ignores this question, as he does others which touch the very heart of the problem, such as:</p>
<p>Industry, lock, stock and barrel, is in the hands of an employer class which fosters and strengthens anti-Negro prejudices in order to be able to more easily exploit workers of all races.</p>
<p>Military training, lock, stock and barrel, is in the hands of a hardened anti-Negro bureaucratic military caste which is dedicated to the maintenance in military life of every form of racial discrimination that exists in civilian life.</p>
<p>The government, lock, stock and barrel, is in the hands of a war-mongering administration that is notorious for its indifference to the needs and desires of the Negro people, and of two capitalist parties which take turns when they are in power in kicking around legislation such as the anti-lynch bill and the poll tax bill.</p>
<p><em>In other words, far more important than the question of an executive order which would only echo other rulings already on the books, is the question of CONTROL.</em></p>
<p>Even if the order were issued by Roosevelt, it would remain on paper, as long as control of industry, military training and the government remain in the hands of the enemies of the Negroes.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>A Program for Militant Negroes</h4>
<p class="fst">Consequently, Negroes must ask for more than a presidential order.</p>
<p><em>Employers controlling the war industries won’t hire Negroes? Then expropriate the war industries, have the government take them over, and let them be managed and operated without discrimination by committees elected by the workers!</em></p>
<p><em>Negroes need military training in this period when all major questions are decided arms in hand, but the army bureaucrats are bitterly anti-Negro and determined to “keep them in their place”? Then join the fight for military training, financed by the government but Under control of the trade Unions, based on full equality for the Negroes!</em></p>
<p>The government and the boss parties aid the bosses in segregating and discriminating against the Negro people, refusing to pass such elementary legislation as the anti-lynch and poll tax bills ? Then aid in the formation of a labor party pledged to carry on the Negroes’ struggle, pledged to establish a Workers’ and Farmers’ government that, would create a hew society that would forever abolish poverty, war and racial discrimination!</p>
<p>This is the kind of program that Negroes need and must fight for – in Washington on July 1 and everywhere else until they win full social, economic and political freedom.</p>
<p>We do not pretend that the mere adoption of these demands by the marchers will bring automatic victory. Jim Crowism is too strongly rooted in the ways and customs and traditions of our great American democracy to be torn out easily. It will require a long and bitter fight, that will not be ended on July 1.</p>
<p><em>But with this program the marchers, and the Negro people, will have a Weapon that will make a good start on July 1 and lay the foundation for a struggle that will end in victory, instead of in defeat and demoralization, as happens to so many actions that have no clear goal.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(7 June 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 23, 7 June 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Negro March On Washington
Last week, in our discussion of the proposed march of 10,000 Negroes on Washington on July 1, we indicated our support of the undertaking and called attention to the fact that the most important consideration in the march had to be the demands made by the marchers when they got there.
We discussed the proposal of the Negro Committee handling the march preparations; it intends to ask a presidential decree abolishing discrimination in employment and the armed forces. We explained how this was based on A. Philip, Randolph’s theory that Roosevelt could issue such an order tomorrow, “and discriminations against colored people would promptly end.”
We support the demand, that Roosevelt should issue an executive order against discrimination. But we definitely do not believe that discrimination would end if Roosevelt issued the order. We support this demand because it would help the fight against specific cases of Jim Crowism, but do not believe it would by itself abolish Jim Crowism.
In support of our position, we want to recall one of the statements made by A. Philip Randolph in the article in which he first called for the march. It should be remembered that this, statement of his was advanced as a reason for holding the march. Printed in January, it said:
“It seems to be apparent that even when well-meaning, responsible, top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification and evasion.”
To this he should have added that the Negro-hating, labor-hating employers in industry know very well how to avoid laws and rulings when it serves their purpose.
How does Randolph square this statement of his in January with the one he made in April that a presidential decree would “promptly” end discrimination?
What Randolph Leaves Out
He doesn’t, and he doesn’t try to. He ignores this question, as he does others which touch the very heart of the problem, such as:
Industry, lock, stock and barrel, is in the hands of an employer class which fosters and strengthens anti-Negro prejudices in order to be able to more easily exploit workers of all races.
Military training, lock, stock and barrel, is in the hands of a hardened anti-Negro bureaucratic military caste which is dedicated to the maintenance in military life of every form of racial discrimination that exists in civilian life.
The government, lock, stock and barrel, is in the hands of a war-mongering administration that is notorious for its indifference to the needs and desires of the Negro people, and of two capitalist parties which take turns when they are in power in kicking around legislation such as the anti-lynch bill and the poll tax bill.
In other words, far more important than the question of an executive order which would only echo other rulings already on the books, is the question of CONTROL.
Even if the order were issued by Roosevelt, it would remain on paper, as long as control of industry, military training and the government remain in the hands of the enemies of the Negroes.
A Program for Militant Negroes
Consequently, Negroes must ask for more than a presidential order.
Employers controlling the war industries won’t hire Negroes? Then expropriate the war industries, have the government take them over, and let them be managed and operated without discrimination by committees elected by the workers!
Negroes need military training in this period when all major questions are decided arms in hand, but the army bureaucrats are bitterly anti-Negro and determined to “keep them in their place”? Then join the fight for military training, financed by the government but Under control of the trade Unions, based on full equality for the Negroes!
The government and the boss parties aid the bosses in segregating and discriminating against the Negro people, refusing to pass such elementary legislation as the anti-lynch and poll tax bills ? Then aid in the formation of a labor party pledged to carry on the Negroes’ struggle, pledged to establish a Workers’ and Farmers’ government that, would create a hew society that would forever abolish poverty, war and racial discrimination!
This is the kind of program that Negroes need and must fight for – in Washington on July 1 and everywhere else until they win full social, economic and political freedom.
We do not pretend that the mere adoption of these demands by the marchers will bring automatic victory. Jim Crowism is too strongly rooted in the ways and customs and traditions of our great American democracy to be torn out easily. It will require a long and bitter fight, that will not be ended on July 1.
But with this program the marchers, and the Negro people, will have a Weapon that will make a good start on July 1 and lay the foundation for a struggle that will end in victory, instead of in defeat and demoralization, as happens to so many actions that have no clear goal.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(24 May 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_21" target="new">Vol. V No. 21</a>, 24 May 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The Negro March to Washington</h4>
<p class="fst">Last week in this column we discussed the March to Washington on July 1, and indicated the full agreement of the Socialist Workers Party with such an undertaking. We also warned that if the march were to accomplish anything, it would have to he militant, on a mass scale, and based on the proper set of demands.</p>
<p>It is as yet too early to determine just what the Randolph Committee means by the “militancy” which they urge the Negroes to exercise in this march. It is also too early to determine in what way the Committee, and the local groups, are going to mobilize the marchers, and whether they will really succeed in bringing out the masses.</p>
<p><em>But it is already possible to discuss the general approach of the Committee, as set forth in its <strong>Call To America</strong> (copy available from Negroes’ Committee To March On Washington For Equal Participation in National Defense, Suite 301, 217 West 125 St., New York City).</em></p>
<p><em>This <strong>Call</strong> is filled with militant words and some not-so-militant ideas. It demands the end of Jim Crowism; it stresses the need for action by the Negroes to bring it about; but it does not indicate the correct kind of action and program. As a result, it is filled with contradictions from one end to the other, which will have to be set-tied in one direction or another.</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>What the <em>Call</em> Says</h4>
<p class="fst">In one place the <strong>Call</strong> says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But what of national unity? We believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens to jobs in national defense and the armed forces, and in all other institutions and endeavors in America. We condemn all dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi and Communist. We are loyal, patriotic Americans, all.</p>
<p class="quote">“But, if American democracy will not defend its defenders; if American democracy will not protect its protectors; if American democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color; if American democracy will not insure equality of opportunity, freedom and justice to its citizens, black and whiter it is a hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Why all those ifs? Don’t we know very well what is going on? Is there any real doubt in their minds as to exactly what is happening to the Negro in our great American democracy?</em></p>
<p><em>Just turn those two paragraphs around, read the second first, and you’ll get a better picture of what the <strong>Call</strong>’s declaration of loyalty amounts to. You’ll see that it is a declaration of loyalty to a hollow mockery, and that hidden behind the “ifs” is a potential surrender of the fight for full equality for the Negro people.</em></p>
<p>Maybe they don’t think so, but the ruling class in this country sees it and they will say, “Don’t worry too much about this whole business of the march; no matter how they are treated, they promise that they’ll go along and that they’ll drag the masses behind them.”</p>
<p>This is one of the contradictions that must he solved before a fight against Jim Crowism is going to be successful. Loyalty to a Jim-Crow system can never end in its destruction and replacement by a system of equality.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>Kinds of Mass Action for Effective Struggle</h4>
<p class="fst">This is not the only instance of the <strong>Call</strong> for the march making concessions to the ideas looked on with favor by the ruling class. In another place it says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“However, we sternly counsel against violence and ill-considered and intemperate action and the abuse of power. Mass power, like physical power, when misdirected, is more harmful than helpful.</p>
<p class="quote">“We summon you to mass action that is orderly and lawful, but aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom.</p>
<p class="quote">“Crispus Attucks marched and died as a martyr for American independence. Nat Turner, Demark Vesy, Gabriel, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought, bled and died for the emancipation of Negro slaves and the preservation of American democracy.”</p>
<p class="fst">Our criticism of this section of the <strong>Call</strong> should not be mistaken to mean that the Socialist Workers Party is in favor of “ill-considered and intemperate action” or anything of the kind. Not at all.</p>
<p><em>But who is served by this reassurance that everything is going to be nice and respectable and within the “lawful” bounds established by the ruling class and its anti-labor, Jim Crow legislatures and courts?</em></p>
<p>Once again, the Bourbon politicians in Washington will smile and say, “It’s nothing to worry about, they are only letting off a little steam.”</p>
<p>Does this serve the interests of the struggle against Jim Crowism? If so, we fail to see it.</p>
<p>And if we are going to talk about history, let us talk about it correctly. Did King George the Third think that Crispus Attucks’ action was “lawful”? Did the slaveholders of Virginia think that Nat Turner was “orderly”?</p>
<p><em>The trouble is that the Randolph Committee is too much concerned about what the powers-that-be may think about them. And as long as that is true, they lead a half-hearted fight, in spite of all their talk about aggressiveness and militancy.</em></p>
<p>Considerations such as these may seem trivial on first glance, but they help to determine the character of the entire march, and those who want a successful and meaningful march must think about and correct them.</p>
<p class="c"><a href="negrostruggle5.htm"><strong>(Continued next week)</strong></a></p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(24 May 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 21, 24 May 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Negro March to Washington
Last week in this column we discussed the March to Washington on July 1, and indicated the full agreement of the Socialist Workers Party with such an undertaking. We also warned that if the march were to accomplish anything, it would have to he militant, on a mass scale, and based on the proper set of demands.
It is as yet too early to determine just what the Randolph Committee means by the “militancy” which they urge the Negroes to exercise in this march. It is also too early to determine in what way the Committee, and the local groups, are going to mobilize the marchers, and whether they will really succeed in bringing out the masses.
But it is already possible to discuss the general approach of the Committee, as set forth in its Call To America (copy available from Negroes’ Committee To March On Washington For Equal Participation in National Defense, Suite 301, 217 West 125 St., New York City).
This Call is filled with militant words and some not-so-militant ideas. It demands the end of Jim Crowism; it stresses the need for action by the Negroes to bring it about; but it does not indicate the correct kind of action and program. As a result, it is filled with contradictions from one end to the other, which will have to be set-tied in one direction or another.
What the Call Says
In one place the Call says:
“But what of national unity? We believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens to jobs in national defense and the armed forces, and in all other institutions and endeavors in America. We condemn all dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi and Communist. We are loyal, patriotic Americans, all.
“But, if American democracy will not defend its defenders; if American democracy will not protect its protectors; if American democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color; if American democracy will not insure equality of opportunity, freedom and justice to its citizens, black and whiter it is a hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand.”
Why all those ifs? Don’t we know very well what is going on? Is there any real doubt in their minds as to exactly what is happening to the Negro in our great American democracy?
Just turn those two paragraphs around, read the second first, and you’ll get a better picture of what the Call’s declaration of loyalty amounts to. You’ll see that it is a declaration of loyalty to a hollow mockery, and that hidden behind the “ifs” is a potential surrender of the fight for full equality for the Negro people.
Maybe they don’t think so, but the ruling class in this country sees it and they will say, “Don’t worry too much about this whole business of the march; no matter how they are treated, they promise that they’ll go along and that they’ll drag the masses behind them.”
This is one of the contradictions that must he solved before a fight against Jim Crowism is going to be successful. Loyalty to a Jim-Crow system can never end in its destruction and replacement by a system of equality.
Kinds of Mass Action for Effective Struggle
This is not the only instance of the Call for the march making concessions to the ideas looked on with favor by the ruling class. In another place it says:
“However, we sternly counsel against violence and ill-considered and intemperate action and the abuse of power. Mass power, like physical power, when misdirected, is more harmful than helpful.
“We summon you to mass action that is orderly and lawful, but aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom.
“Crispus Attucks marched and died as a martyr for American independence. Nat Turner, Demark Vesy, Gabriel, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought, bled and died for the emancipation of Negro slaves and the preservation of American democracy.”
Our criticism of this section of the Call should not be mistaken to mean that the Socialist Workers Party is in favor of “ill-considered and intemperate action” or anything of the kind. Not at all.
But who is served by this reassurance that everything is going to be nice and respectable and within the “lawful” bounds established by the ruling class and its anti-labor, Jim Crow legislatures and courts?
Once again, the Bourbon politicians in Washington will smile and say, “It’s nothing to worry about, they are only letting off a little steam.”
Does this serve the interests of the struggle against Jim Crowism? If so, we fail to see it.
And if we are going to talk about history, let us talk about it correctly. Did King George the Third think that Crispus Attucks’ action was “lawful”? Did the slaveholders of Virginia think that Nat Turner was “orderly”?
The trouble is that the Randolph Committee is too much concerned about what the powers-that-be may think about them. And as long as that is true, they lead a half-hearted fight, in spite of all their talk about aggressiveness and militancy.
Considerations such as these may seem trivial on first glance, but they help to determine the character of the entire march, and those who want a successful and meaningful march must think about and correct them.
(Continued next week)
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Deutscher’s Biography of Stalin</h1>
<h3>(31 October 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/v13n44-oct-31-1949.pdf" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 44</a>, 31 October 1949.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Falgren and David Walters for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>Stalin: A Political Biography</strong><br>
by Isaac Deutscher<br>
<em>Oxford University Press, 1949, 600 pp., $5.</em></p>
<p class="fst">The publishers of this biography say, “It is not pro-Stalin; it is not pro-Communist. It is, rather, that rare creation – an objective book ...” Whether or not the book is genuinely objective, its complex character was certainly confirmed by the conflicting reviews it received from the different political schools.</p>
<p><em>The N. Y. Times</em> reviewer, generally reflecting the sentiments of the capitalist press, thinks it will serve as “the classic biography and reference book” on Stalin until such time as the historians get access to the archives in the Soviet Union. But he refuses to offer a “final judgment” on this volume until he has had a chance to study Deutscher’s next two books, dealing with Lenin and Trotsky, presumably so that he can get a clearer idea of Deutscher’s attitude to. Lenin and Leninism.</p>
<p>The Social Democratic <em>New Leader</em> issued a pre-publication memorandum warning all reviewers that it is “the most adroit apology for Soviet domestic and foreign policy to be published in many years.” Its own review disparages Deutscher for “his evident ideological bias. in favor of the broad aims of the Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin experiment.”</p>
<p>For the Stalinist <em>Daily Worker</em> it is “a grotesque amalgam of concepts and phrases borrowed from Marxism, Trotskyism and the capitalists ... bristling with garbled quotations ... this spurious facade of balanced historiography ... veils a savage bias and an unscrupulous use of every slander and lie which, has ever been utilized against Stalin and the Soviet Union ... a pyramid of lies ... the same old smelly package.”</p>
<p>The Shachtmanite <em>Labor Action</em> ’finds it an “impressive achievement ... written from a generally Marxist point of view,” but marred by “a very poor final chapter” in which “Deutscher succumbs to a variety of ‘Cannonism’ – actually, that is, to a critical acceptance of the Stalinist myth.”</p>
<p>Deutscher himself says: “This book is intended as the first installment of a biographical trilogy to be continued and completed with a <em>Life of Lenin</em> and a study of <em>Trotsky in Exile</em>. The main study of pre-1917 Bolshevism and the history of such ideas as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Soviets, the ’proletarian vanguard,’ and so on, must have their place in the biography of Lenin. In the present volume the growth and evolution of these ideas have been sketched only in so far as it was necessary for an understanding of the chief character.”</p>
<p>Deutscher is a Polish journalist who broke with Stalinism in 1932 because he favored a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis; it is said that for a while he was sympathetic to Trotskyism. At the beginning of the war, however, he came to England, and served as a Russian expert on the editorial staff of <em>The Economist</em> and for the BBC.</p>
<p>He is well acquainted with the factual and documentary material available on his subject and handles them scrupulously on the whole, although in general his method is to question all charges or testimony adverse to Stalin that cannot be verified beyond question, and to give him, the benefit of the doubt in most such cases. It is this method, plus the curiously detached manner in which it is written, that has earned the book its reputation for objectivity in some quarters.</p>
<p>He also has the irritating habit, after detailing one of Stalin’s crimes against the revolution, of engaging in entirely uncalled for speculation about possible justifications for his acts which Stalin may have had in his mind. Thus, after reporting the Moscow Trials and showing them to be monstrous frameups, he adds: “It is not necessary to assume that he [Stalin] acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power. He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright.”</p>
<p>There is much in this book that no Marxist can accept. One of the worst is Deutscher’s evaluation of the period of industrialization and collectivization beginning with the first Five-Year Plan in 1929 as Soviet Russia’s “second revolution, which was directed solely and exclusively by Stalin” and “was even more sweeping and, radical than the first” in its scope and immediate effect on the masses.</p>
<p>But, as Trotsky pointed out ten years ago, the source of economic progress in the USSR was the revolution of 1917, which led to the nationalization of the means of production and the planned beginnings, and by no means the fact that the bureaucracy usurped command over the economy. On the contrary, bureaucratism, as a system, became the worst brake on the technical and cultural development of the country.</p>
<p>”This was veiled for a certain time by the fact that the Soviet economy was occupied for two decades with transplanting and assimilating the technology and organization of production in advanced capitalist countries. The period of borrowing and imitation still could, for better or for worse, be accommodated to bureaucratic automatism, i.e., the suffocation of all initiative and all creative urge. But the higher the economy rose, the more complex its requirements became, all the more unbearable became the bureaucratic regime. The constantly sharpening contradiction between them leads to uninterrupted political convulsions, to systematic annihilation of the most outstanding creative elements in all spheres of activity.”</p>
<p>In. short, Stalin, far from leading any revolution, “second?” or otherwise, clamped a bureaucratic grip on the Soviet economy. The viability of the economic foundations laid by the 1917 revolution enabled the economy to develop despite the bureaucracy, whose caste interests and police methods conflict with the needs of socialist development. Whatever achievements Stalinism can claim in the technological progress of Soviet economy are a thousand times outweighed by the bureaucratic chains in which it shackles the economy, by its exclusion of the workers from the planning process and by the heavy toll its parasitism exacts from the national income. The facts show that Stalinism, far from playing a progressive role in the economy, functions as the biggest internal obstacle to the Soviet Union’s harmonious economic development.<br>
</p>
<p class="sub">Records his crimes</p>
<p class="fst">Nevertheless, Deutscher does give a fairly complete picture of Stalin’s crimes, and the portrait of Stalin that emerges coincides on the whole with that drawn by Trotsky (from whose writings Deutscher has borrowed much).</p>
<p>It shows Stalin’s development into a professional revolutionary, whose grasp of Marxism was never more than superficial and who gravitated in the direction of Menshevism in every crisis. It describes his rise to dictatorial power after Lenin’s death as the representative of a bureaucratic caste which leaned on the more backward elements in Soviet society and was strengthened by the defeats of the world revolution. It explains why and how he invented the anti-Marxist theory of “socialism in one country.”</p>
<p>It discloses how he suppressed democracy in the Bolshevik Party, transformed the world communist movement into frontier guards for Soviet foreign policy, wiped out the Old Guard in the Moscow Trials. The later chapters, dealing with World War II, also tell of his pact with Hitler, his later relations with his Allied imperialist partners, and the empirical, opportunist policy he pursued throughout in his conduct of the war.</p>
<p>More books recounting Stalin’s crimes against socialism are certainly needed to help educate the new generations and to counteract the flood of volumes depicting Stalin as arch-enemy of capitalism and organizer of world revolution. But Deutscher’s book cannot fulfill this need. For whatever qualities one may be ready to concede its popularization of some major, historical events are wholly negated by the interpretation Deutscher gives to the role of Stalinism as a whole.</p>
<p>Is Stalinism revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? Does it, can it play a progressive role in the struggle for socialism, despite the reactionary methods it employs? Is Stalin’s position, in the modern scene comparable to that of Cromwell and Robespierre in the British and French bourgeois revolutions? No book on the subject that gives wrong answers to these questions can have any value for revolutionary workers, even if it contains accurate information on historical details. Deutscher gives the wrong answers. How they are wrong, and how they differ from those made by the Trotskyists, will be the subject of an article next week.</p>
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George Breitman
Deutscher’s Biography of Stalin
(31 October 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 8 No. 44, 31 October 1949.
Transcribed & marked up by Martin Falgren and David Walters for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Stalin: A Political Biography
by Isaac Deutscher
Oxford University Press, 1949, 600 pp., $5.
The publishers of this biography say, “It is not pro-Stalin; it is not pro-Communist. It is, rather, that rare creation – an objective book ...” Whether or not the book is genuinely objective, its complex character was certainly confirmed by the conflicting reviews it received from the different political schools.
The N. Y. Times reviewer, generally reflecting the sentiments of the capitalist press, thinks it will serve as “the classic biography and reference book” on Stalin until such time as the historians get access to the archives in the Soviet Union. But he refuses to offer a “final judgment” on this volume until he has had a chance to study Deutscher’s next two books, dealing with Lenin and Trotsky, presumably so that he can get a clearer idea of Deutscher’s attitude to. Lenin and Leninism.
The Social Democratic New Leader issued a pre-publication memorandum warning all reviewers that it is “the most adroit apology for Soviet domestic and foreign policy to be published in many years.” Its own review disparages Deutscher for “his evident ideological bias. in favor of the broad aims of the Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin experiment.”
For the Stalinist Daily Worker it is “a grotesque amalgam of concepts and phrases borrowed from Marxism, Trotskyism and the capitalists ... bristling with garbled quotations ... this spurious facade of balanced historiography ... veils a savage bias and an unscrupulous use of every slander and lie which, has ever been utilized against Stalin and the Soviet Union ... a pyramid of lies ... the same old smelly package.”
The Shachtmanite Labor Action ’finds it an “impressive achievement ... written from a generally Marxist point of view,” but marred by “a very poor final chapter” in which “Deutscher succumbs to a variety of ‘Cannonism’ – actually, that is, to a critical acceptance of the Stalinist myth.”
Deutscher himself says: “This book is intended as the first installment of a biographical trilogy to be continued and completed with a Life of Lenin and a study of Trotsky in Exile. The main study of pre-1917 Bolshevism and the history of such ideas as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Soviets, the ’proletarian vanguard,’ and so on, must have their place in the biography of Lenin. In the present volume the growth and evolution of these ideas have been sketched only in so far as it was necessary for an understanding of the chief character.”
Deutscher is a Polish journalist who broke with Stalinism in 1932 because he favored a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis; it is said that for a while he was sympathetic to Trotskyism. At the beginning of the war, however, he came to England, and served as a Russian expert on the editorial staff of The Economist and for the BBC.
He is well acquainted with the factual and documentary material available on his subject and handles them scrupulously on the whole, although in general his method is to question all charges or testimony adverse to Stalin that cannot be verified beyond question, and to give him, the benefit of the doubt in most such cases. It is this method, plus the curiously detached manner in which it is written, that has earned the book its reputation for objectivity in some quarters.
He also has the irritating habit, after detailing one of Stalin’s crimes against the revolution, of engaging in entirely uncalled for speculation about possible justifications for his acts which Stalin may have had in his mind. Thus, after reporting the Moscow Trials and showing them to be monstrous frameups, he adds: “It is not necessary to assume that he [Stalin] acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power. He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright.”
There is much in this book that no Marxist can accept. One of the worst is Deutscher’s evaluation of the period of industrialization and collectivization beginning with the first Five-Year Plan in 1929 as Soviet Russia’s “second revolution, which was directed solely and exclusively by Stalin” and “was even more sweeping and, radical than the first” in its scope and immediate effect on the masses.
But, as Trotsky pointed out ten years ago, the source of economic progress in the USSR was the revolution of 1917, which led to the nationalization of the means of production and the planned beginnings, and by no means the fact that the bureaucracy usurped command over the economy. On the contrary, bureaucratism, as a system, became the worst brake on the technical and cultural development of the country.
”This was veiled for a certain time by the fact that the Soviet economy was occupied for two decades with transplanting and assimilating the technology and organization of production in advanced capitalist countries. The period of borrowing and imitation still could, for better or for worse, be accommodated to bureaucratic automatism, i.e., the suffocation of all initiative and all creative urge. But the higher the economy rose, the more complex its requirements became, all the more unbearable became the bureaucratic regime. The constantly sharpening contradiction between them leads to uninterrupted political convulsions, to systematic annihilation of the most outstanding creative elements in all spheres of activity.”
In. short, Stalin, far from leading any revolution, “second?” or otherwise, clamped a bureaucratic grip on the Soviet economy. The viability of the economic foundations laid by the 1917 revolution enabled the economy to develop despite the bureaucracy, whose caste interests and police methods conflict with the needs of socialist development. Whatever achievements Stalinism can claim in the technological progress of Soviet economy are a thousand times outweighed by the bureaucratic chains in which it shackles the economy, by its exclusion of the workers from the planning process and by the heavy toll its parasitism exacts from the national income. The facts show that Stalinism, far from playing a progressive role in the economy, functions as the biggest internal obstacle to the Soviet Union’s harmonious economic development.
Records his crimes
Nevertheless, Deutscher does give a fairly complete picture of Stalin’s crimes, and the portrait of Stalin that emerges coincides on the whole with that drawn by Trotsky (from whose writings Deutscher has borrowed much).
It shows Stalin’s development into a professional revolutionary, whose grasp of Marxism was never more than superficial and who gravitated in the direction of Menshevism in every crisis. It describes his rise to dictatorial power after Lenin’s death as the representative of a bureaucratic caste which leaned on the more backward elements in Soviet society and was strengthened by the defeats of the world revolution. It explains why and how he invented the anti-Marxist theory of “socialism in one country.”
It discloses how he suppressed democracy in the Bolshevik Party, transformed the world communist movement into frontier guards for Soviet foreign policy, wiped out the Old Guard in the Moscow Trials. The later chapters, dealing with World War II, also tell of his pact with Hitler, his later relations with his Allied imperialist partners, and the empirical, opportunist policy he pursued throughout in his conduct of the war.
More books recounting Stalin’s crimes against socialism are certainly needed to help educate the new generations and to counteract the flood of volumes depicting Stalin as arch-enemy of capitalism and organizer of world revolution. But Deutscher’s book cannot fulfill this need. For whatever qualities one may be ready to concede its popularization of some major, historical events are wholly negated by the interpretation Deutscher gives to the role of Stalinism as a whole.
Is Stalinism revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? Does it, can it play a progressive role in the struggle for socialism, despite the reactionary methods it employs? Is Stalin’s position, in the modern scene comparable to that of Cromwell and Robespierre in the British and French bourgeois revolutions? No book on the subject that gives wrong answers to these questions can have any value for revolutionary workers, even if it contains accurate information on historical details. Deutscher gives the wrong answers. How they are wrong, and how they differ from those made by the Trotskyists, will be the subject of an article next week.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Social Democrats Endorse<br>
Witch-Hunt in Colleges</h1>
<h3>(21 February 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_08" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 8</a>, 21 February 1949, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The <strong>New Leader</strong>, rallying center for Social Democrats, Trumanite liberals and assorted Stalinophobes, has now given its formal blessing to the spreading invasion of the witch-hunt into the field of education. In addition, as proof that there is no service for capitalist reaction which the <strong>New Leader</strong> is unwilling to perform, it has offered to the witch-hunters – free of charge – a “non-political” formula which they can use as a “democratic” mask for their academic purges.</p>
<p>Must attacks on democratic rights begin with expressions of devotion to democracy. And the <strong>New Leader </strong>editorial of Feb. 5 is no exception:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Freedom of teaching is an ancient and respected part of the American system ... It is well to have among the instructors teachers belonging to all partips and to all opinion groups from the most conservative to the most radical ... Americans have always believed in the freedom which provides this sort of intellectual variety.”<br>
</p>
<h4>But –</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“But in this system of academic freedom, the Communists present a special problem. Can we increase and preserve our freedom of teaching by hiring and retaining as instructors men who are not free? Members of the Communist Party or, often enough, men under the influence of Communist thought have made intellectual commitments. They, themselves, are not free to approach problems openly and critically. What they are bound to teach is sterile and prescribed. Any university or educational System is justified in rejecting such instructors on purely educational grounds ...”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>And that’s the formula. Purge the teachers not on the basis of certain political or theoretical differences – but on the ground that those who have such differences are automatically unable to teach the “objective truth” and are not qualified as teachers on “purely educational grounds.” Don’t fire Professor Jones because he tends to accept Marxist ideas – that’s too crude. Fire him on the ground that he isn’t a good teacher – that sounds more “democratic” and less “discriminatory.”</em></p>
<p>The, formula is not original, of course. It is borrowed, as virtually all Social Democratic ideas are, from one school of reaction of another. Stalin uses it in his purges too; educators ousted from schools in the Soviet Union are not only accused of deviating from the Stalinist political line but also of failing in their duty as teachers. And when James Kutcher was fired in Newark, he was not accused of believing in socialism but of “disloyalty” which disqualified him to work as a file clerk for the VA.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Dangerous Thoughts”</h4>
<p class="fst">What does the <strong>New Leader</strong> mean by “intellectual commitments?” It obviously cannot mean mere beliefs. All teachers, to one degree or another, more or less cohspiously or firmly, must have some beliefs in theories or systems of ideas. If they don’t, they are hardly fitted to teach anything.</p>
<p>Take Professor James Burnham, for example. A rabid propagandist for American imperialism, he is also the country’s foremost publicist for the victory of deGaullism in France. Should he be fired from the teaching staff of New York University because of these intellectual commitments? Obviously not,. according to the <strong>New Leader</strong>, which has just completed the publication of three articles by Burnham extolling deGaullist authoritarianism. In short, it is not mere belief or advocacy of belief, no matter how reactionary, which disqualifies a man as a teacher in the eyes of the <strong>New Leader</strong>.</p>
<p><em>“Intellectual commitments,” then, is Social Democratic jargon for “dangerous thoughts” – dangerous, that is, to capitalism.</em> Teachers with pro-capitalist commitments are acceptable to the Social Democrats; advocates of “free enterprise” and agitators for war against the Soviet Union are not “sterile and prescribed” and can be depended on to give their students the objective truth.</p>
<p>But those teachers who question or reject the premises of capitalism – either from the viewpoint of revolutionary Marxism or of Stalinism, which the Social Democrats join the Stalinists in identifying as one and the same thing although they are opposites – such teachers are congenitally incapable of presenting the truth apd must be driven from the campus. <em>This is the gospel of democracy, 1949 model, as interpreted by the ideologists of the coming war of “democracy against totalitarianism.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Where Do They Stand?</h4>
<p class="fst">Almost simultaneous with the appearance of this editorial was the passage by the Oklahoma House of Representatives of a bill requiring the signing of an “anti-communist” oath by both faculty and students at the University of Oklahoma. (These legislators evidently believe that if teachers with “intellectual commitments” have no place in the schools, then neither have students with such commitments.) The bill, now under consideration by the State Senate, would subject violators to a $500 fine and 10 days in jail.</p>
<p>It has aroused a veritable storm of opposition from the faculty and student body as well as nonacademic organizations – none of whom parade as “theoreticians of democratic socialism” like the <strong>New Leader</strong> crowd. The following questions therefore present themselves:</p>
<p><em>On what logical ground can the <strong>New Leader</strong> do anything but support such a measure in principle? If it is in the interests of the Social Democratic concept of academic freedom to purge the school of those with dangerous thoughts, why should they balk at implementing their concepts along the lines followed by the Oklahoma legislators? Will its editors in their next issue have the courage to stand by their own intellectual commitments and applaud the Oklahoma action and demand its extension throughout the country’s schools?</em> (There is nothing fantastic about such a possibility when you recall that the Social Democrats favor the retention of the anti-communist affidavit introduced in the Taft-Hartley Law.)<br>
</p>
<h4>An Uneasy Plea</h4>
<p class="fst">Throw them out, but give more freedom to those of us who support you in this move – that is the note on which the <strong>New Leader </strong>editorial ends:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“As long as teachers are democrats, as long as they are not disloyal, they should be encouraged to follow the truth and to encourage freedom of thought and discussion among their students. The effort to root out Communists – who are against freedom – must logically be accompanied by a conscious effort tp increase the boundaries of freedom.”</p>
<p class="fst">There is good reason for this uneasy note in the Social Democrats’ plea to the ruling class. They know well enough that witch-hunters don’t always stop to draw fine distinctions about treating “democratic socialists” or even liberals differently from Marxists or Stalinists (see, for example, the dismissal from Olivet College of Professor Tucker. P. Smith, a member of the Socialist Party which is blood-brother to the Social Democratic Federation.) They know from the way Hitler treated the German Social Democrats that reactionaries are not always properly grateful for anti-communist formulas and tend to lump together and destroy every organization associated with the labor movement.</p>
<p><em>The Social Democrats have good reason for trepidation, but their pleas for special privilege will not suffice to stop the march of reaction. You cannot put out a fire by feeding it fuel. That is just what the Social Democrats are doing, and eventually they are going to get burned too.</em></p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what reaction to this, editorial, if any, will come from John Dewey, a contributing editor of this paper. Or from such recent recruits to its list of contributors as the novelist, James T. Farrell.</p>
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George Breitman
Social Democrats Endorse
Witch-Hunt in Colleges
(21 February 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 8, 21 February 1949, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The New Leader, rallying center for Social Democrats, Trumanite liberals and assorted Stalinophobes, has now given its formal blessing to the spreading invasion of the witch-hunt into the field of education. In addition, as proof that there is no service for capitalist reaction which the New Leader is unwilling to perform, it has offered to the witch-hunters – free of charge – a “non-political” formula which they can use as a “democratic” mask for their academic purges.
Must attacks on democratic rights begin with expressions of devotion to democracy. And the New Leader editorial of Feb. 5 is no exception:
“Freedom of teaching is an ancient and respected part of the American system ... It is well to have among the instructors teachers belonging to all partips and to all opinion groups from the most conservative to the most radical ... Americans have always believed in the freedom which provides this sort of intellectual variety.”
But –
“But in this system of academic freedom, the Communists present a special problem. Can we increase and preserve our freedom of teaching by hiring and retaining as instructors men who are not free? Members of the Communist Party or, often enough, men under the influence of Communist thought have made intellectual commitments. They, themselves, are not free to approach problems openly and critically. What they are bound to teach is sterile and prescribed. Any university or educational System is justified in rejecting such instructors on purely educational grounds ...”
And that’s the formula. Purge the teachers not on the basis of certain political or theoretical differences – but on the ground that those who have such differences are automatically unable to teach the “objective truth” and are not qualified as teachers on “purely educational grounds.” Don’t fire Professor Jones because he tends to accept Marxist ideas – that’s too crude. Fire him on the ground that he isn’t a good teacher – that sounds more “democratic” and less “discriminatory.”
The, formula is not original, of course. It is borrowed, as virtually all Social Democratic ideas are, from one school of reaction of another. Stalin uses it in his purges too; educators ousted from schools in the Soviet Union are not only accused of deviating from the Stalinist political line but also of failing in their duty as teachers. And when James Kutcher was fired in Newark, he was not accused of believing in socialism but of “disloyalty” which disqualified him to work as a file clerk for the VA.
“Dangerous Thoughts”
What does the New Leader mean by “intellectual commitments?” It obviously cannot mean mere beliefs. All teachers, to one degree or another, more or less cohspiously or firmly, must have some beliefs in theories or systems of ideas. If they don’t, they are hardly fitted to teach anything.
Take Professor James Burnham, for example. A rabid propagandist for American imperialism, he is also the country’s foremost publicist for the victory of deGaullism in France. Should he be fired from the teaching staff of New York University because of these intellectual commitments? Obviously not,. according to the New Leader, which has just completed the publication of three articles by Burnham extolling deGaullist authoritarianism. In short, it is not mere belief or advocacy of belief, no matter how reactionary, which disqualifies a man as a teacher in the eyes of the New Leader.
“Intellectual commitments,” then, is Social Democratic jargon for “dangerous thoughts” – dangerous, that is, to capitalism. Teachers with pro-capitalist commitments are acceptable to the Social Democrats; advocates of “free enterprise” and agitators for war against the Soviet Union are not “sterile and prescribed” and can be depended on to give their students the objective truth.
But those teachers who question or reject the premises of capitalism – either from the viewpoint of revolutionary Marxism or of Stalinism, which the Social Democrats join the Stalinists in identifying as one and the same thing although they are opposites – such teachers are congenitally incapable of presenting the truth apd must be driven from the campus. This is the gospel of democracy, 1949 model, as interpreted by the ideologists of the coming war of “democracy against totalitarianism.”
Where Do They Stand?
Almost simultaneous with the appearance of this editorial was the passage by the Oklahoma House of Representatives of a bill requiring the signing of an “anti-communist” oath by both faculty and students at the University of Oklahoma. (These legislators evidently believe that if teachers with “intellectual commitments” have no place in the schools, then neither have students with such commitments.) The bill, now under consideration by the State Senate, would subject violators to a $500 fine and 10 days in jail.
It has aroused a veritable storm of opposition from the faculty and student body as well as nonacademic organizations – none of whom parade as “theoreticians of democratic socialism” like the New Leader crowd. The following questions therefore present themselves:
On what logical ground can the New Leader do anything but support such a measure in principle? If it is in the interests of the Social Democratic concept of academic freedom to purge the school of those with dangerous thoughts, why should they balk at implementing their concepts along the lines followed by the Oklahoma legislators? Will its editors in their next issue have the courage to stand by their own intellectual commitments and applaud the Oklahoma action and demand its extension throughout the country’s schools? (There is nothing fantastic about such a possibility when you recall that the Social Democrats favor the retention of the anti-communist affidavit introduced in the Taft-Hartley Law.)
An Uneasy Plea
Throw them out, but give more freedom to those of us who support you in this move – that is the note on which the New Leader editorial ends:
“As long as teachers are democrats, as long as they are not disloyal, they should be encouraged to follow the truth and to encourage freedom of thought and discussion among their students. The effort to root out Communists – who are against freedom – must logically be accompanied by a conscious effort tp increase the boundaries of freedom.”
There is good reason for this uneasy note in the Social Democrats’ plea to the ruling class. They know well enough that witch-hunters don’t always stop to draw fine distinctions about treating “democratic socialists” or even liberals differently from Marxists or Stalinists (see, for example, the dismissal from Olivet College of Professor Tucker. P. Smith, a member of the Socialist Party which is blood-brother to the Social Democratic Federation.) They know from the way Hitler treated the German Social Democrats that reactionaries are not always properly grateful for anti-communist formulas and tend to lump together and destroy every organization associated with the labor movement.
The Social Democrats have good reason for trepidation, but their pleas for special privilege will not suffice to stop the march of reaction. You cannot put out a fire by feeding it fuel. That is just what the Social Democrats are doing, and eventually they are going to get burned too.
It will be interesting to see what reaction to this, editorial, if any, will come from John Dewey, a contributing editor of this paper. Or from such recent recruits to its list of contributors as the novelist, James T. Farrell.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>James Kutcher in Hospital for New Operation</h1>
<h3>(6 February 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_07" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 7</a>, 14 February 1949, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">NEWARK, Feb. 6 – “I’m sorry to be out of action again. I hope I’ll be back on my artificial limbs soon so that 1 canresume my part in the fight for civil liberties.” This was James Kutcher speaking – from his bed in the Beth Israel Hospital where he underwent a new operation on the stump of his left leg yesterday.</p>
<p>It is too early to tell if the operation was completely successful. An inch and a half of bone and some tissue were “trimmed” from his left stump in an effort to make it more adaptable to use of his artificial legs.</p>
<p><em>In recent months Kutcher had been suffering discomfort and pain; the stump began to bleed occasionally and there was danger of infection. It is believed that this was caused in part, by his increased activity after he was dismissed from his clerical job with the government because of membership in the Socialist Workers Party.</em></p>
<p>Kutcher will be in the hospital for two or three weeks, until the stitches are removed. Then the stump will have to heal before he can again attempt the use of artificial limbs.<br>
</p>
<h4>Plans Greater Activity</h4>
<p class="fst">As he lay on his bed, looking tired and haggard, he was not interested in discussing the operation or its painfulness. Surgery and hospitals are an old story to him by now. Since he was wounded by a mortar shell in Italy 5½ years ago, he has had a total of three operations on each leg.</p>
<p>And there is no certainty that yesterday’s will be the last one. Despite the advances made in the field of artificial limbs, it is not easy to obtain mobility where one leg extends only to just below the knee and the other has no knee at all.</p>
<p>Kutcher made it clear today, however, that he intends to be more active in the future than before:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I have received invitations to speak before labor, liberal and veteran organizations in many parts of the country. If it is at all possible, I will accept them and maybe make some tours.</p>
<p class="quote">“For another thing, there will soon be a hearing on my case before the Loyalty Review Board in Washington. But above all, I want to reach the widest number of organizations and tell them about the real issue in my case – <em>the danger to all democratic rights that arises when the political party in power assumes the authority to blacklist minority parties as ‘subversive’ on the say-so of one man, the Attorney General.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The VA’s Attitude</h4>
<p class="fst">The local press played up the fact that the Veterans Administration will pay for the operation, which was performed by Dr. David S. Eisenberg. But evidently the VA did not propose to spend a cent more than it had to, denying him the use of either a private or semi-private room and placing him in a general wardroom crowded with 20 patients. The VA is the same agency for which Kutcher worked for over two years before he was fired last October.</p>
<p>Those who understand the broader meaning of the Kutcher fight, who recognize that he is fighting for all of us as well as himself, will redouble their efforts on his behalf while he is completely disabled. Those who want to communicate with him while he is in the hospital should address their mail to James Kutcher, Ward 201, Beth Israel Hospital, 201 Lyons Ave., Newark 8, N.J.</p>
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George Breitman
James Kutcher in Hospital for New Operation
(6 February 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 7, 14 February 1949, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NEWARK, Feb. 6 – “I’m sorry to be out of action again. I hope I’ll be back on my artificial limbs soon so that 1 canresume my part in the fight for civil liberties.” This was James Kutcher speaking – from his bed in the Beth Israel Hospital where he underwent a new operation on the stump of his left leg yesterday.
It is too early to tell if the operation was completely successful. An inch and a half of bone and some tissue were “trimmed” from his left stump in an effort to make it more adaptable to use of his artificial legs.
In recent months Kutcher had been suffering discomfort and pain; the stump began to bleed occasionally and there was danger of infection. It is believed that this was caused in part, by his increased activity after he was dismissed from his clerical job with the government because of membership in the Socialist Workers Party.
Kutcher will be in the hospital for two or three weeks, until the stitches are removed. Then the stump will have to heal before he can again attempt the use of artificial limbs.
Plans Greater Activity
As he lay on his bed, looking tired and haggard, he was not interested in discussing the operation or its painfulness. Surgery and hospitals are an old story to him by now. Since he was wounded by a mortar shell in Italy 5½ years ago, he has had a total of three operations on each leg.
And there is no certainty that yesterday’s will be the last one. Despite the advances made in the field of artificial limbs, it is not easy to obtain mobility where one leg extends only to just below the knee and the other has no knee at all.
Kutcher made it clear today, however, that he intends to be more active in the future than before:
“I have received invitations to speak before labor, liberal and veteran organizations in many parts of the country. If it is at all possible, I will accept them and maybe make some tours.
“For another thing, there will soon be a hearing on my case before the Loyalty Review Board in Washington. But above all, I want to reach the widest number of organizations and tell them about the real issue in my case – the danger to all democratic rights that arises when the political party in power assumes the authority to blacklist minority parties as ‘subversive’ on the say-so of one man, the Attorney General.”
The VA’s Attitude
The local press played up the fact that the Veterans Administration will pay for the operation, which was performed by Dr. David S. Eisenberg. But evidently the VA did not propose to spend a cent more than it had to, denying him the use of either a private or semi-private room and placing him in a general wardroom crowded with 20 patients. The VA is the same agency for which Kutcher worked for over two years before he was fired last October.
Those who understand the broader meaning of the Kutcher fight, who recognize that he is fighting for all of us as well as himself, will redouble their efforts on his behalf while he is completely disabled. Those who want to communicate with him while he is in the hospital should address their mail to James Kutcher, Ward 201, Beth Israel Hospital, 201 Lyons Ave., Newark 8, N.J.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Newark Labor and the Tax Question</h1>
<h3>(15 March 1938)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_11" target="new">Vol. V. No. 11</a>, 15 March 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The coming Newark City Commission elections may very well be decided around the issue of the ever-rising tax rate, which was $4.85 last year and which is driving thousands of home owners, grocers and small shop-keepers to ruin, at the same time that it is partially responsible for the rising cost of rent for the workers.</p>
<p>The forces of big business in Newark, are uniting around the coalition ticket of Commissioner Byrne (Hague Democrat) and Reverend Clee (Republican who was almost elected Governor a few years ago by denouncing Hagueism) and Company.</p>
<p>Crying crocodile tears about the plight of small business (when what interests them alone is the taxation of the big businesses, corporations and insurance companies), they say substantially the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The tax rate is high and will ruin us all if we don’t do something about it. We must put people into office who will cut the tax rate. The way to do it is to elect honest men who will cut relief, because most relief clients are ‘chiselers’ anyhow. Stop sponsoring WPA projects, because there are plenty of jobs available in private industry. Fire more school teachers. Cut down on the City Hospital. Don’t waste money on the library budget. Don’t permit erection of new schools. Cut the wages of city employees”</p>
<p class="fst">And so on.</p>
<p>Tbe Ellenstein group has no satisfactory answer to the problem either. When the pressure for reductions is put on them, they respond by cutting the same things the Byrne-Clee group want to cut: the socially necessary items which are used primarily by the workers.</p>
<p>Secondly, it must he remembered that the more money they spend, the more patronage they have. This is a very important consideration for a group whose main program is stay in power at all costs.</p>
<p>Every taxpayer is thinking about the 1941 tax rate in connection with the election. In most years, the rate is figured out and announced in February or March. Unable to answer the problem satisfactorily, City Hall has decided to get around it – by not announcing the 1941 rate until after the May 13 elections!<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Answer</h4>
<p class="fst">There is an answer to the problem which would cut the tax rate and at the same time provide the necessary money for relief, library, etc. This answer has been presented by the Socialist Workers Party on numerous occasions. It has not been picked up by the City Hall group, in spite of its claims that it represents the interests of the “common people,” for only a party that is really opposed to big business could espouse and tight for it. For this reason, among others, we are calling for the formation of a labor party, based on the unions and embracing the unemployed and Negro groups, and running its own candidates on an independent platform.</p>
<p>The 1940 budget was 55 million dollars. Of this, more than 9½ millions were for debt services, the largest single item in the Budget. Of this, part is for amortization (repayment of past bond issues) and the rest is for interest on these loans.<br>
</p>
<h4>Step No. 1</h4>
<p class="fst">There could be a large cut in the tax rate if the City Commission let the banks and bonding houses go without some of that money this year. The city’s bonds should he recalled and refinanced at a lower interest rate. Of course, this would mean the bonding houses wouldn’t make so much money, but it would also mean that the taxpayers would get some real relief.</p>
<p>The city could go further, as some municipalities have, by just declaring a moratorium on debt services. The bankers would howl about “the sanctity of contracts,” but what they would mean really is “the sanctity of foreclosures on small homes” and “the sanctity of higher rents in the workers’ districts.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Step No. 2</h4>
<p class="fst">The second way to reduce the tax rate is by reassessing the property of the city. Many small homes are still assessed at close to pre-depression values, while on the other hand the larger properties are assessed below their market values. Reassessment of property that would raise assessment figures on the corporations and lower them on the small taxpayers, would lower the tax <em>rate</em> and at the same time would make the corporations pay more in <em>taxes</em>, thus placing the burden of taxation where it belongs, on big business which can afford to pay it. Since the Socialist Workers Party put this program forward. City Hall has adopted a weak and distorted variant of it. In an effort to cut the tax rate this election year, they are refinancing a small part of the bonds in the sinking fund. But they are afraid to go through with refinancing all of them, although that’s the only way to get a real tax rate reduction.</p>
<p>And similarly, they began a reassessment of property with these results:</p>
<p>The 1937 total assessment of almost a billion dollars was cut 67 millions by 1938, and another 67 millions the nest year; 1940 reductions were 51 millions, and this year 53 millions. Had both big taxpayers and small taxpayers received the same proportionate reductions, this would mean the tax rate goes up the same for both.</p>
<p>But there was a change. Out of this reduction of almost a quarter billion dollars, the bulk of reductions in assessment were made for big business, while the reductions for the small tax-payers have been comparatively small.</p>
<p>This is one reason why our slogan in this election campaign is: LET LABOR CONTROL THE CITY COMMISSION! Only a labor party can win the support of the small taxpayer and form a successful alliance against the aims of big business.</p>
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George Breitman
Newark Labor and the Tax Question
(15 March 1938)
From The Militant, Vol. V. No. 11, 15 March 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The coming Newark City Commission elections may very well be decided around the issue of the ever-rising tax rate, which was $4.85 last year and which is driving thousands of home owners, grocers and small shop-keepers to ruin, at the same time that it is partially responsible for the rising cost of rent for the workers.
The forces of big business in Newark, are uniting around the coalition ticket of Commissioner Byrne (Hague Democrat) and Reverend Clee (Republican who was almost elected Governor a few years ago by denouncing Hagueism) and Company.
Crying crocodile tears about the plight of small business (when what interests them alone is the taxation of the big businesses, corporations and insurance companies), they say substantially the following:
“The tax rate is high and will ruin us all if we don’t do something about it. We must put people into office who will cut the tax rate. The way to do it is to elect honest men who will cut relief, because most relief clients are ‘chiselers’ anyhow. Stop sponsoring WPA projects, because there are plenty of jobs available in private industry. Fire more school teachers. Cut down on the City Hospital. Don’t waste money on the library budget. Don’t permit erection of new schools. Cut the wages of city employees”
And so on.
Tbe Ellenstein group has no satisfactory answer to the problem either. When the pressure for reductions is put on them, they respond by cutting the same things the Byrne-Clee group want to cut: the socially necessary items which are used primarily by the workers.
Secondly, it must he remembered that the more money they spend, the more patronage they have. This is a very important consideration for a group whose main program is stay in power at all costs.
Every taxpayer is thinking about the 1941 tax rate in connection with the election. In most years, the rate is figured out and announced in February or March. Unable to answer the problem satisfactorily, City Hall has decided to get around it – by not announcing the 1941 rate until after the May 13 elections!
Our Answer
There is an answer to the problem which would cut the tax rate and at the same time provide the necessary money for relief, library, etc. This answer has been presented by the Socialist Workers Party on numerous occasions. It has not been picked up by the City Hall group, in spite of its claims that it represents the interests of the “common people,” for only a party that is really opposed to big business could espouse and tight for it. For this reason, among others, we are calling for the formation of a labor party, based on the unions and embracing the unemployed and Negro groups, and running its own candidates on an independent platform.
The 1940 budget was 55 million dollars. Of this, more than 9½ millions were for debt services, the largest single item in the Budget. Of this, part is for amortization (repayment of past bond issues) and the rest is for interest on these loans.
Step No. 1
There could be a large cut in the tax rate if the City Commission let the banks and bonding houses go without some of that money this year. The city’s bonds should he recalled and refinanced at a lower interest rate. Of course, this would mean the bonding houses wouldn’t make so much money, but it would also mean that the taxpayers would get some real relief.
The city could go further, as some municipalities have, by just declaring a moratorium on debt services. The bankers would howl about “the sanctity of contracts,” but what they would mean really is “the sanctity of foreclosures on small homes” and “the sanctity of higher rents in the workers’ districts.”
Step No. 2
The second way to reduce the tax rate is by reassessing the property of the city. Many small homes are still assessed at close to pre-depression values, while on the other hand the larger properties are assessed below their market values. Reassessment of property that would raise assessment figures on the corporations and lower them on the small taxpayers, would lower the tax rate and at the same time would make the corporations pay more in taxes, thus placing the burden of taxation where it belongs, on big business which can afford to pay it. Since the Socialist Workers Party put this program forward. City Hall has adopted a weak and distorted variant of it. In an effort to cut the tax rate this election year, they are refinancing a small part of the bonds in the sinking fund. But they are afraid to go through with refinancing all of them, although that’s the only way to get a real tax rate reduction.
And similarly, they began a reassessment of property with these results:
The 1937 total assessment of almost a billion dollars was cut 67 millions by 1938, and another 67 millions the nest year; 1940 reductions were 51 millions, and this year 53 millions. Had both big taxpayers and small taxpayers received the same proportionate reductions, this would mean the tax rate goes up the same for both.
But there was a change. Out of this reduction of almost a quarter billion dollars, the bulk of reductions in assessment were made for big business, while the reductions for the small tax-payers have been comparatively small.
This is one reason why our slogan in this election campaign is: LET LABOR CONTROL THE CITY COMMISSION! Only a labor party can win the support of the small taxpayer and form a successful alliance against the aims of big business.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2><h2>
</h2><h1>On Guard Against<br>
the Stalinist Provocateurs!</h1>
<h4>Whole Labor Movement Must Be Alert to Oppose Stalinist Moves<br>
to Incite Lynch Terror Against Their Working Class Opponents</h4>
<h3>(3 January 1942)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/index.htm#m42_01" target="new">Vol 6 No. 1</a>, 3 January 1942, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The <b>Jewish Morning Journal</b>, a newspaper published in New York, on Dec. 24 printed the following account of the connection between the Stalinists and the attacks of the most reactionary forces in Britain on the revolutionists:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Since the former Ambassador to Russia, Joseph E. Davies, came out with his well-known attack accusing the late Leon Trotsky of being in alliance with Japan and Germany to attack the Soviet Union, several of the more reactionary newspapers in London have begun a strong attack against the English Trotskyists.</p>
<p class="quote">“The <b>Sunday Dispatch</b>, one of the most reactionary newspapers in the country, which is also not free from anti-Semitism and formerly carried on a scurrilous campaign against the Communists, has now come out with a demand to intern all the Trotskyists because they are Stalin’s enemies ahnd hidden friends of Hitler’s.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Justified Suspicion</h4>
<p class="fst">The <b>Morning Journal</b> is not a radical paper; as a matter of fact it is probably the most conservative of the Jewish dailies. Yet it cannot help feeling suspicious of the motives of the <b>Sunday Dispatch</b> in its attacks on the Trotskyists. For the <b>Dispatch</b>, part of the Tory Rothermere chain, is truly one of the most reactionary newspapers in Britain, long noted for its attacks on the labor movement and the Jewish people.</p>
<p>But the <b>Morning Journal</b> tells only part of the story. The Stalinists play a much more direct and recent part in these provocations than the mere authorship of the slanders retailed secondhand now by capitalist spokesmen such as Davies and Harry Hopkins.</p>
<p>Not only do the Stalinists provide the reactionaries with lies about the Trotskyists from the Moscow frameup trials of 1935-37, but they also manufacture new lies and incitements for use by the reactionaries today.</p>
<p>The <b>Sunday Dispatch</b> of Nov. 16, for example, printed, as verification of previous slanders against the Trotskyists, a new Communist Party manifesto which declared in part:<br>
</p>
<h4>Lynch Incitement</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Don’t be deceived by traitors who call themselves ‘Socialists’ to cover up their Fascist activities.</p>
<p class="quote">“They aim to create disunity among the British people when all must pull together for the common good.</p>
<p class="quote">“They have nothing in common with the Labor, Trade Union or Communist organizations. They are doing Hitler’s work in Britain. They are more deadly than paratroops ...”</p>
<p class="fst">The manifesto concludes with the admonition: “Treat the Trotskyist as you would a Nazi.”</p>
<p><i>Thus do the Stalinists provide lynch-inciting arguments for the very same anti-labor newspaper which only a few months ago was calling for the complete suppression of the Stalinists and urging its readers to treat the Stalinist as they would a Nazi!</i></p>
<p><i>Thus do the Stalinists, whose own </i><i><b>Daily Worker</b></i><i> was suppressed and still is suppressed by the government which they are now supporting, appeal for suppression of the anti-fascist revolutionists by the same government and reactionary forces whose repressive measures were directed at themselves only yesterday and will most likely be directed at them again at the next turn of the wheel!</i><br>
</p>
<h4>Use War Hysteria for Their Own Ends</h4>
<p class="fst">The labor movement in this country must be on guard against Stalinist frameups, lies, incitements to lynch violence and governmental repressions. Stalinism is the syphilis of the labor movement not only in Britain but everywhere throughout the world. Its frameup and slander machine operates not only in the Soviet Union, but in the capitalist countries as well.</p>
<p>Especially now, in the spirit of general hysteria created by the war situation, militant workers everywhere must be on the alert to prevent the Stalinists, who cover their most reactionary policies with loud protestations of patriotism, from arousing lypch spirit against working class opponents of Stalinism.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly their provocations against the Trotskyists will be the fiercest because the Trotskyists are the most uncompromising opponents of their treachery and degeneration. But it would be a mistake to assume that such incitement will be directed at the Trotskyists alone.</p>
<p>Already in this country they have launched the most vicious attacks against the Norman Thomas Socialists, in no way connected with the Trotskyists or their policies. And they will not stop there. In their drive for totalitarian repressions against all opponents of their policies, they will stop at nothing. <i>Trotskyists and Socialists are likened to the Nazis today, and tomorrow it will be any militant worker or group who wants to offer resistance to the attacks on their rights or living standards launched by employers who, like the Stalinists, are only too ready to utilize the war situation and hysteria to achieve their anti-labor objectives.</i></p>
<p>That is why all organizations and all workers who sincerely want to defend civil liberties and workers’ rights in war time as well as in peace, must rally together against the provocations of the Stalinists.</p>
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Albert Parker
On Guard Against
the Stalinist Provocateurs!
Whole Labor Movement Must Be Alert to Oppose Stalinist Moves
to Incite Lynch Terror Against Their Working Class Opponents
(3 January 1942)
From The Militant, Vol 6 No. 1, 3 January 1942, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Jewish Morning Journal, a newspaper published in New York, on Dec. 24 printed the following account of the connection between the Stalinists and the attacks of the most reactionary forces in Britain on the revolutionists:
“Since the former Ambassador to Russia, Joseph E. Davies, came out with his well-known attack accusing the late Leon Trotsky of being in alliance with Japan and Germany to attack the Soviet Union, several of the more reactionary newspapers in London have begun a strong attack against the English Trotskyists.
“The Sunday Dispatch, one of the most reactionary newspapers in the country, which is also not free from anti-Semitism and formerly carried on a scurrilous campaign against the Communists, has now come out with a demand to intern all the Trotskyists because they are Stalin’s enemies ahnd hidden friends of Hitler’s.”
Justified Suspicion
The Morning Journal is not a radical paper; as a matter of fact it is probably the most conservative of the Jewish dailies. Yet it cannot help feeling suspicious of the motives of the Sunday Dispatch in its attacks on the Trotskyists. For the Dispatch, part of the Tory Rothermere chain, is truly one of the most reactionary newspapers in Britain, long noted for its attacks on the labor movement and the Jewish people.
But the Morning Journal tells only part of the story. The Stalinists play a much more direct and recent part in these provocations than the mere authorship of the slanders retailed secondhand now by capitalist spokesmen such as Davies and Harry Hopkins.
Not only do the Stalinists provide the reactionaries with lies about the Trotskyists from the Moscow frameup trials of 1935-37, but they also manufacture new lies and incitements for use by the reactionaries today.
The Sunday Dispatch of Nov. 16, for example, printed, as verification of previous slanders against the Trotskyists, a new Communist Party manifesto which declared in part:
Lynch Incitement
“Don’t be deceived by traitors who call themselves ‘Socialists’ to cover up their Fascist activities.
“They aim to create disunity among the British people when all must pull together for the common good.
“They have nothing in common with the Labor, Trade Union or Communist organizations. They are doing Hitler’s work in Britain. They are more deadly than paratroops ...”
The manifesto concludes with the admonition: “Treat the Trotskyist as you would a Nazi.”
Thus do the Stalinists provide lynch-inciting arguments for the very same anti-labor newspaper which only a few months ago was calling for the complete suppression of the Stalinists and urging its readers to treat the Stalinist as they would a Nazi!
Thus do the Stalinists, whose own Daily Worker was suppressed and still is suppressed by the government which they are now supporting, appeal for suppression of the anti-fascist revolutionists by the same government and reactionary forces whose repressive measures were directed at themselves only yesterday and will most likely be directed at them again at the next turn of the wheel!
Use War Hysteria for Their Own Ends
The labor movement in this country must be on guard against Stalinist frameups, lies, incitements to lynch violence and governmental repressions. Stalinism is the syphilis of the labor movement not only in Britain but everywhere throughout the world. Its frameup and slander machine operates not only in the Soviet Union, but in the capitalist countries as well.
Especially now, in the spirit of general hysteria created by the war situation, militant workers everywhere must be on the alert to prevent the Stalinists, who cover their most reactionary policies with loud protestations of patriotism, from arousing lypch spirit against working class opponents of Stalinism.
Undoubtedly their provocations against the Trotskyists will be the fiercest because the Trotskyists are the most uncompromising opponents of their treachery and degeneration. But it would be a mistake to assume that such incitement will be directed at the Trotskyists alone.
Already in this country they have launched the most vicious attacks against the Norman Thomas Socialists, in no way connected with the Trotskyists or their policies. And they will not stop there. In their drive for totalitarian repressions against all opponents of their policies, they will stop at nothing. Trotskyists and Socialists are likened to the Nazis today, and tomorrow it will be any militant worker or group who wants to offer resistance to the attacks on their rights or living standards launched by employers who, like the Stalinists, are only too ready to utilize the war situation and hysteria to achieve their anti-labor objectives.
That is why all organizations and all workers who sincerely want to defend civil liberties and workers’ rights in war time as well as in peace, must rally together against the provocations of the Stalinists.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>Demand Freedom for Negro Sailors</h1>
<h3>(30 November 1940)</h3>
<p> </p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_48" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 48</a>, 30 November 1940, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Letters of protest, demanding the freedom of the Negro sailors on the <em>U.S.S. Philadelphia</em> and an end to the Jim-Crow practices in the Navy, began to pour into the offices of President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Knox last week, at the same time that the government announced its intention of standing by the policy of segregating colored sailors to the mess attendants division only.</p>
<p>The policy of the Navy Department was reiterated in a statement issued by the Bureau of Navigation as follows:<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt’s Policy</h4>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“After many years of experience, the policy of not enlisting men of the colored race for any branch of the naval service, except the messmen’s branch, was adopted to meet the best interests of general ship efficiency.</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“The selection of men to man the navy is left to. the discretion of the executive branch of the government.</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“In the exercise of this discretion. the bureau endeavors to furnish naval vessels with crews consisting of men best qualified to meet the requirements of the special rating and branch to which they are assigned.</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“This policy not only serves the best interests of the navy and the country, but serves as well the best interests of the men themselves.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">In plain English, this means that the President of the United States (executive branch) thinks that colored sailors are best qualified to be Jim-Crowed off into the kitchen and servants’ quarters of the Navy, and that this policy helps not only the country, but the Negro sailors as well.</p>
<p>The letters from various organizations and individuals printed in the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> last week showed that an increasing number of people are aroused over the case of the imprisoned Philadelphia sailors, and are eager to express their resentment over conditions in the Navy.</p>
<p>The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a letter to Secretary Knox stated that the colored people of this country “are bitter about the treatment of their men in the armed forces of the nation ... We wish to enter a most vigorous protest against this action and to request you, as Secretary of the Navy, to intervene.”</p>
<p>The N.A.A.C.P. upheld the action of the mess attendants in bravely signing their names to the published letter of complaint, saying they had done so “in belief that they had a just complaint which ought not to be weakened by an anonymous letter.”</p>
<p>The <strong>Courier</strong> also quoted from the “pointed letter” to Roosevelt and Knox by the Workers Relief & WPA Union of Newark, N.J., signed by George Breitman, secretary, which asked for an immediate end to the arrest, confinement to the ship for “further investigation,” molestation and inquisition suffered by the boys “whose only ‘offense’ is that they complained with much cause against a brutal system of discrimination and segregation.”</p>
<p>The unemployed union also demanded that Roosevelt and Knox use their powers to put an end to these conditions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Harlem Union Offers Support</h4>
<p class="fst">Another letter, for Local 32 of the Building Service Employees International Union, signed by J. Cyril Fullerton, executive manager, explained that the union has a membership of 2,000 who reside and work in Harlem, 90 percent of whom are Negroes.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We feel as you (<strong>The Courier</strong>) do that Jim-crowism when captioned by that lofty term, ‘The American Way’, or race discrimination even when covered by the American flag to disguise its viciousness ... stinks to the high heavens nonetheless.</p>
<p class="quote">“We are definitely united to lend your worthy paper every possible means of support in its drive against this outcropping of injustice which has now come to the surface m the United States Navy.</p>
<p class="quote">“We have one aim and that is to see that justice is secured for the colored men in the Navy who are now being unjustly punished for demanding their rights as men and American citizens.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Mess Attendants Expose Aim</h4>
<p class="fst">Since their arrest, the mess attendants on the Philadelphia have been joined by sailors from at least three other ships who have spoken out and in most cases signed their names, corroborating their testimony about treatment of Negroes in the Navy.</p>
<p>Added to these this week were the names of Negro sailors from two other ships. Those on the <em>U.S.S. Brooklyn</em>, stationed off Mare Island, California, show that they understand what is going on behind the closed doors of the Philadelphia case when they write:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“They are trying to make an example of Johnson and Goodwin (two of the <strong>Philadelphia</strong> men) to try to scare the rest of us into submission.</em> But these constant letters to you are the only hope Johnson, Goodwin and the rest of us have to get your help, that of the N.A.A.C.P., and other such organizations throughout the country so that this case will not be dropped into obscurity and forgotten by our people while conditions remain the same. We, part of the messmen of the <em>U.S.S. Brooklyn</em>, ... are prepared to sacrifice the time that we have in here and ourselves to help remedy this condition.”</p>
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Albert Parker
Demand Freedom for Negro Sailors
(30 November 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 48, 30 November 1940, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Letters of protest, demanding the freedom of the Negro sailors on the U.S.S. Philadelphia and an end to the Jim-Crow practices in the Navy, began to pour into the offices of President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Knox last week, at the same time that the government announced its intention of standing by the policy of segregating colored sailors to the mess attendants division only.
The policy of the Navy Department was reiterated in a statement issued by the Bureau of Navigation as follows:
Roosevelt’s Policy
“After many years of experience, the policy of not enlisting men of the colored race for any branch of the naval service, except the messmen’s branch, was adopted to meet the best interests of general ship efficiency.
“The selection of men to man the navy is left to. the discretion of the executive branch of the government.
“In the exercise of this discretion. the bureau endeavors to furnish naval vessels with crews consisting of men best qualified to meet the requirements of the special rating and branch to which they are assigned.
“This policy not only serves the best interests of the navy and the country, but serves as well the best interests of the men themselves.”
In plain English, this means that the President of the United States (executive branch) thinks that colored sailors are best qualified to be Jim-Crowed off into the kitchen and servants’ quarters of the Navy, and that this policy helps not only the country, but the Negro sailors as well.
The letters from various organizations and individuals printed in the Pittsburgh Courier last week showed that an increasing number of people are aroused over the case of the imprisoned Philadelphia sailors, and are eager to express their resentment over conditions in the Navy.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a letter to Secretary Knox stated that the colored people of this country “are bitter about the treatment of their men in the armed forces of the nation ... We wish to enter a most vigorous protest against this action and to request you, as Secretary of the Navy, to intervene.”
The N.A.A.C.P. upheld the action of the mess attendants in bravely signing their names to the published letter of complaint, saying they had done so “in belief that they had a just complaint which ought not to be weakened by an anonymous letter.”
The Courier also quoted from the “pointed letter” to Roosevelt and Knox by the Workers Relief & WPA Union of Newark, N.J., signed by George Breitman, secretary, which asked for an immediate end to the arrest, confinement to the ship for “further investigation,” molestation and inquisition suffered by the boys “whose only ‘offense’ is that they complained with much cause against a brutal system of discrimination and segregation.”
The unemployed union also demanded that Roosevelt and Knox use their powers to put an end to these conditions.
Harlem Union Offers Support
Another letter, for Local 32 of the Building Service Employees International Union, signed by J. Cyril Fullerton, executive manager, explained that the union has a membership of 2,000 who reside and work in Harlem, 90 percent of whom are Negroes.
“We feel as you (The Courier) do that Jim-crowism when captioned by that lofty term, ‘The American Way’, or race discrimination even when covered by the American flag to disguise its viciousness ... stinks to the high heavens nonetheless.
“We are definitely united to lend your worthy paper every possible means of support in its drive against this outcropping of injustice which has now come to the surface m the United States Navy.
“We have one aim and that is to see that justice is secured for the colored men in the Navy who are now being unjustly punished for demanding their rights as men and American citizens.”
Mess Attendants Expose Aim
Since their arrest, the mess attendants on the Philadelphia have been joined by sailors from at least three other ships who have spoken out and in most cases signed their names, corroborating their testimony about treatment of Negroes in the Navy.
Added to these this week were the names of Negro sailors from two other ships. Those on the U.S.S. Brooklyn, stationed off Mare Island, California, show that they understand what is going on behind the closed doors of the Philadelphia case when they write:
“They are trying to make an example of Johnson and Goodwin (two of the Philadelphia men) to try to scare the rest of us into submission. But these constant letters to you are the only hope Johnson, Goodwin and the rest of us have to get your help, that of the N.A.A.C.P., and other such organizations throughout the country so that this case will not be dropped into obscurity and forgotten by our people while conditions remain the same. We, part of the messmen of the U.S.S. Brooklyn, ... are prepared to sacrifice the time that we have in here and ourselves to help remedy this condition.”
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h4>New Purge Is Stalin’s Answer to<br>
Economic Crisis in Soviet Union</h4>
<h1>Kremlin Offers Scapegoats to<br>
Cover Up Its Own Crimes</h1>
<h3>(6 July 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_27" target="new">Vol. X No. 27</a>, 6 July 1946, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The purges in the Soviet Union have invariably expressed a grave internal economic situation which threatened to grow into a political and social crisis. Today the country is passing through an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions, which is producing profound political convulsions. That is the significance of the current purges.</p>
<p>But to understand both the political crisis and the purges, one must first understand the origin and nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy conducting the purge.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union was created by a workers’ revolution. The government led by Lenin and Trotsky was something new – a government frankly basing itself on and acting in the interests of the workers and poor farmers. Through the Soviets democratically expressing the desires of the masses, the rule of the capitalists and landowners was ended. Industry was nationalized. The land was distributed among the peasants. All special privilege was abolished. The first steps were taken toward the free and plentiful society of socialism.</p>
<p>But the young workers’ state remained blockaded and encircled by the imperialist powers. Under the conditions of a backward and war devastated country, the social and cultural transformation inaugurated by the revolution could not fully unfold.<br>
</p>
<h4>Despotic Clique</h4>
<p class="fst">Degeneration set in. After Lenin’s death in 1924, a clique of bureaucrats headed by Stalin usurped power. The despotic rule of this bureaucracy replaced the regime of workers’ democracy through the Soviets and other mass organizations. Lenin’s program of world revolution was abandoned, and most of the progressive gains won by the Russian revolution were undone.</p>
<p>With the years, the gap between the mass of the people and the bureaucrats grew wider and wider. As the privileged grouping intrenched itself, the workers were stripped of all their political rights. The bureaucracy, established new social privileges for itself, raising its own living standards – at the expense of the people.</p>
<p>Industrially, Russia was always a backward country. Nationalization of industry and planned economy, introduced by the revolution, gave a great boost to production and industrialization. But even so, living standards in the Soviet Union remained lower than in the advanced capitalist countries.</p>
<p>A factor contributing to this was the bureaucratic domination of the economy, which discouraged the initiative of the masses, preventing them from correcting errors, eliminating waste, etc. The living standards of the masses remained pitifully low because of the ever-growing proportion of the national income devoured by the bureaucratic caste.</p>
<p>Totalitarian rule does not prevent mass discontent – it only suppresses its free expression. In times of economic crisis, when this discontent threatened to break out into the open, purges would take place. They followed this general pattern:<br>
</p>
<h4>Pattern of Purges</h4>
<p class="fst">To explain away the economic catastrophes for which they alone were responsible, the bureaucrats in the Kremlin selected scapegoats and charged them with all kinds of crimes – sabotage, diversion, etc. The scapegoats were usually lesser bureaucrats, or those who had ventured to express critical views in the past. Trials were staged to give publicity to these “explanations” for the economic crisis. The defendants were each time duly found guilty and were then either executed or disappeared.</p>
<p>But that was only the beginning, the propaganda appetizer so to speak. These trials provided Stalin with the pretext for exterminating everyone in the country who represented a threat to the continued privileges and power of the bureaucracy – either from the right (those who wanted a restoration of capitalism), or from the left (those who wanted a restoration of the communist policies of Leninism).</p>
<p>For every man tried, there were tens of thousands purged without trial. The Red Army leadership was decimated. The whole generation of Bolsheviks that made the revolution was destroyed. Millions of workers and peasants were dragged from their homes and flung into forced-labor camps. The leading government and industrial bodies were purged, then purged again and again.</p>
<p>Such is the background and pattern of the present purge.</p>
<p>Today, a great part of the country’s industrial apparatus lies in ruins. The new Five-Year Plan will be considered a great success if it restores the economy tos prewar levels. But this will not restore even prewar living standards. Because, as Stalin’s speeches show, a large portion of production will go to the armed forces or into heavy industry and not to the masses in the form of consumers’ goods.</p>
<p>Foreign trade remains virtually at a standstill; the countries producing machinery required by the USSR – the U. S. and England primarily – are using it themselves or supplying governments they are trying to weld into an alliance against the USSR. The prospect of a loan from Washington is admittedly slim.<br>
</p>
<h4>Crisis Today</h4>
<p class="fst">Famine has not spared the Soviet Union; UNRRA officials estimated last week that the Ukraine winter wheat crop will not be half of the normal pre-war crop.</p>
<p>The commodities on display in the stores of the big cities are “slightly” out of reach of the average citizen, the press reports. That means they go into the hands of bureaucrats.</p>
<p>The masses who were fed all kinds of promises – about “advancing from socialism to communism,” for example – find on the one hand that it was never so hard for them to make both ends meet; and on the other, they see the bureaucrats living the life of Riley. They see that despite the acute shortages the gulf was never so great between the living standards of the worker and the manager, of the collective farmer and the collective farm director.<br>
</p>
<h4>Making Protests</h4>
<p class="fst">And they are undoubtedly making their sentiments known, as even the Soviet press occasionally indicates in its super-cautious way. The report several months ago, of the woman who asked Kalinin at a mass meeting why he was able to wear excellent shoes while the masses were lucky to get tree-bark sandals, is probably not unique.</p>
<p>In any case, the Kremlin knows that resentment exists deep down and is boiling there. It is not for nothing, as merchant seamen reported on returning from Soviet ports this spring, that Odessa is still under martial law and that other cities bristle like armed camps with troops and police.</p>
<p>Hence the need for new scapegoats. In order to save its own face, the Kremlin throws the masses a few unpopular bureaucrats (even though these victims were promoted only a few years ago solely on the basis of their “reliability” and fidelity to Stalinism). And what could be more appropriate for the occasion – or more popular with the masses – than charges of “embezzlement” and “mismanagement of industry”?</p>
<p>Hence trials and widespread publicity, which pursue a dual aim: To refurbish the Kremlin’s prestige. And to serve as a shield behind which will be launched a new wave of terror to liquidate or intimidate all sorts of opposition – both from the growing pro-capitalist elements, encouraged by Stalin during the war, and from the revolutionary opponents of Stalinism.<br>
</p>
<h3>Proving Ground</h3>
<p class="fst">But the pitcher can go to the well too often. The war was a proving ground for the masses. As the recent Conference of the Fourth International pointed out:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The war ... has roused broad layers of' the population and lifted them from the rut of conservatism and passivity toward the bureaucracy and its regime, acquainting them with other ways of life and other ideas (Red Army fighters, war prisoners, soldiers in the armies of occupation in the different European countries), thus sharpening their critical faculties and stimulating tendencies toward self-assertion.”</p>
<p class="fst">Stalin will not forever be able to foist his own crimes on scapegoats, for with each successive purge it becomes clearer that they are his own underlings.</p>
<p>It is not at all precluded that the purge begun by the summits of the bureaucracy and directed fundamentally against the masses may end as a purge of the bureaucracy by the masses.</p>
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George Breitman
New Purge Is Stalin’s Answer to
Economic Crisis in Soviet Union
Kremlin Offers Scapegoats to
Cover Up Its Own Crimes
(6 July 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 27, 6 July 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The purges in the Soviet Union have invariably expressed a grave internal economic situation which threatened to grow into a political and social crisis. Today the country is passing through an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions, which is producing profound political convulsions. That is the significance of the current purges.
But to understand both the political crisis and the purges, one must first understand the origin and nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy conducting the purge.
The Soviet Union was created by a workers’ revolution. The government led by Lenin and Trotsky was something new – a government frankly basing itself on and acting in the interests of the workers and poor farmers. Through the Soviets democratically expressing the desires of the masses, the rule of the capitalists and landowners was ended. Industry was nationalized. The land was distributed among the peasants. All special privilege was abolished. The first steps were taken toward the free and plentiful society of socialism.
But the young workers’ state remained blockaded and encircled by the imperialist powers. Under the conditions of a backward and war devastated country, the social and cultural transformation inaugurated by the revolution could not fully unfold.
Despotic Clique
Degeneration set in. After Lenin’s death in 1924, a clique of bureaucrats headed by Stalin usurped power. The despotic rule of this bureaucracy replaced the regime of workers’ democracy through the Soviets and other mass organizations. Lenin’s program of world revolution was abandoned, and most of the progressive gains won by the Russian revolution were undone.
With the years, the gap between the mass of the people and the bureaucrats grew wider and wider. As the privileged grouping intrenched itself, the workers were stripped of all their political rights. The bureaucracy, established new social privileges for itself, raising its own living standards – at the expense of the people.
Industrially, Russia was always a backward country. Nationalization of industry and planned economy, introduced by the revolution, gave a great boost to production and industrialization. But even so, living standards in the Soviet Union remained lower than in the advanced capitalist countries.
A factor contributing to this was the bureaucratic domination of the economy, which discouraged the initiative of the masses, preventing them from correcting errors, eliminating waste, etc. The living standards of the masses remained pitifully low because of the ever-growing proportion of the national income devoured by the bureaucratic caste.
Totalitarian rule does not prevent mass discontent – it only suppresses its free expression. In times of economic crisis, when this discontent threatened to break out into the open, purges would take place. They followed this general pattern:
Pattern of Purges
To explain away the economic catastrophes for which they alone were responsible, the bureaucrats in the Kremlin selected scapegoats and charged them with all kinds of crimes – sabotage, diversion, etc. The scapegoats were usually lesser bureaucrats, or those who had ventured to express critical views in the past. Trials were staged to give publicity to these “explanations” for the economic crisis. The defendants were each time duly found guilty and were then either executed or disappeared.
But that was only the beginning, the propaganda appetizer so to speak. These trials provided Stalin with the pretext for exterminating everyone in the country who represented a threat to the continued privileges and power of the bureaucracy – either from the right (those who wanted a restoration of capitalism), or from the left (those who wanted a restoration of the communist policies of Leninism).
For every man tried, there were tens of thousands purged without trial. The Red Army leadership was decimated. The whole generation of Bolsheviks that made the revolution was destroyed. Millions of workers and peasants were dragged from their homes and flung into forced-labor camps. The leading government and industrial bodies were purged, then purged again and again.
Such is the background and pattern of the present purge.
Today, a great part of the country’s industrial apparatus lies in ruins. The new Five-Year Plan will be considered a great success if it restores the economy tos prewar levels. But this will not restore even prewar living standards. Because, as Stalin’s speeches show, a large portion of production will go to the armed forces or into heavy industry and not to the masses in the form of consumers’ goods.
Foreign trade remains virtually at a standstill; the countries producing machinery required by the USSR – the U. S. and England primarily – are using it themselves or supplying governments they are trying to weld into an alliance against the USSR. The prospect of a loan from Washington is admittedly slim.
Crisis Today
Famine has not spared the Soviet Union; UNRRA officials estimated last week that the Ukraine winter wheat crop will not be half of the normal pre-war crop.
The commodities on display in the stores of the big cities are “slightly” out of reach of the average citizen, the press reports. That means they go into the hands of bureaucrats.
The masses who were fed all kinds of promises – about “advancing from socialism to communism,” for example – find on the one hand that it was never so hard for them to make both ends meet; and on the other, they see the bureaucrats living the life of Riley. They see that despite the acute shortages the gulf was never so great between the living standards of the worker and the manager, of the collective farmer and the collective farm director.
Making Protests
And they are undoubtedly making their sentiments known, as even the Soviet press occasionally indicates in its super-cautious way. The report several months ago, of the woman who asked Kalinin at a mass meeting why he was able to wear excellent shoes while the masses were lucky to get tree-bark sandals, is probably not unique.
In any case, the Kremlin knows that resentment exists deep down and is boiling there. It is not for nothing, as merchant seamen reported on returning from Soviet ports this spring, that Odessa is still under martial law and that other cities bristle like armed camps with troops and police.
Hence the need for new scapegoats. In order to save its own face, the Kremlin throws the masses a few unpopular bureaucrats (even though these victims were promoted only a few years ago solely on the basis of their “reliability” and fidelity to Stalinism). And what could be more appropriate for the occasion – or more popular with the masses – than charges of “embezzlement” and “mismanagement of industry”?
Hence trials and widespread publicity, which pursue a dual aim: To refurbish the Kremlin’s prestige. And to serve as a shield behind which will be launched a new wave of terror to liquidate or intimidate all sorts of opposition – both from the growing pro-capitalist elements, encouraged by Stalin during the war, and from the revolutionary opponents of Stalinism.
Proving Ground
But the pitcher can go to the well too often. The war was a proving ground for the masses. As the recent Conference of the Fourth International pointed out:
“The war ... has roused broad layers of' the population and lifted them from the rut of conservatism and passivity toward the bureaucracy and its regime, acquainting them with other ways of life and other ideas (Red Army fighters, war prisoners, soldiers in the armies of occupation in the different European countries), thus sharpening their critical faculties and stimulating tendencies toward self-assertion.”
Stalin will not forever be able to foist his own crimes on scapegoats, for with each successive purge it becomes clearer that they are his own underlings.
It is not at all precluded that the purge begun by the summits of the bureaucracy and directed fundamentally against the masses may end as a purge of the bureaucracy by the masses.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro in the Post-War World</h1>
<h3>(June 1943)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi43_06" target="new">Vol.4 No.6</a>, June 1943, pp.179-184.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<p class="fst">“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, young man,” stated
A.N. Kemp, president of American Airlines, “but I don’t believe that
Negroes will be used as pilots in the immediate world of post-war
aviation.” He said it in an interview in New York printed in the <strong>Pittsburgh
Courier</strong>, March 27, 1943.</p>
<p>The airline executive went on to explain that “of course” he
personally had nothing against Negroes and had even hired some to work
in his ground crews, but that his company would lose money if it hired
Negro pilots; and presumably to show that his outlook was not limited
by considerations of profits alone, he added that “the Negro would have
to become more cultured before he could expect to enjoy the fullness of
American life.”</p>
<p>He spoke pleasantly, politely, his tone was friendly, but in his
words there was no hint of doubt or hesitation: he was speaking with
the voice of the whole capitalist class and frankly stating its
intention of maintaining in the post-war world the rotten pattern of
Jim Crow discrimination, segregation and insult which dominated this
country before Pearl Harbor and the proclamation of the “four
freedoms.” There are some people who harbor illusions about the
character of the Negro’s status after the termination of the second
“war for democracy,” but if they do, it is not the fault of Kemp and
his fellow capitalists and the government, whose words and deeds speak
loudly and plainly enough.</p>
<p>A. Philip Randolph, AFL union leader and national director of the
March-On-Washington Movement, has proposed that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... there ought to be and must be a movement known
as the Free Negro, which will send a strong delegation of Negroes and
their true friends to the Peace Conference at the end of this war to
present the claims of Negro people in America, the British West Indies
and Africa.”</p>
<p class="fst">One would be justified in concluding from this that
Randolph believes the post-war status of the Negro will be decided at a
peace conference of the victorious United Nations. To a certain extent
this is correct. But to a far greater extent the Negro’s fate is being
determined right now, in the midst of the war. What happens at a peace
conference will depend not only on the relationship of forces between
the various countries, but even more on the relationship of class
forces within each country. The character of the peace conference will
have been decided more or less conclusively by what happened during the
war, just as the nature of the war and what happens during it flow from
the developments and struggles leading up to the war.</p>
<p>The Negro’s greatest opportunity for advancing toward full equality
is now, as his enemies well recognize, and if the Negro does not take
advantage of this opportunity now he will find it much harder to make
progress after the war, when his enemies will have disposed of their
foreign rivals and will be able to devote their energy and attention
toward keeping the Negro “in his place.”</p>
<p>It is necessary to make this point and to drive it home again and
again because there are so many people trying to obscure it. These
people — the modern Uncle Toms, in whose ranks the Stalinists must be
included — never miss an opportunity to explain how much progress is
being made. They loudly tell you how many more one-tenths of one per
cent schools there are for Negroes today than there were before; they
cite figures to show that Negro birth mortality rates have fallen by so
much or that Negro preachers and lawyers have increased in number by
that much. Needless to say, they attribute all this progress to the
superior qualities of their own programs. Nor are middle class Negroes
and Stalinists the only people addicted to the pastime of
progress-shouting. Government bureaus and the capitalist press have
been going in for it quite heavily since Pearl Harbor. Indeed, you
might say of the capitalist press articles and reports on the Negroes
that they devote two-thirds of their space to inflammatory and most
often distorted accounts of crimes by Negroes and one-third to accounts
of the remarkable extent of Negro progress.</p>
<p>The purpose behind this pointing-with-pride and
viewing-with-pleasure is obvious. The Negro people instinctively want
to take advantage of the present crisis to achieve the rights which
have been denied them. This can be confirmed by any honest person
acquainted with Negro thought today. It is hard to convince the Negro
masses that this is a war for democracy when they are denied the most
elementary democratic rights. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1" target="_blank">[1]</a>
The progress-shouters seek, so to speak, to change the subject, to
convince the Negroes that even though things aren’t perfect, they are
getting better day by day and will eventually work out all right. Their
purpose is to persuade the masses not to conduct militant struggle
against Jim Crow. If they are successful, the Negro people will miss
the present opportunity to improve their status with the result that
they might be condemned to second-class citizenship for decades to come.</p>
<p>It is not our intention here to argue that the Negro’s conditions
have not changed at all, nor to overlook whatever genuine progress that
has been made. No one can dispute, for example, the fact that Negro
unemployment today is much lower than before the war, or that many
Negroes have won genuine equality on their jobs as the result of trade
union efforts. What we propose to do here is to look at the whole
picture, to examine the true character of the gains that have been made
since Pearl Harbor, to list the losses and the setbacks that have been
encountered while these gains were being made, to show what was
temporary and secondary and what was permanent about these gains and
losses. It is necessary for militant Negroes to ponder these questions,
for World War II will not last forever and they have lives to live
after it comes to an end. They must understand the developments of the
first 18 months of American participation in the war, for the post-war
pattern is foreshadowed in these developments.</p>
<p>First, the question of employment, which strikes so directly at the
economic conditions of the Negro masses that there is quite often a
tendency to subordinate all other questions to this one. There are many
estimates of the number of Negro workers employed in war plants, the
highest being a half million. This figure includes both those working
on machines and janitors, porters, etc. All others listed as gainfully
employed are either in non-war industries and occupations, including
domestic service, on the farms, or in the armed forces. The total in
the armed forces is already over a half million and is expected to
increase to a million by the end of 1943. Newly-adopted legislation,
embodied in House Joint Resolution 96, which was passed by both houses
of Congress and signed by the president over the protests of many labor
and farm organizations, who charge the bill with restoring “virtual
peonage,” in effect ties the Southern Negro farmers and sharecroppers
to the land for the duration of the war. It gives county agents
notoriously staunch upholders of “white supremacy,” the power to deny
Negroes the right to leave their home county for such purposes as going
North to work in war industries.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in the face of the most severe manpower shortage in the
nation’s history and in the eighteenth month of the war, there is still
a comparatively large body of able-bodied Negroes, estimated from
600,000 to 1,000,000, who remain unemployed. There are still hundreds
of plants in the country which refuse to hire Negroes or which resort
to “token” employment, and there are thousands of other plants — by no
means all in the South — which will not permit Negroes to hold skilled
or semi-skilled jobs and which refuse to give Negroes equal pay for
equal work. Even in New York, the State Committee on Discrimination
reported recently, “discrimination because of color, race or creed
still exists” and employers continue “the old practice of
discriminating against Negroes not by barring them from employment, but
by restricting them to such menial jobs as porters or other maintenance
men.” (<strong>New York Times</strong>, May 7, 1943) And in an industry
as vital as the railroads, where Negroes have been employed for many
decades, the Office of War Information admitted in April 1943 that “war
or no war, unwillingness to employ Negroes in many types of railroad
jobs persists.”</p>
<p>Negroes hold more jobs than they did before Pearl Harbor, and in
many cases better ones, and that is all to the good. But their jobs are
not as secure as those of other workers. In plants where there are
strong unions, the seniority of Negroes is generally protected. But
even in such plants the probability is that when war production is
ended or reduced after the war, they will be the first fired because
they were the last hired. Thus it is clear that gains in Negro
employment are by no means permanent and can disappear like last year’s
snow with the end of the war. This is not the least of the reasons why
thoughtful Negroes are so concerned about the post-war world.<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt and the Negro</h4>
<p class="fst">We have indicated why Negro employment increased — not
because of any widespread elimination of racial bias in employment but
because of the manpower shortage. It is necessary to emphasize this
point because there are many scoundrels pretending otherwise and trying
to give the credit for the rise in Negro employment to the Roosevelt
administration and its agencies — scoundrels like the Stalinist James
W. Ford, who says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The government has a well-established policy against
discrimination of Negro citizens in war industries. That policy was
established by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, issued June
25, 1941. One cannot deny that much has been accomplished in the
elimination of job discrimination, that many hundreds of thousands of
Negro workers have been put to work in war industries. The Fair
Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) was an effective instrument in
exposing cases of discrimination and forcing employers to hire Negroes
...” (<strong>Daily Worker</strong>, April 10, 1943)</p>
<p class="fst">To show how Ford lies we need only refer to the brief
history of the FEPC.</p>
<p>Not even its own members ever claimed with Ford that the FEPC was
“an effective instrument in ... forcing employers to hire Negroes.”
They knew too well that Executive Order 8802, from which they drew
their authority, gave them no powers to force anyone to do anything.
The FEPC was set up by Roosevelt to ward off the projected
March-On-Washington in the summer of 1941, and was a concession without
any teeth in it. The FEPC helped a little by a few open hearings to
publicize the scandalous situation in industry, and it prevailed on a
few employers to hire some Negro workers. Its ineffectualness was amply
demonstrated when it held a hearing in Birmingham in 1942, where it was
more or less openly defied by the Jim Crow employers.</p>
<p>Despite its impotence, the FEPC was the object of much opposition,
especially from the Southern Democratic poll tax bloc in Washington,
who hated it as a symbol of the government’s right to “encroach” in any
way on the right of the states to treat the Negroes as they please.
This opposition resulted, in the summer of 1942, in Roosevelt’s
transfer of the FEPC from the jurisdiction of the White House to that
of McNutt’s War Manpower Commission,whose finances are controlled by
Congressional committees largely dominated by the poll taxers. Many
labor and Negro organizations condemned this transfer as a move to make
the FEPC even more powerless than it had been previously, and requested
that it be restored to its previous status. Finally, in December 1942,
Roosevelt answered these protests with the statement that he saw no
necessity for any changes in the situation because the FEPC is “still
under direct control of the Chief Executive.” He also made reference to
the announcement that the FEPC was planning soon to go ahead with a
number of open hearings.</p>
<p>But the goose of the FEPC had already been cooked in spite of these
typically Rooseveltian assurances. A month later Jim Crow scored
another victory in Washington when McNutt, against the expressed wishes
of the FEPC members, suddenly called off an already scheduled hearing
on discriminatory employment policies of the railroads, a hearing which
Negro leaders had described as a “key test” of McNutt’s attitude toward
the Negro. In the four months after this, the FEPC achieved absolutely
nothing: some of its members resigned; Roosevelt promised, again after
many protests had been made, that the railroad hearings would be held
after all; McNutt and Attorney General Biddle called a number of
organizations to a conference to suggest means of reconstituting and
strengthening the FEPC; McNutt explained many times after that
conference that the delay in further action was due to the difficulty
in getting a new chairman for the agency. Finally a new chairman was
secured, Mgr. Francis J. Haas, dean at Catholic University which has
barred Negro athletes from its track meets, and on May 27, 1943,
Roosevelt issued a new executive order establishing a new FEPC which
like its predecessor has now power to abolish Jim Crow in industry.
There isn’t an informed person in Washington who honestly believes
after these developments that the new FEPC will meet a happier end than
the old one.</p>
<p>The fate of the FEPC is a sign of the things to come. To this it
should be added, for the benefit of those looking ahead to the post-war
period, that the FEPC had authority to investigate only war plants and
was never intended to function after the war anyhow.</p>
<p>Roosevelt’s own attitude can be gauged not only by what happened to
the FEPC, which as he insisted was “under direct control of the Chief
Executive,” but also by a number of other events. It will be recalled
that when Negroes were preparing for a march on Washington in June
1941, Roosevelt summoned A. Philip Randolph, Walter White and other
Negro leaders to the White House for a discussion. The following year
Randolph declared on several occasions that the interests of the fight
against Jim Crowism required that “free, independent and courageous
Negro leaders have a frank, candid and plain talk with President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the whole situation.” Randolph even
wired the White House an assurance that he wanted a discussion “in the
interests of national unity, effective defense and victory for the
United Nations and the cause of democracy.” But on August 6, 1942
Roosevelt’s secretary curtly replied:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Regret that owing to extreme pressure on the
President’s time impossible to make appointment requested.”</p>
<p class="fst">In 1943 Randolph apparently knows better than to ask
again for such a talk.</p>
<p>Nor have Negroes forgotten Roosevelt’s failure to intervene, as he
had the power to do, to prevent the legal lynching of the sharecropper
Odell Waller. And they see a deep significance in the contrast between
his repeated condemnation of Axis atrocities and his continued failure
to say a word against lynching in the United States. They are likewise
bitterly aware of the contrast between his many declamations about the
four freedoms and his cynical remarks last year while the fate of the
anti-poll tax bill hung in the balance in the Senate:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... asked whether he thought the poll tax repeal
bill should pass, he reiterated that he knew nothing about it, had
talked to no one about it, and therefore could not express an opinion.”
(<strong>New York Times</strong>, November 21, 1942)</p>
<p class="fst">And this is the man who will probably be at the head of
the government when the present war is ended.</p>
<p>Of course the executive is not the only arm of the federal
government. There is also Congress, and its present members may also be
in office when the peace conference is held. But is there a single high
school student in the nation who does not know that this Congress is at
least as reactionary as the Roosevelt administration? This is the
Congress which is admittedly more conservative than the previous
Congress which permitted anti-poll tax legislation to be filibustered
to death. This is the Congress where the Southern Democrats hold the
undisputed balance of power and where both capitalist parties vie with
each other in wooing the Southern Democrats by appeasing them regularly
on all issues affecting the Negro. This is the Congress where the poll
taxers control the most important committees and use them to uphold and
extend “white supremacy,” as in the case of the Social Security Board
whose chairman, A.J. Altmeyer, was recently intimidated by poll tax
congressmen into promising that hereafter no white stenographers would
be permitted to assist Negroes and no Negroes would be permitted to
furnish stenographic assistance to white employees of that federal
agency.</p>
<p>There is also the judicial division, the Supreme Court, now
controlled by Roosevelt’s appointees. Twice last year, while the
sharecropper Odell Waller sat in death row for killing a man in
self-defense, the court was asked to review the case, and twice it
refused, not even explaining its refusal. Its attitude, however, was
later made unmistakeable by the “liberal” Justice Frankfurter who
stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“As a federal judge I am unable to find any
justification for summary interference with the ORDERLY process of
Virginia’s courts of justice.”</p>
<p class="fst">That the poll tax bars Negroes and poor whites from
service on Virginia’s juries, that Waller was the victim of a lynch
spirit and a viciously prejudiced judge — all this appears “orderly” to
the gentlemen on the Supreme Court. And why not? It is in complete
accord with the views expressed by this body when it upheld the poll
tax laws, when it upheld the “white primary” rules which bar Negroes
from voting in the most important part of elections in the South, when
it upheld the educational, transportation and other Jim Crow
segregation laws of the South.</p>
<p>The law-enforcement agency of the administration is no better. The
Department of Justice has been hinting lately that it deserves to be
decorated with a few medals because it has followed up a handful of
prosecutions for flagrant violations of the thirteenth amendment to the
Constitution, which forbids slavery and involuntary servitude. But what
has this or any other department of the government done to put an end
to the bloody crime of lynching, which certainly violates that section
of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution requiring that no state
shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws”? What has it done about the poll tax and other devices to
disfranchise the Negroes in the South, all of which technically evade
but plainly violate the first section of the fifteenth amendment which
reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any state, on account of
race, color or previous condition of servitude”?</p>
<p>What can be expected after the “war for democracy” of a government
which refuses during that war to enforce its own laws for the
democratic rights of the Negro people? Will such a government, after
the “war for democracy” is won, be likely or willing to pass additional
laws benefitting the Negro? And if it does, will such laws be worth the
paper they are printed on?<br>
</p>
<h4>Jim Crow in the Army</h4>
<p class="fst">But the capitalist plans for the Negro in the future are
most glaringly highlighted by the government’s treatment of the Negro
in the armed forces today. It is not necessary to recount the whole
story of that treatment in this place. <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2" target="_blank">[2]</a>
Every Negro family is already too well acquainted with the details. But
our discussion requires that we at least outline the pattern employed
in the armed forces.</p>
<p>In 1940, with US entry into the war growing imminent, leading Negro
organizations appealed to Roosevelt to drop the Jim Crow bars that
excluded Negroes from most branches of the armed forces and confined
them to segregated regiments in the army and kitchen duty in the navy.
Shortly before the presidential election that year, Roosevelt answered
the protests by stating:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This policy (not to intermingle colored and white)
has proved satisfactory over a long period of years, and to make
changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental
to the preparations for national defense.”</p>
<p class="fst">And although this policy violates Section 4(a) of the
1940 Draft Act which prohibits “discrimination against any person on
account of race or color,” it has been rigidly adhered to ever since,
and applied to every Negro volunteer and draftee.</p>
<p>Protests and the needs of the armed forces compelled the military
authorities to admit Negroes into many branches previously closed to
them. But always, and under all circumstances, this was done on a
strictly segregated basis. Negroes were permitted (a handful, anyhow)
to enter the Army air force, but only after an all-Negro squadron and a
separate and, needless to say, inferior training center had been
established. They were permitted to enter the Navy in some non-kitchen
servant capacities, but only after arrangements had been made to
segregate them in small shore patrol ships and labor battalions in
which they could not become commissioned officers. Similarly they were
accepted into the Coast Guard and the Marines in separate all-Negro
bodies. Negroes are permitted to take officer training — a grand total
of 1,200 during the first 17 months of the war! — but only with the
understanding that they will not be allowed to command any white
soldiers, although naturally with such a small number of Negro officers
for such a large number of Negro soldiers, there will have to be and
are many white officers in command of Negroes.</p>
<p>To change this “satisfactory” setup in the armed forces, says
Roosevelt, “would produce situations destructive to morale.” He does
not say whose morale. <a id="f3" href="#n3" name="f3" target="_blank">[3]</a> But it
is not hard to guess that he means primarily the morale of Southern
ruling class opinion. To protect Southern bias, therefore, the military
authorities try to spread anti-Negro prejudices among hundreds of
thousands of non-Southern white youth in uniform, many of whom went to
school with Negroes and were taught to regard them as equals. To
prevent “situations destructive to morale,” the military authorities
export their prejudices to Great Britain, where the people greeted
American Negro soldiers in the most friendly and comradely manner until
they were ordered to desist in the interest of not hurting the feelings
of bigoted US Army officers and soldiers.</p>
<p>But the utter hypocrisy of Roosevelt’s explanation for segregating
Negroes in the armed forces has been bared most conclusively by his
reaction to a very reasonable request made by several liberal and Negro
organizations representing at least a million people. Very well, they
said in effect, you don’t want to end segregation in the armed forces
and we won’t press you on that; but why don’t you at least permit the
formation of a single mixed division, which would be made up of white
and Negro soldiers volunteering to serve in it? It is hard to see how
anyone could argue against creation of such a division on the ground
that it would produce situations harmful to morale; being made up of
volunteers who would want to show that it is possible for Negroes and
white to collaborate amicably and fruitfully, it would probably have
the highest morale in the armed forces. Precisely for this reason
Roosevelt not only refused to act on the mixed division petitions
delivered to him — he even refused to comment on them.</p>
<p>This incident, and many others like it, indicate that what Roosevelt
and the government are upholding is not morale but anti-Negro prejudice
and the predominant Southern technique for keeping the Negro “in his
(separate) place.” This is upheld in the armed forces because the
Southern rulers fear, in the words of a resolution of the Socialist
Workers Party, “that no Negro trained to handle a gun would peacefully
go back to the old life of discrimination, segregation,
disfranchisement and insult, after training in an army where he was
treated as an equal with white soldiers.” But the logic of segregation
is such that once adopted as a policy for the armed forces there is
nothing to stop it from being extended to all the major and minor
organs and institutions of society. This is precisely what the enemies
of the Negroes want and are striving for.</p>
<p>The issue of segregation is in many respects the most important one
facing the Negro today. It is the last and strongest line of defense of
those who want to keep the Negro down, the stronghold from which a
thousands types of discrimination can be launched. Yet the only Negro
member of Congress, William L. Dawson, who like his colleagues Rankin
and Bilbo believes in the greater glory of the Democratic Party, and
who claims to be a representative of the Negro people not only in
Chicago but in the whole United States, recently declared that such
issues as segregation “fade into insignificance in the light of the
bigger questions raised by this war. America’s enemies now are the foes
of all minorities.” (<strong>PM</strong>, April 23, 1943.)</p>
<p>But flag-waving won’t solve the problems of the Negro people and it
won’t change the mind of a single one of their enemies. For on this one
issue there is a remarkable unanimity among all leaders of Southern
ruling class thought — both openly reactionary and “liberal.” The
demagogues like Rankin, Talmadge and Dixon rave and rant and threaten
civil war at the very prospect of any breaches in the wall of
segregation; they don’t like it but they don’t object too strenuously
when Negroes in the South get jobs which were always closed to them
before because this helps to win the war which they believe is being
fought to save “the white man’s civilization”; but they declare their
readiness even to secede from the Democratic Party when there is talk
of ending or altering the system of segregation. The “Southern
liberals” show their real colors when this problem is raised, as the
publisher Mark Ethridge did when he warned that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is no power in the world — not even in all the
mechanized armies of the earth, Allied or Axis — which could force the
Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social
segregation.” (July 1942)</p>
<p class="fst">And in April 1943 when more than 100 white “Southern
liberals” met in Atlanta to discuss a program for Negro-white
relations, they expressed the same idea although much more
hypocritically when they stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The only justification offered for those laws which
have for their purpose the separation of the races is that they are
intended to minister to the welfare and the integrity of both races.”</p>
<p class="fst">To minister to the welfare and the integrity of both
races is truly a noble aim, and no doubt explains why every outspoken
enemy of the Negro people is so determined to uphold the segregation
laws and practices!</p>
<p>The truth is that all Southern capitalists and their “liberal”
agents stand so firmly on this issue because once segregation is ended,
all else is lost for the oppressors of the Negro people. Once the wall
separating them is removed, the Negroes and poor whites will see that
their interests are the same and they will unite their forces to better
their common conditions. And conversely, if the barrier of segregation
can be maintained for the duration of the war, then the Negro-haters
will be able to use it to extend and intensify their oppression and to
take back whatever the Negroes have gained during the war. For the very
basis of segregation is the myth of “white supremacy” — just as the
basis of the persecution of the Jews in Europe is the myth of “Nordic
superiority” — and so long as that myth can be preserved, the Negro
will be unable to make permanent gains.</p>
<p>The government does more than its share to uphold this myth. Why
should Negroes be segregated in the armed forces and not in federal
housing projects? There is no logic in that, so — a little pressure
from the Southern congressmen, and Negroes are segregated in these
projects even in Northern communities. But why in housing projects and
nowhere else? The poison of bi-racialism spreads further through the
government apparatus and by way of that into all spheres of economic,
political and social life. Uncle Toms like F.D. Patterson of Tuskegee
Institute hail the government when, for example, it opens the air force
to Negroes on a segregated basis, declaring that this is “a definite
improvement” in the conditions of the Negro people. These people fail
to see, or at any rate to admit, that such “improvement” is comparable
to the government striking off a few links in the chain binding the
Negroes only to surround him with another prison wall. But every
thoughtful Negro sees in these developments the intention of their
enemies, with the approval of the government, to establish a strongly
enforced and far-reaching system of segregation which will freeze the
Negro into a permanent position of second class citizenship. To fully
estimate the Negro’s status in post-war America, one must also
understand the economic and political direction in which American
capitalism is moving. In a recent pamphlet <a id="f4" href="#n4" name="f4" target="_blank">[4]</a> we summed up the process as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The United States is the richest, most powerful
capitalist country in the world. But no more than the others has it
been able to escape the processes of decay which are inherent in
capitalism and are developing ever more rapidly in this period. As in .
the other capitalist nations, here too greater and greater power and
wealth are accumulated in the hands of the monopoly corporations and
heavier restrictions are set on the rights of the masses.</p>
<p class="quote">“In its youth capitalism was able to grant
concessions: democratic liberties to certain sections of the masses,
and slightly higher wages to the more skilled layers of the working
class. Today, capitalism is in its death agony. To exist, it must
snatch back the few concessions it was able to give in the past; it
must depress the living standards of all the workers; it must destroy
the democratic rights of all the masses. No capitalist nation in the
epoch of imperialism is immune from this process which is speeded up in
wartime but was in operation before the war and will not be eliminated
after the war if the capitalists remain in power. The United States
capitalists follow in the footsteps of their German brothers, although
at a different tempo.</p>
<p class="quote">“Keeping in mind this background, Negroes will best be
able to appreciate what capitalism in this country has to offer them.
When the trend is toward the destruction of all democratic rights, when
more regimentation is in store for the masses as a whole, Negroes have
little to hope for from the capitalist system. When the employers are
trying to take away the few democratic rights of the white workers,
there is little chance that they will willingly extend new rights to
the Negroes. The events of the last decade clearly indicate that under
capitalism the prospect is not for Negroes to be raised to the status
of the white workers but rather for the white workers to be driven down
to the status of the Negroes. And once fascist reaction triumphs, the
Negro’s status may become even more intolerable than it is today.
Negroes can learn from the fate of the Jews in Europe, who made some
gains during the period of capitalism’s rise only to be forcibly
deprived of them when capitalism assumed the political form of fascism.
Like the Jewish scapegoat in Germany, the Negro may face deportation,
loss of whatever citizenship rights he now possesses, mass slaughter
and extermination.”</p>
<p class="fst">Fortunately there is another perspective, the
perspective of the socialist revolution and the establishment of a
Workers’ and Farmers’ Government which will, as the Bolsheviks did in
the Soviet Union under Lenin and Trotsky, not only destroy the economic
cause of race discrimination but will also adopt and enforce
legislation guaranteeing full equality to the Negro people and all
other minorities.</p>
<p>It is in the light of this perspective that we can see that the
Negro has made some genuine gains in recent years, gains which have a
permanent character and cannot be erased at the mere command of the
capitalists. These gains are in the trade union movement. More Negroes
belong and there is a greater understanding of the need for Negro-white
solidarity in the unions than ever before. What the white trade
unionists have learned about the heroism and sacrifices of their black
brothers in building the unions and what the Negro unionists have
learned about the need for allying themselves with the labor movement
will make possible the speedier entry of the unions into the political
struggle against capitalism and for the creation of a Workers’ and
Farmers’ Government. In the unions and through the unions, in and
through the revolutionary party, the Negro masses will be able to meet
and defeat the challenge of their enemies in the post-war world.</p>
<p>Unlike most other people and groups who discuss postwar problems,
the Trotskyist aim is not to divert attention away from current needs,
but on the contrary to show by what capitalism offers after the war the
need for struggling against capitalism and all its works today. Unlike
the Dawsons, the Pattersons and the Stalinists, we seek to show the
Negroes that they must not be lulled into passivity and acquiescence by
seeming but actually non-existent “progress.” We try to show the
Negroes what fundamental achievements must be won if they are to make
permanent advances on the road to equality. That is our contribution to
the discussion on the Negro’s future in a capitalist world: to show the
masses what lies ahead and to summon them to the struggle for
emancipation today.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top" target="_blank">Top of page</a><br>
</p>
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1" target="_blank">1.</a> Just what the
Negro thinks about this question has been demonstrated in the polls of
the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>’s Bureau of Public Sentiment,
the most reliable and thorough index of Negro opinion In this country.</p>
<p class="note">On October 24, 1942 it asked: “Do you believe that the
Negro should soft-pedal his demands for complete freedom and
citizenship and await the development of the educational process?” The
answers were:</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">NO</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note">81.2%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">YES</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note">17.1%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">UNCERTAIN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note"> 1.7%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p class="note">One year after US entry into the war the Bureau asked:
“Have you been convinced that the statements which our national leaders
have made about freedom and equality for all peoples include the
American Negro?” The answers, printed on Dec. 19, 1942 were:</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">NO</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note">82.2%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">YES</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note">17.7%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">UNCERTAIN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note"> 1.1%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p class="note">Even before these surveys were taken, the government
itself conducted one. Officials apparently found the results so
devastating that the findings of the survey have never been made public
to this day. But a newspaperman found out about some of the facts and
revealed them in the June 14, 1942 issue of the <strong>Minneapolis
Sunday Tribune and Star Journal</strong>. In part he wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A government survey which is regarded as a secret
document, has uncovered the information that 38% of the Negroes
questioned believe it is more important to ‘make democracy work at
home’ than it is to beat the Germans and Japanese ...</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Only 50.5% of the Negroes questioned regard beating
the Germans and Japanese as more important than ‘making democracy work
at home.’</p>
<p class="quoteb">“That phrase has a diverse meaning ... Essentially,
and to most Negroes, it means the elimination of economic
discrimination, the right to work and live in decency; to others it
means the elimination of segregation, and to still others complete race
equality.”</p>
<p class="note">As we wrote at the time:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We are not in a position to check on the accuracy of
figures in a report which is kept secret. Nor do we know what kind of
people were questioned in this survey — what proportion, for example,
were government employees and what proportion were in the South where a
Negro worker or sharecropper might be putting his life in jeopardy by
stating his true opinion. But we can take it for granted that if there
was any exaggeration in it, it was all on the side of making things
seem as rosy and cheerful as possible.”</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2" target="_blank">2.</a> That has been
done briefly but most adequately in a 5-cent pamphlet, <strong>The
War’s Greatest Scandal: The Story of Jim Crow In Uniform</strong>,
issued by the March-On-Washington Movement, 2084 Seventh Ave., New
York, April, 1943.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n3" href="#f3" name="n3" target="_blank">3.</a> “What the Negro
people feel about such segregationist policies is shown by their answer
to the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>’s poll of February 20,
1943. The question was: “Do you believe the Negro should fight against
segregation even when it is the accepted ‘pattern of the community’?”
The answers:</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">YES</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note">89.1%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">NO</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note"> 8.8%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="note">UNCERTAIN</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="note"> 1.9%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p class="note">Even in the South the answer from 88.6% of those
questioned was yes.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n4" href="#f4" name="n4" target="_blank">4.</a> <strong>The
Struggle for Negro Equality</strong> by John Saunders and Albert
Parker, Pioneer Pubishers, June 1943, five cents.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro in the Post-War World
(June 1943)
From Fourth International, Vol.4 No.6, June 1943, pp.179-184.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, young man,” stated
A.N. Kemp, president of American Airlines, “but I don’t believe that
Negroes will be used as pilots in the immediate world of post-war
aviation.” He said it in an interview in New York printed in the Pittsburgh
Courier, March 27, 1943.
The airline executive went on to explain that “of course” he
personally had nothing against Negroes and had even hired some to work
in his ground crews, but that his company would lose money if it hired
Negro pilots; and presumably to show that his outlook was not limited
by considerations of profits alone, he added that “the Negro would have
to become more cultured before he could expect to enjoy the fullness of
American life.”
He spoke pleasantly, politely, his tone was friendly, but in his
words there was no hint of doubt or hesitation: he was speaking with
the voice of the whole capitalist class and frankly stating its
intention of maintaining in the post-war world the rotten pattern of
Jim Crow discrimination, segregation and insult which dominated this
country before Pearl Harbor and the proclamation of the “four
freedoms.” There are some people who harbor illusions about the
character of the Negro’s status after the termination of the second
“war for democracy,” but if they do, it is not the fault of Kemp and
his fellow capitalists and the government, whose words and deeds speak
loudly and plainly enough.
A. Philip Randolph, AFL union leader and national director of the
March-On-Washington Movement, has proposed that
“... there ought to be and must be a movement known
as the Free Negro, which will send a strong delegation of Negroes and
their true friends to the Peace Conference at the end of this war to
present the claims of Negro people in America, the British West Indies
and Africa.”
One would be justified in concluding from this that
Randolph believes the post-war status of the Negro will be decided at a
peace conference of the victorious United Nations. To a certain extent
this is correct. But to a far greater extent the Negro’s fate is being
determined right now, in the midst of the war. What happens at a peace
conference will depend not only on the relationship of forces between
the various countries, but even more on the relationship of class
forces within each country. The character of the peace conference will
have been decided more or less conclusively by what happened during the
war, just as the nature of the war and what happens during it flow from
the developments and struggles leading up to the war.
The Negro’s greatest opportunity for advancing toward full equality
is now, as his enemies well recognize, and if the Negro does not take
advantage of this opportunity now he will find it much harder to make
progress after the war, when his enemies will have disposed of their
foreign rivals and will be able to devote their energy and attention
toward keeping the Negro “in his place.”
It is necessary to make this point and to drive it home again and
again because there are so many people trying to obscure it. These
people — the modern Uncle Toms, in whose ranks the Stalinists must be
included — never miss an opportunity to explain how much progress is
being made. They loudly tell you how many more one-tenths of one per
cent schools there are for Negroes today than there were before; they
cite figures to show that Negro birth mortality rates have fallen by so
much or that Negro preachers and lawyers have increased in number by
that much. Needless to say, they attribute all this progress to the
superior qualities of their own programs. Nor are middle class Negroes
and Stalinists the only people addicted to the pastime of
progress-shouting. Government bureaus and the capitalist press have
been going in for it quite heavily since Pearl Harbor. Indeed, you
might say of the capitalist press articles and reports on the Negroes
that they devote two-thirds of their space to inflammatory and most
often distorted accounts of crimes by Negroes and one-third to accounts
of the remarkable extent of Negro progress.
The purpose behind this pointing-with-pride and
viewing-with-pleasure is obvious. The Negro people instinctively want
to take advantage of the present crisis to achieve the rights which
have been denied them. This can be confirmed by any honest person
acquainted with Negro thought today. It is hard to convince the Negro
masses that this is a war for democracy when they are denied the most
elementary democratic rights. [1]
The progress-shouters seek, so to speak, to change the subject, to
convince the Negroes that even though things aren’t perfect, they are
getting better day by day and will eventually work out all right. Their
purpose is to persuade the masses not to conduct militant struggle
against Jim Crow. If they are successful, the Negro people will miss
the present opportunity to improve their status with the result that
they might be condemned to second-class citizenship for decades to come.
It is not our intention here to argue that the Negro’s conditions
have not changed at all, nor to overlook whatever genuine progress that
has been made. No one can dispute, for example, the fact that Negro
unemployment today is much lower than before the war, or that many
Negroes have won genuine equality on their jobs as the result of trade
union efforts. What we propose to do here is to look at the whole
picture, to examine the true character of the gains that have been made
since Pearl Harbor, to list the losses and the setbacks that have been
encountered while these gains were being made, to show what was
temporary and secondary and what was permanent about these gains and
losses. It is necessary for militant Negroes to ponder these questions,
for World War II will not last forever and they have lives to live
after it comes to an end. They must understand the developments of the
first 18 months of American participation in the war, for the post-war
pattern is foreshadowed in these developments.
First, the question of employment, which strikes so directly at the
economic conditions of the Negro masses that there is quite often a
tendency to subordinate all other questions to this one. There are many
estimates of the number of Negro workers employed in war plants, the
highest being a half million. This figure includes both those working
on machines and janitors, porters, etc. All others listed as gainfully
employed are either in non-war industries and occupations, including
domestic service, on the farms, or in the armed forces. The total in
the armed forces is already over a half million and is expected to
increase to a million by the end of 1943. Newly-adopted legislation,
embodied in House Joint Resolution 96, which was passed by both houses
of Congress and signed by the president over the protests of many labor
and farm organizations, who charge the bill with restoring “virtual
peonage,” in effect ties the Southern Negro farmers and sharecroppers
to the land for the duration of the war. It gives county agents
notoriously staunch upholders of “white supremacy,” the power to deny
Negroes the right to leave their home county for such purposes as going
North to work in war industries.
Meanwhile, in the face of the most severe manpower shortage in the
nation’s history and in the eighteenth month of the war, there is still
a comparatively large body of able-bodied Negroes, estimated from
600,000 to 1,000,000, who remain unemployed. There are still hundreds
of plants in the country which refuse to hire Negroes or which resort
to “token” employment, and there are thousands of other plants — by no
means all in the South — which will not permit Negroes to hold skilled
or semi-skilled jobs and which refuse to give Negroes equal pay for
equal work. Even in New York, the State Committee on Discrimination
reported recently, “discrimination because of color, race or creed
still exists” and employers continue “the old practice of
discriminating against Negroes not by barring them from employment, but
by restricting them to such menial jobs as porters or other maintenance
men.” (New York Times, May 7, 1943) And in an industry
as vital as the railroads, where Negroes have been employed for many
decades, the Office of War Information admitted in April 1943 that “war
or no war, unwillingness to employ Negroes in many types of railroad
jobs persists.”
Negroes hold more jobs than they did before Pearl Harbor, and in
many cases better ones, and that is all to the good. But their jobs are
not as secure as those of other workers. In plants where there are
strong unions, the seniority of Negroes is generally protected. But
even in such plants the probability is that when war production is
ended or reduced after the war, they will be the first fired because
they were the last hired. Thus it is clear that gains in Negro
employment are by no means permanent and can disappear like last year’s
snow with the end of the war. This is not the least of the reasons why
thoughtful Negroes are so concerned about the post-war world.
Roosevelt and the Negro
We have indicated why Negro employment increased — not
because of any widespread elimination of racial bias in employment but
because of the manpower shortage. It is necessary to emphasize this
point because there are many scoundrels pretending otherwise and trying
to give the credit for the rise in Negro employment to the Roosevelt
administration and its agencies — scoundrels like the Stalinist James
W. Ford, who says:
“The government has a well-established policy against
discrimination of Negro citizens in war industries. That policy was
established by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, issued June
25, 1941. One cannot deny that much has been accomplished in the
elimination of job discrimination, that many hundreds of thousands of
Negro workers have been put to work in war industries. The Fair
Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) was an effective instrument in
exposing cases of discrimination and forcing employers to hire Negroes
...” (Daily Worker, April 10, 1943)
To show how Ford lies we need only refer to the brief
history of the FEPC.
Not even its own members ever claimed with Ford that the FEPC was
“an effective instrument in ... forcing employers to hire Negroes.”
They knew too well that Executive Order 8802, from which they drew
their authority, gave them no powers to force anyone to do anything.
The FEPC was set up by Roosevelt to ward off the projected
March-On-Washington in the summer of 1941, and was a concession without
any teeth in it. The FEPC helped a little by a few open hearings to
publicize the scandalous situation in industry, and it prevailed on a
few employers to hire some Negro workers. Its ineffectualness was amply
demonstrated when it held a hearing in Birmingham in 1942, where it was
more or less openly defied by the Jim Crow employers.
Despite its impotence, the FEPC was the object of much opposition,
especially from the Southern Democratic poll tax bloc in Washington,
who hated it as a symbol of the government’s right to “encroach” in any
way on the right of the states to treat the Negroes as they please.
This opposition resulted, in the summer of 1942, in Roosevelt’s
transfer of the FEPC from the jurisdiction of the White House to that
of McNutt’s War Manpower Commission,whose finances are controlled by
Congressional committees largely dominated by the poll taxers. Many
labor and Negro organizations condemned this transfer as a move to make
the FEPC even more powerless than it had been previously, and requested
that it be restored to its previous status. Finally, in December 1942,
Roosevelt answered these protests with the statement that he saw no
necessity for any changes in the situation because the FEPC is “still
under direct control of the Chief Executive.” He also made reference to
the announcement that the FEPC was planning soon to go ahead with a
number of open hearings.
But the goose of the FEPC had already been cooked in spite of these
typically Rooseveltian assurances. A month later Jim Crow scored
another victory in Washington when McNutt, against the expressed wishes
of the FEPC members, suddenly called off an already scheduled hearing
on discriminatory employment policies of the railroads, a hearing which
Negro leaders had described as a “key test” of McNutt’s attitude toward
the Negro. In the four months after this, the FEPC achieved absolutely
nothing: some of its members resigned; Roosevelt promised, again after
many protests had been made, that the railroad hearings would be held
after all; McNutt and Attorney General Biddle called a number of
organizations to a conference to suggest means of reconstituting and
strengthening the FEPC; McNutt explained many times after that
conference that the delay in further action was due to the difficulty
in getting a new chairman for the agency. Finally a new chairman was
secured, Mgr. Francis J. Haas, dean at Catholic University which has
barred Negro athletes from its track meets, and on May 27, 1943,
Roosevelt issued a new executive order establishing a new FEPC which
like its predecessor has now power to abolish Jim Crow in industry.
There isn’t an informed person in Washington who honestly believes
after these developments that the new FEPC will meet a happier end than
the old one.
The fate of the FEPC is a sign of the things to come. To this it
should be added, for the benefit of those looking ahead to the post-war
period, that the FEPC had authority to investigate only war plants and
was never intended to function after the war anyhow.
Roosevelt’s own attitude can be gauged not only by what happened to
the FEPC, which as he insisted was “under direct control of the Chief
Executive,” but also by a number of other events. It will be recalled
that when Negroes were preparing for a march on Washington in June
1941, Roosevelt summoned A. Philip Randolph, Walter White and other
Negro leaders to the White House for a discussion. The following year
Randolph declared on several occasions that the interests of the fight
against Jim Crowism required that “free, independent and courageous
Negro leaders have a frank, candid and plain talk with President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the whole situation.” Randolph even
wired the White House an assurance that he wanted a discussion “in the
interests of national unity, effective defense and victory for the
United Nations and the cause of democracy.” But on August 6, 1942
Roosevelt’s secretary curtly replied:
“Regret that owing to extreme pressure on the
President’s time impossible to make appointment requested.”
In 1943 Randolph apparently knows better than to ask
again for such a talk.
Nor have Negroes forgotten Roosevelt’s failure to intervene, as he
had the power to do, to prevent the legal lynching of the sharecropper
Odell Waller. And they see a deep significance in the contrast between
his repeated condemnation of Axis atrocities and his continued failure
to say a word against lynching in the United States. They are likewise
bitterly aware of the contrast between his many declamations about the
four freedoms and his cynical remarks last year while the fate of the
anti-poll tax bill hung in the balance in the Senate:
“... asked whether he thought the poll tax repeal
bill should pass, he reiterated that he knew nothing about it, had
talked to no one about it, and therefore could not express an opinion.”
(New York Times, November 21, 1942)
And this is the man who will probably be at the head of
the government when the present war is ended.
Of course the executive is not the only arm of the federal
government. There is also Congress, and its present members may also be
in office when the peace conference is held. But is there a single high
school student in the nation who does not know that this Congress is at
least as reactionary as the Roosevelt administration? This is the
Congress which is admittedly more conservative than the previous
Congress which permitted anti-poll tax legislation to be filibustered
to death. This is the Congress where the Southern Democrats hold the
undisputed balance of power and where both capitalist parties vie with
each other in wooing the Southern Democrats by appeasing them regularly
on all issues affecting the Negro. This is the Congress where the poll
taxers control the most important committees and use them to uphold and
extend “white supremacy,” as in the case of the Social Security Board
whose chairman, A.J. Altmeyer, was recently intimidated by poll tax
congressmen into promising that hereafter no white stenographers would
be permitted to assist Negroes and no Negroes would be permitted to
furnish stenographic assistance to white employees of that federal
agency.
There is also the judicial division, the Supreme Court, now
controlled by Roosevelt’s appointees. Twice last year, while the
sharecropper Odell Waller sat in death row for killing a man in
self-defense, the court was asked to review the case, and twice it
refused, not even explaining its refusal. Its attitude, however, was
later made unmistakeable by the “liberal” Justice Frankfurter who
stated:
“As a federal judge I am unable to find any
justification for summary interference with the ORDERLY process of
Virginia’s courts of justice.”
That the poll tax bars Negroes and poor whites from
service on Virginia’s juries, that Waller was the victim of a lynch
spirit and a viciously prejudiced judge — all this appears “orderly” to
the gentlemen on the Supreme Court. And why not? It is in complete
accord with the views expressed by this body when it upheld the poll
tax laws, when it upheld the “white primary” rules which bar Negroes
from voting in the most important part of elections in the South, when
it upheld the educational, transportation and other Jim Crow
segregation laws of the South.
The law-enforcement agency of the administration is no better. The
Department of Justice has been hinting lately that it deserves to be
decorated with a few medals because it has followed up a handful of
prosecutions for flagrant violations of the thirteenth amendment to the
Constitution, which forbids slavery and involuntary servitude. But what
has this or any other department of the government done to put an end
to the bloody crime of lynching, which certainly violates that section
of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution requiring that no state
shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws”? What has it done about the poll tax and other devices to
disfranchise the Negroes in the South, all of which technically evade
but plainly violate the first section of the fifteenth amendment which
reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any state, on account of
race, color or previous condition of servitude”?
What can be expected after the “war for democracy” of a government
which refuses during that war to enforce its own laws for the
democratic rights of the Negro people? Will such a government, after
the “war for democracy” is won, be likely or willing to pass additional
laws benefitting the Negro? And if it does, will such laws be worth the
paper they are printed on?
Jim Crow in the Army
But the capitalist plans for the Negro in the future are
most glaringly highlighted by the government’s treatment of the Negro
in the armed forces today. It is not necessary to recount the whole
story of that treatment in this place. [2]
Every Negro family is already too well acquainted with the details. But
our discussion requires that we at least outline the pattern employed
in the armed forces.
In 1940, with US entry into the war growing imminent, leading Negro
organizations appealed to Roosevelt to drop the Jim Crow bars that
excluded Negroes from most branches of the armed forces and confined
them to segregated regiments in the army and kitchen duty in the navy.
Shortly before the presidential election that year, Roosevelt answered
the protests by stating:
“This policy (not to intermingle colored and white)
has proved satisfactory over a long period of years, and to make
changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental
to the preparations for national defense.”
And although this policy violates Section 4(a) of the
1940 Draft Act which prohibits “discrimination against any person on
account of race or color,” it has been rigidly adhered to ever since,
and applied to every Negro volunteer and draftee.
Protests and the needs of the armed forces compelled the military
authorities to admit Negroes into many branches previously closed to
them. But always, and under all circumstances, this was done on a
strictly segregated basis. Negroes were permitted (a handful, anyhow)
to enter the Army air force, but only after an all-Negro squadron and a
separate and, needless to say, inferior training center had been
established. They were permitted to enter the Navy in some non-kitchen
servant capacities, but only after arrangements had been made to
segregate them in small shore patrol ships and labor battalions in
which they could not become commissioned officers. Similarly they were
accepted into the Coast Guard and the Marines in separate all-Negro
bodies. Negroes are permitted to take officer training — a grand total
of 1,200 during the first 17 months of the war! — but only with the
understanding that they will not be allowed to command any white
soldiers, although naturally with such a small number of Negro officers
for such a large number of Negro soldiers, there will have to be and
are many white officers in command of Negroes.
To change this “satisfactory” setup in the armed forces, says
Roosevelt, “would produce situations destructive to morale.” He does
not say whose morale. [3] But it
is not hard to guess that he means primarily the morale of Southern
ruling class opinion. To protect Southern bias, therefore, the military
authorities try to spread anti-Negro prejudices among hundreds of
thousands of non-Southern white youth in uniform, many of whom went to
school with Negroes and were taught to regard them as equals. To
prevent “situations destructive to morale,” the military authorities
export their prejudices to Great Britain, where the people greeted
American Negro soldiers in the most friendly and comradely manner until
they were ordered to desist in the interest of not hurting the feelings
of bigoted US Army officers and soldiers.
But the utter hypocrisy of Roosevelt’s explanation for segregating
Negroes in the armed forces has been bared most conclusively by his
reaction to a very reasonable request made by several liberal and Negro
organizations representing at least a million people. Very well, they
said in effect, you don’t want to end segregation in the armed forces
and we won’t press you on that; but why don’t you at least permit the
formation of a single mixed division, which would be made up of white
and Negro soldiers volunteering to serve in it? It is hard to see how
anyone could argue against creation of such a division on the ground
that it would produce situations harmful to morale; being made up of
volunteers who would want to show that it is possible for Negroes and
white to collaborate amicably and fruitfully, it would probably have
the highest morale in the armed forces. Precisely for this reason
Roosevelt not only refused to act on the mixed division petitions
delivered to him — he even refused to comment on them.
This incident, and many others like it, indicate that what Roosevelt
and the government are upholding is not morale but anti-Negro prejudice
and the predominant Southern technique for keeping the Negro “in his
(separate) place.” This is upheld in the armed forces because the
Southern rulers fear, in the words of a resolution of the Socialist
Workers Party, “that no Negro trained to handle a gun would peacefully
go back to the old life of discrimination, segregation,
disfranchisement and insult, after training in an army where he was
treated as an equal with white soldiers.” But the logic of segregation
is such that once adopted as a policy for the armed forces there is
nothing to stop it from being extended to all the major and minor
organs and institutions of society. This is precisely what the enemies
of the Negroes want and are striving for.
The issue of segregation is in many respects the most important one
facing the Negro today. It is the last and strongest line of defense of
those who want to keep the Negro down, the stronghold from which a
thousands types of discrimination can be launched. Yet the only Negro
member of Congress, William L. Dawson, who like his colleagues Rankin
and Bilbo believes in the greater glory of the Democratic Party, and
who claims to be a representative of the Negro people not only in
Chicago but in the whole United States, recently declared that such
issues as segregation “fade into insignificance in the light of the
bigger questions raised by this war. America’s enemies now are the foes
of all minorities.” (PM, April 23, 1943.)
But flag-waving won’t solve the problems of the Negro people and it
won’t change the mind of a single one of their enemies. For on this one
issue there is a remarkable unanimity among all leaders of Southern
ruling class thought — both openly reactionary and “liberal.” The
demagogues like Rankin, Talmadge and Dixon rave and rant and threaten
civil war at the very prospect of any breaches in the wall of
segregation; they don’t like it but they don’t object too strenuously
when Negroes in the South get jobs which were always closed to them
before because this helps to win the war which they believe is being
fought to save “the white man’s civilization”; but they declare their
readiness even to secede from the Democratic Party when there is talk
of ending or altering the system of segregation. The “Southern
liberals” show their real colors when this problem is raised, as the
publisher Mark Ethridge did when he warned that
“There is no power in the world — not even in all the
mechanized armies of the earth, Allied or Axis — which could force the
Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social
segregation.” (July 1942)
And in April 1943 when more than 100 white “Southern
liberals” met in Atlanta to discuss a program for Negro-white
relations, they expressed the same idea although much more
hypocritically when they stated:
“The only justification offered for those laws which
have for their purpose the separation of the races is that they are
intended to minister to the welfare and the integrity of both races.”
To minister to the welfare and the integrity of both
races is truly a noble aim, and no doubt explains why every outspoken
enemy of the Negro people is so determined to uphold the segregation
laws and practices!
The truth is that all Southern capitalists and their “liberal”
agents stand so firmly on this issue because once segregation is ended,
all else is lost for the oppressors of the Negro people. Once the wall
separating them is removed, the Negroes and poor whites will see that
their interests are the same and they will unite their forces to better
their common conditions. And conversely, if the barrier of segregation
can be maintained for the duration of the war, then the Negro-haters
will be able to use it to extend and intensify their oppression and to
take back whatever the Negroes have gained during the war. For the very
basis of segregation is the myth of “white supremacy” — just as the
basis of the persecution of the Jews in Europe is the myth of “Nordic
superiority” — and so long as that myth can be preserved, the Negro
will be unable to make permanent gains.
The government does more than its share to uphold this myth. Why
should Negroes be segregated in the armed forces and not in federal
housing projects? There is no logic in that, so — a little pressure
from the Southern congressmen, and Negroes are segregated in these
projects even in Northern communities. But why in housing projects and
nowhere else? The poison of bi-racialism spreads further through the
government apparatus and by way of that into all spheres of economic,
political and social life. Uncle Toms like F.D. Patterson of Tuskegee
Institute hail the government when, for example, it opens the air force
to Negroes on a segregated basis, declaring that this is “a definite
improvement” in the conditions of the Negro people. These people fail
to see, or at any rate to admit, that such “improvement” is comparable
to the government striking off a few links in the chain binding the
Negroes only to surround him with another prison wall. But every
thoughtful Negro sees in these developments the intention of their
enemies, with the approval of the government, to establish a strongly
enforced and far-reaching system of segregation which will freeze the
Negro into a permanent position of second class citizenship. To fully
estimate the Negro’s status in post-war America, one must also
understand the economic and political direction in which American
capitalism is moving. In a recent pamphlet [4] we summed up the process as follows:
“The United States is the richest, most powerful
capitalist country in the world. But no more than the others has it
been able to escape the processes of decay which are inherent in
capitalism and are developing ever more rapidly in this period. As in .
the other capitalist nations, here too greater and greater power and
wealth are accumulated in the hands of the monopoly corporations and
heavier restrictions are set on the rights of the masses.
“In its youth capitalism was able to grant
concessions: democratic liberties to certain sections of the masses,
and slightly higher wages to the more skilled layers of the working
class. Today, capitalism is in its death agony. To exist, it must
snatch back the few concessions it was able to give in the past; it
must depress the living standards of all the workers; it must destroy
the democratic rights of all the masses. No capitalist nation in the
epoch of imperialism is immune from this process which is speeded up in
wartime but was in operation before the war and will not be eliminated
after the war if the capitalists remain in power. The United States
capitalists follow in the footsteps of their German brothers, although
at a different tempo.
“Keeping in mind this background, Negroes will best be
able to appreciate what capitalism in this country has to offer them.
When the trend is toward the destruction of all democratic rights, when
more regimentation is in store for the masses as a whole, Negroes have
little to hope for from the capitalist system. When the employers are
trying to take away the few democratic rights of the white workers,
there is little chance that they will willingly extend new rights to
the Negroes. The events of the last decade clearly indicate that under
capitalism the prospect is not for Negroes to be raised to the status
of the white workers but rather for the white workers to be driven down
to the status of the Negroes. And once fascist reaction triumphs, the
Negro’s status may become even more intolerable than it is today.
Negroes can learn from the fate of the Jews in Europe, who made some
gains during the period of capitalism’s rise only to be forcibly
deprived of them when capitalism assumed the political form of fascism.
Like the Jewish scapegoat in Germany, the Negro may face deportation,
loss of whatever citizenship rights he now possesses, mass slaughter
and extermination.”
Fortunately there is another perspective, the
perspective of the socialist revolution and the establishment of a
Workers’ and Farmers’ Government which will, as the Bolsheviks did in
the Soviet Union under Lenin and Trotsky, not only destroy the economic
cause of race discrimination but will also adopt and enforce
legislation guaranteeing full equality to the Negro people and all
other minorities.
It is in the light of this perspective that we can see that the
Negro has made some genuine gains in recent years, gains which have a
permanent character and cannot be erased at the mere command of the
capitalists. These gains are in the trade union movement. More Negroes
belong and there is a greater understanding of the need for Negro-white
solidarity in the unions than ever before. What the white trade
unionists have learned about the heroism and sacrifices of their black
brothers in building the unions and what the Negro unionists have
learned about the need for allying themselves with the labor movement
will make possible the speedier entry of the unions into the political
struggle against capitalism and for the creation of a Workers’ and
Farmers’ Government. In the unions and through the unions, in and
through the revolutionary party, the Negro masses will be able to meet
and defeat the challenge of their enemies in the post-war world.
Unlike most other people and groups who discuss postwar problems,
the Trotskyist aim is not to divert attention away from current needs,
but on the contrary to show by what capitalism offers after the war the
need for struggling against capitalism and all its works today. Unlike
the Dawsons, the Pattersons and the Stalinists, we seek to show the
Negroes that they must not be lulled into passivity and acquiescence by
seeming but actually non-existent “progress.” We try to show the
Negroes what fundamental achievements must be won if they are to make
permanent advances on the road to equality. That is our contribution to
the discussion on the Negro’s future in a capitalist world: to show the
masses what lies ahead and to summon them to the struggle for
emancipation today.
Top of page
Footnote
1. Just what the
Negro thinks about this question has been demonstrated in the polls of
the Pittsburgh Courier’s Bureau of Public Sentiment,
the most reliable and thorough index of Negro opinion In this country.
On October 24, 1942 it asked: “Do you believe that the
Negro should soft-pedal his demands for complete freedom and
citizenship and await the development of the educational process?” The
answers were:
NO
81.2%
YES
17.1%
UNCERTAIN
1.7%
One year after US entry into the war the Bureau asked:
“Have you been convinced that the statements which our national leaders
have made about freedom and equality for all peoples include the
American Negro?” The answers, printed on Dec. 19, 1942 were:
NO
82.2%
YES
17.7%
UNCERTAIN
1.1%
Even before these surveys were taken, the government
itself conducted one. Officials apparently found the results so
devastating that the findings of the survey have never been made public
to this day. But a newspaperman found out about some of the facts and
revealed them in the June 14, 1942 issue of the Minneapolis
Sunday Tribune and Star Journal. In part he wrote:
“A government survey which is regarded as a secret
document, has uncovered the information that 38% of the Negroes
questioned believe it is more important to ‘make democracy work at
home’ than it is to beat the Germans and Japanese ...
“Only 50.5% of the Negroes questioned regard beating
the Germans and Japanese as more important than ‘making democracy work
at home.’
“That phrase has a diverse meaning ... Essentially,
and to most Negroes, it means the elimination of economic
discrimination, the right to work and live in decency; to others it
means the elimination of segregation, and to still others complete race
equality.”
As we wrote at the time:
“We are not in a position to check on the accuracy of
figures in a report which is kept secret. Nor do we know what kind of
people were questioned in this survey — what proportion, for example,
were government employees and what proportion were in the South where a
Negro worker or sharecropper might be putting his life in jeopardy by
stating his true opinion. But we can take it for granted that if there
was any exaggeration in it, it was all on the side of making things
seem as rosy and cheerful as possible.”
2. That has been
done briefly but most adequately in a 5-cent pamphlet, The
War’s Greatest Scandal: The Story of Jim Crow In Uniform,
issued by the March-On-Washington Movement, 2084 Seventh Ave., New
York, April, 1943.
3. “What the Negro
people feel about such segregationist policies is shown by their answer
to the Pittsburgh Courier’s poll of February 20,
1943. The question was: “Do you believe the Negro should fight against
segregation even when it is the accepted ‘pattern of the community’?”
The answers:
YES
89.1%
NO
8.8%
UNCERTAIN
1.9%
Even in the South the answer from 88.6% of those
questioned was yes.
4. The
Struggle for Negro Equality by John Saunders and Albert
Parker, Pioneer Pubishers, June 1943, five cents.
Top of page
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(26 July 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_30" target="new">Vol. V No. 30</a>, 26 July 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>Defend Our Party Against Roosevelt</h4>
<p class="fst">The Socialist Workers Party is under attack from the war-monger Roosevelt and his Gestapo-FBI because of our opposition to the war.</p>
<p>In the indictments against the 29 defendants handed down by the St. Paul Grand Jury last week, it was charged that they were trying to get “members of the military and naval forces of the United States to become undisciplined, to complain about food, living conditions and missions to which they would be assigned, to create dissension, dissatisfaction and insubordination among the armed forces ...”</p>
<p>In other words, the government is trying to find a scapegoat to blame for the fact that black and white workers are dissatisfied with the present anti-labor, Jim Crow regime in the army and navy.</p>
<p><em>But every Negro who is at all acquainted with the way Negro soldiers and sailors are segregated and discriminated against in the armed forces will quickly understand what the government is up to. This attack on the Socialist Workers Party, which has consistently fought for the rights of all workers, is also an attack, on the right of the workers, to seek equal and just treatment in the armed forces. For if the Socialist Workers Party can be indicted and suppressed because the party fights for an end to Jim Crowism in the armed forces, so can everyone else.</em></p>
<p><em>That is why Negro workers must rally to defense of the 29 defendants.</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>Why Negroes Dislike the Army</h4>
<p class="fst">But aside from this, every Negro worker must be thinking to himself:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“How ridiculous is this business of seeking a scapegoat for dissatisfaction with the way we are treated in this army! Roosevelt knows very well who is responsible for our being dissatisfied – it is Roosevelt himself, and his Jim Crow cabinet who are responsible. The conditions to which we object were not created by the Socialist Workers Party – they are upheld and maintained – by the government itself.”</p>
<p class="fst">The Socialist Workers Party is not responsible for Roosevelt’s orders that Negro and white soldiers must be segregated and kept completely separate in all phases of army life.</p>
<p>The Socialist Workers Party is not responsible for ecretary of the Navy Knox’s order that Negroes can serve only as mess stewards and dish-washers on board the ships of the U.S. Navy.</p>
<p>Roosevelt justifies his Jim Crow position on the grounds that to maintain mixed regiments of both colored and white soldiers “would be destructive to morale and detrimental to the prep’arations for national defense.” Knox says that to let Negroes serve in the Navy on the same basis as, white sailors would be “a dangerous experiment.”</p>
<p><em>What they mean is that, if they even pretended to grant equality to the Negroes in the armed forces, the poll-tax South might not support Roosevelt’s war plans so eagerly. They are really afraid that the end of Jim Crow in the armed forces would be “destructive” to white supremacy, “detrimental” to the continued existence of Jim Crow in civilian life, and “a dangerous experiment” to the capitalists who profit by keeping white and Negro workers divided.</em></p>
<p>But by following a policy of appeasing Jim Crow, Roosevelt and his gang have only exposed to the Negroes the hypocrisy of their slogans about fighting for democracy.</p>
<p><em>And now that the Negro people are dissatisfied and complaining, Roosevelt seeks to attribute the cause of this to “agitators” who are trying to “overthrow the government.”</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>How to Satisfy the Worker-Soldier</h4>
<p class="fst">There is a way for Roosevelt to get rid of this dissatisfaction in the armed forces.</p>
<p>First of all, let him wipe out discrimination and segregation of all kinds. Then let him permit the soldiers to have the right to choose their own officers, the kind of men they can trust to look out for their welfare. Then let them have the right to elect committees from their own ranks, who will represent them when they have any grievances. Then let Roosevelt tell them why the armed forces are being built up and what he intends to use them for; let him try to prove that it is really a war against fascism that he wants to fight and not another war for bosses’ profits, by clearly announcing his war aims and by preventing war profiteering in all spheres.</p>
<p><em>If he would do this, dissatisfaction would disappear. But he cannot do this because he is interested above everything else in protecting boss profits and the system that goes with it.</em></p>
<p>We know that he cannot do it, and that is why we have raised our own program and demands: Let us have military training, financed by the government, but under the control of the trade unions which the workers can trust and through which they will be able to correct their grievances.</p>
<p><em>Under such a system, maybe the warmongers and the profiteers and the lynch mobs would be dissatisfied. But not the workers!</em></p>
<p>Roosevelt may attempt to suppress the activities of the Socialist Workers Party because of its consistent opposition to his war plans and its demand for military training under the trade unions – but that will hot remove the smallest part of the dissatisfaction that now exists, any more than it will prevent our continued struggle against war, fascism, Jim Crowism and unemployment.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(26 July 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 30, 26 July 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Defend Our Party Against Roosevelt
The Socialist Workers Party is under attack from the war-monger Roosevelt and his Gestapo-FBI because of our opposition to the war.
In the indictments against the 29 defendants handed down by the St. Paul Grand Jury last week, it was charged that they were trying to get “members of the military and naval forces of the United States to become undisciplined, to complain about food, living conditions and missions to which they would be assigned, to create dissension, dissatisfaction and insubordination among the armed forces ...”
In other words, the government is trying to find a scapegoat to blame for the fact that black and white workers are dissatisfied with the present anti-labor, Jim Crow regime in the army and navy.
But every Negro who is at all acquainted with the way Negro soldiers and sailors are segregated and discriminated against in the armed forces will quickly understand what the government is up to. This attack on the Socialist Workers Party, which has consistently fought for the rights of all workers, is also an attack, on the right of the workers, to seek equal and just treatment in the armed forces. For if the Socialist Workers Party can be indicted and suppressed because the party fights for an end to Jim Crowism in the armed forces, so can everyone else.
That is why Negro workers must rally to defense of the 29 defendants.
Why Negroes Dislike the Army
But aside from this, every Negro worker must be thinking to himself:
“How ridiculous is this business of seeking a scapegoat for dissatisfaction with the way we are treated in this army! Roosevelt knows very well who is responsible for our being dissatisfied – it is Roosevelt himself, and his Jim Crow cabinet who are responsible. The conditions to which we object were not created by the Socialist Workers Party – they are upheld and maintained – by the government itself.”
The Socialist Workers Party is not responsible for Roosevelt’s orders that Negro and white soldiers must be segregated and kept completely separate in all phases of army life.
The Socialist Workers Party is not responsible for ecretary of the Navy Knox’s order that Negroes can serve only as mess stewards and dish-washers on board the ships of the U.S. Navy.
Roosevelt justifies his Jim Crow position on the grounds that to maintain mixed regiments of both colored and white soldiers “would be destructive to morale and detrimental to the prep’arations for national defense.” Knox says that to let Negroes serve in the Navy on the same basis as, white sailors would be “a dangerous experiment.”
What they mean is that, if they even pretended to grant equality to the Negroes in the armed forces, the poll-tax South might not support Roosevelt’s war plans so eagerly. They are really afraid that the end of Jim Crow in the armed forces would be “destructive” to white supremacy, “detrimental” to the continued existence of Jim Crow in civilian life, and “a dangerous experiment” to the capitalists who profit by keeping white and Negro workers divided.
But by following a policy of appeasing Jim Crow, Roosevelt and his gang have only exposed to the Negroes the hypocrisy of their slogans about fighting for democracy.
And now that the Negro people are dissatisfied and complaining, Roosevelt seeks to attribute the cause of this to “agitators” who are trying to “overthrow the government.”
How to Satisfy the Worker-Soldier
There is a way for Roosevelt to get rid of this dissatisfaction in the armed forces.
First of all, let him wipe out discrimination and segregation of all kinds. Then let him permit the soldiers to have the right to choose their own officers, the kind of men they can trust to look out for their welfare. Then let them have the right to elect committees from their own ranks, who will represent them when they have any grievances. Then let Roosevelt tell them why the armed forces are being built up and what he intends to use them for; let him try to prove that it is really a war against fascism that he wants to fight and not another war for bosses’ profits, by clearly announcing his war aims and by preventing war profiteering in all spheres.
If he would do this, dissatisfaction would disappear. But he cannot do this because he is interested above everything else in protecting boss profits and the system that goes with it.
We know that he cannot do it, and that is why we have raised our own program and demands: Let us have military training, financed by the government, but under the control of the trade unions which the workers can trust and through which they will be able to correct their grievances.
Under such a system, maybe the warmongers and the profiteers and the lynch mobs would be dissatisfied. But not the workers!
Roosevelt may attempt to suppress the activities of the Socialist Workers Party because of its consistent opposition to his war plans and its demand for military training under the trade unions – but that will hot remove the smallest part of the dissatisfaction that now exists, any more than it will prevent our continued struggle against war, fascism, Jim Crowism and unemployment.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(3 May 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_18" target="new">Vol. V No. 18</a>, 3 May 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>Hillman Writes a Letter</h4>
<p class="fst">After many months of receiving complaints from Negro and labor organizations about the Jim Crow bars that keep Negroes from getting jobs in the vital industries, Sidney Hillman, labor front for the Office of Production Management, finally has written a letter. In this letter, sent to all manufacturers receiving contracts from the government, Hillman follows his usual practice of subordinating every other consideration to that of “national defense.”</p>
<p>He is not interested in Jim Crowism in plants financed and in many cases built by the government because of the effect it has on the Negro people, who are largely confined to menial jobs as a result, but because of the effect it will have on the war plans of the capitalist government he is serving.</p>
<p>First he points out that current reports “indicate skilled labor shortage in a number of fields vital to defense production.” This situation has been aggravated because “in many localities, qualified and available Negro workers are either being restricted to unskilled jobs, or barred from defense employment entirely.” Then he goes on with his complaint:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Such practices are extremely wasteful of our human resources and, prevent a total effort for national defense. They result in unnecessary migration of labor, in high rates of labor turnover, and they increase our present and future housing needs and social problems for defense workers.”</p>
<p class="fst">Then follows his suggestions for correcting this situation:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“All holders of defense contracts are urged to examine their employment and training policies at once to determine whether or not these policies make ample provision for the full utilization of Negro workers. Every available source of labor capable of producing defense materials must be tapped in the present emergency.”<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>What the Letter Means</h4>
<p class="fst">Two things stand out in this letter.</p>
<p>First, Hillman is interested in Negroes being employed only because he doesn’t want the war plans of the government disrupted. Second, his letter is not going to change the present situation at all.</p>
<p>It should be noted that the letter does not emphasize the need for hiring Negroes where there is no shortage of labor. This can be interpreted to mean that employers should take them where they can’t get anyone else. The employers do just that anyhow. The most rabid Negro-hating employer will hire Negroes when he can’t get anyone else, because his main interest is in making profit; and to make it, he needs workers, regardless of their race or color.</p>
<p>Hillman wants the employers to determine whether their policies make ample provision for the full utilization of Negro workers. Very well, an employer will say, I will examine my policies and see whether they make provision for, etc.</p>
<p>Even assuming that Hillman really wants Negroes to get jobs, and that his letter is not just a face-saving device, what does it amount to? Little more than nothing. Because the letter does not provide a single hint of a measure to do something about those plants that refuse to “examine” their policies, and worse yet, refuse to hire Negro labor as long as they can get other workers.</p>
<p>An employer can toss the letter into the waste-basket, as probably most of them have done, and Hillman does not propose to do anything about it.</p>
<p>And so, because of the weakness of the letter and its lack of threat to take action against the employers who disregard it, we can confidently predict that nothing will come of it, any more than came of the no-discrimination statement issued several months ago by Knudsen, Hillman’s partner. Not a Negro will get a job as the result of it.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>The OPM Could Take Action</h4>
<p class="fst">As the <strong>Chicago Defender</strong> put it: “His letter has all the earmarks of a theatrical stunt intended only for the gallery.”</p>
<p>It is intended to draw away from the OPM criticism about its failure to do anything about the situation, while it continues to do nothing.</p>
<p>This does not mean that the OPM is powerless in the situation and is only trying to cover up its helplessness. Far from it.</p>
<p>Along with the President, the OPM has the power to veto any proposal of the War or Navy Department for expanding or building facilities for expediting production. Appropriation acts carrying funds for new facilities, according to Undersecretary of War Patterson, give them that authority.</p>
<p>This means that the OPM, by simply using its veto power, could at the very least refuse contracts to Jim Crow companies asking for funds to add to their building and equipment.</p>
<p>The fact that they don’t use this power, but resort instead to weak and meaningless letters, is only additional proof that they don’t want to do anything about the industrial Jim Crow bars against Negroes.</p>
<p>Negroes have to recognize this and to realize that they can expect no help from this direction until they are organized and strong enough to force it from them.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(3 May 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 18, 3 May 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Hillman Writes a Letter
After many months of receiving complaints from Negro and labor organizations about the Jim Crow bars that keep Negroes from getting jobs in the vital industries, Sidney Hillman, labor front for the Office of Production Management, finally has written a letter. In this letter, sent to all manufacturers receiving contracts from the government, Hillman follows his usual practice of subordinating every other consideration to that of “national defense.”
He is not interested in Jim Crowism in plants financed and in many cases built by the government because of the effect it has on the Negro people, who are largely confined to menial jobs as a result, but because of the effect it will have on the war plans of the capitalist government he is serving.
First he points out that current reports “indicate skilled labor shortage in a number of fields vital to defense production.” This situation has been aggravated because “in many localities, qualified and available Negro workers are either being restricted to unskilled jobs, or barred from defense employment entirely.” Then he goes on with his complaint:
“Such practices are extremely wasteful of our human resources and, prevent a total effort for national defense. They result in unnecessary migration of labor, in high rates of labor turnover, and they increase our present and future housing needs and social problems for defense workers.”
Then follows his suggestions for correcting this situation:
“All holders of defense contracts are urged to examine their employment and training policies at once to determine whether or not these policies make ample provision for the full utilization of Negro workers. Every available source of labor capable of producing defense materials must be tapped in the present emergency.”
What the Letter Means
Two things stand out in this letter.
First, Hillman is interested in Negroes being employed only because he doesn’t want the war plans of the government disrupted. Second, his letter is not going to change the present situation at all.
It should be noted that the letter does not emphasize the need for hiring Negroes where there is no shortage of labor. This can be interpreted to mean that employers should take them where they can’t get anyone else. The employers do just that anyhow. The most rabid Negro-hating employer will hire Negroes when he can’t get anyone else, because his main interest is in making profit; and to make it, he needs workers, regardless of their race or color.
Hillman wants the employers to determine whether their policies make ample provision for the full utilization of Negro workers. Very well, an employer will say, I will examine my policies and see whether they make provision for, etc.
Even assuming that Hillman really wants Negroes to get jobs, and that his letter is not just a face-saving device, what does it amount to? Little more than nothing. Because the letter does not provide a single hint of a measure to do something about those plants that refuse to “examine” their policies, and worse yet, refuse to hire Negro labor as long as they can get other workers.
An employer can toss the letter into the waste-basket, as probably most of them have done, and Hillman does not propose to do anything about it.
And so, because of the weakness of the letter and its lack of threat to take action against the employers who disregard it, we can confidently predict that nothing will come of it, any more than came of the no-discrimination statement issued several months ago by Knudsen, Hillman’s partner. Not a Negro will get a job as the result of it.
The OPM Could Take Action
As the Chicago Defender put it: “His letter has all the earmarks of a theatrical stunt intended only for the gallery.”
It is intended to draw away from the OPM criticism about its failure to do anything about the situation, while it continues to do nothing.
This does not mean that the OPM is powerless in the situation and is only trying to cover up its helplessness. Far from it.
Along with the President, the OPM has the power to veto any proposal of the War or Navy Department for expanding or building facilities for expediting production. Appropriation acts carrying funds for new facilities, according to Undersecretary of War Patterson, give them that authority.
This means that the OPM, by simply using its veto power, could at the very least refuse contracts to Jim Crow companies asking for funds to add to their building and equipment.
The fact that they don’t use this power, but resort instead to weak and meaningless letters, is only additional proof that they don’t want to do anything about the industrial Jim Crow bars against Negroes.
Negroes have to recognize this and to realize that they can expect no help from this direction until they are organized and strong enough to force it from them.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Myths About Malcolm X<br>
<small>A Speech</small></h1>
<h3>(March 1967)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr67_09" target="new">Vol. 28, No. 5</a>, September–October 1967, pp. 43–60.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="c"><em>George Breitman, the editor of <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong> and author of <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X: Evolution of a Revolutionary</strong>, gave this speech at the Detroit Friday Night Socialist Forum, March 17, 1967</em></p>
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<p class="fst">Three weeks ago the Friday Night Socialist Forum held its third memorial meeting for one of the greatest men of our time, Malcolm X. It was organized in such a way as to provide a broad range of opinion. There was a panel of several local poets, headed by Dudley Randall, reading their contributions to the new book, <strong>For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X</strong>. The chairman was attorney Milton Henry, who had worked with Malcolm, published the magnificent record of Malcolm’s <em>Message to the Grass Roots</em>, and was the principal speaker at our second memorial meeting one year ago. The speakers were Dave Wesley of SNCC, Derrick Morrison of the Young Socialist Alliance, and Rev. Albert Cleage, chairman of the Inner City Organizing Committee.</p>
<p>The usual custom at the Friday Night Socialist Forum is to have a discussion period after the formal talks, with the audience invited to ask questions or express opinions. But it was not considered proper to have a discussion period at a memorial meeting, and it was omitted three weeks ago. However there was an unusual amount of desire for further discussion expressed after that meeting, much of it stimulated by the remarks of Rev. Cleage. And so the committee in charge of the forum decided to have another meeting on the subject at the first open date, which was tonight, and to follow the customary practice allowing for discussion.</p>
<p>Much of what Rev. Cleage dealt with in his talk concerned myths about Malcolm X, or what he considered to be myths. I am going to deal with the same subject – myths about Malcolm X, or what I consider to be myths. Since I have spoken and written about this subject before and it is a vast subject, I shall try to confine myself tonight mainly to points raised by Rev. Cleage. That is, I will take his remarks as a point of departure for mine.</p>
<p>Someone asked me if I think it worthwhile to give a whole talk in that form. My answer, of course, is yes. In <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X</strong>, I spent a whole chapter discussing the interpretations of Malcolm made by Bayard Rustin, the social-democratic reformist and pacifist, and I consider Rev. Cleage to be a much more important figure in the movement than Bayard Rustin. In 1964, for example, Rev. Cleage led the most advanced expression of independent black political action in the country – the Freedom Now Party – at a time when Bayard Rustin was campaigning for Johnson and pressuring the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to accept Johnson’s rotten compromise offer at the Atlantic City convention of the Democratic Party. It is true that two years later Rev. Cleage took a backward step – a very wrong and harmful step, in our opinion – when he went back into the Democratic Party to run as a Democratic candidate in a primary election. But even so, he remains the spokesman for an important militant wing of the black freedom movement, and a leader and sponsor of campaigns worthy of support, which we have supported despite his backward step; and what he said in his talk three weeks ago, which I think was his first on the subject of Malcolm, deserves serious consideration.</p>
<h4><small>[The next portion, a 10-minute summary of Rev. Cleage’s speech, is omitted from this transcription.]</small></h4>
<p class="fst">That ends my summary of Rev. Cleage’s speech. Of course I haven’t done it justice as rhetoric; Rev. Cleage is one of the best orators in the country, one of the few people who could speak from the same platform as Malcolm without looking bad by comparison. But I have presented all of his main ideas, points and implications as objectively as I could.</p>
<p>I agree with Rev. Cleage that there has been a profusion of myths spread about Malcolm in the two years since his death, and in a moment I will try to explain why. But I don’t agree with him when he says there is a danger that the real Malcolm will be forgotten or obscured through distortion. There was a danger of that when Malcolm was killed, but I don’t think it is a serious danger any longer; at any rate, the danger has grown smaller. I don’t think the real Malcolm can successfully be distorted – whatever Rev. Cleage may say, whatever I may say, and no matter how many more myths may be manufactured and circulated. Because the truth is now too widely known, and becoming better known every day – the whole truth, and not just part of it.</p>
<p>When Malcolm died, there was virtually nothing of what he had said that was in print. But since then many thousands and thousands of people have had the chance to read and hear what Malcolm had said, including large numbers who had never heard of Malcolm while he was alive. Milton Henry told me three weeks ago that he had just returned from the West Coast where he had spoken at a memorial celebration for Malcolm (there were more such memorials held this year than in the previous two) and he said he had run into children, literally children, who were quoting passages from <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>.</p>
<p>And they were quoting what Malcolm really said and thought, not myths. So we have to keep on knocking down any and all myths that are raised, but I believe we can do this in a spirit of optimism, not despair, because the truth is on the march.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for the myths. Malcolm was a remarkable man, a great man, and when he died, he became a folk-hero. Even if we leave aside the unsolved questions about who arranged the assassination, which were bound to spur various speculations and rumors, Malcolm was the kind of man around whom legends grow – not necessarily hostile legends either; favorable ones too.</p>
<p>But there are other reasons for misconceptions about Malcolm. One of these was the fact that Malcolm was cut down before he had finished his work, before he had formulated all of his ideas and brought them together in a consistent whole. In his last year many people thought or knew that Malcolm was developing new ideas, perhaps a new body of thought, theory or philosophy. But because of the press distortions, and because Malcolm did not yet have an organization capable of reaching the masses, they didn’t know exactly or fully what his thinking was after he left the Black Muslims. This is always a breeding ground for rumor and myth.</p>
<p>More than that. One of the things that distinguished Malcolm from almost all of his contemporaries was his ability to grow, to change, to move forward; even – how hard this is! – to admit an error and correct it. These qualities became more prominent after he broke away from the dogmas of Elijah Muhammad and began, as he put it, to think for himself. Free to think for himself and to speak for himself, he had the courage to admit to himself he had been wrong about something if he thought that was so, and the courage to admit it publicly, and to present a new position that he thought was more correct than an old one. It is the rareness of this quality, along with the vital importance of the questions he was reconsidering, that makes a study of his evolution during his last year so rewarding.</p>
<p>But to people whose minds are fixed in a rut – that is, most of us – this was confusing. It wasn’t that Malcolm was confused, but that some people, whose impressions of Malcolm had been formed and hardened and pigeonholed when he was a Black Muslim, some of these people became confused when Malcolm changed a position during his last year – merely because he wasn’t saying word for word and slogan for slogan what they had become accustomed to hearing him say. No matter how logically, how lucidly, Malcolm stated these new positions, such people remained confused – some to this day; and when they spoke, their confusion contributed to myths about Malcolm.</p>
<p>And finally there was the malicious motivation for myths, which Rev. Cleage referred to. Because Malcolm became a martyr and hero after his death, some groups have tried to claim him for their own, even though they did not speak up for him when he was alive. They have tried to “interpret” him in such a way as to make his views appear to coincide with their own. In order to do this, they have to try to make us forget embarrassing facts such as their dislike of some of the positions he took.</p>
<p>So what they do is chop Malcolm up, keeping the parts they like, the parts it suits their purposes to remember, and discarding the other parts as unimportant or irrelevant where they don’t deny their existence altogether. This attempt to preserve only part of Malcolm, the part they find useful, while ignoring or denying the other parts that are needed if you want to see the real Malcolm, the whole Malcolm, is of course bound to result in myths, even if they are presented in the name of opposing myths.</p>
<p>Rev. Cleage is absolutely correct when he labels as a myth the story that Malcolm became an “integrationist” as a result of his trip to Mecca in the spring of 1964. This myth, or lie, is spread, as you can expect, by integrationists. Malcolm did not become an “integrationist” at Mecca, or at any time after that. Until the day of his death he remained an opponent of what is generally or popularly understood, or misunderstood, as “integration.” I find it easy to join Rev. Cleage on this point because we, the Marxists, have been exposing and opposing this myth since Malcolm died, even though Rev. Cleage’s remarks may have left some ambiguity about this.</p>
<p>But while Malcolm did not become an “integrationist” at Mecca, or after, his views on race did begin to change at Mecca – his views on race, race relations, black-white relations, the possibility of eventual brotherhood. They began to change there, and they changed even more after he left Mecca and went to Africa and held discussions with many revolutionary Africans. Rev. Cleage did not mention this, but the impact of revolutionary African thinking on Malcolm was much greater and deeper and more profound than the impact of Mecca.</p>
<p>The change, stated too briefly, was this: Not that Malcolm embraced “integration” as a solution, but that he saw the cause of racial oppression in a new light. He saw it as rooted not in merely racial or color differences, but as rooted in economic, political, social and cultural exploitation. From this he began to conclude, not that “integration” is the answer, but that racial conflict might be eliminated by eliminating exploitation; that racial enmity is not inherent in human beings or immutable or necessarily ordained to last for all time; and that it is possible (not certain) that eventually, some day (not now) oppressed blacks and oppressed whites might be able to march together in genuine brotherhood and fight together against their common oppressors and exploiters. But, and he always qualified this thought immediately, it can’t happen until the blacks first organize themselves independently and create their own movement, their own power. No worthwhile alliance can be created, he insisted, until blacks come together first and create their own organization with their own uncompromising program.</p>
<p>Now Rev. Cleage says he doesn’t believe what Malcolm is supposed to have said at Mecca; he says Malcolm wouldn’t have been taken in by the window dressing, that Malcolm was too intelligent to believe that blacks and whites could march together, and so on. Well, this is really an argument between Rev. Cleage and Malcolm, not between Rev. Cleage and people who accurately report what Malcolm said and wrote. Perhaps Rev. Cleage believes that Malcolm was not saying what he really thought; if he does, he should explain why. I, for one, after carefully studying everything I could find, believe that Malcolm said what he thought, popular or unpopular, especially after he left the Black Muslims, was no longer under their discipline and no longer required to express their ideas. If Rev. Cleage believes that what Malcolm said and wrote has been misrepresented by others, then I think he has the obligation to examine what Malcolm said (available on many tapes) and what he wrote (available hi his own handwriting) and to show where the reports are mac-curate or misleading.</p>
<p>It is not enough to say merely, “I don’t believe it.” It is necessary in addition to square this disbelief with the evidence of Malcolm’s own voice and Malcolm’s own pen, and show why that evidence cannot be accepted or trusted. Rev. Cleage said that what has happened with Malcolm enables him to understand better the various myths about Jesus. But we have nothing about Jesus now except myths; we’ve got facts about Malcolm to balance along with myths. The world has changed since the time of Jesus, and in some ways it has changed for the better – especially technologically. I am thinking about the discovery and development of the tape recorder – a marvelous invention. Thanks to it, we can hear and know what Malcolm said, which is the best antidote to mythology that I can imagine.</p>
<p>So Rev. Cleage is on firm ground in rejecting the myth that Malcolm became an “integrationist.” But the reasons he gives for rejecting it are not so sound, and the conclusions he tries to draw – that Malcolm did not change <em>any</em> of his views – have not been demonstrated factually or logically; and I don’t think they can be demonstrated.</p>
<p>I cannot go along with Rev. Cleage when he says that it is a myth that Malcolm wanted to internationalize the Afro-American struggle. Malcolm spoke here in Detroit twice after leaving the Black Muslims – in April 1964 and in February 1965, one week before his death. On both these occasions Rev. Cleage was present, and at both of them Malcolm called for internationalizing the struggle. What he said both times is preserved on tape, as are many other speeches when he said the same thing. So this is a matter of fact, easily verified.</p>
<p>Besides the question of fact there is the question of interpreting the fact. Rev. Cleage spoke of people who have a mystique about Africa and who say that Malcolm said that the African nations are going to free American black people, and therefore all that Afro-Americans have to do is sit around and wait for that happy day. I haven’t run into many people with this particular interpretation of Malcolm’s call to internationalize the struggle, but of course Rev. Cleage is correct to pronounce this as a distortion and myth, which can only do harm by promoting passivity, instead of struggle.</p>
<p>But this particular distortion or misunderstanding of what Malcolm was talking about does not change the fact that Malcolm did advocate an alliance of Afro-Americans with Africans and other non-whites to coordinate their struggles, and even their strategy, against their common enemy, against what Malcolm called “the international power structure,” whose headquarters he correctly placed in Washington, D.C. I don’t see how anybody can question the fact that Malcolm became an internationalist (this is one of the things that made him so dangerous in the eyes of the imperialists and their CIA), and that internationalism, by definition, means efforts to internationalize the struggle.</p>
<p><em>One</em> of the ways in which Malcolm sought to internationalize the struggle was by bringing an indictment of racism against the United States government before the United Nations, the so-called world court. He raised this proposal immediately after he left the Black Muslims in the spring of 1964, and he worked hard trying to get African leaders to bring the indictment into the United Nations, and to get American civil rights leaders to join in promoting this project. He did not succeed, for various reasons, but he still had it on his agenda at his death.</p>
<p>When he first publicly raised this project in the spring of 1964, he tended to overstate its possibilities – that is, he gave too rosy a picture of what the probable results would be. <strong>The Militant</strong> printed an article by me in May 1964, supporting Malcolm’s proposal to take Washington to the United Nations and expose its racism and hypocrisy, but noting that the US government and its allies control the United Nations, and that the UN cannot be expected to do anything seriously against the interests of American imperialism. I didn’t say it as pungently as Rev. Cleage did three weeks ago, when he said you can’t expect any more justice from the so-called world court than you can from the Supreme Court or Detroit’s Recorder’s Court, because all of them are run by crackers, but I said essentially the same thing almost three years ago. Even though my article was critical, Malcolm sent me a message of thanks for writing it.</p>
<p>Now Rev. Cleage says Malcolm <em>couldn’t</em> have believed that much would be accomplished by going to the United Nations, and therefore it is a myth to say he wanted to internationalize the struggle. But this is a fallacy of over-simplification, a <em>non sequitur</em>. The truth is more complex, and the conclusion to be drawn different. Malcolm <em>did</em> get carried away at the beginning about the possibilities of taking Washington to the UN; I am sorry to say this now, as I was sorry to say it then, but it happens to be the truth. And the truth is what we are after, not simplifications. So: at the beginning Malcolm went overboard in what he said could be accomplished by going to the UN. Later, however, he took a more balanced view of the project, he stopped speaking of it as a move that could solve the problems of black people, he corrected himself in assessing its probable results. But he continued to push this project. After modifying what he said about it, he continued to work for it. Because he did want to internationalize the struggle – that’s no myth – and this was one way of doing it, even though it would not be the final solution, but only a step in that direction. If Malcolm was ready to acknowledge and correct mistakes, I don’t think we do him or the struggle any service by denying either the mistake or the correction; or by saying “I don’t believe” he made this mistake in order to deny that he wanted to internationalize the struggle.</p>
<p>Rev. Cleage’s stated intention – to explode myths in order to preserve the real Malcolm – can only be applauded. But I am afraid that he was only partly successful with some of the myths he aimed at, and that in the process he may have contributed some myths of his own.</p>
<p>His basic mistake, I think, is to present Malcolm the Black Muslim as the real Malcolm, the only one worth remembering, the only one worth building on and continuing from – and to dismiss as unimportant, inconsistent or irrelevant the last year of Malcolm’s life, when Malcolm himself began to build on and continue from his previous positions. This, I submit, is not the way to see or understand the whole Malcolm. Rev. Cleage mentioned the blind men, each of whom touched a different part of the elephant, and came up with a different concept of the elephant. Rev. Cleage is doing that too – he’s saying the hide is the elephant, and the feet and the tail – but not the trunk or the tusks. It is harder to forgive him than those blind men, because he is not blind, and all the parts of Malcolm can be easily seen by anyone who wants to look at them.</p>
<p>I say Malcolm is both the Malcolm of the period before the split and the Malcolm of the year after the split, and I want to see and understand the whole man. I want to see the whole man – the parts that remained constant and never changed, and the parts that did not remain constant and did change; the parts that fit preconceived notions and the parts that contradict preconceived notions; what he was trying to do after he decided to think for himself instead of with the mind of Elijah Muhammad; and in what direction he was moving. That is why in editing his speeches, I included everything available, not just the parts I agree with. That is why in the book about his evolution I was just as concerned in presenting his positions that diverge from my own as I was in exploring those that resemble or approach mine. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t really have the right to talk about myths spread by other people. A myth can consist of nothing but the exclusion of relevant facts.</p>
<p>Rev. Cleage wants, in effect, to dismiss the last year of Malcolm’s life; he could find only one favorable statement to make about that year – that Malcolm was beginning to make a transition to organization, to structure. The last year was the period when Malcolm was developing his own ideas rather than popularizing those of Elijah Muhammad. The reason Rev. Cleage wants to dismiss the last year is not that he agrees with all of the ideas of Elijah Muhammad, but that he disagrees with some of the ideas Malcolm was expressing in this, the independent phase of his life. In a moment I will list some of those ideas. First, I want to call your attention to the way that Rev. Cleage seeks to justify such dismissal.</p>
<p>In the last year, Rev. Cleage says, Malcolm was under constant harassment, under fierce pressure, under never-ending threat of assassination. All of this is completely true. As a result, Rev. Cleage continues, Malcolm made a number of confused and confusing statements, fragmentary statements, which unscrupulous people use to distort the meaning and tradition of Malcolm. Is <em>that</em> true? – not how Malcolm’s statements are used or misused, but is it true that Malcolm’s last year was distinguished by confused and confusing statements?</p>
<p>Rev. Cleage says it is true, I say it is not true, and it is up to you to find the answer. Because on it will depend your judgment about whether the real Malcolm tradition ended when he left the Black Muslims, or whether it continued and reached a higher level after he left.</p>
<p>How are you going to decide this? Rev. Cleage more or less invites you to take his word for it, since he doesn’t suggest any alternative or offer any documentation or evidence. I invite you not to take my word, because there is an alternative. And that is: Read what Malcolm said during his last year. Read it for yourself and judge for yourself if it is confused or confusing – or just the opposite. Read the book <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>, which contains everything from his last year that was available at the time it was published at the end of 1965. It has been in print now for one and a half years and has now been read by tens of thousands of people. So far, not one challenge to its veracity or accuracy has been publicly presented by anybody. <strong>Liberator</strong>, a magazine which is not sympathetic with the views of the editor of <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>, calls it “the source book for what Malcolm actually said.”</p>
<p>Then, after you have read it, if you have the slightest doubt about its accuracy, you should listen to the tapes from which most of <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong> was taken. I have listed them all at the end of The Last Year – 22 tapes from Malcolm’s last year – which are available for anyone who wants to listen to them. And since <strong>The Last Year</strong> was printed there are three more tapes from that period that have become available.</p>
<p>By this method, I contend, you can arrive at a solid judgment not only about the accuracy of the printed material by Malcolm, but also about whether the ideas presented there are confused or confusing; and about whether they are fragmentary, that is, presented out of context. I have no doubt whatever that the outcome of this method of investigation will establish conclusively that it is a myth to assert that Malcolm’s statements in his last year were anything but lucid, carefully thought out, closely argued, and amazingly consistent, despite all the adverse conditions under which he had to operate.</p>
<p>Now what were some of the main ideas that Malcolm developed and adopted in his last year? I cannot deal with this fully tonight, but I have tried to do it in <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X</strong>. There I have presented Malcolm’s main ideas, citing in each case the source, the place, the date, etc., and including both the ideas I agree with and the ones I question or differ with. In addition, I have given my interpretation, <em>my</em> interpretation of the significance, trend and direction of these ideas. It will not surprise me if some people will disagree with my interpretations, but it will surprise me if anyone successfully challenges the facts I have presented there.</p>
<p>Malcolm came to the conclusion that the Black Muslims had gone as far as they could go, and he wanted to go farther. He wanted to get into the active struggle, influence it ideologically, and revolutionize it. He wanted to build a new movement, on new foundations, and therefore he reviewed all his ideas – keeping some, modifying others, casting aside still others. He began to move to the left.</p>
<p>The concept that “the white man is the enemy,” which Rev. Cleage calls the essential strand in Malcolm’s philosophy, is the beginning of wisdom for black people who have had illusions that the white power structure is going to hand them freedom on a platter some day. To reject that illusion, and to get to understand that the black man has to fight for freedom, and that he has to depend first of all on his own organized strength, on black power – that is a great step forward, an indispensable step. But it is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it; it is not a formula sufficient by itself for achieving freedom. After the need for independent black power is learned and absorbed and becomes a guide for action, there are other questions that have to be asked and answered.</p>
<p>If the white man is the enemy, are all white men equally enemies? – both the white men who have the power in this country, the rulers, and the white men who don’t have power, and who are exploited by the rulers – not exploited as much as black people, but exploited too? If the white man is the enemy, is there some way of dividing the enemy, splitting them, driving a wedge in among them, setting them to fighting each other – to the benefit of the black man? If the white man is the enemy, is there some way of transforming the situation so that some of the whites can be demobilized, or neutralized, or even, under certain circumstances, turned into allies or potential allies of the black man because it would be in their own self-interest?</p>
<p>These are some of the questions Malcolm was beginning to think about and work out in his last year. The main allies of Afro-Americans, he decided, are the black, brown, yellow and red people of the world; but then he also began to see the possibility of alliances with what he called “militant white” Americans. In fact, he said, to bring about the changes that are needed such alliances will be necessary. He didn’t think they would be consummated right away – first, he always stressed, blacks must organize themselves independently, with their own leaders, their own movement, their own program. After they did that, which was his main preoccupation – then there might be alliances with militant whites, the right kind of alliances. And by the right kind of alliances he did not mean working in the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>None of this made him into an “integrationist.” But it did make him go beyond the simple formula, the white man is the enemy, which is not the end of wisdom. It did make him think about and study the causes of racism and to see the possibility of its elimination some day. It led him to study the nature of American capitalist society, and of world capitalism – always from the viewpoint of how the interests of black people could be promoted and protected. And from his thought and study – especially from the thinking initiated through his discussions with African revolutionaries (whose impact on him far exceeded the influence of the religious Muslims in Mecca) – he came to the conclusion that capitalism is the cause of racism, that you can’t have capitalism without racism, and therefore socialism should seriously be considered as an objective by black Americans as well as by Africans and Asians and Latin Americans. At the very least, you can say that in his last year he became pro-socialist and anti-capitalist.</p>
<p>Now these are only a few of the ideas Malcolm was thinking about and trying to work out in his last year, and on some of them, I want to be the first to stress, he had not completed his thinking when he was struck down. Rev. Cleage, who doesn’t agree with some of these ideas, wants to discard these parts from the Malcolm tradition as irrelevant, as confused. He says the great speech, <em>Message to the Grass Roots</em>, made while Malcolm was still in the Nation of Islam, is his last will and testament. But I think the evidence shows that Malcolm added to that testament, if you want to call it that, much that is rich, valuable, indispensable, and that he did it knowingly, consciously, and with a clear mind. You may not agree with what he added, but you can’t say he didn’t add it or that he added it out of confusion.</p>
<p>I would also like to offer an explanation of why Rev. Cleage rejects the contributions of Malcolm’s last year. Rev. Cleage is, and has been since the end of 1963, an advocate and defender of black nationalism. Now when I say that, I am not – as anyone who knows me or the Marxist position is aware – I am not attacking him or using the term as an epithet. As I have said and written for many years, black nationalism is progressive and potentially revolutionary. To show what I mean by black nationalism, to show that it is not a negative thing to me, I would like to read you the definition of black nationalism presented in <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X</strong>. Black nationalism, I say,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... is the tendency for black people in the United States to unite as a group, as a people, into a movement of their own to fight for freedom, justice and equality. Animated by the desire of an oppressed minority to decide its own destiny, this tendency holds that black people must control their own movement and the political, economic and social institutions of the black community. Its characteristic attributes include racial pride, group consciousness, hatred of white supremacy, a striving for independence from white control, and identification with black and non-white oppressed groups in other parts of the world.”</p>
<p class="fst">End of definition. In the same chapter I try to show why black nationalism should not be equated with what is called separatism by those who advocate a separate black nation, but I can’t go into that here.</p>
<p>If the definition of black nationalism I have just given is correct, then Rev. Cleage is a black nationalist, and that is not an epithet but, from my standpoint, a scientifically correct designation and an expression of respect. Also, according to this definition, Malcolm was a black nationalist, and remained one to his last day – even though in his final months he began to wonder if that was the right label to describe what he was after.</p>
<p>But within the broad category of black nationalism it is possible to see many subdivisions. (This is one of the reasons why the various kinds of black nationalists unfortunately have been unable so far to unite into a single nationwide movement.) For present purposes I cannot discuss the various subdivisions of black nationalism but have to concentrate on the one I call pure-and-simple.</p>
<p>In <strong>Marxism and the Negro Struggle</strong>, written in 1964, and again in <strong>The Last Year</strong>, I have presented the argument that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The pure and simple black nationalist is concerned exclusively or primarily with the internal problems of the Negro community, with organizing it, with helping it to gain control of the community’s politics, economy, etc. He is not concerned, or is less concerned, with the problems of the total American society, or with the nature of the larger society within which the Negro community exists. He has no theory or program for changing that society; for him that is the white man’s problem.”</p>
<p class="fst">When Rev. Cleage became a black nationalist, he became a pure and simple nationalist (in fact, it was by studying his statements, activities and development that I first became aware of this subdivision), and he remains a pure and simple nationalist. Malcolm too was a pure and simple nationalist before he left the Black Muslims, and he remained one for the first few months after the split. But then, after his first trip to Africa in the spring of 1964, mainly as a result of the thinking started by his discussions with African revolutionaries, he began to move beyond pure and simple nationalism, to transcend it – if not transcend it, to add something to it that changed it into something else. What was it he added? He added the belief that society as a whole has to be changed, revolutionized, if black people are to achieve their freedom. This did not contradict his conviction that blacks must control their own community, that is, his black nationalism; it was an addition to his black nationalism. Black control of the black community, yes – but that is not enough, because even a black-controlled black community inside a reactionary and exploitative social and economic and political system cannot provide full and genuine freedom. The implication is that Afro-Americans must fight not only to gain control of their community but also to change society as a whole, to reconstruct it on a truly non-exploitative basis.</p>
<p>Malcolm accepted this implication, which is profoundly revolutionary, without ceasing to be a black nationalist. Rev. Cleage does not accept this implication. That, I believe, is the theoretical explanation for Rev. Cleage’s tendency to reject most of Malcolm’s last period, and, perhaps, not even study it with the care it deserves.</p>
<p>This is not only a mistake, but a sad mistake, because Malcolm was ready to give his life, he did give his life, for the right to be able to say the things he did in his last year. I mean that literally. He could have lived by keeping quiet. But he had things to say in his last year that he considered vital, things that it is dangerous to say, things that he knew it was dangerous to say – and still he put his life on the line for the right and opportunity to say them. To discard what Malcolm himself considered the most important part of his legacy, and for which he gave his life – that is indeed a sad mistake.</p>
<p>Despite my differences with Rev. Cleage’s evaluation of Malcolm, which I have tried to present objectively and without personal rancor, I think I agree with what may have been the main intention of his talk three weeks ago. If I understood it correctly, his main intention was to inspire black people to make the Malcolm tradition their own – to interpret it according to their lights and needs, cherish it, make it a weapon in their struggle for freedom. With that intention I am in full accord.</p>
<p>I think this is already being done, to a far greater degree than Rev. Cleage does. The same night he spoke here, Eldridge Cleaver spoke in San Francisco about how the ideas and tradition of Malcolm have been “internalized” by black people all over the country. That is true, and in addition there is a growing body of written literature about Malcolm by black people, interpreting him and shaping his tradition, which Rev. Cleage overlooks or may not be aware of. On the West Coast there are people like Cleaver, not only writing about Malcolm but trying to continue what he began. In the Midwest, Milton Henry, Robert Higgins, Lerone Bennett, David Llorens. In the East, LeRoi Jones, Calvin Hernton, Rolland Snellings, Lawrence Neal, A.B. Spellman, Robert Allen, John O. Killens, Robert Vernon, Sara Mitchell, C.E. Wilson, – these are only a few of the many black people whose articles spring to mind (I hope the others will forgive me for not mentioning them too) – whose interpretations I may not always agree with, just as Rev. Cleage may not, but which show that black people have been doing what he urges, in sufficient quantity to fill many volumes. James Baldwin is reportedly considering writing a play about Malcolm’s <strong>Autobiography</strong>; a play called <em>Message from the Grass Roots</em> is soon to open in England. And the poets – I detected a slight tone of condescension or irony in Rev. Cleage’s voice about the poetry by black people about Malcolm, a little surprising when you consider that in his profession he quotes poetry every Sunday – the poets too, in their own way, and it is not a way without influence, are making contributions to the preservation of the real Malcolm.</p>
<p>I agree, as I say, with what I take to be Rev. Cleage’s intention. Malcolm is more than a hero and martyr, he is what Eldridge Cleaver calls “the standard” and “the model.” I think he is and should be the standard and model for revolutionary and radical-minded people of all races, and will be for all who take the trouble to investigate him without prejudice and to learn from him. But he does belong, in a special sense, to black people first of all, and especially to young black people, whom Malcolm counted on to lead their people to freedom. If anyone should be the custodian of the Malcolm tradition, it should be they.</p>
<p>Rev. Cleage called me the custodian, perhaps softening it a bit by granting my sincerity. To make sure, I looked up the word “custody” in the dictionary. It says: “1. keeping, guardianship, care: (example) <em>in the custody of her father</em>; 2. the keeping or charge of officers of the law: (example) <em>the car was in the custody of the police</em>; 3. imprisonment: (example) <em>he was taken into custody</em>.” Well, I am not the custodian of the Malcolm tradition, I have not been, and I do not aspire to be. What I have been, or rather, what Marxists have been – because Rev. Cleage really means the Marxists rather than me personally – are (1) the chief <em>circulators</em> of the Malcolm material, and (2) <em>interpreters</em> of it, from our own point of view.</p>
<p>Circulators, because nobody else showed any interest in doing that job. Of this we are quite proud; we feel it has been a genuine contribution – but it is a task that we do and will gladly share with anyone else. The circulation of this material has been a contribution to everyone, black and white. It is the raw material – not distorted in any way, not dragged in, not partially presented or partially withheld to suit anybody’s factional purposes – it is the raw material which everyone, white or black, can use in order to understand and then fashion the Malcolm tradition. In addition, as I said, we Marxists have interpreted the raw material – again, not by distorting what Malcolm said, only by giving our analysis and opinion about what he said and did. That is everybody’s privilege, that is the duty of anybody who considers himself a radical, and we hope that all tendencies will work out and present their interpretations, as we have done, so that all interpretations can confront each other openly and provide a sound basis for what will be the historical judgment and tradition.</p>
<p>So I join with Rev. Cleage in urging black people to find out what Malcolm really said and stood for, write about it, preserve it, interpret it, circulate it, and use it in the struggle. All I say is that when you do this, don’t do it partly – do it all the way; don’t chop the Malcolm tradition to pieces – preserve the whole thing, confront the whole Malcolm, preserve the whole Malcolm, utilize the whole Malcolm to advance and win the struggle. If you do, and if your aim is to revolutionize society, then I think you will cherish the final part of the whole Malcolm, the part that he gave his life to add, as the most useful part because it is the most revolutionary.</p>
<hr class="section">
<h3>From the Discussion Period</h3>
<p class="fst"><em><strong>Question:</strong> Rev. Cleage said he didn’t know anything about Marxism. You say Malcolm was not a Marxist, but did he know anything about it – had he read or studied it?</em></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Answer:</strong> What Rev. Cleage actually said – and I quote from the transcript of his speech, which I have here – was, “I am not a Marxist – I don’t pretend to be, I don’t even pretend to know anything about it.” Maybe the key word here is “pretend.” I don’t know how much he knows about Marxism, but in one speech he gave in this hall some years ago, and in at least one article he wrote, he gave some reasons why he does not accept Marxism. So I imagine he has some knowledge about it. Or else I don’t see how he could reject it.</p>
<p>Of course I think everybody, and especially leaders, should find out about Marxism, whether they will accept it or not. I can’t say for sure whether Malcolm did, or how much. I know that he read papers and magazines that claim to be Marxist, including small, obscure and uninfluential ones. When I wrote an article for the <strong>International Socialist Review</strong> in 1964, attempting to present a Marxist defense of the Freedom Now Party against various misconceptions, including some spread by so-called socialists, I know that Malcolm ordered a couple dozen copies for leading members of his organization because he thought they should be acquainted with this point of view.</p>
<p>Someone who knew Malcolm in prison before he became a Black Muslim, and later worked closely with him in the Nation of Islam, told me that Malcolm did read and study more than radical papers and magazines; that even while he was in prison he read some radical books and pamphlets, and that he later read some basic works of Marxism. But I am not sure of this from my own knowledge.<br> </p>
<p class="fst"><em><strong>Question:</strong> Rev. Cleage said that if Malcolm had actually become an “integrationist” at Mecca, then he could have become a Marxist and joined the Socialist Workers Party. Does he really think that believing in “integration” is a condition for joining the Socialist Workers Party?</em></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Answer:</strong> What Rev. Cleage said was that if Malcolm had actually become an “integrationist” and accepted the ideas that go with that concept of race relations, then there would have been nothing to stop him from joining the NAACP, or singing <em>We Shall Overcome</em> with Martin Luther King, or becoming a Marxist and joining the Socialist Workers Party. In fact, Rev. Cleage said, these things would follow logically.</p>
<p>On the contrary, leaving the bit about the NAACP and King aside, there is nothing logical about it. The Socialist Workers Party does not view “integration” as the solution any more than Malcolm did, or than Rev. Cleage does; in fact, the Socialist Workers Party reached this conclusion before Rev. Cleage did. So even if Malcolm had become an “integrationist,” that wouldn’t have been any reason for him to join the Socialist Workers Party.</p>
<p>Let it be clearly understood: Malcolm was not a Marxist, and he was not about to join the Socialist Workers Party. That’s what we said when he was alive, and that’s what we’ve said ever since. The only ones who circulated a contrary story were his enemies – as a way of discrediting him, they thought.</p>
<p>The facts are these: Malcolm respected the Socialist Workers Party, and was willing to work with it in certain areas – just as he would have been willing to work with <em>any</em> organization that he believed was opposed to racism and the racist government. He praised <strong>The Militant</strong> as one of the best papers anywhere, and there were copies on sale at his headquarters. He had become pro-socialist in his outlook after his trips to Africa, urging black people in this country to learn about socialism – and he did this not only when he spoke before socialist audiences, but also “at home,” when he spoke before his own organization in Harlem.</p>
<p>Despite this, he was not a Marxist, for reasons I have discussed in <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X</strong>. Whether he would ever have become a Marxist, nobody can say. The most you can say is that it was possible in the long run. But he was not a Marxist at the time of his death, much as we wish he would have become one, and we Marxists have never claimed he was. Anybody that says we do is guilty of misrepresentation.<br> </p>
<p class="fst"><em><strong>Question:</strong> The impression I got from listening to Rev. Cleage last month is that he was saying that after Malcolm died and couldn’t speak for himself, the Marxists jumped on the bandwagon in order to distort his views and print speeches which he wouldn’t have printed, “fragmentary statements” and so on. Will you comment on this and Malcolm’s relations with the Socialist Workers Party?</em></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Answer:</strong> Well, Rev. Cleage did not quite make that specific charge against the Marxists in his talk three weeks ago. But I do believe that when he spoke about distorters, calling them “they” and “somebody else,” when he said certain people remember “the things it suits their purposes to remember,” when he said “everything that is written that they can put their hands on will be saying that Malcolm X said something he never said, that Malcolm X meant something he never meant,” when he said, “I don’t care what else they drag in from wherever they drag it,” and similar statements – I do believe that he meant at least to include the Marxists among his targets. And that would support the impression you got.</p>
<p>First of all, I should point out that our interest in Malcolm, the sympathetic interest of the revolutionary socialist movement in his ideas, did not begin after his death in 1965. Nor did it begin only after his split with the Black Muslims in 1964. It goes back further than that, to the time when he was still a Black Muslim. You can read the pamphlet, <strong>Freedom Now</strong>, adopted in the middle of 1963, and see that the Socialist Workers Party, in that resolution adopted at its national convention, pointed out the progressive potential of black nationalism – that is, while Malcolm was still a Black Muslim, we were pointing out the good aspects of what he was saying. If that can be called jumping on a bandwagon, all I can say is that there weren’t many other people on it besides us.</p>
<p>Even before that, the Friday Night Socialist Forum of Detroit was the first socialist hall in the country where a Black Muslim was a guest speaker – Wilfred X, who was received in a sympathetic way because we saw the potential of the Black Muslims while Malcolm was a leader. Later that year, in the fall of 1963, Malcolm was a speaker at a meeting sponsored by the Young Socialists at Wayne State University – still while Malcolm was a member of the Nation of Islam.</p>
<p>When Malcolm broke with the Black Muslims in March, 1964, <strong>The Militant</strong> was the only paper in the country to point out its great significance for the future of the freedom struggle and the radical movement as a whole – we predicted then that he could change the whole course of the movement, the same thing Rev. Cleage said after the fact here in 1967; and it was the only paper in the country to print Malcolm’s Declaration of Independence in March, 1964.</p>
<p>In the following 50 weeks Malcolm spoke three times at the Militant Labor Forum in New York, and the last time he said he’d speak there again any time he was invited. Again and again he praised <strong>The Militant</strong>, not only when he spoke at the Militant Labor Forum, but also when he spoke before his own Organization of Afro-American Unity in Harlem. In his talk on Afro-American history one month before his death, he mentioned that the Negro press largely ignored what the OAAU was trying to do, while <strong>The Militant</strong> reported it accurately and fully.</p>
<p>Malcolm’s three Militant Labor Forum speeches were all printed in <strong>The Militant</strong>
<em>while he was alive</em>, not later. He didn’t think they were inaccurate in any way. If he had thought so, you can be sure he would have said it, and he wouldn’t have had a bundle of <strong>The Militant</strong> on sale in his office. He did not think the printing of those speeches was something “dragged in” – on the contrary, he was grateful that this paper was willing to print them at a time when nobody else would. A month before his death, he agreed to go on a national speaking tour for the Young Socialist Alliance; and if he hadn’t been killed, he would have spoken here in Debs Hall during that tour.</p>
<p>Excuse me for taking so long with this, but I’m still speaking about the myths about Malcolm, and I want to say a few words about the key book to understanding him, the book of speeches, <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>. This book begins with the <em>Message to the Grass Roots</em>, when Malcolm was still a Black Muslim, and which Rev. Cleage admires; but the rest is from his last year, after the split, about which speeches Rev. Cleage had nothing good to say. The idea for this book, it is true, was suggested by Marxists, who wanted to help Malcolm publicize his independent ideas. But it was not a book thought up after Malcolm’s death – it was suggested to Malcolm himself, while he was still alive, as a book of his speeches following the break with Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm’s response to the suggestion was favorable, and he was going to select the speeches himself. But he was killed a month later, before he could start on the project.</p>
<p>Merit Publishers then asked one of Malcolm’s closest co-workers, who had been present at the original discussion about the proposed book, to select the speeches for the book and edit it. In <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X</strong>, I have told how I was later brought in as co-editor, to speed up the publication, and how finally Malcolm’s co-worker withdrew from the project. But before he withdrew we had agreed on the contents, most of which had been supplied by him – the speeches the book contains. So their selection was not a unilateral choice of Marxists, but one made in collaboration and agreement with one of Malcolm’s closest collaborators – who, I should add, not only was not a Marxist, but did not approve of Malcolm’s entry into any kind of politics. The book contains everything from Malcolm’s last year – I repeat, everything – that was available when the book was published in 1965. Since then, other speeches have become available, such as the one by Malcolm on Afro-American history, and that has been published too, verbatim, without any change.</p>
<p>I stress “everything” because I want to make the point that the material was not picked over to present only things that Marxists like and agree with – it includes what <em>Malcolm</em> liked and agreed with, and that was the sole and overriding criterion that was used in preparing <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>. So, yes, “everything we can get our hands on” has been printed, but, no, nothing has been “dragged in.” I told you earlier how you can check this for yourself.</p>
<p>This is important because <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>, more than anything else, and more than what people claim they remember without any documentation, is the basis for forming your judgment about the value of Malcolm’s last year. You know, Malcolm was not a fool; if he had thought we might misrepresent his ideas, he wouldn’t have trusted us an inch. And he did trust us. But you don’t have to trust us or take our word for anything. Malcolm himself had some wonderfully pertinent words about this in his remarks to Mississippi students visiting Harlem two months before he died. He said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you thing you’re going east, and you will be walking east when you think you’re going west. This generation, especially of our people, has a burden, more so than any other time in history. The most important thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.</p>
<p class="quote">“It’s good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you’ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you’ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you’ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies. This is one of the things our people are beginning to learn today – that it is very important to think out a situation for yourself. If you don’t do it, you’ll always be maneuvered into a situation where you are never fighting your actual enemies, where you will find yourself fighting your own self.” (<strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong>, pp. 137–138, paperback edition.)</p>
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George Breitman
Myths About Malcolm X
A Speech
(March 1967)
From International Socialist Review, Vol. 28, No. 5, September–October 1967, pp. 43–60.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
George Breitman, the editor of Malcolm X Speaks and author of The Last Year of Malcolm X: Evolution of a Revolutionary, gave this speech at the Detroit Friday Night Socialist Forum, March 17, 1967
Three weeks ago the Friday Night Socialist Forum held its third memorial meeting for one of the greatest men of our time, Malcolm X. It was organized in such a way as to provide a broad range of opinion. There was a panel of several local poets, headed by Dudley Randall, reading their contributions to the new book, For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X. The chairman was attorney Milton Henry, who had worked with Malcolm, published the magnificent record of Malcolm’s Message to the Grass Roots, and was the principal speaker at our second memorial meeting one year ago. The speakers were Dave Wesley of SNCC, Derrick Morrison of the Young Socialist Alliance, and Rev. Albert Cleage, chairman of the Inner City Organizing Committee.
The usual custom at the Friday Night Socialist Forum is to have a discussion period after the formal talks, with the audience invited to ask questions or express opinions. But it was not considered proper to have a discussion period at a memorial meeting, and it was omitted three weeks ago. However there was an unusual amount of desire for further discussion expressed after that meeting, much of it stimulated by the remarks of Rev. Cleage. And so the committee in charge of the forum decided to have another meeting on the subject at the first open date, which was tonight, and to follow the customary practice allowing for discussion.
Much of what Rev. Cleage dealt with in his talk concerned myths about Malcolm X, or what he considered to be myths. I am going to deal with the same subject – myths about Malcolm X, or what I consider to be myths. Since I have spoken and written about this subject before and it is a vast subject, I shall try to confine myself tonight mainly to points raised by Rev. Cleage. That is, I will take his remarks as a point of departure for mine.
Someone asked me if I think it worthwhile to give a whole talk in that form. My answer, of course, is yes. In The Last Year of Malcolm X, I spent a whole chapter discussing the interpretations of Malcolm made by Bayard Rustin, the social-democratic reformist and pacifist, and I consider Rev. Cleage to be a much more important figure in the movement than Bayard Rustin. In 1964, for example, Rev. Cleage led the most advanced expression of independent black political action in the country – the Freedom Now Party – at a time when Bayard Rustin was campaigning for Johnson and pressuring the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to accept Johnson’s rotten compromise offer at the Atlantic City convention of the Democratic Party. It is true that two years later Rev. Cleage took a backward step – a very wrong and harmful step, in our opinion – when he went back into the Democratic Party to run as a Democratic candidate in a primary election. But even so, he remains the spokesman for an important militant wing of the black freedom movement, and a leader and sponsor of campaigns worthy of support, which we have supported despite his backward step; and what he said in his talk three weeks ago, which I think was his first on the subject of Malcolm, deserves serious consideration.
[The next portion, a 10-minute summary of Rev. Cleage’s speech, is omitted from this transcription.]
That ends my summary of Rev. Cleage’s speech. Of course I haven’t done it justice as rhetoric; Rev. Cleage is one of the best orators in the country, one of the few people who could speak from the same platform as Malcolm without looking bad by comparison. But I have presented all of his main ideas, points and implications as objectively as I could.
I agree with Rev. Cleage that there has been a profusion of myths spread about Malcolm in the two years since his death, and in a moment I will try to explain why. But I don’t agree with him when he says there is a danger that the real Malcolm will be forgotten or obscured through distortion. There was a danger of that when Malcolm was killed, but I don’t think it is a serious danger any longer; at any rate, the danger has grown smaller. I don’t think the real Malcolm can successfully be distorted – whatever Rev. Cleage may say, whatever I may say, and no matter how many more myths may be manufactured and circulated. Because the truth is now too widely known, and becoming better known every day – the whole truth, and not just part of it.
When Malcolm died, there was virtually nothing of what he had said that was in print. But since then many thousands and thousands of people have had the chance to read and hear what Malcolm had said, including large numbers who had never heard of Malcolm while he was alive. Milton Henry told me three weeks ago that he had just returned from the West Coast where he had spoken at a memorial celebration for Malcolm (there were more such memorials held this year than in the previous two) and he said he had run into children, literally children, who were quoting passages from Malcolm X Speaks.
And they were quoting what Malcolm really said and thought, not myths. So we have to keep on knocking down any and all myths that are raised, but I believe we can do this in a spirit of optimism, not despair, because the truth is on the march.
There are many reasons for the myths. Malcolm was a remarkable man, a great man, and when he died, he became a folk-hero. Even if we leave aside the unsolved questions about who arranged the assassination, which were bound to spur various speculations and rumors, Malcolm was the kind of man around whom legends grow – not necessarily hostile legends either; favorable ones too.
But there are other reasons for misconceptions about Malcolm. One of these was the fact that Malcolm was cut down before he had finished his work, before he had formulated all of his ideas and brought them together in a consistent whole. In his last year many people thought or knew that Malcolm was developing new ideas, perhaps a new body of thought, theory or philosophy. But because of the press distortions, and because Malcolm did not yet have an organization capable of reaching the masses, they didn’t know exactly or fully what his thinking was after he left the Black Muslims. This is always a breeding ground for rumor and myth.
More than that. One of the things that distinguished Malcolm from almost all of his contemporaries was his ability to grow, to change, to move forward; even – how hard this is! – to admit an error and correct it. These qualities became more prominent after he broke away from the dogmas of Elijah Muhammad and began, as he put it, to think for himself. Free to think for himself and to speak for himself, he had the courage to admit to himself he had been wrong about something if he thought that was so, and the courage to admit it publicly, and to present a new position that he thought was more correct than an old one. It is the rareness of this quality, along with the vital importance of the questions he was reconsidering, that makes a study of his evolution during his last year so rewarding.
But to people whose minds are fixed in a rut – that is, most of us – this was confusing. It wasn’t that Malcolm was confused, but that some people, whose impressions of Malcolm had been formed and hardened and pigeonholed when he was a Black Muslim, some of these people became confused when Malcolm changed a position during his last year – merely because he wasn’t saying word for word and slogan for slogan what they had become accustomed to hearing him say. No matter how logically, how lucidly, Malcolm stated these new positions, such people remained confused – some to this day; and when they spoke, their confusion contributed to myths about Malcolm.
And finally there was the malicious motivation for myths, which Rev. Cleage referred to. Because Malcolm became a martyr and hero after his death, some groups have tried to claim him for their own, even though they did not speak up for him when he was alive. They have tried to “interpret” him in such a way as to make his views appear to coincide with their own. In order to do this, they have to try to make us forget embarrassing facts such as their dislike of some of the positions he took.
So what they do is chop Malcolm up, keeping the parts they like, the parts it suits their purposes to remember, and discarding the other parts as unimportant or irrelevant where they don’t deny their existence altogether. This attempt to preserve only part of Malcolm, the part they find useful, while ignoring or denying the other parts that are needed if you want to see the real Malcolm, the whole Malcolm, is of course bound to result in myths, even if they are presented in the name of opposing myths.
Rev. Cleage is absolutely correct when he labels as a myth the story that Malcolm became an “integrationist” as a result of his trip to Mecca in the spring of 1964. This myth, or lie, is spread, as you can expect, by integrationists. Malcolm did not become an “integrationist” at Mecca, or at any time after that. Until the day of his death he remained an opponent of what is generally or popularly understood, or misunderstood, as “integration.” I find it easy to join Rev. Cleage on this point because we, the Marxists, have been exposing and opposing this myth since Malcolm died, even though Rev. Cleage’s remarks may have left some ambiguity about this.
But while Malcolm did not become an “integrationist” at Mecca, or after, his views on race did begin to change at Mecca – his views on race, race relations, black-white relations, the possibility of eventual brotherhood. They began to change there, and they changed even more after he left Mecca and went to Africa and held discussions with many revolutionary Africans. Rev. Cleage did not mention this, but the impact of revolutionary African thinking on Malcolm was much greater and deeper and more profound than the impact of Mecca.
The change, stated too briefly, was this: Not that Malcolm embraced “integration” as a solution, but that he saw the cause of racial oppression in a new light. He saw it as rooted not in merely racial or color differences, but as rooted in economic, political, social and cultural exploitation. From this he began to conclude, not that “integration” is the answer, but that racial conflict might be eliminated by eliminating exploitation; that racial enmity is not inherent in human beings or immutable or necessarily ordained to last for all time; and that it is possible (not certain) that eventually, some day (not now) oppressed blacks and oppressed whites might be able to march together in genuine brotherhood and fight together against their common oppressors and exploiters. But, and he always qualified this thought immediately, it can’t happen until the blacks first organize themselves independently and create their own movement, their own power. No worthwhile alliance can be created, he insisted, until blacks come together first and create their own organization with their own uncompromising program.
Now Rev. Cleage says he doesn’t believe what Malcolm is supposed to have said at Mecca; he says Malcolm wouldn’t have been taken in by the window dressing, that Malcolm was too intelligent to believe that blacks and whites could march together, and so on. Well, this is really an argument between Rev. Cleage and Malcolm, not between Rev. Cleage and people who accurately report what Malcolm said and wrote. Perhaps Rev. Cleage believes that Malcolm was not saying what he really thought; if he does, he should explain why. I, for one, after carefully studying everything I could find, believe that Malcolm said what he thought, popular or unpopular, especially after he left the Black Muslims, was no longer under their discipline and no longer required to express their ideas. If Rev. Cleage believes that what Malcolm said and wrote has been misrepresented by others, then I think he has the obligation to examine what Malcolm said (available on many tapes) and what he wrote (available hi his own handwriting) and to show where the reports are mac-curate or misleading.
It is not enough to say merely, “I don’t believe it.” It is necessary in addition to square this disbelief with the evidence of Malcolm’s own voice and Malcolm’s own pen, and show why that evidence cannot be accepted or trusted. Rev. Cleage said that what has happened with Malcolm enables him to understand better the various myths about Jesus. But we have nothing about Jesus now except myths; we’ve got facts about Malcolm to balance along with myths. The world has changed since the time of Jesus, and in some ways it has changed for the better – especially technologically. I am thinking about the discovery and development of the tape recorder – a marvelous invention. Thanks to it, we can hear and know what Malcolm said, which is the best antidote to mythology that I can imagine.
So Rev. Cleage is on firm ground in rejecting the myth that Malcolm became an “integrationist.” But the reasons he gives for rejecting it are not so sound, and the conclusions he tries to draw – that Malcolm did not change any of his views – have not been demonstrated factually or logically; and I don’t think they can be demonstrated.
I cannot go along with Rev. Cleage when he says that it is a myth that Malcolm wanted to internationalize the Afro-American struggle. Malcolm spoke here in Detroit twice after leaving the Black Muslims – in April 1964 and in February 1965, one week before his death. On both these occasions Rev. Cleage was present, and at both of them Malcolm called for internationalizing the struggle. What he said both times is preserved on tape, as are many other speeches when he said the same thing. So this is a matter of fact, easily verified.
Besides the question of fact there is the question of interpreting the fact. Rev. Cleage spoke of people who have a mystique about Africa and who say that Malcolm said that the African nations are going to free American black people, and therefore all that Afro-Americans have to do is sit around and wait for that happy day. I haven’t run into many people with this particular interpretation of Malcolm’s call to internationalize the struggle, but of course Rev. Cleage is correct to pronounce this as a distortion and myth, which can only do harm by promoting passivity, instead of struggle.
But this particular distortion or misunderstanding of what Malcolm was talking about does not change the fact that Malcolm did advocate an alliance of Afro-Americans with Africans and other non-whites to coordinate their struggles, and even their strategy, against their common enemy, against what Malcolm called “the international power structure,” whose headquarters he correctly placed in Washington, D.C. I don’t see how anybody can question the fact that Malcolm became an internationalist (this is one of the things that made him so dangerous in the eyes of the imperialists and their CIA), and that internationalism, by definition, means efforts to internationalize the struggle.
One of the ways in which Malcolm sought to internationalize the struggle was by bringing an indictment of racism against the United States government before the United Nations, the so-called world court. He raised this proposal immediately after he left the Black Muslims in the spring of 1964, and he worked hard trying to get African leaders to bring the indictment into the United Nations, and to get American civil rights leaders to join in promoting this project. He did not succeed, for various reasons, but he still had it on his agenda at his death.
When he first publicly raised this project in the spring of 1964, he tended to overstate its possibilities – that is, he gave too rosy a picture of what the probable results would be. The Militant printed an article by me in May 1964, supporting Malcolm’s proposal to take Washington to the United Nations and expose its racism and hypocrisy, but noting that the US government and its allies control the United Nations, and that the UN cannot be expected to do anything seriously against the interests of American imperialism. I didn’t say it as pungently as Rev. Cleage did three weeks ago, when he said you can’t expect any more justice from the so-called world court than you can from the Supreme Court or Detroit’s Recorder’s Court, because all of them are run by crackers, but I said essentially the same thing almost three years ago. Even though my article was critical, Malcolm sent me a message of thanks for writing it.
Now Rev. Cleage says Malcolm couldn’t have believed that much would be accomplished by going to the United Nations, and therefore it is a myth to say he wanted to internationalize the struggle. But this is a fallacy of over-simplification, a non sequitur. The truth is more complex, and the conclusion to be drawn different. Malcolm did get carried away at the beginning about the possibilities of taking Washington to the UN; I am sorry to say this now, as I was sorry to say it then, but it happens to be the truth. And the truth is what we are after, not simplifications. So: at the beginning Malcolm went overboard in what he said could be accomplished by going to the UN. Later, however, he took a more balanced view of the project, he stopped speaking of it as a move that could solve the problems of black people, he corrected himself in assessing its probable results. But he continued to push this project. After modifying what he said about it, he continued to work for it. Because he did want to internationalize the struggle – that’s no myth – and this was one way of doing it, even though it would not be the final solution, but only a step in that direction. If Malcolm was ready to acknowledge and correct mistakes, I don’t think we do him or the struggle any service by denying either the mistake or the correction; or by saying “I don’t believe” he made this mistake in order to deny that he wanted to internationalize the struggle.
Rev. Cleage’s stated intention – to explode myths in order to preserve the real Malcolm – can only be applauded. But I am afraid that he was only partly successful with some of the myths he aimed at, and that in the process he may have contributed some myths of his own.
His basic mistake, I think, is to present Malcolm the Black Muslim as the real Malcolm, the only one worth remembering, the only one worth building on and continuing from – and to dismiss as unimportant, inconsistent or irrelevant the last year of Malcolm’s life, when Malcolm himself began to build on and continue from his previous positions. This, I submit, is not the way to see or understand the whole Malcolm. Rev. Cleage mentioned the blind men, each of whom touched a different part of the elephant, and came up with a different concept of the elephant. Rev. Cleage is doing that too – he’s saying the hide is the elephant, and the feet and the tail – but not the trunk or the tusks. It is harder to forgive him than those blind men, because he is not blind, and all the parts of Malcolm can be easily seen by anyone who wants to look at them.
I say Malcolm is both the Malcolm of the period before the split and the Malcolm of the year after the split, and I want to see and understand the whole man. I want to see the whole man – the parts that remained constant and never changed, and the parts that did not remain constant and did change; the parts that fit preconceived notions and the parts that contradict preconceived notions; what he was trying to do after he decided to think for himself instead of with the mind of Elijah Muhammad; and in what direction he was moving. That is why in editing his speeches, I included everything available, not just the parts I agree with. That is why in the book about his evolution I was just as concerned in presenting his positions that diverge from my own as I was in exploring those that resemble or approach mine. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t really have the right to talk about myths spread by other people. A myth can consist of nothing but the exclusion of relevant facts.
Rev. Cleage wants, in effect, to dismiss the last year of Malcolm’s life; he could find only one favorable statement to make about that year – that Malcolm was beginning to make a transition to organization, to structure. The last year was the period when Malcolm was developing his own ideas rather than popularizing those of Elijah Muhammad. The reason Rev. Cleage wants to dismiss the last year is not that he agrees with all of the ideas of Elijah Muhammad, but that he disagrees with some of the ideas Malcolm was expressing in this, the independent phase of his life. In a moment I will list some of those ideas. First, I want to call your attention to the way that Rev. Cleage seeks to justify such dismissal.
In the last year, Rev. Cleage says, Malcolm was under constant harassment, under fierce pressure, under never-ending threat of assassination. All of this is completely true. As a result, Rev. Cleage continues, Malcolm made a number of confused and confusing statements, fragmentary statements, which unscrupulous people use to distort the meaning and tradition of Malcolm. Is that true? – not how Malcolm’s statements are used or misused, but is it true that Malcolm’s last year was distinguished by confused and confusing statements?
Rev. Cleage says it is true, I say it is not true, and it is up to you to find the answer. Because on it will depend your judgment about whether the real Malcolm tradition ended when he left the Black Muslims, or whether it continued and reached a higher level after he left.
How are you going to decide this? Rev. Cleage more or less invites you to take his word for it, since he doesn’t suggest any alternative or offer any documentation or evidence. I invite you not to take my word, because there is an alternative. And that is: Read what Malcolm said during his last year. Read it for yourself and judge for yourself if it is confused or confusing – or just the opposite. Read the book Malcolm X Speaks, which contains everything from his last year that was available at the time it was published at the end of 1965. It has been in print now for one and a half years and has now been read by tens of thousands of people. So far, not one challenge to its veracity or accuracy has been publicly presented by anybody. Liberator, a magazine which is not sympathetic with the views of the editor of Malcolm X Speaks, calls it “the source book for what Malcolm actually said.”
Then, after you have read it, if you have the slightest doubt about its accuracy, you should listen to the tapes from which most of Malcolm X Speaks was taken. I have listed them all at the end of The Last Year – 22 tapes from Malcolm’s last year – which are available for anyone who wants to listen to them. And since The Last Year was printed there are three more tapes from that period that have become available.
By this method, I contend, you can arrive at a solid judgment not only about the accuracy of the printed material by Malcolm, but also about whether the ideas presented there are confused or confusing; and about whether they are fragmentary, that is, presented out of context. I have no doubt whatever that the outcome of this method of investigation will establish conclusively that it is a myth to assert that Malcolm’s statements in his last year were anything but lucid, carefully thought out, closely argued, and amazingly consistent, despite all the adverse conditions under which he had to operate.
Now what were some of the main ideas that Malcolm developed and adopted in his last year? I cannot deal with this fully tonight, but I have tried to do it in The Last Year of Malcolm X. There I have presented Malcolm’s main ideas, citing in each case the source, the place, the date, etc., and including both the ideas I agree with and the ones I question or differ with. In addition, I have given my interpretation, my interpretation of the significance, trend and direction of these ideas. It will not surprise me if some people will disagree with my interpretations, but it will surprise me if anyone successfully challenges the facts I have presented there.
Malcolm came to the conclusion that the Black Muslims had gone as far as they could go, and he wanted to go farther. He wanted to get into the active struggle, influence it ideologically, and revolutionize it. He wanted to build a new movement, on new foundations, and therefore he reviewed all his ideas – keeping some, modifying others, casting aside still others. He began to move to the left.
The concept that “the white man is the enemy,” which Rev. Cleage calls the essential strand in Malcolm’s philosophy, is the beginning of wisdom for black people who have had illusions that the white power structure is going to hand them freedom on a platter some day. To reject that illusion, and to get to understand that the black man has to fight for freedom, and that he has to depend first of all on his own organized strength, on black power – that is a great step forward, an indispensable step. But it is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it; it is not a formula sufficient by itself for achieving freedom. After the need for independent black power is learned and absorbed and becomes a guide for action, there are other questions that have to be asked and answered.
If the white man is the enemy, are all white men equally enemies? – both the white men who have the power in this country, the rulers, and the white men who don’t have power, and who are exploited by the rulers – not exploited as much as black people, but exploited too? If the white man is the enemy, is there some way of dividing the enemy, splitting them, driving a wedge in among them, setting them to fighting each other – to the benefit of the black man? If the white man is the enemy, is there some way of transforming the situation so that some of the whites can be demobilized, or neutralized, or even, under certain circumstances, turned into allies or potential allies of the black man because it would be in their own self-interest?
These are some of the questions Malcolm was beginning to think about and work out in his last year. The main allies of Afro-Americans, he decided, are the black, brown, yellow and red people of the world; but then he also began to see the possibility of alliances with what he called “militant white” Americans. In fact, he said, to bring about the changes that are needed such alliances will be necessary. He didn’t think they would be consummated right away – first, he always stressed, blacks must organize themselves independently, with their own leaders, their own movement, their own program. After they did that, which was his main preoccupation – then there might be alliances with militant whites, the right kind of alliances. And by the right kind of alliances he did not mean working in the Democratic Party.
None of this made him into an “integrationist.” But it did make him go beyond the simple formula, the white man is the enemy, which is not the end of wisdom. It did make him think about and study the causes of racism and to see the possibility of its elimination some day. It led him to study the nature of American capitalist society, and of world capitalism – always from the viewpoint of how the interests of black people could be promoted and protected. And from his thought and study – especially from the thinking initiated through his discussions with African revolutionaries (whose impact on him far exceeded the influence of the religious Muslims in Mecca) – he came to the conclusion that capitalism is the cause of racism, that you can’t have capitalism without racism, and therefore socialism should seriously be considered as an objective by black Americans as well as by Africans and Asians and Latin Americans. At the very least, you can say that in his last year he became pro-socialist and anti-capitalist.
Now these are only a few of the ideas Malcolm was thinking about and trying to work out in his last year, and on some of them, I want to be the first to stress, he had not completed his thinking when he was struck down. Rev. Cleage, who doesn’t agree with some of these ideas, wants to discard these parts from the Malcolm tradition as irrelevant, as confused. He says the great speech, Message to the Grass Roots, made while Malcolm was still in the Nation of Islam, is his last will and testament. But I think the evidence shows that Malcolm added to that testament, if you want to call it that, much that is rich, valuable, indispensable, and that he did it knowingly, consciously, and with a clear mind. You may not agree with what he added, but you can’t say he didn’t add it or that he added it out of confusion.
I would also like to offer an explanation of why Rev. Cleage rejects the contributions of Malcolm’s last year. Rev. Cleage is, and has been since the end of 1963, an advocate and defender of black nationalism. Now when I say that, I am not – as anyone who knows me or the Marxist position is aware – I am not attacking him or using the term as an epithet. As I have said and written for many years, black nationalism is progressive and potentially revolutionary. To show what I mean by black nationalism, to show that it is not a negative thing to me, I would like to read you the definition of black nationalism presented in The Last Year of Malcolm X. Black nationalism, I say,
“... is the tendency for black people in the United States to unite as a group, as a people, into a movement of their own to fight for freedom, justice and equality. Animated by the desire of an oppressed minority to decide its own destiny, this tendency holds that black people must control their own movement and the political, economic and social institutions of the black community. Its characteristic attributes include racial pride, group consciousness, hatred of white supremacy, a striving for independence from white control, and identification with black and non-white oppressed groups in other parts of the world.”
End of definition. In the same chapter I try to show why black nationalism should not be equated with what is called separatism by those who advocate a separate black nation, but I can’t go into that here.
If the definition of black nationalism I have just given is correct, then Rev. Cleage is a black nationalist, and that is not an epithet but, from my standpoint, a scientifically correct designation and an expression of respect. Also, according to this definition, Malcolm was a black nationalist, and remained one to his last day – even though in his final months he began to wonder if that was the right label to describe what he was after.
But within the broad category of black nationalism it is possible to see many subdivisions. (This is one of the reasons why the various kinds of black nationalists unfortunately have been unable so far to unite into a single nationwide movement.) For present purposes I cannot discuss the various subdivisions of black nationalism but have to concentrate on the one I call pure-and-simple.
In Marxism and the Negro Struggle, written in 1964, and again in The Last Year, I have presented the argument that
“The pure and simple black nationalist is concerned exclusively or primarily with the internal problems of the Negro community, with organizing it, with helping it to gain control of the community’s politics, economy, etc. He is not concerned, or is less concerned, with the problems of the total American society, or with the nature of the larger society within which the Negro community exists. He has no theory or program for changing that society; for him that is the white man’s problem.”
When Rev. Cleage became a black nationalist, he became a pure and simple nationalist (in fact, it was by studying his statements, activities and development that I first became aware of this subdivision), and he remains a pure and simple nationalist. Malcolm too was a pure and simple nationalist before he left the Black Muslims, and he remained one for the first few months after the split. But then, after his first trip to Africa in the spring of 1964, mainly as a result of the thinking started by his discussions with African revolutionaries, he began to move beyond pure and simple nationalism, to transcend it – if not transcend it, to add something to it that changed it into something else. What was it he added? He added the belief that society as a whole has to be changed, revolutionized, if black people are to achieve their freedom. This did not contradict his conviction that blacks must control their own community, that is, his black nationalism; it was an addition to his black nationalism. Black control of the black community, yes – but that is not enough, because even a black-controlled black community inside a reactionary and exploitative social and economic and political system cannot provide full and genuine freedom. The implication is that Afro-Americans must fight not only to gain control of their community but also to change society as a whole, to reconstruct it on a truly non-exploitative basis.
Malcolm accepted this implication, which is profoundly revolutionary, without ceasing to be a black nationalist. Rev. Cleage does not accept this implication. That, I believe, is the theoretical explanation for Rev. Cleage’s tendency to reject most of Malcolm’s last period, and, perhaps, not even study it with the care it deserves.
This is not only a mistake, but a sad mistake, because Malcolm was ready to give his life, he did give his life, for the right to be able to say the things he did in his last year. I mean that literally. He could have lived by keeping quiet. But he had things to say in his last year that he considered vital, things that it is dangerous to say, things that he knew it was dangerous to say – and still he put his life on the line for the right and opportunity to say them. To discard what Malcolm himself considered the most important part of his legacy, and for which he gave his life – that is indeed a sad mistake.
Despite my differences with Rev. Cleage’s evaluation of Malcolm, which I have tried to present objectively and without personal rancor, I think I agree with what may have been the main intention of his talk three weeks ago. If I understood it correctly, his main intention was to inspire black people to make the Malcolm tradition their own – to interpret it according to their lights and needs, cherish it, make it a weapon in their struggle for freedom. With that intention I am in full accord.
I think this is already being done, to a far greater degree than Rev. Cleage does. The same night he spoke here, Eldridge Cleaver spoke in San Francisco about how the ideas and tradition of Malcolm have been “internalized” by black people all over the country. That is true, and in addition there is a growing body of written literature about Malcolm by black people, interpreting him and shaping his tradition, which Rev. Cleage overlooks or may not be aware of. On the West Coast there are people like Cleaver, not only writing about Malcolm but trying to continue what he began. In the Midwest, Milton Henry, Robert Higgins, Lerone Bennett, David Llorens. In the East, LeRoi Jones, Calvin Hernton, Rolland Snellings, Lawrence Neal, A.B. Spellman, Robert Allen, John O. Killens, Robert Vernon, Sara Mitchell, C.E. Wilson, – these are only a few of the many black people whose articles spring to mind (I hope the others will forgive me for not mentioning them too) – whose interpretations I may not always agree with, just as Rev. Cleage may not, but which show that black people have been doing what he urges, in sufficient quantity to fill many volumes. James Baldwin is reportedly considering writing a play about Malcolm’s Autobiography; a play called Message from the Grass Roots is soon to open in England. And the poets – I detected a slight tone of condescension or irony in Rev. Cleage’s voice about the poetry by black people about Malcolm, a little surprising when you consider that in his profession he quotes poetry every Sunday – the poets too, in their own way, and it is not a way without influence, are making contributions to the preservation of the real Malcolm.
I agree, as I say, with what I take to be Rev. Cleage’s intention. Malcolm is more than a hero and martyr, he is what Eldridge Cleaver calls “the standard” and “the model.” I think he is and should be the standard and model for revolutionary and radical-minded people of all races, and will be for all who take the trouble to investigate him without prejudice and to learn from him. But he does belong, in a special sense, to black people first of all, and especially to young black people, whom Malcolm counted on to lead their people to freedom. If anyone should be the custodian of the Malcolm tradition, it should be they.
Rev. Cleage called me the custodian, perhaps softening it a bit by granting my sincerity. To make sure, I looked up the word “custody” in the dictionary. It says: “1. keeping, guardianship, care: (example) in the custody of her father; 2. the keeping or charge of officers of the law: (example) the car was in the custody of the police; 3. imprisonment: (example) he was taken into custody.” Well, I am not the custodian of the Malcolm tradition, I have not been, and I do not aspire to be. What I have been, or rather, what Marxists have been – because Rev. Cleage really means the Marxists rather than me personally – are (1) the chief circulators of the Malcolm material, and (2) interpreters of it, from our own point of view.
Circulators, because nobody else showed any interest in doing that job. Of this we are quite proud; we feel it has been a genuine contribution – but it is a task that we do and will gladly share with anyone else. The circulation of this material has been a contribution to everyone, black and white. It is the raw material – not distorted in any way, not dragged in, not partially presented or partially withheld to suit anybody’s factional purposes – it is the raw material which everyone, white or black, can use in order to understand and then fashion the Malcolm tradition. In addition, as I said, we Marxists have interpreted the raw material – again, not by distorting what Malcolm said, only by giving our analysis and opinion about what he said and did. That is everybody’s privilege, that is the duty of anybody who considers himself a radical, and we hope that all tendencies will work out and present their interpretations, as we have done, so that all interpretations can confront each other openly and provide a sound basis for what will be the historical judgment and tradition.
So I join with Rev. Cleage in urging black people to find out what Malcolm really said and stood for, write about it, preserve it, interpret it, circulate it, and use it in the struggle. All I say is that when you do this, don’t do it partly – do it all the way; don’t chop the Malcolm tradition to pieces – preserve the whole thing, confront the whole Malcolm, preserve the whole Malcolm, utilize the whole Malcolm to advance and win the struggle. If you do, and if your aim is to revolutionize society, then I think you will cherish the final part of the whole Malcolm, the part that he gave his life to add, as the most useful part because it is the most revolutionary.
From the Discussion Period
Question: Rev. Cleage said he didn’t know anything about Marxism. You say Malcolm was not a Marxist, but did he know anything about it – had he read or studied it?
Answer: What Rev. Cleage actually said – and I quote from the transcript of his speech, which I have here – was, “I am not a Marxist – I don’t pretend to be, I don’t even pretend to know anything about it.” Maybe the key word here is “pretend.” I don’t know how much he knows about Marxism, but in one speech he gave in this hall some years ago, and in at least one article he wrote, he gave some reasons why he does not accept Marxism. So I imagine he has some knowledge about it. Or else I don’t see how he could reject it.
Of course I think everybody, and especially leaders, should find out about Marxism, whether they will accept it or not. I can’t say for sure whether Malcolm did, or how much. I know that he read papers and magazines that claim to be Marxist, including small, obscure and uninfluential ones. When I wrote an article for the International Socialist Review in 1964, attempting to present a Marxist defense of the Freedom Now Party against various misconceptions, including some spread by so-called socialists, I know that Malcolm ordered a couple dozen copies for leading members of his organization because he thought they should be acquainted with this point of view.
Someone who knew Malcolm in prison before he became a Black Muslim, and later worked closely with him in the Nation of Islam, told me that Malcolm did read and study more than radical papers and magazines; that even while he was in prison he read some radical books and pamphlets, and that he later read some basic works of Marxism. But I am not sure of this from my own knowledge.
Question: Rev. Cleage said that if Malcolm had actually become an “integrationist” at Mecca, then he could have become a Marxist and joined the Socialist Workers Party. Does he really think that believing in “integration” is a condition for joining the Socialist Workers Party?
Answer: What Rev. Cleage said was that if Malcolm had actually become an “integrationist” and accepted the ideas that go with that concept of race relations, then there would have been nothing to stop him from joining the NAACP, or singing We Shall Overcome with Martin Luther King, or becoming a Marxist and joining the Socialist Workers Party. In fact, Rev. Cleage said, these things would follow logically.
On the contrary, leaving the bit about the NAACP and King aside, there is nothing logical about it. The Socialist Workers Party does not view “integration” as the solution any more than Malcolm did, or than Rev. Cleage does; in fact, the Socialist Workers Party reached this conclusion before Rev. Cleage did. So even if Malcolm had become an “integrationist,” that wouldn’t have been any reason for him to join the Socialist Workers Party.
Let it be clearly understood: Malcolm was not a Marxist, and he was not about to join the Socialist Workers Party. That’s what we said when he was alive, and that’s what we’ve said ever since. The only ones who circulated a contrary story were his enemies – as a way of discrediting him, they thought.
The facts are these: Malcolm respected the Socialist Workers Party, and was willing to work with it in certain areas – just as he would have been willing to work with any organization that he believed was opposed to racism and the racist government. He praised The Militant as one of the best papers anywhere, and there were copies on sale at his headquarters. He had become pro-socialist in his outlook after his trips to Africa, urging black people in this country to learn about socialism – and he did this not only when he spoke before socialist audiences, but also “at home,” when he spoke before his own organization in Harlem.
Despite this, he was not a Marxist, for reasons I have discussed in The Last Year of Malcolm X. Whether he would ever have become a Marxist, nobody can say. The most you can say is that it was possible in the long run. But he was not a Marxist at the time of his death, much as we wish he would have become one, and we Marxists have never claimed he was. Anybody that says we do is guilty of misrepresentation.
Question: The impression I got from listening to Rev. Cleage last month is that he was saying that after Malcolm died and couldn’t speak for himself, the Marxists jumped on the bandwagon in order to distort his views and print speeches which he wouldn’t have printed, “fragmentary statements” and so on. Will you comment on this and Malcolm’s relations with the Socialist Workers Party?
Answer: Well, Rev. Cleage did not quite make that specific charge against the Marxists in his talk three weeks ago. But I do believe that when he spoke about distorters, calling them “they” and “somebody else,” when he said certain people remember “the things it suits their purposes to remember,” when he said “everything that is written that they can put their hands on will be saying that Malcolm X said something he never said, that Malcolm X meant something he never meant,” when he said, “I don’t care what else they drag in from wherever they drag it,” and similar statements – I do believe that he meant at least to include the Marxists among his targets. And that would support the impression you got.
First of all, I should point out that our interest in Malcolm, the sympathetic interest of the revolutionary socialist movement in his ideas, did not begin after his death in 1965. Nor did it begin only after his split with the Black Muslims in 1964. It goes back further than that, to the time when he was still a Black Muslim. You can read the pamphlet, Freedom Now, adopted in the middle of 1963, and see that the Socialist Workers Party, in that resolution adopted at its national convention, pointed out the progressive potential of black nationalism – that is, while Malcolm was still a Black Muslim, we were pointing out the good aspects of what he was saying. If that can be called jumping on a bandwagon, all I can say is that there weren’t many other people on it besides us.
Even before that, the Friday Night Socialist Forum of Detroit was the first socialist hall in the country where a Black Muslim was a guest speaker – Wilfred X, who was received in a sympathetic way because we saw the potential of the Black Muslims while Malcolm was a leader. Later that year, in the fall of 1963, Malcolm was a speaker at a meeting sponsored by the Young Socialists at Wayne State University – still while Malcolm was a member of the Nation of Islam.
When Malcolm broke with the Black Muslims in March, 1964, The Militant was the only paper in the country to point out its great significance for the future of the freedom struggle and the radical movement as a whole – we predicted then that he could change the whole course of the movement, the same thing Rev. Cleage said after the fact here in 1967; and it was the only paper in the country to print Malcolm’s Declaration of Independence in March, 1964.
In the following 50 weeks Malcolm spoke three times at the Militant Labor Forum in New York, and the last time he said he’d speak there again any time he was invited. Again and again he praised The Militant, not only when he spoke at the Militant Labor Forum, but also when he spoke before his own Organization of Afro-American Unity in Harlem. In his talk on Afro-American history one month before his death, he mentioned that the Negro press largely ignored what the OAAU was trying to do, while The Militant reported it accurately and fully.
Malcolm’s three Militant Labor Forum speeches were all printed in The Militant
while he was alive, not later. He didn’t think they were inaccurate in any way. If he had thought so, you can be sure he would have said it, and he wouldn’t have had a bundle of The Militant on sale in his office. He did not think the printing of those speeches was something “dragged in” – on the contrary, he was grateful that this paper was willing to print them at a time when nobody else would. A month before his death, he agreed to go on a national speaking tour for the Young Socialist Alliance; and if he hadn’t been killed, he would have spoken here in Debs Hall during that tour.
Excuse me for taking so long with this, but I’m still speaking about the myths about Malcolm, and I want to say a few words about the key book to understanding him, the book of speeches, Malcolm X Speaks. This book begins with the Message to the Grass Roots, when Malcolm was still a Black Muslim, and which Rev. Cleage admires; but the rest is from his last year, after the split, about which speeches Rev. Cleage had nothing good to say. The idea for this book, it is true, was suggested by Marxists, who wanted to help Malcolm publicize his independent ideas. But it was not a book thought up after Malcolm’s death – it was suggested to Malcolm himself, while he was still alive, as a book of his speeches following the break with Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm’s response to the suggestion was favorable, and he was going to select the speeches himself. But he was killed a month later, before he could start on the project.
Merit Publishers then asked one of Malcolm’s closest co-workers, who had been present at the original discussion about the proposed book, to select the speeches for the book and edit it. In The Last Year of Malcolm X, I have told how I was later brought in as co-editor, to speed up the publication, and how finally Malcolm’s co-worker withdrew from the project. But before he withdrew we had agreed on the contents, most of which had been supplied by him – the speeches the book contains. So their selection was not a unilateral choice of Marxists, but one made in collaboration and agreement with one of Malcolm’s closest collaborators – who, I should add, not only was not a Marxist, but did not approve of Malcolm’s entry into any kind of politics. The book contains everything from Malcolm’s last year – I repeat, everything – that was available when the book was published in 1965. Since then, other speeches have become available, such as the one by Malcolm on Afro-American history, and that has been published too, verbatim, without any change.
I stress “everything” because I want to make the point that the material was not picked over to present only things that Marxists like and agree with – it includes what Malcolm liked and agreed with, and that was the sole and overriding criterion that was used in preparing Malcolm X Speaks. So, yes, “everything we can get our hands on” has been printed, but, no, nothing has been “dragged in.” I told you earlier how you can check this for yourself.
This is important because Malcolm X Speaks, more than anything else, and more than what people claim they remember without any documentation, is the basis for forming your judgment about the value of Malcolm’s last year. You know, Malcolm was not a fool; if he had thought we might misrepresent his ideas, he wouldn’t have trusted us an inch. And he did trust us. But you don’t have to trust us or take our word for anything. Malcolm himself had some wonderfully pertinent words about this in his remarks to Mississippi students visiting Harlem two months before he died. He said:
“One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you thing you’re going east, and you will be walking east when you think you’re going west. This generation, especially of our people, has a burden, more so than any other time in history. The most important thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.
“It’s good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you’ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you’ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you’ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies. This is one of the things our people are beginning to learn today – that it is very important to think out a situation for yourself. If you don’t do it, you’ll always be maneuvered into a situation where you are never fighting your actual enemies, where you will find yourself fighting your own self.” (Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 137–138, paperback edition.)
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<h2>Anthony Massini</h2><h2>
</h2><h1>Davies’ Book and the Elimination<br>
of the ‘Fifth Column’</h1>
<h3>(24 January 1942)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/index.htm#m42_04" target="new">Vol 6 No. 4</a>, 24 January 1942, p. 4. <a href="#na" name="fa">[A]</a><br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Six months ago the people in this country were told by the so-called military experts that the Soviet Union didn’t have a chance in the world against Hitler. Since then, the stubborn resistance of the first workers state to Hitler’s attack, even when the German armies were advancing, has aroused much admiration. And since late November, when at Rostov and Moscow and then along the whole front the Red Army, aided by detachments of armed workers, began to gain ground and drive back the German troops, popular interest in the USSR has grown and is seeking the explanation.</p>
<p>If Joseph E. Davies’ <strong>Mission to Moscow</strong> <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> becomes a best seller, it will be because the author, in his capacity as Ambassador to the USSR for two or three years, is supposed to have discovered the explanation and written it down in his official dispatches to the State Department which make up the bulk of this book.</p>
<p>But actually the reader will not find an honest explanation of the Soviet Union’s resistance in this book. Instead he will find the same false explanations that he can read any time in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> or the <strong>New Masses</strong>.<br>
</p>
<h4>Davies “Reconsiders” the Trials</h4>
<p class="fst">The world already knows that one of the chief differences between the Soviet Union’s war against Hitler and the war of practically all the capitalist governments is that at no time has there appeared in the Soviet Union any “Fifth Column” to obstruct or sabotage the war effort in the interests in the enemy. In other countries there had always been groups in the government or leading political circles who advocated collaboration with Hitler or aided in capitulation to him. In the Soviet Union no one has been able to point to a single figure or group of great or small importance who favors the victory of the Nazis.</p>
<p>Like everyone else, Davies originally doubted the validity of the Moscow Trials. His book shows that after the shooting of the Red Army generals without public trial, his dispatches were crowded with speculations whether this marked the beginning of Stalin’s downfall. Late in 1941, however, he sharply changed his mind.</p>
<p>He tells how at a lecture three days after Hitler invaded the USSR, someone in the audience asked: “What about Fifth Columnists in Russia?” “Off the anvil, I said: ‘There aren’t any – they shot them.’”</p>
<p>Then, thinking this over after the lecture, “there came a flash in my mind of a possible new significance to some of the things that happened in Russia when I was there.” So he hastened to read his old dispatches, he says, and the old entries in his diary – and to reconsider.</p>
<p>He brings forward no new documents or fresh analysis to account for his sudden change of mind. He does not mention – let alone try to answer – the findings of the Dewey International Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials, which after searching and thorough investigation pronounced the trials to be frameups; he does not attempt to explain any of the fantastic contradictions about the trials that led the whole world to reject their validity.</p>
<p>Quickly he reached the conclusion that he had been wrong; that the trials had not been frameups; that the defendants, many of them Lenin’s comrades-in-arms who had led the October Revolution which created the Soviet Union, had really been guilty of plotting to hand the USSR over to the fascists.<br>
</p>
<h4>What He Bases His Argument On</h4>
<p class="fst">Davies does not try to convince anyone of the validity of the trials by what happened at them, and therefore it is unnecessary here to add anything to previous comment on the frameups. But Davies <em>does</em> ask the world to accept the Moscow Trials now because something happened in 1941, because a Fifth Column failed to appear during the war with Germany. This reasoning, weak though it is, requires an answer.</p>
<p>To understand this answer it is necessary to understand the basic difference between the capitalist states and the Soviet Union as a workers state. In the USSR there is no capitalist class. This class disappeared when the economy of the country was nationalized. The basis for a “Fifth Column” disappeared when the capitalist class disappeared. No important force in the Soviet Union wants the return of capitalism – and that is why Hitler can find no “Fifth Column”. In capitalist countries, however, as in France, there are always important sections of the ruling class which are willing to come to terms with Hitler, rather than face a revolution by the masses in their own country.</p>
<p>There is no “Fifth Column” in the USSR – but the credit for this does not belong to the butcher in Kremlin for his murder of his pro-Soviet political opponents. The “Fifth Column” was destroyed in the USSR more than 20 years ago by those who, under Lenin and Trotsky, replaced capitalism with a workers and farmers government.</p>
<p>Davies argues that Stalin strengthened the USSR by murdering the old Bolsheviks and the leaders of the Red Army, industry and agriculture. But it is clear that if the only reason he can give is the absence of a Fifth Column exterminated 20 years ago, then the trials and purges weakened, not strengthened, the resistance of the Soviet Union to imperialist attack.</p>
<p>Davies’ chief conclusion from his argument is that: “There are no saboteurs, secret agents, or Fifth Columnists to cooperate with the invaders, because the Russians were a. sufficiently far-sighted to eliminate them before it was too late. That is a fact which other liberty-loving nations might well ponder.”</p>
<p>We know what Davies means: that the United States government should proceed with frame-up trials against its political opponents just as Stalin did.</p>
<p>To this we can only reply: Yes, the Russians <em>were</em> far-sighted. They eliminated their “Fifth Column” 20 years ago. American workers must “ponder” this. And they must join the movement, before it is “too late”, to eliminate the “Fifth Column” here. The way to do it is by helping to establish a Workers and Farmers Government in the United States.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> <strong>Mission to Moscow</strong>. By Joseph E. Davies. 659 pages. Simon and Schuster. $3.00.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>Note by ETOL</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#fa" name="na">A.</a> This article was originally attributed to William F. Warde (i.e. George Novack) but a note in the following issue corrected this to attribute the article to Anthony Massini (i.e. George Breitman. (<strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/v06n05-jan-31-1942.pdf" target="new">Vol. 6 No. 5</a>, 31 January 1942, p. 4)</p>
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Anthony Massini
Davies’ Book and the Elimination
of the ‘Fifth Column’
(24 January 1942)
From The Militant, Vol 6 No. 4, 24 January 1942, p. 4. [A]
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Six months ago the people in this country were told by the so-called military experts that the Soviet Union didn’t have a chance in the world against Hitler. Since then, the stubborn resistance of the first workers state to Hitler’s attack, even when the German armies were advancing, has aroused much admiration. And since late November, when at Rostov and Moscow and then along the whole front the Red Army, aided by detachments of armed workers, began to gain ground and drive back the German troops, popular interest in the USSR has grown and is seeking the explanation.
If Joseph E. Davies’ Mission to Moscow [1] becomes a best seller, it will be because the author, in his capacity as Ambassador to the USSR for two or three years, is supposed to have discovered the explanation and written it down in his official dispatches to the State Department which make up the bulk of this book.
But actually the reader will not find an honest explanation of the Soviet Union’s resistance in this book. Instead he will find the same false explanations that he can read any time in the Daily Worker or the New Masses.
Davies “Reconsiders” the Trials
The world already knows that one of the chief differences between the Soviet Union’s war against Hitler and the war of practically all the capitalist governments is that at no time has there appeared in the Soviet Union any “Fifth Column” to obstruct or sabotage the war effort in the interests in the enemy. In other countries there had always been groups in the government or leading political circles who advocated collaboration with Hitler or aided in capitulation to him. In the Soviet Union no one has been able to point to a single figure or group of great or small importance who favors the victory of the Nazis.
Like everyone else, Davies originally doubted the validity of the Moscow Trials. His book shows that after the shooting of the Red Army generals without public trial, his dispatches were crowded with speculations whether this marked the beginning of Stalin’s downfall. Late in 1941, however, he sharply changed his mind.
He tells how at a lecture three days after Hitler invaded the USSR, someone in the audience asked: “What about Fifth Columnists in Russia?” “Off the anvil, I said: ‘There aren’t any – they shot them.’”
Then, thinking this over after the lecture, “there came a flash in my mind of a possible new significance to some of the things that happened in Russia when I was there.” So he hastened to read his old dispatches, he says, and the old entries in his diary – and to reconsider.
He brings forward no new documents or fresh analysis to account for his sudden change of mind. He does not mention – let alone try to answer – the findings of the Dewey International Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials, which after searching and thorough investigation pronounced the trials to be frameups; he does not attempt to explain any of the fantastic contradictions about the trials that led the whole world to reject their validity.
Quickly he reached the conclusion that he had been wrong; that the trials had not been frameups; that the defendants, many of them Lenin’s comrades-in-arms who had led the October Revolution which created the Soviet Union, had really been guilty of plotting to hand the USSR over to the fascists.
What He Bases His Argument On
Davies does not try to convince anyone of the validity of the trials by what happened at them, and therefore it is unnecessary here to add anything to previous comment on the frameups. But Davies does ask the world to accept the Moscow Trials now because something happened in 1941, because a Fifth Column failed to appear during the war with Germany. This reasoning, weak though it is, requires an answer.
To understand this answer it is necessary to understand the basic difference between the capitalist states and the Soviet Union as a workers state. In the USSR there is no capitalist class. This class disappeared when the economy of the country was nationalized. The basis for a “Fifth Column” disappeared when the capitalist class disappeared. No important force in the Soviet Union wants the return of capitalism – and that is why Hitler can find no “Fifth Column”. In capitalist countries, however, as in France, there are always important sections of the ruling class which are willing to come to terms with Hitler, rather than face a revolution by the masses in their own country.
There is no “Fifth Column” in the USSR – but the credit for this does not belong to the butcher in Kremlin for his murder of his pro-Soviet political opponents. The “Fifth Column” was destroyed in the USSR more than 20 years ago by those who, under Lenin and Trotsky, replaced capitalism with a workers and farmers government.
Davies argues that Stalin strengthened the USSR by murdering the old Bolsheviks and the leaders of the Red Army, industry and agriculture. But it is clear that if the only reason he can give is the absence of a Fifth Column exterminated 20 years ago, then the trials and purges weakened, not strengthened, the resistance of the Soviet Union to imperialist attack.
Davies’ chief conclusion from his argument is that: “There are no saboteurs, secret agents, or Fifth Columnists to cooperate with the invaders, because the Russians were a. sufficiently far-sighted to eliminate them before it was too late. That is a fact which other liberty-loving nations might well ponder.”
We know what Davies means: that the United States government should proceed with frame-up trials against its political opponents just as Stalin did.
To this we can only reply: Yes, the Russians were far-sighted. They eliminated their “Fifth Column” 20 years ago. American workers must “ponder” this. And they must join the movement, before it is “too late”, to eliminate the “Fifth Column” here. The way to do it is by helping to establish a Workers and Farmers Government in the United States.
*
Footnote
1. Mission to Moscow. By Joseph E. Davies. 659 pages. Simon and Schuster. $3.00.
*
Note by ETOL
A. This article was originally attributed to William F. Warde (i.e. George Novack) but a note in the following issue corrected this to attribute the article to Anthony Massini (i.e. George Breitman. (The Militant, Vol. 6 No. 5, 31 January 1942, p. 4)
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h1>Churchill and the Negroes</h1>
<h3>(25 October 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_43" target="new">Vol. V No. 43</a>, 25 October 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">William Pickens, A. Philip Randolph and others who support the war program as a “war for democracy” leap into print every time something happens which shows that Hitlerism is a threat to the interests of the Negro people. But they never have a word to say any more about the British Empire and its attitude toward the Negro people.</p>
<p>Both Pickens and Randolph are leading members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP has just issued a letter addressed to Prime Minister Churchill describing five types of racial discrimination against Negroes being practiced by British agencies in this country.</p>
<p>But neither Pickens nor Randolph will make any attempt to answer this letter or deny what it says or to explain how it is that a government which is supposed to be fighting for “democracy” is guilty of the same kind of discrimination practiced by the Nazis against the racial minorities under their control. They will answer this indictment of British imperialism with silence – as they do all other questions which expose the fraud in their talk about a war for democracy.</p>
<p>The charges in the NAACP letter show that the acts of discrimination complained of are not isolated or accidental cases of Jim Crowism, but rather parts of a larger pattern which reflects the views of the British government. Let us briefly review them:<br>
</p>
<a name="s1"></a>
<h3>Five Kinds of British Jim Crow</h3>
<ol>
<li>Charles M. Ashe, fully qualified commercial pilot and instructor, was refused by the British Air Commission in Washington a job ferrying bombers from this country to England, solely because of his color. He was told that according to the regulations of the RAF Ferry Command, “all applicants must be of the white race.”<br>
</li>
<li>Dr. Walter W. King of New York City volunteered through the American Red Cross, in response to recent appeals from England for American doctors, to serve in England. He was rejected solely because of his color. He was told by the Red Cross:</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
<p class="quoteb">“It is true that only white citizens of the United States are eligible for the Doctors for Britain project. The American Red Cross did not set the standards which are being followed. The American Red Cross is acting upon instructions and cannot deviate.”</p>
</blockquote>
<ol start="3">
<li>The NAACP letter continues:</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
<p class="quoteb">“Touching appeals have been made to Americans to contribute their blood to blood banks to be sent to save the lives of men, women and children in Great Britain who, without such aid would die from grievous wounds inflicted by Nazi bombs. Instructions have come to the United States from Great Britain, we are informed, that only ‘white’ blood is wanted. Does this mean that English men, women and children would prefer dying to living, if the balance in favor of life is non-Aryan blood?”</p>
</blockquote>
<ol start="4">
<li>The British government has asked the United States government to refuse to send any Negroes, regardless of qualifications, to help build naval and air bases in islands of the British West Indies, and “visas are denied by British consulates to highly qualified American Negroes who wish to work in the British Caribbean Islands.” The NAACP letter, after pointing out that Negroes form 90 to 95% of the population of these islands, asks:</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
<p class="quoteb">“Does the British Government bar these American Negroes lest the example of qualified Negroes filling executive and other official positions arouse too great ambition on the part of underprivileged Negro British subjects in these islands?”/p>
</p></blockquote>
<ol start="5">
<li>The British Purchasing Commission in Washington has turned down all Negro applicants for employment, regardless of their qualifications, just as it has discriminated against Jews, South Irish and Germans.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The NAACP press release on its letter to Churchill concludes with the statement: “No answer has yet been received.” We do not guarantee that no answer will be received in the future, but we are positive that no satisfactory answer will ever come from Churchill. For Churchill is in full accord with the policies being carried out by his agents in the United States.</p>
<p>Those who have any doubts on this score need only read what he had to say about his much-publicized Eight Point <em>Atlantic Charter</em> with Roosevelt.</p>
<p>Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee, head of the British Labor Party, who supports Churchill’s war and tries to cover up its reactionary character, shot off his mouth that “Colored races, as well as white, will share the benefits of the Churchill-Roosevelt <em>Atlantic Charter</em>” and that after the war there will be “an ever-increasing measure of self-government in Africa and ... an ever-rising standard of life for all the peoples of Africa ...”</p>
<p>A few days later Churchill set the record straight on this question, for he would rather be honest than have the colonial people getting any false ideas and taking all the talk about democracy too seriously.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“At the Atlantic meeting,” he said, according to a censored report from the London correspondent of the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, “we had in mind primarily restoration of the sovereignty, self-government and national life of the States and nations of Europe ... That is quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown.”</p>
<p class="fst">When Pickens, Randolph and Co. remain silent on such questions, they help only to conceal the reactionary character of the British imperialism they want the masses to defend. Treacherous politics of this kind leads in the end to betrayal of the interests of the masses in their struggle against Jim Crow at home.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
Churchill and the Negroes
(25 October 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 43, 25 October 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
William Pickens, A. Philip Randolph and others who support the war program as a “war for democracy” leap into print every time something happens which shows that Hitlerism is a threat to the interests of the Negro people. But they never have a word to say any more about the British Empire and its attitude toward the Negro people.
Both Pickens and Randolph are leading members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP has just issued a letter addressed to Prime Minister Churchill describing five types of racial discrimination against Negroes being practiced by British agencies in this country.
But neither Pickens nor Randolph will make any attempt to answer this letter or deny what it says or to explain how it is that a government which is supposed to be fighting for “democracy” is guilty of the same kind of discrimination practiced by the Nazis against the racial minorities under their control. They will answer this indictment of British imperialism with silence – as they do all other questions which expose the fraud in their talk about a war for democracy.
The charges in the NAACP letter show that the acts of discrimination complained of are not isolated or accidental cases of Jim Crowism, but rather parts of a larger pattern which reflects the views of the British government. Let us briefly review them:
Five Kinds of British Jim Crow
Charles M. Ashe, fully qualified commercial pilot and instructor, was refused by the British Air Commission in Washington a job ferrying bombers from this country to England, solely because of his color. He was told that according to the regulations of the RAF Ferry Command, “all applicants must be of the white race.”
Dr. Walter W. King of New York City volunteered through the American Red Cross, in response to recent appeals from England for American doctors, to serve in England. He was rejected solely because of his color. He was told by the Red Cross:
“It is true that only white citizens of the United States are eligible for the Doctors for Britain project. The American Red Cross did not set the standards which are being followed. The American Red Cross is acting upon instructions and cannot deviate.”
The NAACP letter continues:
“Touching appeals have been made to Americans to contribute their blood to blood banks to be sent to save the lives of men, women and children in Great Britain who, without such aid would die from grievous wounds inflicted by Nazi bombs. Instructions have come to the United States from Great Britain, we are informed, that only ‘white’ blood is wanted. Does this mean that English men, women and children would prefer dying to living, if the balance in favor of life is non-Aryan blood?”
The British government has asked the United States government to refuse to send any Negroes, regardless of qualifications, to help build naval and air bases in islands of the British West Indies, and “visas are denied by British consulates to highly qualified American Negroes who wish to work in the British Caribbean Islands.” The NAACP letter, after pointing out that Negroes form 90 to 95% of the population of these islands, asks:
“Does the British Government bar these American Negroes lest the example of qualified Negroes filling executive and other official positions arouse too great ambition on the part of underprivileged Negro British subjects in these islands?”/p>
The British Purchasing Commission in Washington has turned down all Negro applicants for employment, regardless of their qualifications, just as it has discriminated against Jews, South Irish and Germans.
The NAACP press release on its letter to Churchill concludes with the statement: “No answer has yet been received.” We do not guarantee that no answer will be received in the future, but we are positive that no satisfactory answer will ever come from Churchill. For Churchill is in full accord with the policies being carried out by his agents in the United States.
Those who have any doubts on this score need only read what he had to say about his much-publicized Eight Point Atlantic Charter with Roosevelt.
Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee, head of the British Labor Party, who supports Churchill’s war and tries to cover up its reactionary character, shot off his mouth that “Colored races, as well as white, will share the benefits of the Churchill-Roosevelt Atlantic Charter” and that after the war there will be “an ever-increasing measure of self-government in Africa and ... an ever-rising standard of life for all the peoples of Africa ...”
A few days later Churchill set the record straight on this question, for he would rather be honest than have the colonial people getting any false ideas and taking all the talk about democracy too seriously.
“At the Atlantic meeting,” he said, according to a censored report from the London correspondent of the Pittsburgh Courier, “we had in mind primarily restoration of the sovereignty, self-government and national life of the States and nations of Europe ... That is quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown.”
When Pickens, Randolph and Co. remain silent on such questions, they help only to conceal the reactionary character of the British imperialism they want the masses to defend. Treacherous politics of this kind leads in the end to betrayal of the interests of the masses in their struggle against Jim Crow at home.
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<h2>>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>A New Spirit</h1>
<h3>(21 June 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_25" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 25</a>, 21 June 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">One of the most dramatic stories in last week’s news was the case of Leroy Hutson, Negro radio engineer who had just bought and moved into a home in Wall Township, N.J., a small, all-white community which used to be the Eastern regional headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Hutson got some anonymous phone calls asking if he intended to stay in his new home; he naturally answered that he did. Two days after he moved in, a 12-foot fiery cross was burned in front of his home.</p>
<p>t was a “terrifying experience” for the Hutson family, but the interesting thing is what Mr. Hutson did about it. He immediately phoned a friend in nearby Asbury Park, who came as quickly as he could with a shotgun. Then he called the state police and reported what had happened. But he did not rely on the police alone. A phone call was sent to another friend, and this friend got in touch with the Asbury Park branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.</p>
<p>n short order, nine cars arrived with about 25 Negroes, who, according to the <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, were “armed with shotguns, pistols, knives, pitchforks and other weapons.” They searched the area and kept a guard around the Hutson home for several hours “until they were persuaded to leave by the state police, who took over.”</p>
<p>The Negro people are learning more and more that to protect themselves, they must rely first of all on their own organized strength. The defense guard organized in the Hutson case should serve as an example to be followed by the Negro and labor movements, and should serve as a warning to the vigilante groups that 'the Negro people are ready to protect themselves vigorously against mob action and terror.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The reason that Negroes have such little confidence in protection from the police is that the police are notorious for their brutality against Negroes. Take, for instance, the recent cold-blooded murder by Detroit cops of a 15-year old Negro youth, Leon Mosley.</p>
<p>Cops had stopped him while he was in a car which had been allegedly stolen, and dragged him from it. Four cops proceeded to beat the boy mercilessly till his face was streaming blood, and when he staggered off a few yards, shot him in the back. As he lay on the ground, dying, one of the cops hit him in the head with a gun butt, breaking his neck.</p>
<p>That happened in Detroit, and the same kind of brutality is duplicated by the police in most of the other Negro communities, in the North just as in the South. Organized action by the Negro and labor movements is needed not only against the vigilantes operating outside the law, but also against the police who commit atrocities in the name of the law.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">Another name in the news last week was Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram, Georgia sharecropper framed-up with her two teen-age sons for the self-defense slaying of a white man who had attacked her. Mrs. Ingram and her children were saved from execution by the mass protest in their behalf, and their sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Now, lawyers representing the Ingrams and the NAACP have filed arguments with the Georgia Supreme Court, asking for a new trial. Continued mass pressure by Negro and labor groups can win freedom for the Ingrams just as it saved them from death.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">Last week’s <strong>Militant</strong> mentioned a questionnaire sent by the NAACP to 13,000 Negro male students to determine their reactions to the Randolph-Reynolds proposals for a civil disobedience campaign against military Jim Crow. But the short report printed in this paper dealt only with one aspect of the poll. Actually, the NAACP reported, 71% of the 2,280 answers received were sympathetic to the proposed civil disobedience campaign.</p>
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>Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
A New Spirit
(21 June 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 25, 21 June 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
One of the most dramatic stories in last week’s news was the case of Leroy Hutson, Negro radio engineer who had just bought and moved into a home in Wall Township, N.J., a small, all-white community which used to be the Eastern regional headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Hutson got some anonymous phone calls asking if he intended to stay in his new home; he naturally answered that he did. Two days after he moved in, a 12-foot fiery cross was burned in front of his home.
t was a “terrifying experience” for the Hutson family, but the interesting thing is what Mr. Hutson did about it. He immediately phoned a friend in nearby Asbury Park, who came as quickly as he could with a shotgun. Then he called the state police and reported what had happened. But he did not rely on the police alone. A phone call was sent to another friend, and this friend got in touch with the Asbury Park branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
n short order, nine cars arrived with about 25 Negroes, who, according to the N.Y. Times, were “armed with shotguns, pistols, knives, pitchforks and other weapons.” They searched the area and kept a guard around the Hutson home for several hours “until they were persuaded to leave by the state police, who took over.”
The Negro people are learning more and more that to protect themselves, they must rely first of all on their own organized strength. The defense guard organized in the Hutson case should serve as an example to be followed by the Negro and labor movements, and should serve as a warning to the vigilante groups that 'the Negro people are ready to protect themselves vigorously against mob action and terror.
* * *
The reason that Negroes have such little confidence in protection from the police is that the police are notorious for their brutality against Negroes. Take, for instance, the recent cold-blooded murder by Detroit cops of a 15-year old Negro youth, Leon Mosley.
Cops had stopped him while he was in a car which had been allegedly stolen, and dragged him from it. Four cops proceeded to beat the boy mercilessly till his face was streaming blood, and when he staggered off a few yards, shot him in the back. As he lay on the ground, dying, one of the cops hit him in the head with a gun butt, breaking his neck.
That happened in Detroit, and the same kind of brutality is duplicated by the police in most of the other Negro communities, in the North just as in the South. Organized action by the Negro and labor movements is needed not only against the vigilantes operating outside the law, but also against the police who commit atrocities in the name of the law.
* * *
Another name in the news last week was Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram, Georgia sharecropper framed-up with her two teen-age sons for the self-defense slaying of a white man who had attacked her. Mrs. Ingram and her children were saved from execution by the mass protest in their behalf, and their sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Now, lawyers representing the Ingrams and the NAACP have filed arguments with the Georgia Supreme Court, asking for a new trial. Continued mass pressure by Negro and labor groups can win freedom for the Ingrams just as it saved them from death.
* * *
Last week’s Militant mentioned a questionnaire sent by the NAACP to 13,000 Negro male students to determine their reactions to the Randolph-Reynolds proposals for a civil disobedience campaign against military Jim Crow. But the short report printed in this paper dealt only with one aspect of the poll. Actually, the NAACP reported, 71% of the 2,280 answers received were sympathetic to the proposed civil disobedience campaign.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>Another Negro Lynched</h1>
<h3>(6 December 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_49" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 49</a>, 6 December 1948, p. 4.<br>
ranscribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Civil rights promises come and civil rights promises go, but lynch terror continues as usual in the South, and as usual the. government does nothing about it. The latest evidence of this grisly fact is the story of Robert Mallard and his wife, Amy.</p>
<p>On the night of Nov. 20, less than three weeks after the elections, Mallard, accompanied by his wife, 18-month old son and two other persons, was driving to his home, 20 miles outside of Vidalia, Georgia, when he found the road blocked by a group of automobiles and a gang of 50 to 75 hooded men. Mallard was dragged from his seat and shot to death; the mob would not even permit his horror-stricken family and friends to take the body, which they left lying by the roadside.</p>
<p>For several days the fact that a man had been lynched was hushed up and kept out of the press. When a newspaper finally did break through the curtain of silence on Nov. 23, and it was revealed that Mrs. Mallard accused the Ku Klux Klan of the crime, the Georgia authorities moved into action – and arrested Mrs. Mallard at the funeral of her husband, charging her with his murder!</p>
<p>This was so raw that the Georgia police were later compelled to release her. But, as this is written, they have not yet arrested the member of the mob whom she had positively identified, or the owner of an automobile which she recognized in the roadblock. Add those facts together, and you will understand the real attitude of Georgia authorities toward prosecuting known white lynchers of a Negro.</p>
<p>That’s the attitude of the Southern ruling class – but what about the attitude of the government in Washington? It’s substantially the same. Truman’s agents are not trying to arrest Mrs. Mallard, but neither are they trying to do anything to apprehend or punish the lynch mob.</p>
<p>Walter White assures us that Truman assured him that his civil rights program, including an anti-lynching bill, will get top priority in the 81st Congress. It remains to be seen if Truman will actually do this, or if it will have any success if he does.</p>
<p>This does not mean that foes of lynching should sit back now and wait to see what will happen next year. If we do that, little or nothing will be accomplished and the lynch murderers will remain free to continue their savage practices. What we need now is the mobilization of mass pressure, through a conference of Negro and labor organizations in Washington to force the new Congress to take appropriate action.</p>
<p>Finally, we must recognize an important truth – the passage of an anti-lynching bill will not automatically end lynch terror any more than the presence of an anti-murder law in the Georgia statutes has prevented the mob murder of Negroes. It is possible to have an anti-lynching law that will achieve nothing, just as it is possible to have one that has some real teeth in it. And much will depend not only on the kind of law passed, but also on. who enforces it, and how.</p>
<p>That is why, while pressing for the strongest possible kind of anti-lynch law, we must also work unceasingly for the abolition of the capitalist-bred Jim-Crow system that encourages lynching and for the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Government that would really be concerned with wiping out terror and violence against minority groups.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
Another Negro Lynched
(6 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 49, 6 December 1948, p. 4.
ranscribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Civil rights promises come and civil rights promises go, but lynch terror continues as usual in the South, and as usual the. government does nothing about it. The latest evidence of this grisly fact is the story of Robert Mallard and his wife, Amy.
On the night of Nov. 20, less than three weeks after the elections, Mallard, accompanied by his wife, 18-month old son and two other persons, was driving to his home, 20 miles outside of Vidalia, Georgia, when he found the road blocked by a group of automobiles and a gang of 50 to 75 hooded men. Mallard was dragged from his seat and shot to death; the mob would not even permit his horror-stricken family and friends to take the body, which they left lying by the roadside.
For several days the fact that a man had been lynched was hushed up and kept out of the press. When a newspaper finally did break through the curtain of silence on Nov. 23, and it was revealed that Mrs. Mallard accused the Ku Klux Klan of the crime, the Georgia authorities moved into action – and arrested Mrs. Mallard at the funeral of her husband, charging her with his murder!
This was so raw that the Georgia police were later compelled to release her. But, as this is written, they have not yet arrested the member of the mob whom she had positively identified, or the owner of an automobile which she recognized in the roadblock. Add those facts together, and you will understand the real attitude of Georgia authorities toward prosecuting known white lynchers of a Negro.
That’s the attitude of the Southern ruling class – but what about the attitude of the government in Washington? It’s substantially the same. Truman’s agents are not trying to arrest Mrs. Mallard, but neither are they trying to do anything to apprehend or punish the lynch mob.
Walter White assures us that Truman assured him that his civil rights program, including an anti-lynching bill, will get top priority in the 81st Congress. It remains to be seen if Truman will actually do this, or if it will have any success if he does.
This does not mean that foes of lynching should sit back now and wait to see what will happen next year. If we do that, little or nothing will be accomplished and the lynch murderers will remain free to continue their savage practices. What we need now is the mobilization of mass pressure, through a conference of Negro and labor organizations in Washington to force the new Congress to take appropriate action.
Finally, we must recognize an important truth – the passage of an anti-lynching bill will not automatically end lynch terror any more than the presence of an anti-murder law in the Georgia statutes has prevented the mob murder of Negroes. It is possible to have an anti-lynching law that will achieve nothing, just as it is possible to have one that has some real teeth in it. And much will depend not only on the kind of law passed, but also on. who enforces it, and how.
That is why, while pressing for the strongest possible kind of anti-lynch law, we must also work unceasingly for the abolition of the capitalist-bred Jim-Crow system that encourages lynching and for the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Government that would really be concerned with wiping out terror and violence against minority groups.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Can the Workers Take Power?</h1>
<h3>(19 April 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_16" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 16</a>, 19 April 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">In contrast to the working class and its struggle for socialism, the capitalist class possessed many relative advantages in its struggle to overthrow feudalism and establish its own system. Even so, it took the capitalists several centuries before they won power. Understanding that enables us to see how the renegades from Marxism (like Jean Vannier in the March <strong>Partisan Review</strong>) are deliberately stacking the cards against the working class when they conclude that it lacks the “political capacity” to take power because it did not do so in the first 100 years after the <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong>.</p>
<p>One of the easiest ways to distort history and muddle up its lessons is by isolating events and trends, that is, approaching them without reference to comparable phenomena that provide us with the basis for making valid comparisons. That is what Vannier does. He “neglects” to discuss the political capacity of the workers during the first century of their existence in relation to the political capacity of the capitalists during an analogous stage of development. Instead, he discusses the workers’ political capacity in an idealistically abstract form, showing that it does not measure up to some perfect “norm” of political capacity. (And this is what he calls “a rational and methodical scrutiny of the lessons of the past”!)</p>
<p>But by using an all-sided approach to the history of the last 100 years, we are justified in drawing diametrically opposite conclusions from Vannier’s. Here are a few that are pertinent:</p>
<p>The workers’ struggle for power does not proceed in a straight line, ever onward and upward, without defeats and retreats and detours and lulls – any more than the capitalist struggle for power did. The working class is not invested with some “ideal” political wisdom, enabling it to skip over all preparatory and intermediate stages – any more than the capitalists were. Like all previous classes contending for power, the workers are bound to grope for solutions from their own experience, to make mistakes and to learn from them, to test their leaders in action before discarding them and selecting new ones.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Bolshevik Party</h4>
<p class="fst">To illustrate this point, we should bear in mind that while Marx and Engels outlined the broad socialist goal in the middle of the 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1900’s – in Lenin’s time – that light was first shed on the kind of party needed for the conquest of power and on the way to build it. A conscious understanding of the nature of the revolutionary party was not grasped, therefore, even by the vanguard forces, until less than 50 years ago.</p>
<p>In short, the lessons of the last century are the lessons of a new class making its first entrance into the political arena. They prove the difficulties in the way of making a working class revolution, not the impossibility of it. Vannier’s contrary conclusion has no basis in historical analysis; it is pure prejudice, arbitrarily imposed on the facts in order to “justify” his own flight from the camp of working class revolution.</p>
<p><em>Political capacity, like “maturity,” is a relative factor; it is least of all a fixed and final category. When Vannier sneers that the “political capacity of the working classes has revealed itself as a never-ending capacity for being ‘betrayed’,” then we are forced to recall that the capitalist class too displayed “political incapacity” for a long time and that it too was often betrayed by its leaders. But that didn’t stop it from learning lessons, choosing new leaders and making a revolution later on. Why should the capitalist class be judged by one historical standard and the working class by another?</em></p>
<p>Vannier’s attempt to forever disqualify the working class from taking power is so weak that he trips to strengthen it by repeating one of the standard slanders of the renegades. Stalinism, he declares, “is as much an effect as a cause” of the workers’ incapacity. If this means anything at all, it means that the working class is to blame for Stalinism and Social Democracy because it continues to “tolerate” their leadership.</p>
<p>Like every other big lie, there is a tiny grain of truth hidden in this one. The working class can be held “responsible” for the Stalinists and Social Democrats in the sense that it hasn’t yet awakened to the enormity of their crimes, repudiated them and destroyed their influence. But if that is the criterion to be used, then it could be just as easily claimed that the working class is also “responsible” for capitalism and fascism and imperialist war in the sense that it hasn’t yet used its invincible potential power to finish off these evils too. Vannier does not carry his ridiculous argument to this extreme, but that’s his inconsistency, not ours.</p>
<p>What is the real relationship between the workers and their bankrupt leaders? We must know the answer to that question before we can decide if the workers’ continued adherence to these leaders is proof of their incapacity to take power.<br>
</p>
<h4>Leaders and Classes</h4>
<p class="fst">Vannier plainly holds the concept that the leadership “reflects” or “represents” the class, directly and simply. If this is not so, he asks by implication, then why do the workers “tolerate” such leaders ? Green and Murray would no doubt agree with Vannier that they represent or reflect the American workers, and Vannier may accept Togliatti’s claim to represent the Italian workers. But the Marxists dissent violently.</p>
<p>The truth is, as Trotsky more than once pointed out, the workers don’t select their leaders the way they pick out a pair of shoes in a well-stocked shoe store. The actual process is far more complex, the leadership being a product both of the struggle between the classes and of the clash; between conflicting and often antagonistic layers within the working class itself.</p>
<p>It is a great mistake in this connection to think; of the working class as a single political entity. Actually it is composed of different strata – official labor leaders, privileged skilled workers, unskilled laborers, the most intensively exploited workers who are often not even unionized, etc. A struggle goes on among these different strata – some of whom are reactionary, some passive, some revolutionary, with the relationship of forces within the working class changing under different conditions.</p>
<p><em>The leadership of the class is the product of the ascendancy of one or more strata over the others at the time of its selection. The emergence of a conservative or reactionary leadership is the result of the defeat of the revolutionary elements. It is not and cannot be a permanent and lasting defeat because the struggle continues after the leadership is selected, paving the way for a reversal of the situation at a later stage.</em></p>
<p>Once established, the leadership may succeed in holding its position for a much longer time than the relationship of forces which produced it, not only because of the inertia of the class but also because of the power of compulsion wielded by the leadership. It is highly misleading, therefore, to conclude that a leadership elected but a few months ago necessarily reflects accurately the mood of the class today.</p>
<p>Moreover, the leadership, once it is established, tends to rise above the class and thus becomes subject to the pressure and influence of enemy classes. Trotsky pointed out correctly that the American trade union leadership, for example, “reflects” not so much the workers as the capitalists.</p>
<p>The working class is slow to change its leaders – a source of its strength in some ways, a source of its weakness in others. It tends to “tolerate” a degenerate leadership until the contradiction between this leadership and the interests of the class is revealed by the shock of great events. And even then it tends to caution in elevating a new leadership until convinced that it is genuinely superior to the old.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Contradiction</h4>
<p class="fst">But this slowness, this caution, does not at all eliminate or remove what Trotsky called “the profound contradiction between the organic, deep-going, insurmountable urge of the toiling masses to tear themselves free from the bloody capitalist chaos, and the conservative, . patriotic, utterly bourgeois character of the outlived labor leadership.” Superficial observers, looking only at the surface, do not see this contradiction and that is why they identify the leadership with the class. But this contradiction remains, and continues, along with the internal contradictions of capitalism, to affect the struggle for leadership within the class, generating opportunities for the revolutionary forces to challenge the reactionary leaders who reflect capitalist pressure.</p>
<p><em>The fact that conservatives head the workers’ movement far more often than the revolutionists testifies not to the historical law that even a progressive class is able to challenge the enormous pressures and violence of the ruling class only on special occasions, and that such extraordinary exertions of strength can be maintained only for short periods. The importance of the revolutionary party is that it alone can lead the class in taking advantage of these exceptional situations to make the revolution and take power.</em></p>
<p>Up to now, we have examined the arguments about the workers’ capacity to take power without reference to the most instructive experience of all, the Russian revolution of 1917, which will be taken up in our next article.</p>
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George Breitman
Can the Workers Take Power?
(19 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 16, 19 April 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In contrast to the working class and its struggle for socialism, the capitalist class possessed many relative advantages in its struggle to overthrow feudalism and establish its own system. Even so, it took the capitalists several centuries before they won power. Understanding that enables us to see how the renegades from Marxism (like Jean Vannier in the March Partisan Review) are deliberately stacking the cards against the working class when they conclude that it lacks the “political capacity” to take power because it did not do so in the first 100 years after the Communist Manifesto.
One of the easiest ways to distort history and muddle up its lessons is by isolating events and trends, that is, approaching them without reference to comparable phenomena that provide us with the basis for making valid comparisons. That is what Vannier does. He “neglects” to discuss the political capacity of the workers during the first century of their existence in relation to the political capacity of the capitalists during an analogous stage of development. Instead, he discusses the workers’ political capacity in an idealistically abstract form, showing that it does not measure up to some perfect “norm” of political capacity. (And this is what he calls “a rational and methodical scrutiny of the lessons of the past”!)
But by using an all-sided approach to the history of the last 100 years, we are justified in drawing diametrically opposite conclusions from Vannier’s. Here are a few that are pertinent:
The workers’ struggle for power does not proceed in a straight line, ever onward and upward, without defeats and retreats and detours and lulls – any more than the capitalist struggle for power did. The working class is not invested with some “ideal” political wisdom, enabling it to skip over all preparatory and intermediate stages – any more than the capitalists were. Like all previous classes contending for power, the workers are bound to grope for solutions from their own experience, to make mistakes and to learn from them, to test their leaders in action before discarding them and selecting new ones.
A Bolshevik Party
To illustrate this point, we should bear in mind that while Marx and Engels outlined the broad socialist goal in the middle of the 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1900’s – in Lenin’s time – that light was first shed on the kind of party needed for the conquest of power and on the way to build it. A conscious understanding of the nature of the revolutionary party was not grasped, therefore, even by the vanguard forces, until less than 50 years ago.
In short, the lessons of the last century are the lessons of a new class making its first entrance into the political arena. They prove the difficulties in the way of making a working class revolution, not the impossibility of it. Vannier’s contrary conclusion has no basis in historical analysis; it is pure prejudice, arbitrarily imposed on the facts in order to “justify” his own flight from the camp of working class revolution.
Political capacity, like “maturity,” is a relative factor; it is least of all a fixed and final category. When Vannier sneers that the “political capacity of the working classes has revealed itself as a never-ending capacity for being ‘betrayed’,” then we are forced to recall that the capitalist class too displayed “political incapacity” for a long time and that it too was often betrayed by its leaders. But that didn’t stop it from learning lessons, choosing new leaders and making a revolution later on. Why should the capitalist class be judged by one historical standard and the working class by another?
Vannier’s attempt to forever disqualify the working class from taking power is so weak that he trips to strengthen it by repeating one of the standard slanders of the renegades. Stalinism, he declares, “is as much an effect as a cause” of the workers’ incapacity. If this means anything at all, it means that the working class is to blame for Stalinism and Social Democracy because it continues to “tolerate” their leadership.
Like every other big lie, there is a tiny grain of truth hidden in this one. The working class can be held “responsible” for the Stalinists and Social Democrats in the sense that it hasn’t yet awakened to the enormity of their crimes, repudiated them and destroyed their influence. But if that is the criterion to be used, then it could be just as easily claimed that the working class is also “responsible” for capitalism and fascism and imperialist war in the sense that it hasn’t yet used its invincible potential power to finish off these evils too. Vannier does not carry his ridiculous argument to this extreme, but that’s his inconsistency, not ours.
What is the real relationship between the workers and their bankrupt leaders? We must know the answer to that question before we can decide if the workers’ continued adherence to these leaders is proof of their incapacity to take power.
Leaders and Classes
Vannier plainly holds the concept that the leadership “reflects” or “represents” the class, directly and simply. If this is not so, he asks by implication, then why do the workers “tolerate” such leaders ? Green and Murray would no doubt agree with Vannier that they represent or reflect the American workers, and Vannier may accept Togliatti’s claim to represent the Italian workers. But the Marxists dissent violently.
The truth is, as Trotsky more than once pointed out, the workers don’t select their leaders the way they pick out a pair of shoes in a well-stocked shoe store. The actual process is far more complex, the leadership being a product both of the struggle between the classes and of the clash; between conflicting and often antagonistic layers within the working class itself.
It is a great mistake in this connection to think; of the working class as a single political entity. Actually it is composed of different strata – official labor leaders, privileged skilled workers, unskilled laborers, the most intensively exploited workers who are often not even unionized, etc. A struggle goes on among these different strata – some of whom are reactionary, some passive, some revolutionary, with the relationship of forces within the working class changing under different conditions.
The leadership of the class is the product of the ascendancy of one or more strata over the others at the time of its selection. The emergence of a conservative or reactionary leadership is the result of the defeat of the revolutionary elements. It is not and cannot be a permanent and lasting defeat because the struggle continues after the leadership is selected, paving the way for a reversal of the situation at a later stage.
Once established, the leadership may succeed in holding its position for a much longer time than the relationship of forces which produced it, not only because of the inertia of the class but also because of the power of compulsion wielded by the leadership. It is highly misleading, therefore, to conclude that a leadership elected but a few months ago necessarily reflects accurately the mood of the class today.
Moreover, the leadership, once it is established, tends to rise above the class and thus becomes subject to the pressure and influence of enemy classes. Trotsky pointed out correctly that the American trade union leadership, for example, “reflects” not so much the workers as the capitalists.
The working class is slow to change its leaders – a source of its strength in some ways, a source of its weakness in others. It tends to “tolerate” a degenerate leadership until the contradiction between this leadership and the interests of the class is revealed by the shock of great events. And even then it tends to caution in elevating a new leadership until convinced that it is genuinely superior to the old.
The Contradiction
But this slowness, this caution, does not at all eliminate or remove what Trotsky called “the profound contradiction between the organic, deep-going, insurmountable urge of the toiling masses to tear themselves free from the bloody capitalist chaos, and the conservative, . patriotic, utterly bourgeois character of the outlived labor leadership.” Superficial observers, looking only at the surface, do not see this contradiction and that is why they identify the leadership with the class. But this contradiction remains, and continues, along with the internal contradictions of capitalism, to affect the struggle for leadership within the class, generating opportunities for the revolutionary forces to challenge the reactionary leaders who reflect capitalist pressure.
The fact that conservatives head the workers’ movement far more often than the revolutionists testifies not to the historical law that even a progressive class is able to challenge the enormous pressures and violence of the ruling class only on special occasions, and that such extraordinary exertions of strength can be maintained only for short periods. The importance of the revolutionary party is that it alone can lead the class in taking advantage of these exceptional situations to make the revolution and take power.
Up to now, we have examined the arguments about the workers’ capacity to take power without reference to the most instructive experience of all, the Russian revolution of 1917, which will be taken up in our next article.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>Senator Taylor’s Arrest</h1>
<h3>(17 May 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_20" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 20</a>, 17 May 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The arrest of Senator Glen Taylor in Birmingham furnished a good example of “the American way of life” in the South, where almost three-quarters of the Negro people reside. Taylor had gone to make a speech to the Southern Negro Youth Conference in a church, and had found the audience strictly segregated, whites on one side of the aisle and Negroes on the other, and cops swarming around the place to make sure the state’s sacred segregation law was enforced. Not only was the audience divided, but there were even two doors for entering the church, the front one for Negroes and a side door for whites.</p>
<p>Taylor decided to go in the front way but when he tried, a big cop shoved him off the porch, and another cop gave him the elbow so hard he was spun across the yard and thrown across a small fence. He had offered no resistance but his suit was torn, his leg was bruised and his hand was cut. He was shoved into a police car and driven off on a roundabout route to the jail; on the way he got the impression the cops were trying to provoke him into some action for which they could beat him up. At the jail he was held for “disorderly conduct” until bail was raised. A few days later he was fined $50 and costs and given a jail sentence of 180 days; the sentence was suspended and an appeal has been filed.</p>
<p>That is what happened to a member of the U.S. Senate, the highest legislative body in the country. It is not hard to imagine what would have happened in this case to a man in a less prominent position – white or Negro. He would be in a jail or hospital (if not in his grave). The Southern ruling class does not fool around when it comes to defending its “way of life.” It proposes to keep the white and Negro workers divided at all costs – by the use of propaganda and Jim Crow laws where possible, and by brute violence where necessary. Anybody who thinks the Southern rulers are going to peacefully accept a civil rights program that alters the Negro’s position in the South is a dreamer, due for a rude awakening.</p>
<p>The judge who sentenced Taylor delivered the usual harangue against “outside influences” that are interfering with the Southern way of life. He did not say anything about the Northern capitalists with investments in the South who have conspired with the Southern rulers for the past 60-odd years to institute and maintain the present Jim Crow set-up. He highly approves of that kind of outside influence. And he did not say a word about the South’s outside influence, exerted through congressmen elected by a tiny fraction of the population, who help to pass laws oppressing the workers of all colors in all parts of the country and who are responsible for the spread of racial hatred and restrictions through the federal government and the armed forces.</p>
<p>What this country needs is the introduction of more “outside influence” in the South, backed up by the power of the organized labor movement. For either the workers of the North will help their Southern brothers end the dictatorial way of life in the South, or the ruling class will extend it to the rest of the nation.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">Just to keep the record straight, the Communist Party was forced to quickly change its false estimate of the Supreme Court decision on restrictive covenants, reported in this column last week. The May 4 <strong>Daily Worker</strong> did print a story entitled, <em>Supreme Court Voids Restrictive Covenants</em>, which declared that the court had “dealt a serious blow to real estate agreements which bar Negroes from all-white neighborhoods.” However an editorial in the next day’s issue declared: “But that this Court decision gives the Negro tenant or property buyer any substantial gain, as is claimed by certain leaders who are only too anxious to quiet down the indignation of the Negro people, is a fallacy.” Unfortunately, most of the Negro press, who also hailed the court’s OK of restrictive covenants, have <em>not</em> changed their position.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
Senator Taylor’s Arrest
(17 May 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 20, 17 May 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The arrest of Senator Glen Taylor in Birmingham furnished a good example of “the American way of life” in the South, where almost three-quarters of the Negro people reside. Taylor had gone to make a speech to the Southern Negro Youth Conference in a church, and had found the audience strictly segregated, whites on one side of the aisle and Negroes on the other, and cops swarming around the place to make sure the state’s sacred segregation law was enforced. Not only was the audience divided, but there were even two doors for entering the church, the front one for Negroes and a side door for whites.
Taylor decided to go in the front way but when he tried, a big cop shoved him off the porch, and another cop gave him the elbow so hard he was spun across the yard and thrown across a small fence. He had offered no resistance but his suit was torn, his leg was bruised and his hand was cut. He was shoved into a police car and driven off on a roundabout route to the jail; on the way he got the impression the cops were trying to provoke him into some action for which they could beat him up. At the jail he was held for “disorderly conduct” until bail was raised. A few days later he was fined $50 and costs and given a jail sentence of 180 days; the sentence was suspended and an appeal has been filed.
That is what happened to a member of the U.S. Senate, the highest legislative body in the country. It is not hard to imagine what would have happened in this case to a man in a less prominent position – white or Negro. He would be in a jail or hospital (if not in his grave). The Southern ruling class does not fool around when it comes to defending its “way of life.” It proposes to keep the white and Negro workers divided at all costs – by the use of propaganda and Jim Crow laws where possible, and by brute violence where necessary. Anybody who thinks the Southern rulers are going to peacefully accept a civil rights program that alters the Negro’s position in the South is a dreamer, due for a rude awakening.
The judge who sentenced Taylor delivered the usual harangue against “outside influences” that are interfering with the Southern way of life. He did not say anything about the Northern capitalists with investments in the South who have conspired with the Southern rulers for the past 60-odd years to institute and maintain the present Jim Crow set-up. He highly approves of that kind of outside influence. And he did not say a word about the South’s outside influence, exerted through congressmen elected by a tiny fraction of the population, who help to pass laws oppressing the workers of all colors in all parts of the country and who are responsible for the spread of racial hatred and restrictions through the federal government and the armed forces.
What this country needs is the introduction of more “outside influence” in the South, backed up by the power of the organized labor movement. For either the workers of the North will help their Southern brothers end the dictatorial way of life in the South, or the ruling class will extend it to the rest of the nation.
* * *
Just to keep the record straight, the Communist Party was forced to quickly change its false estimate of the Supreme Court decision on restrictive covenants, reported in this column last week. The May 4 Daily Worker did print a story entitled, Supreme Court Voids Restrictive Covenants, which declared that the court had “dealt a serious blow to real estate agreements which bar Negroes from all-white neighborhoods.” However an editorial in the next day’s issue declared: “But that this Court decision gives the Negro tenant or property buyer any substantial gain, as is claimed by certain leaders who are only too anxious to quiet down the indignation of the Negro people, is a fallacy.” Unfortunately, most of the Negro press, who also hailed the court’s OK of restrictive covenants, have not changed their position.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>C.P. Cites Lenin Against<br>
Earl Browder – and Itself</h1>
<h3>(19 January 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_03" target="new">Vol. XII No. 3</a>, 19 January 1948, p.–4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. And the Stalinists would be better off if they did not quote Lenin. Such quotations invariably boomerang against them. This is illustrated in their current polemics against Earl Browder.</p>
<p>Two years ago, after 23 years of loyal service to the Kremlin, Browder was ousted from the leadership of the American Communist Party as a Wall Street agent, to use the mildest term of his former fellow bureaucrats.</p>
<p>Browder’s expulsion was not due to any difference in principle with the Stalinists. It resulted from differences in achieving an end sought by all of them – how to continue, or to resume, the wartime honeymoon between U.S. imperialism and the Kremlin. Browder thought the best way to do this was by continuing the policy followed during the war – to give loyal support to U.S. imperialism.</p>
<p><em>The Stalinists decided, after some vacillation, that the way to do it was by exerting pressure on Washington through such moves as the formation of the Cominform, the strikes in France and Italy, the establishment of the so-called "free" Greek government, the organization of a third party in the U.S. Browder was too committed to the previous policy; so when Stalin changed the line, he was booted out.</em></p>
<p>Now, according to four articles in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> (Dec. 30–Jan. 2) written by CP National Educational Director Jack Stachel, Browder is circulating among key members of the CP advance copies of a pamphlet to justify his policy.</p>
<p>Stachel says that, according to Browder, “because the U.S. joined in the war against the Axis on the side of the Soviet Union, this proves that American imperialism played a ‘progressive’ role. He then says that if American imperialism does not today play a ‘progressive’ role, this is so because Truman does not possess the ‘intelligence’ of Roosevelt.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Progressive in Past”</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“According to Browder’s idealistic conception, imperialism can be either reactionary or progressive ... Browder quotes Lenin’s attack on Kautsky’s definition of imperialism as a policy, <em>a policy preferred by finance capital</em>, to justify his position. But actually, Browder accepts Kautsky’s definition. If imperialism can pursue either a ‘progressive’ or reactionary course determined by its ‘intelligence,’ then what is this if not a ’policy preferred by finance capital?’</p>
<p class="quote">“Lenin shows in opposition to Kautsky that imperialism is a stage in the development of capitalism and not just a policy of finance capital. But it is not just a neutral economic category into which can be poured in either a reactionary or ‘progressive’ policy as Browder believes. It is a stage of capitalism which also has its political counterpart.”</p>
<p class="fst">And to prove this, Stachel quotes from Lenin’s article, <em>A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism</em>:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The political superstructure over the new economics, over monopoly capitalism (imperialism is monopoly capitalism) – is a change from democracy to reaction. To free competition corresponds democracy. To monopoly corresponds political reaction.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Lenin’s basic teachings thus blow to shreds Browder’s theory about a “progressive” imperialism and show it to be the most arrant revision and rejection of Marxism. But Lenin’s teachings are equally devastating for the official CP policy.<br>
</p>
<h4>Both Then and Now</h4>
<p class="fst">For if imperialism is a stage in the development of capitalism, and if imperialism invariably takes the political expression of reaction – then it follows that U.S. capitalism, which entered the stage of imperialism more than 30 years ago, played a necessarily reactionary role in World War II, no matter whom it was allied with.</p>
<p><em>That is what the Trotskyists said before, during and after the war. But the Stalinists – all the Stalinists, Foster and Stachel as well as Browder – vigorously denied this, urging the workers to even break strikes in the interests of supporting U.S. imperialism.</em></p>
<p>Stachel now seems to criticize Browder for repeating the line they all espoused during the war, but nowhere has the CP withdrawn its characterization of the “progressive” role of U.S. imperialism in that war. And to this day the Stalinists howl about the need to “return to the policies of FDR” – which, according to Leninism, could be nothing but reactionary.</p>
<p><em>Furthermore, if imperialism is not a policy preferred by the capitalists, but a stage in the development of the capitalist system, then those who administer the capitalist government in Washington necessarily follow an imperialist policy, no matter who they are. Expressed a little differently, it means that whoever administers the government – be it Roosevelt, Truman, Wallace or any other adherent of capitalism – follows an imperialist, that is, reactionary line so long as the government is a capitalist government.</em></p>
<p>Thus, Lenin’s teachings on the nature of imperialism expose not only the wartime line of the CP, but also its current, fake “leftist” line.</p>
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George Breitman
C.P. Cites Lenin Against
Earl Browder – and Itself
(19 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 3, 19 January 1948, p.–4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. And the Stalinists would be better off if they did not quote Lenin. Such quotations invariably boomerang against them. This is illustrated in their current polemics against Earl Browder.
Two years ago, after 23 years of loyal service to the Kremlin, Browder was ousted from the leadership of the American Communist Party as a Wall Street agent, to use the mildest term of his former fellow bureaucrats.
Browder’s expulsion was not due to any difference in principle with the Stalinists. It resulted from differences in achieving an end sought by all of them – how to continue, or to resume, the wartime honeymoon between U.S. imperialism and the Kremlin. Browder thought the best way to do this was by continuing the policy followed during the war – to give loyal support to U.S. imperialism.
The Stalinists decided, after some vacillation, that the way to do it was by exerting pressure on Washington through such moves as the formation of the Cominform, the strikes in France and Italy, the establishment of the so-called "free" Greek government, the organization of a third party in the U.S. Browder was too committed to the previous policy; so when Stalin changed the line, he was booted out.
Now, according to four articles in the Daily Worker (Dec. 30–Jan. 2) written by CP National Educational Director Jack Stachel, Browder is circulating among key members of the CP advance copies of a pamphlet to justify his policy.
Stachel says that, according to Browder, “because the U.S. joined in the war against the Axis on the side of the Soviet Union, this proves that American imperialism played a ‘progressive’ role. He then says that if American imperialism does not today play a ‘progressive’ role, this is so because Truman does not possess the ‘intelligence’ of Roosevelt.”
“Progressive in Past”
“According to Browder’s idealistic conception, imperialism can be either reactionary or progressive ... Browder quotes Lenin’s attack on Kautsky’s definition of imperialism as a policy, a policy preferred by finance capital, to justify his position. But actually, Browder accepts Kautsky’s definition. If imperialism can pursue either a ‘progressive’ or reactionary course determined by its ‘intelligence,’ then what is this if not a ’policy preferred by finance capital?’
“Lenin shows in opposition to Kautsky that imperialism is a stage in the development of capitalism and not just a policy of finance capital. But it is not just a neutral economic category into which can be poured in either a reactionary or ‘progressive’ policy as Browder believes. It is a stage of capitalism which also has its political counterpart.”
And to prove this, Stachel quotes from Lenin’s article, A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism:
“The political superstructure over the new economics, over monopoly capitalism (imperialism is monopoly capitalism) – is a change from democracy to reaction. To free competition corresponds democracy. To monopoly corresponds political reaction.”
Lenin’s basic teachings thus blow to shreds Browder’s theory about a “progressive” imperialism and show it to be the most arrant revision and rejection of Marxism. But Lenin’s teachings are equally devastating for the official CP policy.
Both Then and Now
For if imperialism is a stage in the development of capitalism, and if imperialism invariably takes the political expression of reaction – then it follows that U.S. capitalism, which entered the stage of imperialism more than 30 years ago, played a necessarily reactionary role in World War II, no matter whom it was allied with.
That is what the Trotskyists said before, during and after the war. But the Stalinists – all the Stalinists, Foster and Stachel as well as Browder – vigorously denied this, urging the workers to even break strikes in the interests of supporting U.S. imperialism.
Stachel now seems to criticize Browder for repeating the line they all espoused during the war, but nowhere has the CP withdrawn its characterization of the “progressive” role of U.S. imperialism in that war. And to this day the Stalinists howl about the need to “return to the policies of FDR” – which, according to Leninism, could be nothing but reactionary.
Furthermore, if imperialism is not a policy preferred by the capitalists, but a stage in the development of the capitalist system, then those who administer the capitalist government in Washington necessarily follow an imperialist policy, no matter who they are. Expressed a little differently, it means that whoever administers the government – be it Roosevelt, Truman, Wallace or any other adherent of capitalism – follows an imperialist, that is, reactionary line so long as the government is a capitalist government.
Thus, Lenin’s teachings on the nature of imperialism expose not only the wartime line of the CP, but also its current, fake “leftist” line.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Introduction to<br>
<small><em>Afro-American History</em><br>
by Malcolm X</small></h1>
<h3>(March 1967)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr67_03" target="new">Vol. 28 No. 2</a>, March–April 1967, pp. 1–2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Malcolm X believed that the education, or re-education, of the black people of this country was necessary for the building of a new mass movement capable of fighting effectively for human rights. He therefore took every opportunity he could get – on television and radio, at press conferences, interviews and public meetings, large or small – to teach, to explain, to show the connections between various aspects of the freedom struggle, to induce people to think for themselves. He always adapted his speaking style to the particular audience he faced, using the vocabulary and the rhythm best suited for communication. The speech that follows, which has been transcribed from the tape of a public meeting on January 24, 1965, is typical of those he made in the last months of his life to the people of Harlem.</p>
<p>Malcolm left the Nation of Islam (“Black Muslims”) in March 1964 for reasons partly explained in this speech. That month he organized the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and in June, 1964, he founded the non-religious Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was abroad – in Africa, the Middle East and Europe – during half of this independent phase of his life, which ended after a short fifty weeks with his assassination in New York on February 21, 1965. Yet he managed, during the 25 weeks he spent at home, to hold 17 or 18 public rallies in Harlem, most of them at the Audubon Ballroom. It was in that hall, as he started to speak at one of those rallies, that he was killed.</p>
<p>Sometimes there were invited guest speakers at these public meetings – African students, Dick Gregory, Muhammad Babu of the Tanzanian cabinet, Fannie Lou Hamer; Che Guevara was invited once, but couldn’t make it, and sent a message of solidarity. Sometimes films were shown. But the main speaker was usually Malcolm himself. He was often over-worked and exhausted, but he was never too tired to present, patiently and calmly, facts and ideas and arguments that he believed his brothers and sisters needed to arm themselves for the freedom fight.</p>
<p>The January 24, 1965, speech was typical of his final period, but it also had special features. At that time the leaders of the Organization of Afro-American Unity had decided that their organization needed a new program. To arouse interest in it, they arranged a series of three public meetings at the Audubon. At the first of these (January 24), Malcolm was to speak on Afro-American history, from the ancient black civilizations through slavery to the present day. At the second (January 31), he was to discuss current conditions and the methods used to keep black people oppressed. At the third (which would have been February 7, although Malcolm twice made a mistake about that date in his January 24 talk), he was to speak about the future of the Afro-American struggle and the new OAAU program was to be presented.</p>
<p>This schedule was never completed. Malcolm did speak about the past on January 24, and he did speak about the present on January 31, but the third meeting was not held on February 7, because Malcolm had some important speaking engagements in England and France that week.</p>
<p>The third meeting in the Audubon series therefore was postponed to Monday, February 15; the regular Sunday time was not possible because Malcolm was scheduled to speak in Detroit on February 14. But a few hours after Malcolm’s return from England, his home was fire-bombed, early in the morning of February 14, while he, his wife and four children were asleep. As a result, the February 15 meeting was devoted to a discussion of the bombing, and the presentation of the new OAAU program was postponed. At the next meeting, February 21, Malcolm was shot down as he started to speak at the Audubon.</p>
<p>Two other Audubon speeches (December 13 and December 20, 1964) will be found in the collection, <strong>Malcolm X Speaks</strong> (Merit Publishers, 1965, and Grove Press, 1966). The text of the OAAU program, which Malcolm approved although he did not write it, is printed as an appendix in my book, <strong>The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary</strong> (Merit Publishers, 1967).</p>
<table width="100%">
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<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="fst"><em>George Breitman</em></p>
</td>
</tr>
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George Breitman
Introduction to
Afro-American History
by Malcolm X
(March 1967)
From International Socialist Review, Vol. 28 No. 2, March–April 1967, pp. 1–2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Malcolm X believed that the education, or re-education, of the black people of this country was necessary for the building of a new mass movement capable of fighting effectively for human rights. He therefore took every opportunity he could get – on television and radio, at press conferences, interviews and public meetings, large or small – to teach, to explain, to show the connections between various aspects of the freedom struggle, to induce people to think for themselves. He always adapted his speaking style to the particular audience he faced, using the vocabulary and the rhythm best suited for communication. The speech that follows, which has been transcribed from the tape of a public meeting on January 24, 1965, is typical of those he made in the last months of his life to the people of Harlem.
Malcolm left the Nation of Islam (“Black Muslims”) in March 1964 for reasons partly explained in this speech. That month he organized the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and in June, 1964, he founded the non-religious Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was abroad – in Africa, the Middle East and Europe – during half of this independent phase of his life, which ended after a short fifty weeks with his assassination in New York on February 21, 1965. Yet he managed, during the 25 weeks he spent at home, to hold 17 or 18 public rallies in Harlem, most of them at the Audubon Ballroom. It was in that hall, as he started to speak at one of those rallies, that he was killed.
Sometimes there were invited guest speakers at these public meetings – African students, Dick Gregory, Muhammad Babu of the Tanzanian cabinet, Fannie Lou Hamer; Che Guevara was invited once, but couldn’t make it, and sent a message of solidarity. Sometimes films were shown. But the main speaker was usually Malcolm himself. He was often over-worked and exhausted, but he was never too tired to present, patiently and calmly, facts and ideas and arguments that he believed his brothers and sisters needed to arm themselves for the freedom fight.
The January 24, 1965, speech was typical of his final period, but it also had special features. At that time the leaders of the Organization of Afro-American Unity had decided that their organization needed a new program. To arouse interest in it, they arranged a series of three public meetings at the Audubon. At the first of these (January 24), Malcolm was to speak on Afro-American history, from the ancient black civilizations through slavery to the present day. At the second (January 31), he was to discuss current conditions and the methods used to keep black people oppressed. At the third (which would have been February 7, although Malcolm twice made a mistake about that date in his January 24 talk), he was to speak about the future of the Afro-American struggle and the new OAAU program was to be presented.
This schedule was never completed. Malcolm did speak about the past on January 24, and he did speak about the present on January 31, but the third meeting was not held on February 7, because Malcolm had some important speaking engagements in England and France that week.
The third meeting in the Audubon series therefore was postponed to Monday, February 15; the regular Sunday time was not possible because Malcolm was scheduled to speak in Detroit on February 14. But a few hours after Malcolm’s return from England, his home was fire-bombed, early in the morning of February 14, while he, his wife and four children were asleep. As a result, the February 15 meeting was devoted to a discussion of the bombing, and the presentation of the new OAAU program was postponed. At the next meeting, February 21, Malcolm was shot down as he started to speak at the Audubon.
Two other Audubon speeches (December 13 and December 20, 1964) will be found in the collection, Malcolm X Speaks (Merit Publishers, 1965, and Grove Press, 1966). The text of the OAAU program, which Malcolm approved although he did not write it, is printed as an appendix in my book, The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (Merit Publishers, 1967).
George Breitman
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>Help the Purge Victims!</h1>
<h3>(22 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_47" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 47</a>, 22 November 1948, p. 4<br>
ranscribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The “loyalty” purge is striking hard and fast at Negro government employees, especially in the Post Office. Charges have already been brought against scores of purge victims in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and many other cities. And that’s only the beginning.</p>
<p>The NAACP Board of Directors points out that a year ago, when the so- called subversive list was issued, it called attention to the danger that “prejudiced officials could utilize false charges of disloyalty against minorities to eliminate them from government.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“One year, later,” the NAACP declares, “our worst fears have been realized. Charges of disloyalty based on flimsy and prejudiced information have been filed against colored government employees ... In practically all of the cases before us it is apparent that the employees have been placed in the position of defending themselves because of their opposition to segregation and discrimination, against unnamed accusers, before officials who are hostile to, or unaware of, the broad implications of the fight for civil rights in this country.”</p>
<p class="fst">The NAACP statement finishes with a new warning: “Not one of the more than 150,000 colored government employes will be safe if the present trend continues.” For this reason, the NAACP has decided to defend Negroes who are being victimized in this purge because of their race, and has called on the president and the</p>
<p>Loyalty Review Board “to take steps to prevent the persecution of colored employees solely because they have dared to stand up and be counted on the side of those who believe in justice for all men.”</p>
<p>Such a stand by the NAACP is entirely justified. But the matter doesn’t end there. Not only the Negro people, but the whole labor movement is affected by the government purge. For that reason, the labor movement too must swing into action to help the Negro victims of this witch hunt—especially that section of the labormovement which has already shown its understanding of the issues involved by coming to the aid of James Kutcher, the legless veteran who was fired from his job in the Veterans Administration.</p>
<p>Kutcher was fired under the same presidential order that is being used to hound the Negro government workers. The charge against him was his political beliefs and his membership ir. the Socialist Workers Party. But the essence of the matter is the same—his “crime” too is that he “dared to stand up and be counted on the side of those who believe in justice for all men.”</p>
<p>White workers must defend the rights of Negro Victims of the purge, and Negro workers must defend the rights of the white victims. Only in this way will we be able to successfully combat and defeat this drive to terrorize and intimidate the government employes who dare to exhibit a, spark of independence or to exercise their rights to speak and act freely.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
Help the Purge Victims!
(22 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 47, 22 November 1948, p. 4
ranscribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The “loyalty” purge is striking hard and fast at Negro government employees, especially in the Post Office. Charges have already been brought against scores of purge victims in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and many other cities. And that’s only the beginning.
The NAACP Board of Directors points out that a year ago, when the so- called subversive list was issued, it called attention to the danger that “prejudiced officials could utilize false charges of disloyalty against minorities to eliminate them from government.”
“One year, later,” the NAACP declares, “our worst fears have been realized. Charges of disloyalty based on flimsy and prejudiced information have been filed against colored government employees ... In practically all of the cases before us it is apparent that the employees have been placed in the position of defending themselves because of their opposition to segregation and discrimination, against unnamed accusers, before officials who are hostile to, or unaware of, the broad implications of the fight for civil rights in this country.”
The NAACP statement finishes with a new warning: “Not one of the more than 150,000 colored government employes will be safe if the present trend continues.” For this reason, the NAACP has decided to defend Negroes who are being victimized in this purge because of their race, and has called on the president and the
Loyalty Review Board “to take steps to prevent the persecution of colored employees solely because they have dared to stand up and be counted on the side of those who believe in justice for all men.”
Such a stand by the NAACP is entirely justified. But the matter doesn’t end there. Not only the Negro people, but the whole labor movement is affected by the government purge. For that reason, the labor movement too must swing into action to help the Negro victims of this witch hunt—especially that section of the labormovement which has already shown its understanding of the issues involved by coming to the aid of James Kutcher, the legless veteran who was fired from his job in the Veterans Administration.
Kutcher was fired under the same presidential order that is being used to hound the Negro government workers. The charge against him was his political beliefs and his membership ir. the Socialist Workers Party. But the essence of the matter is the same—his “crime” too is that he “dared to stand up and be counted on the side of those who believe in justice for all men.”
White workers must defend the rights of Negro Victims of the purge, and Negro workers must defend the rights of the white victims. Only in this way will we be able to successfully combat and defeat this drive to terrorize and intimidate the government employes who dare to exhibit a, spark of independence or to exercise their rights to speak and act freely.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Yugoslavia and the Shachtmanites</h1>
<h3>(May 1951)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi51_05" target="new">Vol.12 No.3</a>, May-June 1951, pp.84-85.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<p class="fst">For two and a half years the scribes of the Independent
Socialist League, formerly the Workers Party (Shachtmanites), wrote
scores of articles to demonstrate that “Titoism” is only another form
of Stalinism, and just as reactionary. Simultaneously, they
hysterically denounced the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth
International for approaching the Yugoslav Communist Party
sympathetically and trying to influence its development in a
revolutionary Marxist direction.</p>
<p>Now, however, judging from an article by Henry Judd in the
March-April issue of the <strong>New International</strong>, the ISL
line seems in process of change. Judd was one of the noisiest critics
of our policy on Yugoslavia; only four months before the present
article his summation of the entire Yugoslav development since the
split with the Kremlin was that “the direction in Yugoslavia is away
from socialism and Workers’ Statism.” Now — after throwing up the
smokescreen that “all” parties suffered from “short-sightedness,
superficiality and a failure to grasp the full significance of this
[Yugoslav] development,” with the Trotskyists “of course” being the
“outstanding example of this” — he declares:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Titoism must now be redefined as a legitimate and
serious international tendency, politically and ideologically, within
the revolutionary movement; it must be recognized as the first of many
other similar developments which, springing out of the world of
Stalinism, must be accepted as harbingers of new, hitherto unknown,
ideological currents with which socialists must sympathetically
collaborate.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is the position that we have taken, both in words
and actions, ever since the Tito-Stalin split three years ago. And this
is the position that Judd and the ISL kept denouncing not only as
shortsighted, ignorant, etc., but as a capitulation to Stalinism.</p>
<p>How account for this sudden turnabout? Judd tries to explain it away
(even while apologizing for the old ISL line in the past) in the
following manner:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The real fact of the matter is that both in terms of
internal political ideology and international politics, Titoism has
already passed beyond its early characteristics which permitted it to
be defined more or less correctly, if abstractly, as a Stalinist
movement, or a bureaucratic clique seeking to retain power by a
neutralist position in a divided world.”</p>
<p class="fst">Judd does not explicitly indicate what “early
characteristics” he is referring to, and he remains very vague about
when it was that Titoism passed beyond them. But because this is the
central issue, we ourselves must stress that the policies of the
Yugoslav leaders have undergone important shifts since 1948, and show
both what these shifts were and when they took place.</p>
<ol>
<li>From the middle of 1948 to about the middle of 1949. This was the
period when the Yugoslav CP leaders tried to minimize their differences
with the Kremlin, withheld from the workers the full details and
history of the split, refused to engage in any criticism of Stalin and
Stalinism, and in general left the way open for a reconciliation.</li>
<li>From the middle of 1949 to the late summer or fall of 1950. Now
the Yugoslav leaders, faced with a tightening Cominform blockade and
openly designated as targets for assassination by the GPU, took a
decided turn to the left. They began to re-examine some of the
fundamental theories of Stalinism, the nature of the Soviet
bureaucracy, etc., and to move toward conclusions in accord with those
of Marxism. They disclosed the full history of their dispute with the
Kremlin, called on the workers of the world to return to Leninism, and
undertook a number of democratic reforms within their own country. At
the same time they proclaimed a foreign policy of independence from
both Washington and Moscow, although (his policy even then was not
without serious faults.</li>
<li>From the fall of 1950 to the present time. The outbreak of the
war in Korea brought an increased danger of a Kremlin-directed assault
on Yugoslavia together with increased pressure from Washington for
concessions from Belgrade in return for material aid to combat the
famine threatening the country. The Yugoslav leaders drew back,
especially in, their foreign policy, endorsed the UN policy on Korea,
promised to go to war on the side of the UN anywhere in Europe, and
began to make compromising advances to the international Social
Democracy.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">When was it, according to Judd, that Titoism changed
from “a Stalinist movement” into “a legitimate and serious
international tendency, politically and ideologically, within the
revolutionary movement?” Was it in 1949, when the Yugoslav leaders were
moving to the left? Or was it at the end of 1950, when they were
unmistakably moving to the right and collaboration with US imperialism?</p>
<p>Judd evades a direct answer. But it sticks out all over his article
— in the timing of his decision that a “redefinition” of Titoism is in
order, in the way he denounces us for criticizing the present
anti-internationalist foreign policy of the Yugoslav regime, and above
all in his insistence that “Titoism is clearly deepening the gap
between itself and Stalinism.”</p>
<p>What does Judd mean by this? A year ago Titoism was engaging in a
furious ideological struggle against Stalinism and dealing the Kremlin
damaging blows that reverberated all over Eastern and Western Europe —
and from the left. But nothing Tito did then could produce the
slightest expression of support from the ISL. What new thing has been
added that persuades Judd a genuine change for the better has taken
place within Titoism? Only one thing — Tito has abandoned his hesitant
moves to the left in the international field, submitted to the pressure
of Washington and apparently decided that his future is linked with the
camp of US imperialism.</p>
<p>From the viewpoint of Marxism, Tito is actually less anti-Stalinist
today than he was a year ago, for now he has completely reverted to the
kind of foreign policy he learned in the Kremlin school — collaboration
with imperialism, apologetics for the imperialist powers he hopes will
aid him as allies, dependence on the UN, and so on. In other words, the
very changes in Tito’s policy which endanger the revolutionary future
of Yugoslavia and merit the sharpest criticism of revolutionary
socialists are just the ones that have earned Judd’s admiration and
endorsement.</p>
<p>Thus the thinking that underlies Judd’s revision is far more
revealing than the revision itself — thinking that Judd shares with
most of his fellow ISL leaders, including some who are not yet ready to
subscribe to his new position on Yugoslavia.</p>
<p>The fashion on Titoism, so far as American petty bourgeois radicals
and Stalinophobes are concerned, is set in Washington. Judd may not be
aware of this, but he reacts to it instinctively; that is why he is the
most reliable weathervane of the ISL leadership. Proceeding in the
belief that his policy of both yesterday and today contributes to the
struggle against Stalinism, which the ISL regards as its No.1 enemy, he
is actually twisted and turned by the pressure of the tail-end of
American imperialism.</p>
<p>The Shachtmanites don’t know where they are going, but almost
everyone else does. Long before Judd began his “redefinition,” it was
predicted by our movement. As Murry Weiss put it in his political
report on the Yugoslav question at the SWP Convention last November:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Social Democrats and centrists, who belatedly
recognized the importance of the Yugoslav affair, are attracted to the
worst features of the Yugoslav Communist Party and its policies. They
are ‘Titoist’ whenever there is any indication of a swing to the right
[on the part of the Yugoslav leaders] ... As for the Shachtmanites —
they are not in our class camp but are simply a special case of left
Social Democracy.”</p>
<p class="fst">A special case of left Social Democracy, but one which
is steadily losing its special traits. This is manifested not only by
their policy on Yugoslavia, but by their advocacy that labor
participate in capitalist party primaries, their unceasing internal
dispute over whether or not to support US imperialism in Korea and the
next world war, the increasing concessions which the openly
social-patriotic and pro-war wing of the organization wrings from its
opponents.</p>
<p>The Shachtmanites are an instructive example of the consequences of
Stalinophobia in the present tense world situation. They originally
split away from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, saying they could
not remain in one party with advocates of the defense of the Soviet
Union against imperialism. Today they feel at home in one party with
advocates of support of imperialist war against the Soviet Union. What
price Third Camp?</p>
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George Breitman
Yugoslavia and the Shachtmanites
(May 1951)
From Fourth International, Vol.12 No.3, May-June 1951, pp.84-85.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
For two and a half years the scribes of the Independent
Socialist League, formerly the Workers Party (Shachtmanites), wrote
scores of articles to demonstrate that “Titoism” is only another form
of Stalinism, and just as reactionary. Simultaneously, they
hysterically denounced the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth
International for approaching the Yugoslav Communist Party
sympathetically and trying to influence its development in a
revolutionary Marxist direction.
Now, however, judging from an article by Henry Judd in the
March-April issue of the New International, the ISL
line seems in process of change. Judd was one of the noisiest critics
of our policy on Yugoslavia; only four months before the present
article his summation of the entire Yugoslav development since the
split with the Kremlin was that “the direction in Yugoslavia is away
from socialism and Workers’ Statism.” Now — after throwing up the
smokescreen that “all” parties suffered from “short-sightedness,
superficiality and a failure to grasp the full significance of this
[Yugoslav] development,” with the Trotskyists “of course” being the
“outstanding example of this” — he declares:
“Titoism must now be redefined as a legitimate and
serious international tendency, politically and ideologically, within
the revolutionary movement; it must be recognized as the first of many
other similar developments which, springing out of the world of
Stalinism, must be accepted as harbingers of new, hitherto unknown,
ideological currents with which socialists must sympathetically
collaborate.”
This is the position that we have taken, both in words
and actions, ever since the Tito-Stalin split three years ago. And this
is the position that Judd and the ISL kept denouncing not only as
shortsighted, ignorant, etc., but as a capitulation to Stalinism.
How account for this sudden turnabout? Judd tries to explain it away
(even while apologizing for the old ISL line in the past) in the
following manner:
“The real fact of the matter is that both in terms of
internal political ideology and international politics, Titoism has
already passed beyond its early characteristics which permitted it to
be defined more or less correctly, if abstractly, as a Stalinist
movement, or a bureaucratic clique seeking to retain power by a
neutralist position in a divided world.”
Judd does not explicitly indicate what “early
characteristics” he is referring to, and he remains very vague about
when it was that Titoism passed beyond them. But because this is the
central issue, we ourselves must stress that the policies of the
Yugoslav leaders have undergone important shifts since 1948, and show
both what these shifts were and when they took place.
From the middle of 1948 to about the middle of 1949. This was the
period when the Yugoslav CP leaders tried to minimize their differences
with the Kremlin, withheld from the workers the full details and
history of the split, refused to engage in any criticism of Stalin and
Stalinism, and in general left the way open for a reconciliation.
From the middle of 1949 to the late summer or fall of 1950. Now
the Yugoslav leaders, faced with a tightening Cominform blockade and
openly designated as targets for assassination by the GPU, took a
decided turn to the left. They began to re-examine some of the
fundamental theories of Stalinism, the nature of the Soviet
bureaucracy, etc., and to move toward conclusions in accord with those
of Marxism. They disclosed the full history of their dispute with the
Kremlin, called on the workers of the world to return to Leninism, and
undertook a number of democratic reforms within their own country. At
the same time they proclaimed a foreign policy of independence from
both Washington and Moscow, although (his policy even then was not
without serious faults.
From the fall of 1950 to the present time. The outbreak of the
war in Korea brought an increased danger of a Kremlin-directed assault
on Yugoslavia together with increased pressure from Washington for
concessions from Belgrade in return for material aid to combat the
famine threatening the country. The Yugoslav leaders drew back,
especially in, their foreign policy, endorsed the UN policy on Korea,
promised to go to war on the side of the UN anywhere in Europe, and
began to make compromising advances to the international Social
Democracy.
When was it, according to Judd, that Titoism changed
from “a Stalinist movement” into “a legitimate and serious
international tendency, politically and ideologically, within the
revolutionary movement?” Was it in 1949, when the Yugoslav leaders were
moving to the left? Or was it at the end of 1950, when they were
unmistakably moving to the right and collaboration with US imperialism?
Judd evades a direct answer. But it sticks out all over his article
— in the timing of his decision that a “redefinition” of Titoism is in
order, in the way he denounces us for criticizing the present
anti-internationalist foreign policy of the Yugoslav regime, and above
all in his insistence that “Titoism is clearly deepening the gap
between itself and Stalinism.”
What does Judd mean by this? A year ago Titoism was engaging in a
furious ideological struggle against Stalinism and dealing the Kremlin
damaging blows that reverberated all over Eastern and Western Europe —
and from the left. But nothing Tito did then could produce the
slightest expression of support from the ISL. What new thing has been
added that persuades Judd a genuine change for the better has taken
place within Titoism? Only one thing — Tito has abandoned his hesitant
moves to the left in the international field, submitted to the pressure
of Washington and apparently decided that his future is linked with the
camp of US imperialism.
From the viewpoint of Marxism, Tito is actually less anti-Stalinist
today than he was a year ago, for now he has completely reverted to the
kind of foreign policy he learned in the Kremlin school — collaboration
with imperialism, apologetics for the imperialist powers he hopes will
aid him as allies, dependence on the UN, and so on. In other words, the
very changes in Tito’s policy which endanger the revolutionary future
of Yugoslavia and merit the sharpest criticism of revolutionary
socialists are just the ones that have earned Judd’s admiration and
endorsement.
Thus the thinking that underlies Judd’s revision is far more
revealing than the revision itself — thinking that Judd shares with
most of his fellow ISL leaders, including some who are not yet ready to
subscribe to his new position on Yugoslavia.
The fashion on Titoism, so far as American petty bourgeois radicals
and Stalinophobes are concerned, is set in Washington. Judd may not be
aware of this, but he reacts to it instinctively; that is why he is the
most reliable weathervane of the ISL leadership. Proceeding in the
belief that his policy of both yesterday and today contributes to the
struggle against Stalinism, which the ISL regards as its No.1 enemy, he
is actually twisted and turned by the pressure of the tail-end of
American imperialism.
The Shachtmanites don’t know where they are going, but almost
everyone else does. Long before Judd began his “redefinition,” it was
predicted by our movement. As Murry Weiss put it in his political
report on the Yugoslav question at the SWP Convention last November:
“The Social Democrats and centrists, who belatedly
recognized the importance of the Yugoslav affair, are attracted to the
worst features of the Yugoslav Communist Party and its policies. They
are ‘Titoist’ whenever there is any indication of a swing to the right
[on the part of the Yugoslav leaders] ... As for the Shachtmanites —
they are not in our class camp but are simply a special case of left
Social Democracy.”
A special case of left Social Democracy, but one which
is steadily losing its special traits. This is manifested not only by
their policy on Yugoslavia, but by their advocacy that labor
participate in capitalist party primaries, their unceasing internal
dispute over whether or not to support US imperialism in Korea and the
next world war, the increasing concessions which the openly
social-patriotic and pro-war wing of the organization wrings from its
opponents.
The Shachtmanites are an instructive example of the consequences of
Stalinophobia in the present tense world situation. They originally
split away from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, saying they could
not remain in one party with advocates of the defense of the Soviet
Union against imperialism. Today they feel at home in one party with
advocates of support of imperialist war against the Soviet Union. What
price Third Camp?
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h1>Stalinist Propaganda</h1>
<h3>(18 October 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_42" target="new">Vol. V No. 42</a>, 18 October 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Our comrades in Newark, N.J., have sent us a copy of a leaflet issued by the Communist Party in that city, entitled <em>A United America Can Defeat Hitler</em> and addressed primarily to the Negro people.</p>
<p>In it the Stalinists follow the example set by the warmongering politicians who have taken advantage of Lindbergh’s Jew-baiting speech in Des Moines to try to make the war-mongers appear as advocates of racial equality and equal opportunity.</p>
<p>But, as in many other fields, the Stalinist propaganda is so crude and obvious in this leaflet, which is quite typical of most Stalinist propaganda, that it gives their game away completely.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“One look at Hitler’s friends in this country shows that they are also the preachers of hatred for the Negro people. Lindbergh and his pals are spreading the phony ‘racial’ theories which Hitler has spread over Germany ... It is no accident that Southern politicians like Senator Reynolds have lined up with Hitler. They see eye to eye.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Now certainly Reynolds is an enemy of the Negro people and of the whole labor movement. He has for many years been associated with the red-baiting opponents of the trade unions, and was the organizer of a super-“patriotic” movement known as the “Vindicators” which spent most of its energy whipping up attacks on foreign-born workers. But in these respects there is nothing to distinguish him from most of the other politicians from the poll-tax states of the South.</p>
<p>There is only one thing that distinguishes him from the other Southern congressman, and that is that he belongs to the “isolationist” group, rather than the interventionist. At the present time, he is willing, for the sake of building up a pro-American fascist movement now and after the war, to exploit the honest anti-war sentiments of the masses. He is of course no real fighter against war; he stands wholeheartedly for the preservation of the system of capitalism which causes war.</p>
<p>But when the Stalinists speak about Reynolds, workers will naturally ask themselves, “What about the other Southern politicians who do not pretend to be opponents of the war, who are as a matter of fact, the most rabid advocates of the war program in Washington? Where do they stand on the racial question? With whom do they see eye to eye?”</p>
<p>The answer., of course, is well-known to the Stalinists, who published it hundreds of times only a few months ago when they were still opposed to the Roosevelt war program.<br>
</p>
<a name="s1"></a>
<h3>The Warmongers and the Negroes</h3>
<p class="fst">Who are these other Southern politicians who are howling for the war? They are, almost to a man, cut in the mold of Pepper, Dies, Connally, <em>et al.</em> They are men who are elected year after year only because they deny the great mass of the workers, Negro and white, the right to vote. They are the men who by threat of filibuster and other kinds of pressure have prevented any kind of anti-lynch legislation from being enacted by Congress.</p>
<p>Only recently, Pepper, that great advocate of a “war for democracy”, arose on the floor of the United States Senate to declare:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Whatever may be written into the Constitution, whatever may be placed upon the statute books of this nation, however many soldiers may be stationed about the ballot boxes of the Southland, the colored race will not vote.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">What do the Southern warmongers think about the Jim Crow laws of the South? What do they think about the laws and customs that segregate the Negro people in jobs, in church, in the armed forces, in every economic and social sphere and excludes them completely from participation in polities?</p>
<p>To ask these questions is to answer them. These pro-war Southern politicians not only strengthen and bolster segregation, but they are ready to stage another civil war if any serious attempt is made to destroy Jim Crowism. They did this long before the name of Hitler was heard of in this country. They intend to continue it long after Hitler is gone and forgotten.</p>
<p>These people see eye to eye with Hitler too, or perhaps it is more correct to say that Hitler sees eye to eye with them. Not on the war, it is true, but certainly on racial questions. To paraphrase the Stalinists, “one look at Hitler’s” imperialist enemies “in this country shows that they are also the preachers of hatred for the Negro people.” In this respect there is no difference whatever between them and men like Reynolds.</p>
<p>The Stalinists try to get support for the war by showing that the “isolationists” are enemies of the Negro people. That this is a false way of posing the question is shown by the fact that the interventionists are no less enemies of the Negro people.</p>
<p>Only we, the Trotskyists, can speak the truth on this question. We are opposed to all the enemies of the Negro people, and we don’t have to try to defend any of them.</p>
<p>We cite their records not to win support for a reactionary position, as the Stalinists do, but to show the hypocrisy behind their protestations about democracy and racial equality, and to show how the Stalinists serve the cause of a certain section of the enemies of the Negro people.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
Stalinist Propaganda
(18 October 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 42, 18 October 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Our comrades in Newark, N.J., have sent us a copy of a leaflet issued by the Communist Party in that city, entitled A United America Can Defeat Hitler and addressed primarily to the Negro people.
In it the Stalinists follow the example set by the warmongering politicians who have taken advantage of Lindbergh’s Jew-baiting speech in Des Moines to try to make the war-mongers appear as advocates of racial equality and equal opportunity.
But, as in many other fields, the Stalinist propaganda is so crude and obvious in this leaflet, which is quite typical of most Stalinist propaganda, that it gives their game away completely.
“One look at Hitler’s friends in this country shows that they are also the preachers of hatred for the Negro people. Lindbergh and his pals are spreading the phony ‘racial’ theories which Hitler has spread over Germany ... It is no accident that Southern politicians like Senator Reynolds have lined up with Hitler. They see eye to eye.”
Now certainly Reynolds is an enemy of the Negro people and of the whole labor movement. He has for many years been associated with the red-baiting opponents of the trade unions, and was the organizer of a super-“patriotic” movement known as the “Vindicators” which spent most of its energy whipping up attacks on foreign-born workers. But in these respects there is nothing to distinguish him from most of the other politicians from the poll-tax states of the South.
There is only one thing that distinguishes him from the other Southern congressman, and that is that he belongs to the “isolationist” group, rather than the interventionist. At the present time, he is willing, for the sake of building up a pro-American fascist movement now and after the war, to exploit the honest anti-war sentiments of the masses. He is of course no real fighter against war; he stands wholeheartedly for the preservation of the system of capitalism which causes war.
But when the Stalinists speak about Reynolds, workers will naturally ask themselves, “What about the other Southern politicians who do not pretend to be opponents of the war, who are as a matter of fact, the most rabid advocates of the war program in Washington? Where do they stand on the racial question? With whom do they see eye to eye?”
The answer., of course, is well-known to the Stalinists, who published it hundreds of times only a few months ago when they were still opposed to the Roosevelt war program.
The Warmongers and the Negroes
Who are these other Southern politicians who are howling for the war? They are, almost to a man, cut in the mold of Pepper, Dies, Connally, et al. They are men who are elected year after year only because they deny the great mass of the workers, Negro and white, the right to vote. They are the men who by threat of filibuster and other kinds of pressure have prevented any kind of anti-lynch legislation from being enacted by Congress.
Only recently, Pepper, that great advocate of a “war for democracy”, arose on the floor of the United States Senate to declare:
“Whatever may be written into the Constitution, whatever may be placed upon the statute books of this nation, however many soldiers may be stationed about the ballot boxes of the Southland, the colored race will not vote.”
What do the Southern warmongers think about the Jim Crow laws of the South? What do they think about the laws and customs that segregate the Negro people in jobs, in church, in the armed forces, in every economic and social sphere and excludes them completely from participation in polities?
To ask these questions is to answer them. These pro-war Southern politicians not only strengthen and bolster segregation, but they are ready to stage another civil war if any serious attempt is made to destroy Jim Crowism. They did this long before the name of Hitler was heard of in this country. They intend to continue it long after Hitler is gone and forgotten.
These people see eye to eye with Hitler too, or perhaps it is more correct to say that Hitler sees eye to eye with them. Not on the war, it is true, but certainly on racial questions. To paraphrase the Stalinists, “one look at Hitler’s” imperialist enemies “in this country shows that they are also the preachers of hatred for the Negro people.” In this respect there is no difference whatever between them and men like Reynolds.
The Stalinists try to get support for the war by showing that the “isolationists” are enemies of the Negro people. That this is a false way of posing the question is shown by the fact that the interventionists are no less enemies of the Negro people.
Only we, the Trotskyists, can speak the truth on this question. We are opposed to all the enemies of the Negro people, and we don’t have to try to defend any of them.
We cite their records not to win support for a reactionary position, as the Stalinists do, but to show the hypocrisy behind their protestations about democracy and racial equality, and to show how the Stalinists serve the cause of a certain section of the enemies of the Negro people.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>What’s to Be Done About Civil Rights?</h1>
<h3>(28 March 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_13" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 13</a>, 28 March 1949, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>What is to be done about the civil rights fight now that the Southern Democrats have succeeded in strengthening their filibuster powers?</strong></p>
<p>The <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, a conservative capitalist paper that parades as “liberal” on the civil rights issue, does not have an answer to this question, but it has plenty to say about what should NOT be done. In an editorial on March 16 it warns the Negro people not to get the idea that it will “take a revolution to correct abuses” and to beware “against pulling down the whole structure in order to get at the faulty parts.” The Times wants the Negro people not to go “out of bounds” in the civil rights fight, to be patient – even if it takes another 300 years before they win equality.</p>
<p>Another self-styled “friend of the Negro people,” the <strong>New Leader</strong>, a paper which speaks for Social Democrats, New Dealers and a part of the labor bureaucracy, on March 19 editorially congratulated the Negro leaders on the “fine statesmanship”,they displayed in not demanding a “fight to the finish on the floor of the Senate.” Why? Because then the rent-control law would have lapsed and everyone, including Negroes, would have suffered as a consequence. “It is too great a sacrifice to pay for such a victory. It will be better to get our social legislation now and deal with bi-partisan reactionaries two years hence.” <em>These are the words that Uncle Tom would have spoken if he had lived long enough, and unlike the <strong>New Leader</strong>, Uncle Tom never pretended to be a “democratic socialist.”</em></p>
<p>The NAACP, through its secretary, Walter White, promises the fight for civil rights will go on. “We shall go to the people – the people who expressed their approval of civil rights legislation at the polls last November – and let them know how the majority of the senators, both Democratic and Republican, have defied their mandate. We shall urge them again to remember at the polls how their senators voted on this crucial issue.” That’s fine, but how much good will that do? The NAACP leaders are against the formation of a Labor Party. <em>How will it help to replace Democrats with Republicans, or Republicans with Democrats, when both parties knife civil rights? Doesn’t the Democratic 81st Congress, which replaced the Republican 80th Congress, once again prove the futility of such a course?</em></p>
<p>The common note in all this advice is.a plea to sit tight for at least another two years. If such advice is followed, the Negro and white workers who want and need civil rights laws will end up in the same blind alley that it led them to this year. That’s why we say: Don’t wait, the time to begin fighting is now, and the way to fight is by militant mass, action!</p>
<p><em>The trouble with the fight up to now is that there has been too much “fine statesmanship” about it, that is, too much hat-in-hand lobbying and reliance on capitalist politicians like Truman. This method couldn’t work and it didn’t work. Now is the time for the rank-and-file to be heard, now is the time for applying pressure through mass demonstrations and struggle, now is the time to show that our patience is thoroughly exhausted.</em></p>
<p>Now – not two years from now – the fight can begin in real earnest by the convocation of a United Labor and Negro Congress for Civil Rights, to be held in Washington next door to the Congress, attended not only by the official labor and Negro leaders but also by the representatives of all the labor and Negro organizations pouring into the capital from all parts of the country to express their wrath and their determination to fight without quarter until they obtain the passage of the civil rights bills promised by both capitalist parties.</p>
<p><em>This is the exact opposite of what the “fine statesmen” advocate, but it is the only thing that capitalist politicians will have respect for and listen to. <strong>The Times</strong> would call such a move “revolutionary” but it is only by such mass action that the civil rights fight can be won.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
What’s to Be Done About Civil Rights?
(28 March 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 13, 28 March 1949, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
What is to be done about the civil rights fight now that the Southern Democrats have succeeded in strengthening their filibuster powers?
The N.Y. Times, a conservative capitalist paper that parades as “liberal” on the civil rights issue, does not have an answer to this question, but it has plenty to say about what should NOT be done. In an editorial on March 16 it warns the Negro people not to get the idea that it will “take a revolution to correct abuses” and to beware “against pulling down the whole structure in order to get at the faulty parts.” The Times wants the Negro people not to go “out of bounds” in the civil rights fight, to be patient – even if it takes another 300 years before they win equality.
Another self-styled “friend of the Negro people,” the New Leader, a paper which speaks for Social Democrats, New Dealers and a part of the labor bureaucracy, on March 19 editorially congratulated the Negro leaders on the “fine statesmanship”,they displayed in not demanding a “fight to the finish on the floor of the Senate.” Why? Because then the rent-control law would have lapsed and everyone, including Negroes, would have suffered as a consequence. “It is too great a sacrifice to pay for such a victory. It will be better to get our social legislation now and deal with bi-partisan reactionaries two years hence.” These are the words that Uncle Tom would have spoken if he had lived long enough, and unlike the New Leader, Uncle Tom never pretended to be a “democratic socialist.”
The NAACP, through its secretary, Walter White, promises the fight for civil rights will go on. “We shall go to the people – the people who expressed their approval of civil rights legislation at the polls last November – and let them know how the majority of the senators, both Democratic and Republican, have defied their mandate. We shall urge them again to remember at the polls how their senators voted on this crucial issue.” That’s fine, but how much good will that do? The NAACP leaders are against the formation of a Labor Party. How will it help to replace Democrats with Republicans, or Republicans with Democrats, when both parties knife civil rights? Doesn’t the Democratic 81st Congress, which replaced the Republican 80th Congress, once again prove the futility of such a course?
The common note in all this advice is.a plea to sit tight for at least another two years. If such advice is followed, the Negro and white workers who want and need civil rights laws will end up in the same blind alley that it led them to this year. That’s why we say: Don’t wait, the time to begin fighting is now, and the way to fight is by militant mass, action!
The trouble with the fight up to now is that there has been too much “fine statesmanship” about it, that is, too much hat-in-hand lobbying and reliance on capitalist politicians like Truman. This method couldn’t work and it didn’t work. Now is the time for the rank-and-file to be heard, now is the time for applying pressure through mass demonstrations and struggle, now is the time to show that our patience is thoroughly exhausted.
Now – not two years from now – the fight can begin in real earnest by the convocation of a United Labor and Negro Congress for Civil Rights, to be held in Washington next door to the Congress, attended not only by the official labor and Negro leaders but also by the representatives of all the labor and Negro organizations pouring into the capital from all parts of the country to express their wrath and their determination to fight without quarter until they obtain the passage of the civil rights bills promised by both capitalist parties.
This is the exact opposite of what the “fine statesmen” advocate, but it is the only thing that capitalist politicians will have respect for and listen to. The Times would call such a move “revolutionary” but it is only by such mass action that the civil rights fight can be won.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>N.J. Survey Shows Workers Want Union Control of Military Training</h1>
<h3>Approve Enactment of Conscription, But Also Favor Union Control of It</h3>
<h4>Newark S.W.P. Polls Representative Body of Workers to Get Views on Training</h4>
<h3>(29 September 1940)</h3>
<p> </p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_39" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 39</a>, 29 September 1940, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">A carefully-conducted poll of a representative group of workers in New Jersey, completed last week, established that a majority of them are in favor of the conscription bill which has just been enacted into law, but that a majority are also in favor of placing military training under, control of the trade unions.</p>
<p>These significant conclusions were the result of a four-week survey among workers in Newark, in a poll conducted by the Newark branch of the Socialist Workers Party.</p>
<p>The material tabulated was secured by visiting the homes of nearly a thousand workers in two representative working class neighborhoods, the Iron-bound section, heavily populated by industrial workers, and the Third and Fourteenth Wards, heart of Newark’s Negro population.</p>
<p>who conducted the poll were extremely careful not to influence the answers given by the workers. Those questioned – chosen at random – were told that a poll of the neighborhood was being made, that their names would not be taken, and that their replies would be kept strictly confidential. They were not told who was conducting the poll before they answered.</p>
<p>They were asked two questions: 1. “Are you in favor of the conscription bill which is now being debated in Congress?” and 2. “Would you be in favor of military training of workers if they were to be trained under supervision of their trade unions?” They could answer to each question, “yes”, “no”, or “don’t know.”</p>
<p>Here are the results in percentages:</p>
<table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" align="center" width="300">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">Yes</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="3">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">No</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Don’t Know</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Question 1</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">47 </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">26.7</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">26.3</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Question 2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">50.5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">22.8</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">26.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">One thing is startlingly clear from this and other tables which were tabulated from the answers: pacifist tendencies among the workers can hardly be said to exist. Of the whole, only 7 per cent are opposed to both forms of military training! 71.9 per cent favor one or both forms of military training. (The remaining 21%. were against one form and didn’t know about the other, or didn’t know about both forms.)<br>
</p>
<h4>Few Negro Pacifists!</h4>
<p class="fst">Interestingly enough, when these figures were broken down still further, it was found that pacifist tendencies were even smaller than the general 7 per cent, among union members (4) and Negroes (5.8).</p>
<p>The general conclusions to be drawn from the poll may be formulated as follows:<br>
</p>
<h4>Pacifism Is Bankrupt</h4>
<p class="fst">Workers are looking for some means of military training. Most of them favored the conscription bill just adopted by Congress because it appeared to them as the answer to the problem of military training. Most of them, however, likewise are in favor of military training under the control of the trade unions, once the idea if presented to them. <i>This is especially true among the employed union-member and Negro sections of the working class – i.e.. the most decisive sections of the labor movement.</i></p>
<p>The housewives and the unemployed who, by virtue of their status, tend to be less informed and politically developed than the others, give smaller majorities to both forms of military training, but generally show the same tendency as the others. Negro workers show themselves to be particularly receptive to the idea of trade union control of military training.</p>
<p>In the light of these established conclusions, we may say confidently: Woe to the pacifists and semi-pacifists (the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, etc.) who go to the workers walling against conscription, but offering no alternative and progressive system of military training to take its place. These whiners will make no headway, and especially not among the most important sections of the working class.</p>
<p>It is instructive to break down the figures of the poll that show the majority of the workers to be in favor of military training under trade union control. The following were the percentages for the 200 unionists, 421 non-union workers, 308 unemployed-or-housewives, 531 whites and 398 Negroes:</p>
<table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" align="center" width="350">
<tbody><tr valign="bottom">
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">Yes</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="6">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">No</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Don’t Know</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Union</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">61 </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17.5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">21.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Non-union working</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">51.5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">27.6</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">20.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Unemployed housewives</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">42.5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">19.8</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">27.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Whites</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">46.9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">29.9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">23.2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Negroes</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">55.3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">13.3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">31.4</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">It is important to point out that practically none of these workers had ever before considered the question of trade union control of military training; it is correct to say that the poll-takers were the first to raise the question in their minds. Consequently, their opinions on this subject were not, of course, as long thought over as their answers on the question of conscription.<br>
</p>
<h4>Instinctively Class Conscious</h4>
<p class="fst">It would be fair to say, therefore, that for many workers their favorable answer to the question of military training under trade union control was instinctively class conscious. If they thought unions were good, if they felt unions protected or could protect them, they answered yes. And since – as even a recent <b>Fortune</b> poll had to concede – most workers, whether organized or not, favor trade unions, they were struck favorably by the proposition that trade unions should protect them in the sphere of military training as well as in private industry.</p>
<p>Those, however, who felt hostility toward unions for some reason, or felt their own union leaders had failed to protect them on the job, tended to answer no to the proposition that trade unions should control military training. In spite of this, the yes answers were decisive in proportion to those who answered no – almost 5 to 2!<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Program Realistic</h4>
<p class="fst">On the basis of this poll, which we believe quite accurate – it should be carefully repeated In other parts of the country to check it – it appears to be an established fact, that the Socialist Workers Party’s program for military training under trade union control is a popular and practical basis for winning the workers. Needless to say, it is a program against which the capitalist class will fight like cornered rats.</p>
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George Breitman
N.J. Survey Shows Workers Want Union Control of Military Training
Approve Enactment of Conscription, But Also Favor Union Control of It
Newark S.W.P. Polls Representative Body of Workers to Get Views on Training
(29 September 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 39, 29 September 1940, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A carefully-conducted poll of a representative group of workers in New Jersey, completed last week, established that a majority of them are in favor of the conscription bill which has just been enacted into law, but that a majority are also in favor of placing military training under, control of the trade unions.
These significant conclusions were the result of a four-week survey among workers in Newark, in a poll conducted by the Newark branch of the Socialist Workers Party.
The material tabulated was secured by visiting the homes of nearly a thousand workers in two representative working class neighborhoods, the Iron-bound section, heavily populated by industrial workers, and the Third and Fourteenth Wards, heart of Newark’s Negro population.
who conducted the poll were extremely careful not to influence the answers given by the workers. Those questioned – chosen at random – were told that a poll of the neighborhood was being made, that their names would not be taken, and that their replies would be kept strictly confidential. They were not told who was conducting the poll before they answered.
They were asked two questions: 1. “Are you in favor of the conscription bill which is now being debated in Congress?” and 2. “Would you be in favor of military training of workers if they were to be trained under supervision of their trade unions?” They could answer to each question, “yes”, “no”, or “don’t know.”
Here are the results in percentages:
Yes
No
Don’t Know
Question 1
47
26.7
26.3
Question 2
50.5
22.8
26.7
One thing is startlingly clear from this and other tables which were tabulated from the answers: pacifist tendencies among the workers can hardly be said to exist. Of the whole, only 7 per cent are opposed to both forms of military training! 71.9 per cent favor one or both forms of military training. (The remaining 21%. were against one form and didn’t know about the other, or didn’t know about both forms.)
Few Negro Pacifists!
Interestingly enough, when these figures were broken down still further, it was found that pacifist tendencies were even smaller than the general 7 per cent, among union members (4) and Negroes (5.8).
The general conclusions to be drawn from the poll may be formulated as follows:
Pacifism Is Bankrupt
Workers are looking for some means of military training. Most of them favored the conscription bill just adopted by Congress because it appeared to them as the answer to the problem of military training. Most of them, however, likewise are in favor of military training under the control of the trade unions, once the idea if presented to them. This is especially true among the employed union-member and Negro sections of the working class – i.e.. the most decisive sections of the labor movement.
The housewives and the unemployed who, by virtue of their status, tend to be less informed and politically developed than the others, give smaller majorities to both forms of military training, but generally show the same tendency as the others. Negro workers show themselves to be particularly receptive to the idea of trade union control of military training.
In the light of these established conclusions, we may say confidently: Woe to the pacifists and semi-pacifists (the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, etc.) who go to the workers walling against conscription, but offering no alternative and progressive system of military training to take its place. These whiners will make no headway, and especially not among the most important sections of the working class.
It is instructive to break down the figures of the poll that show the majority of the workers to be in favor of military training under trade union control. The following were the percentages for the 200 unionists, 421 non-union workers, 308 unemployed-or-housewives, 531 whites and 398 Negroes:
Yes
No
Don’t Know
Union
61
17.5
21.5
Non-union working
51.5
27.6
20.9
Unemployed housewives
42.5
19.8
27.7
Whites
46.9
29.9
23.2
Negroes
55.3
13.3
31.4
It is important to point out that practically none of these workers had ever before considered the question of trade union control of military training; it is correct to say that the poll-takers were the first to raise the question in their minds. Consequently, their opinions on this subject were not, of course, as long thought over as their answers on the question of conscription.
Instinctively Class Conscious
It would be fair to say, therefore, that for many workers their favorable answer to the question of military training under trade union control was instinctively class conscious. If they thought unions were good, if they felt unions protected or could protect them, they answered yes. And since – as even a recent Fortune poll had to concede – most workers, whether organized or not, favor trade unions, they were struck favorably by the proposition that trade unions should protect them in the sphere of military training as well as in private industry.
Those, however, who felt hostility toward unions for some reason, or felt their own union leaders had failed to protect them on the job, tended to answer no to the proposition that trade unions should control military training. In spite of this, the yes answers were decisive in proportion to those who answered no – almost 5 to 2!
Our Program Realistic
On the basis of this poll, which we believe quite accurate – it should be carefully repeated In other parts of the country to check it – it appears to be an established fact, that the Socialist Workers Party’s program for military training under trade union control is a popular and practical basis for winning the workers. Needless to say, it is a program against which the capitalist class will fight like cornered rats.
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<h2 class="western">Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(15 February 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_07" target="new">Vol. V No. 7</a>, 15 February 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4 class="western">Randolph, The Judas Goat</h4>
<p class="fst">Four or five months ago A. Philip Randolph, head of the Pullman Porters union issued a statement called <em>The Battle for Britain</em>, which called for support by the Negro people of all aid, short of war, lo Great Britain.</p>
<p>Randolph was immediately answered by George Schuyler, <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> columnist, who took up each of his arguments point hy point and tore them to pieces. Randolph did not try to answer Schuyler; and Randolph’s statement was widely distributed hy the war-monger ins Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.</p>
<p>This week again Randolph, undaunted by the weakness and falseness of his arguments, has issued another statement. <em>England’s Fight Our Caus</em>e.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Negroes.” he begins, “should support ‘all out aid.’ including the Lend-Lease Bill, to Great Britain, short of war, because she is fighting the cause of democracy, the only hope and salvation of minority groups.”</p>
<p>Did Randolph ever hear about the British Empire? Does he know that it is the greatest corporation of slave colonies the world has ever seen? Does he know that it has more than 400,000,000 colored people under its control, that the “cause of democracy” for which it is fighting is not intended to include these 400.000,000, that the democracy of Great Britain means oppression, exploitation, dictatorial rule, discrimination segregation, excessive taxation, denial of every kind of liberty but the liberty to work for the lowest wages in the world or starve?</p>
<p>Randolph of course must know what this democracy means to the Negro, not only in the British Empire, but right here in the United Slates where he is Jim-Crowed and discriminated against everywhere and in everything.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4 class="western">Two Kinds of Imperialism?</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Now, of course,” he continues, “there are those who say that this is an imperialist war ... It is true ... in the sense that Germany, Great Britain and Italy are imperialist nations, and that Great Britain has been and is an oppressor of the darker races. But it does not follow that Great Britain, Germany and Italy represent equal degrees of evil and danger to the darker races and to ... progress and the cause of peace ...”</p>
<p>Then follows an attempt to differentiate between imperialist Germany and imperialist Britain.</p>
<p>Hitler has shown his contempt and disdain of the Negro people in <strong>Mein Kampf</strong>, where he calls them half-apes and sub-human. The Nazis in France pulled down Negro statues and drove the Negroes out of the country, “in other words, Hitler preaches and practices, unashamedly, his hellish hatred of all Negroes.”</p>
<p>Randolph then contrasts to this his version of the behavior of British imperialism. Does he say a word about the policies it is still carrying on in Africa and India and the West Indies, the denial of all rights of free speech, free press and free assemblage, the arrests of all who speak up against the war, the intensification during the war of the exploitation of the Africans to raise the money to run the war? Not a word. For then he would have to admit that while Hitler preaches <em>and practices</em> Negro oppression, England <em>keeps quiet and practices</em> it. that while Hitler <em>calls</em> the Negro inferior, England <em>keeps quiet and treats</em> him as an inferior.</p>
<p>Instead, Randolph points to the “co-operation Britain is giving Emperor Haile Selassie” in driving the fascists out of Ethiopia. He also points to the fact that since the raids over London, West Indian Negroes have been permitted to join the RAF. And beyond that he has nothing to say.</p>
<p>The fact that he can point to so few specific things which can be offered in England’s favor is proof Itself of the bankruptcy of Randolph’s position.<br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4 class="western">The Truth About Ethiopia</h4>
<p>Imperialist Britain, which was largely responsible for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, is now described as helping to free Ethiopia today! Even Randolph knows that this is a little too much to get people to swallow, so he tries to qualify it.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There are those who cynically remark that England’s support of the freedom of Ethiopia is inspired by a selfish interest. There would be no point in denying this. It is true. But what is wrong with it? The motivation of all great power nations is self interest. Self interest is not to be condemned if it is not anti-social and reactionary. Here, the self interest of Great Britain takes the form of fighting to help restore the independence and liberty of a smaller, defenseless nation, and thereby serves the cause of humanity and justice, though, verily, this course of action be belated.”</p>
<p>Thus, according to Randolph, England isn’t fighting Germany because these two gangs of bandits each want control of the colonies and their to continue its exploitation of the 400,000,000 – it’s fighting because it is interested in the freedom of Ethiopia!</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Therefore,” he says, “the Battle of Britain is the Battle of America, and the Battle of America is the Battle of the Negro ...”</p>
<p>If England’s fight to maintain its death grip on the colonies is the Battle of the Negro, one may logically ask why give only aid “short of war”? Randolph’s only answer, when Roosevelt and the Sixty Families give the word, will be: That’s right, we’ve got to get into the war too. And again. Randolph will have no answer to those who try to point the correct path to the workers of the world: uniting Negro and white against the imperialist gangsters on both sides and taking power to set up a socialist society.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(15 February 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 7, 15 February 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Randolph, The Judas Goat
Four or five months ago A. Philip Randolph, head of the Pullman Porters union issued a statement called The Battle for Britain, which called for support by the Negro people of all aid, short of war, lo Great Britain.
Randolph was immediately answered by George Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier columnist, who took up each of his arguments point hy point and tore them to pieces. Randolph did not try to answer Schuyler; and Randolph’s statement was widely distributed hy the war-monger ins Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.
This week again Randolph, undaunted by the weakness and falseness of his arguments, has issued another statement. England’s Fight Our Cause.
“Negroes.” he begins, “should support ‘all out aid.’ including the Lend-Lease Bill, to Great Britain, short of war, because she is fighting the cause of democracy, the only hope and salvation of minority groups.”
Did Randolph ever hear about the British Empire? Does he know that it is the greatest corporation of slave colonies the world has ever seen? Does he know that it has more than 400,000,000 colored people under its control, that the “cause of democracy” for which it is fighting is not intended to include these 400.000,000, that the democracy of Great Britain means oppression, exploitation, dictatorial rule, discrimination segregation, excessive taxation, denial of every kind of liberty but the liberty to work for the lowest wages in the world or starve?
Randolph of course must know what this democracy means to the Negro, not only in the British Empire, but right here in the United Slates where he is Jim-Crowed and discriminated against everywhere and in everything.
Two Kinds of Imperialism?
“Now, of course,” he continues, “there are those who say that this is an imperialist war ... It is true ... in the sense that Germany, Great Britain and Italy are imperialist nations, and that Great Britain has been and is an oppressor of the darker races. But it does not follow that Great Britain, Germany and Italy represent equal degrees of evil and danger to the darker races and to ... progress and the cause of peace ...”
Then follows an attempt to differentiate between imperialist Germany and imperialist Britain.
Hitler has shown his contempt and disdain of the Negro people in Mein Kampf, where he calls them half-apes and sub-human. The Nazis in France pulled down Negro statues and drove the Negroes out of the country, “in other words, Hitler preaches and practices, unashamedly, his hellish hatred of all Negroes.”
Randolph then contrasts to this his version of the behavior of British imperialism. Does he say a word about the policies it is still carrying on in Africa and India and the West Indies, the denial of all rights of free speech, free press and free assemblage, the arrests of all who speak up against the war, the intensification during the war of the exploitation of the Africans to raise the money to run the war? Not a word. For then he would have to admit that while Hitler preaches and practices Negro oppression, England keeps quiet and practices it. that while Hitler calls the Negro inferior, England keeps quiet and treats him as an inferior.
Instead, Randolph points to the “co-operation Britain is giving Emperor Haile Selassie” in driving the fascists out of Ethiopia. He also points to the fact that since the raids over London, West Indian Negroes have been permitted to join the RAF. And beyond that he has nothing to say.
The fact that he can point to so few specific things which can be offered in England’s favor is proof Itself of the bankruptcy of Randolph’s position.
The Truth About Ethiopia
Imperialist Britain, which was largely responsible for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, is now described as helping to free Ethiopia today! Even Randolph knows that this is a little too much to get people to swallow, so he tries to qualify it.
“There are those who cynically remark that England’s support of the freedom of Ethiopia is inspired by a selfish interest. There would be no point in denying this. It is true. But what is wrong with it? The motivation of all great power nations is self interest. Self interest is not to be condemned if it is not anti-social and reactionary. Here, the self interest of Great Britain takes the form of fighting to help restore the independence and liberty of a smaller, defenseless nation, and thereby serves the cause of humanity and justice, though, verily, this course of action be belated.”
Thus, according to Randolph, England isn’t fighting Germany because these two gangs of bandits each want control of the colonies and their to continue its exploitation of the 400,000,000 – it’s fighting because it is interested in the freedom of Ethiopia!
“Therefore,” he says, “the Battle of Britain is the Battle of America, and the Battle of America is the Battle of the Negro ...”
If England’s fight to maintain its death grip on the colonies is the Battle of the Negro, one may logically ask why give only aid “short of war”? Randolph’s only answer, when Roosevelt and the Sixty Families give the word, will be: That’s right, we’ve got to get into the war too. And again. Randolph will have no answer to those who try to point the correct path to the workers of the world: uniting Negro and white against the imperialist gangsters on both sides and taking power to set up a socialist society.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
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<h1>The Elections on November 4</h1>
<h3>(1 November 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_44" target="new">Vol. V No. 44</a>, 1 November 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Negro workers in the metropolitan area will have a chance on Tuesday, November 4, to express their views on the most important questions of the day. On election day in New York City and in Essex County, New Jersey, they will be able by the votes they cast to show where they stand on the vital questions of war, fascism, Jim Crowism, jobs and equal rights for the Negro people, attacks on civil liberties and militant unionism.</p>
<p>What do the Democratic and Republican parties stand for today? Every Negro worker has had the opportunity from his own experience and observation to learn the answer to this question. Not from the answers the Democratic and Republican politicians give to this question around election time, for then they are all honey and sweetness, full of fine promises, ready to give away cigars and hot dogs and beer and to pat babies on the head. I once saw a white wardheeler who despised Negroes pick up a little colored baby and kiss her – ten days before the voting took place.</p>
<p>I mean what do these boss parties <em>really</em> stand for?</p>
<p>Where do they stand on Negro rights? On paper, they say they stand for “fair play” and “equal treatment” and so on. But when it comes to action, these promises are shown to be very hollow indeed.</p>
<p>Take the Anti-Lynch bills, for example. When the Republican Party had a majority in both houses of Congress, it failed to pass this legislation. When the Democratic Party got a majority, it too refused to pass it. And these bills of theirs are very weak and inadequate as it is. When they refuse to pass them, they reveal more about their true attitude toward the Negro people than all the talk and words in the world.</p>
<p>The same thing with the Anti-Poll Tax bills. The same thing with legislation to stop the bosses from barring Negroes from industry. Talk is cheap, but action is what counts.</p>
<p>Of course, there are some politicians who are more dependent on Negro votes than others, and they are more careful in how they act. LaGuardia is a good example. But when it comes to something important, men like LaGuardia only use their reputations as “friends of the Negroes” to hinder and prevent the real struggle against Jim Crowism. Last June, when thousands of Negroes were getting ready for their March on Washington for jobs and equality, LaGuardia used all his influence to prevent them from going through with their militant action which would have accomplished a million times more than all his promises and appointments.</p>
<p>Workers must stop making the mistake of saying, “The boss parties are no good, we know that, but Jones and Smith are good men belonging to those parties, and so we will vote for them.” Politicians must be judged primarily on the basis of the party they belong to, and the program and record of the party they belong to. Candidates of the boss parties must accept the responsibility not only for what they do themselves, but for what their party does.<br>
</p>
<a name="s1"></a>
<h3>Vote for the Program You Support</h3>
<p class="fst">Workers must also learn to resist the old argument that it is no use voting for the candidate of a fighting workers party, “because he can’t get elected anyhow, and it would only be wasting your vote to support him.”</p>
<p>If you really want to waste your vote, cast it for the candidates who are opposed to labor’s best interests. What good does it do workers to help elect people who are going to oppose labor’s needs?</p>
<p>What does a vote for the Republican or Democratic party mean? It means a vote in favor of the war and the war program that the masses will have to pay for. It means a vote of approval for their refusal to pass the Anti-Lynch Bill, the Anti-Poll Tax Bill, for their refusal to put any teeth into the order to abolish discrimination in industry. It means a vote of approval of the refusal of both parties to do anything about the vicious Jim Crow system in the Army and Navy.</p>
<p>And what will you be voting for when you support the Socialist Workers Party? First of all, you will be saying that you are opposed to this fake “war for democracy”. Secondly, you will be saying that you are opposed to fascism both at home and abroad, and you recognize that the workers themselves, independently of the bosses, must organize their forces to defeat fascism and destroy its roots.</p>
<p>You will be saying that you are opposed to Jim Crowism in any form and in any place. You will be saying that you are ready to fight for full social, economic and political equality for the Negro people. You will be saying that you are opposed to the capitalist system that breeds racial prejudices to keep the workers divided so that the bosses can exploit them more easily, and that you want to replace it with a system where discrimination will be forever abolished, where all workers will have security and freedom.</p>
<p>In New York our candidate for mayor is James P. Cannon. In Essex County our candidate for General Assembly is George Breitman. They merit the support of every Negro and white worker not only because of the struggles they have led and participated in, but primarily because the program they represent is the only answer to the problems of the working class.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
The Elections on November 4
(1 November 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 44, 1 November 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Negro workers in the metropolitan area will have a chance on Tuesday, November 4, to express their views on the most important questions of the day. On election day in New York City and in Essex County, New Jersey, they will be able by the votes they cast to show where they stand on the vital questions of war, fascism, Jim Crowism, jobs and equal rights for the Negro people, attacks on civil liberties and militant unionism.
What do the Democratic and Republican parties stand for today? Every Negro worker has had the opportunity from his own experience and observation to learn the answer to this question. Not from the answers the Democratic and Republican politicians give to this question around election time, for then they are all honey and sweetness, full of fine promises, ready to give away cigars and hot dogs and beer and to pat babies on the head. I once saw a white wardheeler who despised Negroes pick up a little colored baby and kiss her – ten days before the voting took place.
I mean what do these boss parties really stand for?
Where do they stand on Negro rights? On paper, they say they stand for “fair play” and “equal treatment” and so on. But when it comes to action, these promises are shown to be very hollow indeed.
Take the Anti-Lynch bills, for example. When the Republican Party had a majority in both houses of Congress, it failed to pass this legislation. When the Democratic Party got a majority, it too refused to pass it. And these bills of theirs are very weak and inadequate as it is. When they refuse to pass them, they reveal more about their true attitude toward the Negro people than all the talk and words in the world.
The same thing with the Anti-Poll Tax bills. The same thing with legislation to stop the bosses from barring Negroes from industry. Talk is cheap, but action is what counts.
Of course, there are some politicians who are more dependent on Negro votes than others, and they are more careful in how they act. LaGuardia is a good example. But when it comes to something important, men like LaGuardia only use their reputations as “friends of the Negroes” to hinder and prevent the real struggle against Jim Crowism. Last June, when thousands of Negroes were getting ready for their March on Washington for jobs and equality, LaGuardia used all his influence to prevent them from going through with their militant action which would have accomplished a million times more than all his promises and appointments.
Workers must stop making the mistake of saying, “The boss parties are no good, we know that, but Jones and Smith are good men belonging to those parties, and so we will vote for them.” Politicians must be judged primarily on the basis of the party they belong to, and the program and record of the party they belong to. Candidates of the boss parties must accept the responsibility not only for what they do themselves, but for what their party does.
Vote for the Program You Support
Workers must also learn to resist the old argument that it is no use voting for the candidate of a fighting workers party, “because he can’t get elected anyhow, and it would only be wasting your vote to support him.”
If you really want to waste your vote, cast it for the candidates who are opposed to labor’s best interests. What good does it do workers to help elect people who are going to oppose labor’s needs?
What does a vote for the Republican or Democratic party mean? It means a vote in favor of the war and the war program that the masses will have to pay for. It means a vote of approval for their refusal to pass the Anti-Lynch Bill, the Anti-Poll Tax Bill, for their refusal to put any teeth into the order to abolish discrimination in industry. It means a vote of approval of the refusal of both parties to do anything about the vicious Jim Crow system in the Army and Navy.
And what will you be voting for when you support the Socialist Workers Party? First of all, you will be saying that you are opposed to this fake “war for democracy”. Secondly, you will be saying that you are opposed to fascism both at home and abroad, and you recognize that the workers themselves, independently of the bosses, must organize their forces to defeat fascism and destroy its roots.
You will be saying that you are opposed to Jim Crowism in any form and in any place. You will be saying that you are ready to fight for full social, economic and political equality for the Negro people. You will be saying that you are opposed to the capitalist system that breeds racial prejudices to keep the workers divided so that the bosses can exploit them more easily, and that you want to replace it with a system where discrimination will be forever abolished, where all workers will have security and freedom.
In New York our candidate for mayor is James P. Cannon. In Essex County our candidate for General Assembly is George Breitman. They merit the support of every Negro and white worker not only because of the struggles they have led and participated in, but primarily because the program they represent is the only answer to the problems of the working class.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>French and Italian June Elections<br>
Record Slight Shift to Right</h1>
<h3>(15 June 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_24" target="new">Vol. X No. 24</a>, 15 June 1946, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">A slight shift to the right took place in the French and Italian elections of June 2. In both countries, for the first time since the end of the war, a capitalist party came forward as the largest in the electoral field. But in each case this capitalist party still remains a minority. France and Italy remain in the grip of a political crisis; in both countries the parliamentary scene will be marked by instability for the coming period. The decisive battles still lie ahead.</p>
<p>In the elections to the French Constituent Assembly, which will prepare a new constitution, the Communist Party held its own, even adding slightly to its popular vote, but losing 4 or 5 seats in the Assembly. The Socialist Party lost both seats and votes, falling back to the position of third party. Together the two parties still represent a majority, but now by only one or two seats; their combined relative strength has declined.</p>
<p>The chief gains were made by the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), which added over a million votes and about 15 seats in the Assembly. The MRP, whose strength was an unknown factor only last October, has emerged as the main party and rallying center of the French capitalist class.</p>
<p>In the Italian referendum on the monarchy and election of a Constituent Assembly, a similar trend was revealed. The House of Savoy was rejected by roughly twelve million to ten million votes. The Christian Democrats, who resemble the French MRP, received over one-third of the votes. The Socialist and Communist Party each got about 20 per cent.</p>
<p>What is the explanation for the rise and growth of the MRP (and its “Christian Socialist” counterparts not only in Italy, but in Germany, Austria, and several other countries in western Europe)?</p>
<p>It must be remembered, that the capitalist parties on the continent were completely discredited and lost all semblance of mass support during the war. When the German occupation ended, the capitalists did not have a single party of their own. They had to begin all over again and build them. Capitalism remained dominant not because of the strength of the capitalists, but because the Communist and Socialist Parties, supported by the masses who wanted a revolutionary change, refused to overthrow it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Capitalist Aims</h4>
<p class="fst">But the capitalists were not and are not satisfied to rule through these workers’ parties, subservient though their leaders are. For the continuation of rule in this manner implies some concessions to the masses; furthermore, it contains the danger that the workers’ organizations, under a different leadership, may move toward the overthrow of capitalism. The stabilization of the ruined French economy under capitalism can be achieved only by further attacks on the masses’ living standards and rights. To carry this out completely, the capitalists must have agents more trustworthy and less subject to mass pressure than the Stalinist and “Socialist” leaders. For the perspective of French capitalism is not rule by “democratic” forms but by a dictatorial regime which can repress all independent activity of the masses.</p>
<p>Of course the capitalists could not make this change overnight – the political conditions were not ripe for it. First of all they needed a party of their own. So, while they were rebuilding the shattered structure of the capitalist state with the aid of the workers parties’ leaders, they began to prepare for the future by organizing the MRP. To help it secure a mass base, even among the lower middle class, they had to give it a radical hue. The MRP declared for nationalization of industry, for example, and in many other ways took the coloration of the workers’ parties.<br>
</p>
<h4>October Election</h4>
<p class="fst">The MRP made a strong beginning in the first postwar election last October, but it was still only the third largest party. De Gaulle, who represented one wing of the MRP, thought the time had come early this year for beginning the anti-labor offensive, but the capitalists generally judged more time was required. De Gaulle was compelled to step down from the government until a more favorable occasion.</p>
<p>The MRP got all the help the ruling class could give it, but no one aided it more effectively than the leaders of the CP and SP. Instead of exposing the true aims of the MRP, the leaders of these parties – who constituted a majority of the government – entered into a coalition with the MRP and thus helped to build up its authority. Instead of offering a truly revolutionary program to inspire the workers, peasants and middle class, the CP and SP sponsored measures which the MRP could support and go along with.</p>
<p>As the Republican columnist, Walter Lippman, points out with satisfaction: “The Communists have no social program for the reconstruction of France which is more advanced or more radical than that which the MRP and the Socialists offer.”</p>
<p>Furthermore, the CP and SP vied with the MRP, and even surpassed it, in such measures as disarming the workers, prohibiting strikes, increasing the speedup, maintaining wage-freezing, etc. Little wonder, therefore, that large sections of the masses have become confused, discouraged and even fallen into apathy.<br>
</p>
<h4>MRP Benefits</h4>
<p class="fst">That the MRP was able to benefit from such conditions was shown in the next balloting – the May 5 referendum on the constitution. Here, by cleverly seizing on a secondary though important difference with the other two parties, the MRP was able to get credit for being an opposition to the Gouin government, thus partly obscuring the fact that it shared responsibility for all the unpopular measures of that government.</p>
<p>As a Paris dispatch to <strong>The Militant</strong> two weeks ago indicated. the MRP was able to win in this test of strength because of “the abstention, if not the direct opposition, of a considerable section of the lowest strata of the population.” In four of the industrial departments, the vote in favor of the constitution was more than 200,000 less than the vote cast for the CP and SP together last October. (A typographical error in the June 1 <strong>Militant</strong> made this read 2,000,000 instead of 200,000; but this does not alter the significance of the decline in the CP-SP vote.)</p>
<p>The June 2 election shows that this trend, in a modified form, is continuing.</p>
<p>The capitalists in Italy and France can thank the CP and SP not only for maintaining capitalism in its darkest days, but also for assisting in the creation of strong and growing capitalist parties.</p>
<p>As a result the political forces of French capitalism are today stronger comparatively than at any time since the collapse of Germany. But even now they are not in the position they aim to secure. The social crisis remains unresolved.</p>
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George Breitman
French and Italian June Elections
Record Slight Shift to Right
(15 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 24, 15 June 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A slight shift to the right took place in the French and Italian elections of June 2. In both countries, for the first time since the end of the war, a capitalist party came forward as the largest in the electoral field. But in each case this capitalist party still remains a minority. France and Italy remain in the grip of a political crisis; in both countries the parliamentary scene will be marked by instability for the coming period. The decisive battles still lie ahead.
In the elections to the French Constituent Assembly, which will prepare a new constitution, the Communist Party held its own, even adding slightly to its popular vote, but losing 4 or 5 seats in the Assembly. The Socialist Party lost both seats and votes, falling back to the position of third party. Together the two parties still represent a majority, but now by only one or two seats; their combined relative strength has declined.
The chief gains were made by the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), which added over a million votes and about 15 seats in the Assembly. The MRP, whose strength was an unknown factor only last October, has emerged as the main party and rallying center of the French capitalist class.
In the Italian referendum on the monarchy and election of a Constituent Assembly, a similar trend was revealed. The House of Savoy was rejected by roughly twelve million to ten million votes. The Christian Democrats, who resemble the French MRP, received over one-third of the votes. The Socialist and Communist Party each got about 20 per cent.
What is the explanation for the rise and growth of the MRP (and its “Christian Socialist” counterparts not only in Italy, but in Germany, Austria, and several other countries in western Europe)?
It must be remembered, that the capitalist parties on the continent were completely discredited and lost all semblance of mass support during the war. When the German occupation ended, the capitalists did not have a single party of their own. They had to begin all over again and build them. Capitalism remained dominant not because of the strength of the capitalists, but because the Communist and Socialist Parties, supported by the masses who wanted a revolutionary change, refused to overthrow it.
Capitalist Aims
But the capitalists were not and are not satisfied to rule through these workers’ parties, subservient though their leaders are. For the continuation of rule in this manner implies some concessions to the masses; furthermore, it contains the danger that the workers’ organizations, under a different leadership, may move toward the overthrow of capitalism. The stabilization of the ruined French economy under capitalism can be achieved only by further attacks on the masses’ living standards and rights. To carry this out completely, the capitalists must have agents more trustworthy and less subject to mass pressure than the Stalinist and “Socialist” leaders. For the perspective of French capitalism is not rule by “democratic” forms but by a dictatorial regime which can repress all independent activity of the masses.
Of course the capitalists could not make this change overnight – the political conditions were not ripe for it. First of all they needed a party of their own. So, while they were rebuilding the shattered structure of the capitalist state with the aid of the workers parties’ leaders, they began to prepare for the future by organizing the MRP. To help it secure a mass base, even among the lower middle class, they had to give it a radical hue. The MRP declared for nationalization of industry, for example, and in many other ways took the coloration of the workers’ parties.
October Election
The MRP made a strong beginning in the first postwar election last October, but it was still only the third largest party. De Gaulle, who represented one wing of the MRP, thought the time had come early this year for beginning the anti-labor offensive, but the capitalists generally judged more time was required. De Gaulle was compelled to step down from the government until a more favorable occasion.
The MRP got all the help the ruling class could give it, but no one aided it more effectively than the leaders of the CP and SP. Instead of exposing the true aims of the MRP, the leaders of these parties – who constituted a majority of the government – entered into a coalition with the MRP and thus helped to build up its authority. Instead of offering a truly revolutionary program to inspire the workers, peasants and middle class, the CP and SP sponsored measures which the MRP could support and go along with.
As the Republican columnist, Walter Lippman, points out with satisfaction: “The Communists have no social program for the reconstruction of France which is more advanced or more radical than that which the MRP and the Socialists offer.”
Furthermore, the CP and SP vied with the MRP, and even surpassed it, in such measures as disarming the workers, prohibiting strikes, increasing the speedup, maintaining wage-freezing, etc. Little wonder, therefore, that large sections of the masses have become confused, discouraged and even fallen into apathy.
MRP Benefits
That the MRP was able to benefit from such conditions was shown in the next balloting – the May 5 referendum on the constitution. Here, by cleverly seizing on a secondary though important difference with the other two parties, the MRP was able to get credit for being an opposition to the Gouin government, thus partly obscuring the fact that it shared responsibility for all the unpopular measures of that government.
As a Paris dispatch to The Militant two weeks ago indicated. the MRP was able to win in this test of strength because of “the abstention, if not the direct opposition, of a considerable section of the lowest strata of the population.” In four of the industrial departments, the vote in favor of the constitution was more than 200,000 less than the vote cast for the CP and SP together last October. (A typographical error in the June 1 Militant made this read 2,000,000 instead of 200,000; but this does not alter the significance of the decline in the CP-SP vote.)
The June 2 election shows that this trend, in a modified form, is continuing.
The capitalists in Italy and France can thank the CP and SP not only for maintaining capitalism in its darkest days, but also for assisting in the creation of strong and growing capitalist parties.
As a result the political forces of French capitalism are today stronger comparatively than at any time since the collapse of Germany. But even now they are not in the position they aim to secure. The social crisis remains unresolved.
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<h4><em><strong>Fourth International</strong></em>, October 1944</h4>
<p> </p>
<h2>Our Paris Correspondent</h2>
<h1>The Real Situation in France</h1>
<p> </p>
<p class="from">From <em><strong>Fourth International</strong></em>, <a href="../../index.htm#fi44_10" target="new">vol.5 No.10</a>, October 1944, pp.293-295.<br>
Transcribed, marked up & formatted by Ted Crawford & David Walters in 2008 for <em>ETOL</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="fst">Although the bourgeois groups, and especially the Stalinists, succeeded in canalizing the Paris uprising of August 19-24 into nationalist lines and making it a “national” insurrection, the class lines, although superficially hidden, exerted their influence all the same. The general slogan was the purely nationalist one: “Out with the Boche;” and the general idea in the minds of the insurrectionists who fought and died on the barricades was that the sole purpose of the uprising was the ejection of the Germans from the city. In fact, the French Communist Party (CPF), which no doubt exerted the greatest influence in the Resistance Movement (in Paris the Stalinist-controlled FTP – <em>Francs Tireurs et Partisans</em> – formed the major part of the FFI) deliberately fostered this mood. <strong>L’Humanité</strong> appeared one day with the headline: “<em>A chaque Parisien son Boche</em>” (Let Every Parisian Get His Boche). However, while the class issues were momentarily confused in the minds of the masses, the character of the movement revealed the underlying class issues.</p>
<p>The actual street fighting was done largely by the FFI (FTP and others) in the city itself, aided on the barricades by elements of the petty bourgeoisie (the local shopkeepers, functionaries, housewives, etc.) and workers in the proletarian districts (XIth, XIVth, and other districts).</p>
<p>The workers of the <em>banlieue</em>, of the big factories, Renault, Citroen, SNAC, Gnome et Rhone, etc., did not in general descend into Paris. They intervened in quite another way. They occupied the factories, arrested or forced the arrest of the collaborating directing factory personnel and in the most advanced cases prepared the given factory to start production again under their control.</p>
<p>In most factories the initiative was taken by Communist Party factory militants, and the Trotskyists. For example, at one factory employing over 1,000 workers, about 15 workers assembled at the plant. Among these were some 10 CP members and supporters and two or three Trotskyists. These 15 occupied the deserted factory, sent messages to call the workers to a factory meeting in order to elect a workers’ committee. A “<em>Commission d’Epuration</em>” (Purging Committee) was set up to “try” all the collaborating managing personnel, directors, managers, etc. Supply committees were likewise elected to take over the factory canteen.</p>
<p>The food situation being acute, the factory canteens had begun to play an important role. Not only the workers but their families ate there. A large proportion of the disputes and strikes that had taken place in the weeks prior to the capture of Paris were related to feeding and canteen arrangements, the quality and quantity of the food, the prices, etc. Thus, during the insurrection, the canteen and the control of it became a vital issue. To obtain food the workers had recourse to direct requisitioning. Black market stocks were requisitioned by organized detachments sent out by the factories to supply the canteens. In the districts housewives’ committees sprung up to fight the black market and ensure the distribution of captured German food stocks.<br>
</p>
<h4>Factory Militias</h4>
<p class="fst">In many factories the nuclei of workers’ militias had already been built up secretly under the German occupation. The CP had called for the formation in the factories of “<em>Milices Ouvrieres Patriotiques</em>” (Patriotic Workers’ Militia), but in two ways their growth was obstructed. First, whatever arms were available to the Resistance Movement were distributed mainly to the reactionary elements, <em>Organisation Civile et Militaire</em> (OCMO), the <em>Armée Secrete</em>, etc. The FTP and workers had to arm themselves mostly from arms captured or stolen from the Germans. Secondly, the Stalinists urged the workers to leave the factories and join the Maquis, where invariably the workers were integrated under the leadership and control of ex-officer cadres. The Trotskyists, on the other hand urged the workers to stick to their factories which were their stronghold and not allow themselves to be dispersed and thus lose their class coherence.</p>
<p>In some cases the workers when they came to occupy the factories, found these already guarded by FFI formations, including the reactionary bosses’ <em>Organisation Civile at Militaire</em> (OCM).</p>
<p>In many factories in the Paris region, similar conditions as in Italy in 1919 and in Spain in 1936 existed, where the whole of the managing and technical personnel of the works had either fled or were arrested. The workers’ committees appointed new directors, foremen, technicians, etc., to work under their control and prepare the factories for the resumption of production; and they sent delegates to de Gaulle’s Ministry of Production, Ministry of Labor, etc., asking permission to start work and laying out detailed plans. They were told that it was impossible to start production as there was no power for the machines. The Government, they were told, would appoint <em>administrateurs-delegues</em> (administrator-delegates) to take over the factories whose directors had been arrested. In the meanwhile, nothing was to be done.</p>
<p>Even in the Paris Metro (subway) the staff on their own initiative drew up a plan and time-table for the trains, made the necessary repairs and said to the authorities, “Let us run the Metro.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Production Under Workers’ Control</h4>
<p class="fst">At the same time, the workers in the factories drew up “<em>Cahiers de Revendications</em>” (lists of demands) which varied from factory to factory, but included commonly wage increases, workers’ control and inspection of the books, workers’ control of employment and exchange, control of the canteen, etc.</p>
<p>In some suburbs the different factories joined forces and called inter-factory delegates’ meetings representing several factories in the district, democratically elected by secret ballot.</p>
<p>The “illegal CGT” (French Confederation of Labor) and the returned trade union officials from Algiers tried to bridle this spontaneous creation of factory committees. One example will illustrate the mood in which they were received. At a meeting of district factory delegates in a Paris suburb, an official of the CGT intervened and declared that the meeting had no authority, was not properly constituted and represented nothing. And so forth and so on. Whereupon one delegate, not belonging to any party, jumped up and exclaimed:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“And who the hell do you represent? I represent – he factory, I was elected by so many workers. Who elected you? I have paid my trade union dues for 15 years and it (the CGT) has done nothing for us at all.”</p>
<p class="fst">He was loudly applauded by the rest of the meeting. The CGT official had to withdraw.</p>
<p>Thus, although the Paris insurrection took place under nationalist, “classless” slogans, and although all tendencies in the Resistance Movement, from ultra-reactionary royalists to the Communist Party, tried to give it a national and classless character, from the very beginning the working class, basing itself, on the factories, “spontaneously” threw up its own class organs – factory committees, factory militias, etc. – and began to put forward class demands, thus creating the elements of dual power.</p>
<p>In the districts (<em>arrondissements</em>) of Paris, a form of dual power as between the Resistance forces (mostly Stalinist FTP) and the de Gaulle authorities exists. During the fighting, detachments of the FFI, FTP, etc., took the local <em>mairies</em> (town halls) by storm and once the Germans were ejected, contrived to occupy them and to assure the municipal services. At the same time housewives’ committees sprang up to control the food rationing.</p>
<p>The reactionaries are already trying to liquidate this duality of power which exists between them and the Stalinists who control the FTP, and the <em>mairies</em>. The headquarters of the FTP has been raided and searched by the police! The formations of the FFI are either being integrated into the regular army or dissolved. De Gaulle in his speech at the Palais de Chaillot was certainly referring to the FFI and FTP when he warned “France must have a <em>united</em> army which belongs to France <em>only</em>.”</p>
<p>Undoubtedly the French Communist Party had a decisive influence on Paris and on the course of the insurrection – in the factories, the FFI – hrough the FFP and in the districts. <em>If</em> it had pursued a policy of “<em>Les Soviets Partout!</em>” (Build Soviets Everywhere!) and actively pushed the workers’ committees, etc., and called upon the workers to build up their committees as the basis of workers’ power as an alternative to the Provisional Government, the insurrection would have very quickly developed into a workers’ revolution.</p>
<p>In fact, all the necessary conditions for a revolutionary situation existed, except for the presence of a sufficiently strong revolutionary party. The CP, by its very nature, and the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy <em>could not but play</em> an altogether different, counter-revolutionary role. By pursuing a “Popular Front,” national unity policy, and calling for a purely “national” insurrection, by exciting to the highest pitch the nationalist and chauvinist sentiments of the masses, it confused the class issues in the minds of the workers. It now finds itself on the horns of this dilemma: It is faced with an offensive by the reaction to liquidate – “legally” and peacefully if possible – he duality of power, and it is equally afraid of leaning on the support of the masses. The Trotskyist organization, on the other hand, calls for the strengthening of the workers’ committees in the factories and their coordination on first a local and then a regional and national plane. It points out that the only way of legalizing the power of the municipal councils is to base them on the “<em>comités de quartier</em>” (district committees), on the housewives’ and factory committees, through democratic elections, thus confirming them as the real expression of the will of the masses.</p>
<p>It is because these demands correspond to the needs of the situation and the real interests of the masses that they are being followed even by rank and file members of the CP in the factories. In several big factories of the Paris region, the initiative in occupying the factories and forming the workers’ committees was taken by the Trotskyists who received the support of CP militants. <em>In such fluid conditions as existed in Paris, it has been shown by the experience of the French Trotskyists that a small body with a correct orientation, can definitely contribute to the development of the situation.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Conclusions</h4>
<p class="fst">The problem that poses itself in France is – <em>who will triumph?</em></p>
<p>Will it be the workers and peasants through the development of their own class organs, workers’ committees, peasants’ committees, etc. – into a Soviet Government – or will it be the bourgeois reaction in the form of a military Bonapartist dictatorship? There is no middle road possible.</p>
<p>A Constituent Assembly might be elected, but the internal contradictions and antagonisms in France are too acute to permit of France going through a more or less lengthy period of parliamentary democracy. Even before the elections for a Constituent Assembly can be held, it is quite possible that the contradictions will have developed to a stage that makes the holding of, “free” elections impossible. However, the struggle for all the democratic liberties – freedom of organization, freedom of the press and of speech, right to strike, etc. – hese are in France today of paramount importance and must be fought for and defended vigorously against all attacks. In the long run all these democratic liberties can be guaranteed only by the class organizations of the working class allied to the peasantry and the lower middle class.</p>
<p>The developments in France, of course, are not separate, but part of the developments in Europe itself. The French ruling class, expressing itself through de Gaulle, is staking its claim to a share in the peace settlement, the partition of Germany and the policing of Europe as a great power. As a matter of fact, however, France no longer has the power to play such a role in view of its economic, political and military weakness and the preponderant power, economic and military, of the USA. But in an attempt to stake his claim, de Gaulle plans – as his speech at the Chaillot Palace shows – to rebuild the French army and gear the whole economic life of France to the war effort. Such a burden will prove too heavy. France will be like Balaam’s ass. The imposition of such a burden upon the already weary masses after four years of German occupation and exploitation can only he achieved by dictatorial methods. De Gaulle, perhaps, has hopes of becoming a new Napoleon.</p>
<p>The fate of France cannot be separated from that of Europe. Either it will become a Bonapartist state in a Balkanized Europe, or its social revolution, bringing into power the Soviet government, will be but one part of the European revolution for a United States of Europe.</p>
<p class="date">Paris, September 1944.</p>
<p class="fst">P.S. When Jacques Duclos, in a speech at a big mass meeting in the <em>Vel. d’Hiv.</em> said: “We all know that the proportion of two Communists in the Government does not represent the real relation of forces in the country,” he was very vigorously applauded.</p>
<p>If in Britain the question for the coming period is “Labor to Power,” then in France one might similarly say: “<em>Thorez au pouvoir</em>” (Thorez to Power), and let the masses in each case learn from their own experience.</p>
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Fourth International, October 1944
Our Paris Correspondent
The Real Situation in France
From Fourth International, vol.5 No.10, October 1944, pp.293-295.
Transcribed, marked up & formatted by Ted Crawford & David Walters in 2008 for ETOL.
Although the bourgeois groups, and especially the Stalinists, succeeded in canalizing the Paris uprising of August 19-24 into nationalist lines and making it a “national” insurrection, the class lines, although superficially hidden, exerted their influence all the same. The general slogan was the purely nationalist one: “Out with the Boche;” and the general idea in the minds of the insurrectionists who fought and died on the barricades was that the sole purpose of the uprising was the ejection of the Germans from the city. In fact, the French Communist Party (CPF), which no doubt exerted the greatest influence in the Resistance Movement (in Paris the Stalinist-controlled FTP – Francs Tireurs et Partisans – formed the major part of the FFI) deliberately fostered this mood. L’Humanité appeared one day with the headline: “A chaque Parisien son Boche” (Let Every Parisian Get His Boche). However, while the class issues were momentarily confused in the minds of the masses, the character of the movement revealed the underlying class issues.
The actual street fighting was done largely by the FFI (FTP and others) in the city itself, aided on the barricades by elements of the petty bourgeoisie (the local shopkeepers, functionaries, housewives, etc.) and workers in the proletarian districts (XIth, XIVth, and other districts).
The workers of the banlieue, of the big factories, Renault, Citroen, SNAC, Gnome et Rhone, etc., did not in general descend into Paris. They intervened in quite another way. They occupied the factories, arrested or forced the arrest of the collaborating directing factory personnel and in the most advanced cases prepared the given factory to start production again under their control.
In most factories the initiative was taken by Communist Party factory militants, and the Trotskyists. For example, at one factory employing over 1,000 workers, about 15 workers assembled at the plant. Among these were some 10 CP members and supporters and two or three Trotskyists. These 15 occupied the deserted factory, sent messages to call the workers to a factory meeting in order to elect a workers’ committee. A “Commission d’Epuration” (Purging Committee) was set up to “try” all the collaborating managing personnel, directors, managers, etc. Supply committees were likewise elected to take over the factory canteen.
The food situation being acute, the factory canteens had begun to play an important role. Not only the workers but their families ate there. A large proportion of the disputes and strikes that had taken place in the weeks prior to the capture of Paris were related to feeding and canteen arrangements, the quality and quantity of the food, the prices, etc. Thus, during the insurrection, the canteen and the control of it became a vital issue. To obtain food the workers had recourse to direct requisitioning. Black market stocks were requisitioned by organized detachments sent out by the factories to supply the canteens. In the districts housewives’ committees sprung up to fight the black market and ensure the distribution of captured German food stocks.
Factory Militias
In many factories the nuclei of workers’ militias had already been built up secretly under the German occupation. The CP had called for the formation in the factories of “Milices Ouvrieres Patriotiques” (Patriotic Workers’ Militia), but in two ways their growth was obstructed. First, whatever arms were available to the Resistance Movement were distributed mainly to the reactionary elements, Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCMO), the Armée Secrete, etc. The FTP and workers had to arm themselves mostly from arms captured or stolen from the Germans. Secondly, the Stalinists urged the workers to leave the factories and join the Maquis, where invariably the workers were integrated under the leadership and control of ex-officer cadres. The Trotskyists, on the other hand urged the workers to stick to their factories which were their stronghold and not allow themselves to be dispersed and thus lose their class coherence.
In some cases the workers when they came to occupy the factories, found these already guarded by FFI formations, including the reactionary bosses’ Organisation Civile at Militaire (OCM).
In many factories in the Paris region, similar conditions as in Italy in 1919 and in Spain in 1936 existed, where the whole of the managing and technical personnel of the works had either fled or were arrested. The workers’ committees appointed new directors, foremen, technicians, etc., to work under their control and prepare the factories for the resumption of production; and they sent delegates to de Gaulle’s Ministry of Production, Ministry of Labor, etc., asking permission to start work and laying out detailed plans. They were told that it was impossible to start production as there was no power for the machines. The Government, they were told, would appoint administrateurs-delegues (administrator-delegates) to take over the factories whose directors had been arrested. In the meanwhile, nothing was to be done.
Even in the Paris Metro (subway) the staff on their own initiative drew up a plan and time-table for the trains, made the necessary repairs and said to the authorities, “Let us run the Metro.”
Production Under Workers’ Control
At the same time, the workers in the factories drew up “Cahiers de Revendications” (lists of demands) which varied from factory to factory, but included commonly wage increases, workers’ control and inspection of the books, workers’ control of employment and exchange, control of the canteen, etc.
In some suburbs the different factories joined forces and called inter-factory delegates’ meetings representing several factories in the district, democratically elected by secret ballot.
The “illegal CGT” (French Confederation of Labor) and the returned trade union officials from Algiers tried to bridle this spontaneous creation of factory committees. One example will illustrate the mood in which they were received. At a meeting of district factory delegates in a Paris suburb, an official of the CGT intervened and declared that the meeting had no authority, was not properly constituted and represented nothing. And so forth and so on. Whereupon one delegate, not belonging to any party, jumped up and exclaimed:
“And who the hell do you represent? I represent – he factory, I was elected by so many workers. Who elected you? I have paid my trade union dues for 15 years and it (the CGT) has done nothing for us at all.”
He was loudly applauded by the rest of the meeting. The CGT official had to withdraw.
Thus, although the Paris insurrection took place under nationalist, “classless” slogans, and although all tendencies in the Resistance Movement, from ultra-reactionary royalists to the Communist Party, tried to give it a national and classless character, from the very beginning the working class, basing itself, on the factories, “spontaneously” threw up its own class organs – factory committees, factory militias, etc. – and began to put forward class demands, thus creating the elements of dual power.
In the districts (arrondissements) of Paris, a form of dual power as between the Resistance forces (mostly Stalinist FTP) and the de Gaulle authorities exists. During the fighting, detachments of the FFI, FTP, etc., took the local mairies (town halls) by storm and once the Germans were ejected, contrived to occupy them and to assure the municipal services. At the same time housewives’ committees sprang up to control the food rationing.
The reactionaries are already trying to liquidate this duality of power which exists between them and the Stalinists who control the FTP, and the mairies. The headquarters of the FTP has been raided and searched by the police! The formations of the FFI are either being integrated into the regular army or dissolved. De Gaulle in his speech at the Palais de Chaillot was certainly referring to the FFI and FTP when he warned “France must have a united army which belongs to France only.”
Undoubtedly the French Communist Party had a decisive influence on Paris and on the course of the insurrection – in the factories, the FFI – hrough the FFP and in the districts. If it had pursued a policy of “Les Soviets Partout!” (Build Soviets Everywhere!) and actively pushed the workers’ committees, etc., and called upon the workers to build up their committees as the basis of workers’ power as an alternative to the Provisional Government, the insurrection would have very quickly developed into a workers’ revolution.
In fact, all the necessary conditions for a revolutionary situation existed, except for the presence of a sufficiently strong revolutionary party. The CP, by its very nature, and the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy could not but play an altogether different, counter-revolutionary role. By pursuing a “Popular Front,” national unity policy, and calling for a purely “national” insurrection, by exciting to the highest pitch the nationalist and chauvinist sentiments of the masses, it confused the class issues in the minds of the workers. It now finds itself on the horns of this dilemma: It is faced with an offensive by the reaction to liquidate – “legally” and peacefully if possible – he duality of power, and it is equally afraid of leaning on the support of the masses. The Trotskyist organization, on the other hand, calls for the strengthening of the workers’ committees in the factories and their coordination on first a local and then a regional and national plane. It points out that the only way of legalizing the power of the municipal councils is to base them on the “comités de quartier” (district committees), on the housewives’ and factory committees, through democratic elections, thus confirming them as the real expression of the will of the masses.
It is because these demands correspond to the needs of the situation and the real interests of the masses that they are being followed even by rank and file members of the CP in the factories. In several big factories of the Paris region, the initiative in occupying the factories and forming the workers’ committees was taken by the Trotskyists who received the support of CP militants. In such fluid conditions as existed in Paris, it has been shown by the experience of the French Trotskyists that a small body with a correct orientation, can definitely contribute to the development of the situation.
Conclusions
The problem that poses itself in France is – who will triumph?
Will it be the workers and peasants through the development of their own class organs, workers’ committees, peasants’ committees, etc. – into a Soviet Government – or will it be the bourgeois reaction in the form of a military Bonapartist dictatorship? There is no middle road possible.
A Constituent Assembly might be elected, but the internal contradictions and antagonisms in France are too acute to permit of France going through a more or less lengthy period of parliamentary democracy. Even before the elections for a Constituent Assembly can be held, it is quite possible that the contradictions will have developed to a stage that makes the holding of, “free” elections impossible. However, the struggle for all the democratic liberties – freedom of organization, freedom of the press and of speech, right to strike, etc. – hese are in France today of paramount importance and must be fought for and defended vigorously against all attacks. In the long run all these democratic liberties can be guaranteed only by the class organizations of the working class allied to the peasantry and the lower middle class.
The developments in France, of course, are not separate, but part of the developments in Europe itself. The French ruling class, expressing itself through de Gaulle, is staking its claim to a share in the peace settlement, the partition of Germany and the policing of Europe as a great power. As a matter of fact, however, France no longer has the power to play such a role in view of its economic, political and military weakness and the preponderant power, economic and military, of the USA. But in an attempt to stake his claim, de Gaulle plans – as his speech at the Chaillot Palace shows – to rebuild the French army and gear the whole economic life of France to the war effort. Such a burden will prove too heavy. France will be like Balaam’s ass. The imposition of such a burden upon the already weary masses after four years of German occupation and exploitation can only he achieved by dictatorial methods. De Gaulle, perhaps, has hopes of becoming a new Napoleon.
The fate of France cannot be separated from that of Europe. Either it will become a Bonapartist state in a Balkanized Europe, or its social revolution, bringing into power the Soviet government, will be but one part of the European revolution for a United States of Europe.
Paris, September 1944.
P.S. When Jacques Duclos, in a speech at a big mass meeting in the Vel. d’Hiv. said: “We all know that the proportion of two Communists in the Government does not represent the real relation of forces in the country,” he was very vigorously applauded.
If in Britain the question for the coming period is “Labor to Power,” then in France one might similarly say: “Thorez au pouvoir” (Thorez to Power), and let the masses in each case learn from their own experience.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Major Fallacy in Wallace’s<br>
Anti-War Campaign</h1>
<h3>(29 March 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_13" target="new">Vol. XII No. 13</a>, 29 March 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">One reason why Henry Wallace will get a big vote next November is that he is telling the people a considerable number of truths and half-truths, especially about the responsibility of the Democrats and Republicans for the growing war danger. But at the same time he is propagating one of the most insidious lies of all – the illusion that it is possible for a party like his own to prevent imperialist war.</p>
<p>While Wallace is at his weakest (and most uncomfortable) when he trie’s to explain or justify the Stalinist policy in Europe, he is on his strongest ground politically when he attacks the bi-partisan war policy and manufacture of war hysteria. A good example was his radio speech answering Truman’s demand on March 17 for the resumption of the draft and the passage of UMT.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“<em>America’s mothers and sons ... rightfully believe that a draft and compulsory military training are not the way to preserve freedom at home or to guarantee democracy abroad ... The program to militarize America, if carried out, will impose a police state.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">These are the things a worried people want to hear, the things they know to be true. Wallace also gives them the following explanation of why this situation exists:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We have reached this state because the men who are running our government fear the power of the common men and women the world over ... We have come to this world crisis because willful men with private interests are dictating our foreign policy. Their interest is profit, not people. They seek to protect and extend their foreign investments against the democratic actions of people abroad.”</p>
<p class="fst">That is an example of the half-truths spread by Wallace. It is correct so far as it goes. Properly understood and applied, it has a place within the scientific explanation of why the U.S. is being driven down the road to war. But because it is only a part of the broader explanation, it can and does lead to all kinds of false conclusions when it is presented as the basic reason.<br>
</p>
<h4>Only Part of Cause</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>To understand this problem, it is necessary to begin by recognizing that war is an inevitable product of the capitalist system in its present monopoly stage. No big capitalist power can prosper within its own borders atone; it must expand or suffer paralyzing economic crisis; to survive, it must get new markets abroad, new sources of raw materials, new fields of investment, new spheres of influence. When it is blocked from securing or consolidating these objectives by the economic or political power of other nations, it resorts to military means.</em></p>
<p>It is not enough, therefore, to point an accusing finger at the greedy and evil men who are running the government today. Their individual avarice and lust for power are important factors in the situation, but not the decisive ones. In the first place, they are not acting on their own; they are the representatives and administrators of their class, the capitalist class. Without the consent of their class they would never dare embark on such a dangerous venture as war.<br>
</p>
<h4>System Drives Them</h4>
<p class="fst">In the second place, they are driven to desperate measures for resolving international disputes not merely by some quirk in their individual or collective minds or hearts, but by the very needs of the capitalist system itself. War represents a terrible risk for them, but an even more terrible prospect is the collapse of capitalism in Europe. Because of the very nature of the system, American capitalism could not long survive in an anti-capitalist world.</p>
<p>Within this framework, the Wallace statement quoted above has full validity. But separated from it, it becomes a snare, having meaning only as a “devil” theory on the cause of imperialist war. <em>Used as Wallace uses it, it means wars are caused by “bad men.” And the obvious corollary is: Get rid of the bad men, put in good men. and then we won’t have to worry about war any more.</em></p>
<p>The main thing to remember about Wallace’s position on war is its denial that war is an inseparable feature of capitalism. Being a devoted defender of capitalism, he holds, on the contrary, that peace is possible under capitalism. Put in good men, reform or patch up the system, show the ruling class how much it stands to lose by going to war, build up some mechanism like the United Nations and – according to Wallace – you can have everlasting peace.</p>
<p>Wallace tried in his radio address to show how “reasonable” this position is:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Shall we fight Russia because we are competing for the raw materials of the world? We shall dissipate more raw materials in such a war than they are worth to either the United States or Russia. There is no competition or raw materials which cannot be settled by peaceful means.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>In a rational world order there would of course be no war over raw materials, which would be accessible to all and collectively used for the common welfare. But a world dominated by capitalism is not a rational world. It’s a world whose very fate is based on such conflicts as the competition for raw materials.</em></p>
<p>This competition is costly and in the long run undermines the system it seeks to maintain – but that fact never prevented imperialist and commercial wars before, and it has no more effect on Wall Street today than it had on Hitler ten years ago. “Reasonable” arguments of this kind are shrugged off by the imperialists – like rain off a duck’s back – because it’s a dog-eat-dog system, where each dog is ready to undergo some suffering himself in order to remain or become the top dog, and where all the dogs are indifferent to the welfare of doghood as a whole.<br>
</p>
<h4>Competition Breeds War</h4>
<p class="fst">Moreover, Wallace’s contention that there is no competition which cannot be settled by peaceful means flies in the face of all capitalist history. Tragic experience has shown us too often that under imperialism, competition always leads to economic warfare, the precursor of military explosions. Was World War I just an- accident, due to unreasonableness? Was World War II a fluke that could have been prevented by an amicable conference to settle competition in a friendly kind of way? To imply that is to mock at the lessons of history and thereby to prevent the kind of understanding of modern world conflicts that alone can lead to peace.</p>
<p><em>History has also taught us to be on guard against capitalist reformism and pacifism. Wallace is not the first of his kind. There was Wilson before him, who was going to reform capitalism and keep us out of war, and Roosevelt after that, who sang the same sweet song. They, too, were “reasonable” men but in the end their reputation as men of peace served only to facilitate their efforts to drag the country into war.</em></p>
<p>There is no need here to enter into the question of Wallace’s sincerity – although it should never be forgotten that he was against World War II before it started and then became its busiest apologist once the guns began to boom. What counts in these big questions is program. And Wallace’s program for preventing war can have no different outcome than Wilson’s or Roosevelt’s or that of the pre-World War II isolationists.<br>
</p>
<h4>Get Rid of Cause</h4>
<p class="fst">Fundamentally, the reason is that you can’t end war without ending its cause, capitalism. No matter how fine his intentions may be, a man who clings to this decaying system can’t help misleading his followers who want to fight against war. As long as his influence is able to dissuade the people from replacing capitalism with a socialist system, just so long will the prospect of war be with us.</p>
<p>Many workers intend to vote for Wallace because he, like them, expresses opposition to the war now being prepared. But it is necessary, precisely in the interests of preventing that war, to warn them most insistently that no party dedicated to the maintenance of capitalism can prevent war. The exposure of Wallace’s big lie, the destruction of all pacifist illusions about his party being able to stop the war drive – these are important tasks in today’s struggle for a new socialist society, where war will be a horrible memory rather than an ever-present threat.</p>
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George Breitman
Major Fallacy in Wallace’s
Anti-War Campaign
(29 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 13, 29 March 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
One reason why Henry Wallace will get a big vote next November is that he is telling the people a considerable number of truths and half-truths, especially about the responsibility of the Democrats and Republicans for the growing war danger. But at the same time he is propagating one of the most insidious lies of all – the illusion that it is possible for a party like his own to prevent imperialist war.
While Wallace is at his weakest (and most uncomfortable) when he trie’s to explain or justify the Stalinist policy in Europe, he is on his strongest ground politically when he attacks the bi-partisan war policy and manufacture of war hysteria. A good example was his radio speech answering Truman’s demand on March 17 for the resumption of the draft and the passage of UMT.
“America’s mothers and sons ... rightfully believe that a draft and compulsory military training are not the way to preserve freedom at home or to guarantee democracy abroad ... The program to militarize America, if carried out, will impose a police state.”
These are the things a worried people want to hear, the things they know to be true. Wallace also gives them the following explanation of why this situation exists:
“We have reached this state because the men who are running our government fear the power of the common men and women the world over ... We have come to this world crisis because willful men with private interests are dictating our foreign policy. Their interest is profit, not people. They seek to protect and extend their foreign investments against the democratic actions of people abroad.”
That is an example of the half-truths spread by Wallace. It is correct so far as it goes. Properly understood and applied, it has a place within the scientific explanation of why the U.S. is being driven down the road to war. But because it is only a part of the broader explanation, it can and does lead to all kinds of false conclusions when it is presented as the basic reason.
Only Part of Cause
To understand this problem, it is necessary to begin by recognizing that war is an inevitable product of the capitalist system in its present monopoly stage. No big capitalist power can prosper within its own borders atone; it must expand or suffer paralyzing economic crisis; to survive, it must get new markets abroad, new sources of raw materials, new fields of investment, new spheres of influence. When it is blocked from securing or consolidating these objectives by the economic or political power of other nations, it resorts to military means.
It is not enough, therefore, to point an accusing finger at the greedy and evil men who are running the government today. Their individual avarice and lust for power are important factors in the situation, but not the decisive ones. In the first place, they are not acting on their own; they are the representatives and administrators of their class, the capitalist class. Without the consent of their class they would never dare embark on such a dangerous venture as war.
System Drives Them
In the second place, they are driven to desperate measures for resolving international disputes not merely by some quirk in their individual or collective minds or hearts, but by the very needs of the capitalist system itself. War represents a terrible risk for them, but an even more terrible prospect is the collapse of capitalism in Europe. Because of the very nature of the system, American capitalism could not long survive in an anti-capitalist world.
Within this framework, the Wallace statement quoted above has full validity. But separated from it, it becomes a snare, having meaning only as a “devil” theory on the cause of imperialist war. Used as Wallace uses it, it means wars are caused by “bad men.” And the obvious corollary is: Get rid of the bad men, put in good men. and then we won’t have to worry about war any more.
The main thing to remember about Wallace’s position on war is its denial that war is an inseparable feature of capitalism. Being a devoted defender of capitalism, he holds, on the contrary, that peace is possible under capitalism. Put in good men, reform or patch up the system, show the ruling class how much it stands to lose by going to war, build up some mechanism like the United Nations and – according to Wallace – you can have everlasting peace.
Wallace tried in his radio address to show how “reasonable” this position is:
“Shall we fight Russia because we are competing for the raw materials of the world? We shall dissipate more raw materials in such a war than they are worth to either the United States or Russia. There is no competition or raw materials which cannot be settled by peaceful means.”
In a rational world order there would of course be no war over raw materials, which would be accessible to all and collectively used for the common welfare. But a world dominated by capitalism is not a rational world. It’s a world whose very fate is based on such conflicts as the competition for raw materials.
This competition is costly and in the long run undermines the system it seeks to maintain – but that fact never prevented imperialist and commercial wars before, and it has no more effect on Wall Street today than it had on Hitler ten years ago. “Reasonable” arguments of this kind are shrugged off by the imperialists – like rain off a duck’s back – because it’s a dog-eat-dog system, where each dog is ready to undergo some suffering himself in order to remain or become the top dog, and where all the dogs are indifferent to the welfare of doghood as a whole.
Competition Breeds War
Moreover, Wallace’s contention that there is no competition which cannot be settled by peaceful means flies in the face of all capitalist history. Tragic experience has shown us too often that under imperialism, competition always leads to economic warfare, the precursor of military explosions. Was World War I just an- accident, due to unreasonableness? Was World War II a fluke that could have been prevented by an amicable conference to settle competition in a friendly kind of way? To imply that is to mock at the lessons of history and thereby to prevent the kind of understanding of modern world conflicts that alone can lead to peace.
History has also taught us to be on guard against capitalist reformism and pacifism. Wallace is not the first of his kind. There was Wilson before him, who was going to reform capitalism and keep us out of war, and Roosevelt after that, who sang the same sweet song. They, too, were “reasonable” men but in the end their reputation as men of peace served only to facilitate their efforts to drag the country into war.
There is no need here to enter into the question of Wallace’s sincerity – although it should never be forgotten that he was against World War II before it started and then became its busiest apologist once the guns began to boom. What counts in these big questions is program. And Wallace’s program for preventing war can have no different outcome than Wilson’s or Roosevelt’s or that of the pre-World War II isolationists.
Get Rid of Cause
Fundamentally, the reason is that you can’t end war without ending its cause, capitalism. No matter how fine his intentions may be, a man who clings to this decaying system can’t help misleading his followers who want to fight against war. As long as his influence is able to dissuade the people from replacing capitalism with a socialist system, just so long will the prospect of war be with us.
Many workers intend to vote for Wallace because he, like them, expresses opposition to the war now being prepared. But it is necessary, precisely in the interests of preventing that war, to warn them most insistently that no party dedicated to the maintenance of capitalism can prevent war. The exposure of Wallace’s big lie, the destruction of all pacifist illusions about his party being able to stop the war drive – these are important tasks in today’s struggle for a new socialist society, where war will be a horrible memory rather than an ever-present threat.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>Negro Sailors Are Still in the Brig</h1>
<h3>(16 November 1940)</h3>
<p> </p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_46" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 46</a>, 16 November 1940, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Because they bravely exposed the hypocritical nature of the slogans about a “war for democracy,” and because they warned other Negroes about the falsity of the promises of the recruiting sergeants about “joining the Navy seeing the world and learning a trade,” two of the fifteen Negro mess boys on the <em>U.S.S. Philadelphia</em> stationed at Long Beach, California, are in prison awaiting court-martial, and the others are prisoners-at-large, forbidden to leave the ship, held for “further investigation.”</p>
<p>Letters from two of the men on the ship sent to the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> this week appeal to that paper to publicize the fact that the officer caste is attempting to terrorize them because they dared to sign their names to the previous letter.<br>
</p>
<h4>Afraid to Sign</h4>
<p class="fst">One of them, ending “I am afraid to sign my name. One of the <em>Philadelphia</em> Boys,” sends the information that “Goodwin and Johnson were put. in prison for standing up for their rights and all the rest of us can’t leave the ship ... I hope the people of my race will not stand up and see men tell the truth and go to prison.”</p>
<p>The other, also unsigned, explains that the “Commanding Officer of the ship is holding all of us for an investigation trying to force the boys to tell who is the brains of that letter.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Officers Grill Men</h4>
<p class="fst">It is plain from this that the officers of the <em>Philadelphia</em> are determind to put an end to any protests to public opinion against Jim Crowism. They have arrested two of the men and are grilling the others to find out who the “agitators” and “instigators” are. It is inconceivable to them that men can be driven just so far and then they revolt without the help of “agitators” because they just can’t stand the torment and insult to which they are subjected.</p>
<p>But it is equally plain that so far they have had no success. The toys are sticking together and, in the face of intensified inquisition, are still appealing to the public for help.<br>
</p>
<h4>Aid Comes</h4>
<p class="fst">Already they are being joined by men from other ships, coming to their aid, helping as much as they can under the circumstances.</p>
<p>One of these, a mess man from the far-away Naval Air Base at Opa Locha, Florida, helps to break through the wall of silence surrounding the case by passing on to the <strong>Courier</strong> a letter he had received from Byron Johnson, who has since been thrown into prison.</p>
<p>Johnson, in answering a question from him on the results of their letter’s publication, wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We are now P.A.L. (prisoners-at-large). Of course, we can’t do much since they have us restricted until the outcome of the case. As it is now, we are unable to do anything since we can’t make any outside contacts. So it is up to you to carry on where we left off ... The boys of the <em>Philadelphia</em> are depending on everyone to buck us up.”</p>
<p class="fst">The sailor who received this letter signed his name, saying:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If you publish anything about this letter, you may publish my name if you feel it necessary to do so. That, of course, would probably mean that I would meet the same fate Byron Johnson and his friends met. But I am fanatical enough about it all to allow that to happen to me too, if necessary.”</p>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Courier</strong> did not print his name.</p>
<p>This is followed by a long letter signed by Richard C. Watts. Donald Moran and William Seabrook, of the <em>U.S.S. Sampson</em>, stationed at Norfolk. Virginia, in which, after paying tribute to the courage of the <em>Philadelphia</em> men they proceed to uncover a system of Jim Crow conditions on board their ship that easily rivals for viciousness the story told about the <em>Philadelphia</em>.</p>
<p>These conditions exist not only in the every day life of the ship, but on Sunday too, for as they say:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Constitution clearly provides that all men are created equal, yet in our Naval churches – both Protestant and Catholic – discrimination is openly practiced. When conditions are so bad that people who say they are believers of God, are choicy about who sits beside them, then it is time that we pray and start to do something about it.”</p>
<p class="quote">“We (colored) men in the Navy are just flunkies, disguised in a uniform ... It will be found that on the smaller ships in the Navy, the mess boys really do not have a place to eat their food properly. He either has to stand up or sit down on the deck to eat. while the rest of the crew have designated tables, where they may sit, talk, properly masticate and enjoy their food.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Sent to Brig</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“We are subjected to be roughly spoken to three-fourths of the time, cursed at sometimes, with out a murmur of resentment coming from us. In case of resentment we are put on report, restricted, fined, or sent to the brig for being insubordinate to a superior officer, etc. ...</p>
<p class="quote">“Wherever we turn we hear the words, ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that’, or you don’t get liberty for a week. We are not wanted to talk to each other when an officer is around, and in general, an officer is to be treated as though he were a god or king.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Ships Are Jails</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Literally speaking, the Negro is in jail under observation but somebody thought it would sound nicer to call it the Navy ...</p>
<p class="quote">“The majority of officers seem to think that we Negroes are just a race of illiterates who have to have someone standing over them with a whip all the time and tell them what to do ...</p>
<p class="quote">“We are allowed thirty days leave each year, which we rarely get because the officers want us there to serve them ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>Time to Wake Up</h4>
<p class="fst">And the letter ends:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We are not trying to stir up strife, hatred or discontentment, we are only trying to tell our people that it is time to wake up and go to the front and demand what we so justly deserve. We have slept long enough. Now is the time for more action and less talk!”</p>
<p class="fst">As the <strong>Courier</strong> points out:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Col. Benjamin O. Davis has been made a general in the United States Army, but that means nothing. Judge William Hastie had been named a civilian aide to the Secretary of War, but that means nothing. Major Campbell Johnson has been made executive assistant to the director of selective service, but that means nothing. THE UNITED STATES NAVY STILL ABUSES, RESTRICTS AND JIM CROWS BLACK BOYS!”<br>
</p>
<h4>End Their Control</h4>
<p class="fst">That’s true and it will continue to abuse, restrict and: Jim Crow them as long as the Negro-hating, labor-hating generals and admirals continue to <em>control</em> military and naval training!</p>
<p>One Negro general, colored assistants and aides can do nothing as long as the military caste <em>controls</em> things.</p>
<p>Let us, in addition to defending these boys, take a page from their heroic books and carry to a finish the fight for workers’ control of military and naval training!</p>
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Albert Parker
Negro Sailors Are Still in the Brig
(16 November 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 46, 16 November 1940, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Because they bravely exposed the hypocritical nature of the slogans about a “war for democracy,” and because they warned other Negroes about the falsity of the promises of the recruiting sergeants about “joining the Navy seeing the world and learning a trade,” two of the fifteen Negro mess boys on the U.S.S. Philadelphia stationed at Long Beach, California, are in prison awaiting court-martial, and the others are prisoners-at-large, forbidden to leave the ship, held for “further investigation.”
Letters from two of the men on the ship sent to the Pittsburgh Courier this week appeal to that paper to publicize the fact that the officer caste is attempting to terrorize them because they dared to sign their names to the previous letter.
Afraid to Sign
One of them, ending “I am afraid to sign my name. One of the Philadelphia Boys,” sends the information that “Goodwin and Johnson were put. in prison for standing up for their rights and all the rest of us can’t leave the ship ... I hope the people of my race will not stand up and see men tell the truth and go to prison.”
The other, also unsigned, explains that the “Commanding Officer of the ship is holding all of us for an investigation trying to force the boys to tell who is the brains of that letter.”
Officers Grill Men
It is plain from this that the officers of the Philadelphia are determind to put an end to any protests to public opinion against Jim Crowism. They have arrested two of the men and are grilling the others to find out who the “agitators” and “instigators” are. It is inconceivable to them that men can be driven just so far and then they revolt without the help of “agitators” because they just can’t stand the torment and insult to which they are subjected.
But it is equally plain that so far they have had no success. The toys are sticking together and, in the face of intensified inquisition, are still appealing to the public for help.
Aid Comes
Already they are being joined by men from other ships, coming to their aid, helping as much as they can under the circumstances.
One of these, a mess man from the far-away Naval Air Base at Opa Locha, Florida, helps to break through the wall of silence surrounding the case by passing on to the Courier a letter he had received from Byron Johnson, who has since been thrown into prison.
Johnson, in answering a question from him on the results of their letter’s publication, wrote:
“We are now P.A.L. (prisoners-at-large). Of course, we can’t do much since they have us restricted until the outcome of the case. As it is now, we are unable to do anything since we can’t make any outside contacts. So it is up to you to carry on where we left off ... The boys of the Philadelphia are depending on everyone to buck us up.”
The sailor who received this letter signed his name, saying:
“If you publish anything about this letter, you may publish my name if you feel it necessary to do so. That, of course, would probably mean that I would meet the same fate Byron Johnson and his friends met. But I am fanatical enough about it all to allow that to happen to me too, if necessary.”
The Courier did not print his name.
This is followed by a long letter signed by Richard C. Watts. Donald Moran and William Seabrook, of the U.S.S. Sampson, stationed at Norfolk. Virginia, in which, after paying tribute to the courage of the Philadelphia men they proceed to uncover a system of Jim Crow conditions on board their ship that easily rivals for viciousness the story told about the Philadelphia.
These conditions exist not only in the every day life of the ship, but on Sunday too, for as they say:
“The Constitution clearly provides that all men are created equal, yet in our Naval churches – both Protestant and Catholic – discrimination is openly practiced. When conditions are so bad that people who say they are believers of God, are choicy about who sits beside them, then it is time that we pray and start to do something about it.”
“We (colored) men in the Navy are just flunkies, disguised in a uniform ... It will be found that on the smaller ships in the Navy, the mess boys really do not have a place to eat their food properly. He either has to stand up or sit down on the deck to eat. while the rest of the crew have designated tables, where they may sit, talk, properly masticate and enjoy their food.”
Sent to Brig
“We are subjected to be roughly spoken to three-fourths of the time, cursed at sometimes, with out a murmur of resentment coming from us. In case of resentment we are put on report, restricted, fined, or sent to the brig for being insubordinate to a superior officer, etc. ...
“Wherever we turn we hear the words, ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that’, or you don’t get liberty for a week. We are not wanted to talk to each other when an officer is around, and in general, an officer is to be treated as though he were a god or king.”
Ships Are Jails
“Literally speaking, the Negro is in jail under observation but somebody thought it would sound nicer to call it the Navy ...
“The majority of officers seem to think that we Negroes are just a race of illiterates who have to have someone standing over them with a whip all the time and tell them what to do ...
“We are allowed thirty days leave each year, which we rarely get because the officers want us there to serve them ...”
Time to Wake Up
And the letter ends:
“We are not trying to stir up strife, hatred or discontentment, we are only trying to tell our people that it is time to wake up and go to the front and demand what we so justly deserve. We have slept long enough. Now is the time for more action and less talk!”
As the Courier points out:
“Col. Benjamin O. Davis has been made a general in the United States Army, but that means nothing. Judge William Hastie had been named a civilian aide to the Secretary of War, but that means nothing. Major Campbell Johnson has been made executive assistant to the director of selective service, but that means nothing. THE UNITED STATES NAVY STILL ABUSES, RESTRICTS AND JIM CROWS BLACK BOYS!”
End Their Control
That’s true and it will continue to abuse, restrict and: Jim Crow them as long as the Negro-hating, labor-hating generals and admirals continue to control military and naval training!
One Negro general, colored assistants and aides can do nothing as long as the military caste controls things.
Let us, in addition to defending these boys, take a page from their heroic books and carry to a finish the fight for workers’ control of military and naval training!
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<h2>John F. Petrone</h2>
<h1>Air Conditioned Suites</h1>
<h3>(5 July 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_27" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 27</a>, 5 July 1948, p. 4.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">They didn’t have any smoke-filled rooms at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, but they did have plenty of air-conditioned, luxuriously-equipped hotel suites. And while the convention was held (or rather, staged) in the glare of television, the blare of radio and the clack of telegraphy transmitting millions of words by hundreds of correspondents, the real decisions were made in the hotel suites, admission to which required a special pass.</p>
<p>One such decision resulted in the switch to Dewey by Pennsylvania’s Sen. Edward Martin. An able Washington correspondent, Tris Coffin, explains that this took place after Martin had tried, and failed, to get his state delegation to commit itself indefinitely to his own nomination, a move which would strongly have increased his bargaining power: “The spurned and burning Ed Martin went down the street to Gov. Dewey panting with bitterness. In the closed door conferences, Sen. Martin got the idea he could be Secretary of National Defense in a Dewey cabinet. That sounded elegant to the ex-general. He put his arm around his friend, and they called the photographers.”</p>
<p>Two days later, Dewey accepted the nomination and announced with a straight face: “I come to you unfettered by a single obligation or promise to any living person.” Or, as Mother used to tell us, the moon is made of green cheese. The only difference being that we couldn’t prove what the moon is made of, while every man, woman and child inside and outside of Philadelphia knew that the Martin switch was just one of the scores of deals, trades and bargains by which Dewey got the nomination. It couldn’t be flatly denied by even his closest sympathizers, like Arthur Krock of the <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, a conservative with the subtlety of a brick.</p>
<p>Krock chides Dewey’s rivals, by whom “‘deals’ have been steadily charged and denounced, with intimations that they are of the kind that cannot withstand the light of day.” Apparently Krock wants people to think they can withstand the light of day, although neither Dewey, Krock nor any of the other <strong>Times</strong> correspondents revealed any of the details. But rhe pay-off comes on Krock’s reasons for pooh-poohing the charges: “the so-called ‘deals’ were routine professional politics (all the contenders tried to make the same kind).”</p>
<p>In other words, there’s nothing wrong in the Republican candidate having the morals of a wardheeler just so long as all the other Republican (and Democratic) bigwigs have the same morals. That’s like a stick-up man asking to be acquitted because all his friends are stick-up men too.</p>
<p>The above remarks are not prompted by the indignation that swells in liberals at the thought of sordid deals in smoke-filled rooms. In our opinion it wouldn’t make any difference if there were no deals at all among the various contenders for the Republican and Democratic nominations. They would still be the candidates of Big Business, with the morals of a shark crossed with a vulture.</p>
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John F. Petrone
Air Conditioned Suites
(5 July 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 27, 5 July 1948, p. 4. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
They didn’t have any smoke-filled rooms at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, but they did have plenty of air-conditioned, luxuriously-equipped hotel suites. And while the convention was held (or rather, staged) in the glare of television, the blare of radio and the clack of telegraphy transmitting millions of words by hundreds of correspondents, the real decisions were made in the hotel suites, admission to which required a special pass.
One such decision resulted in the switch to Dewey by Pennsylvania’s Sen. Edward Martin. An able Washington correspondent, Tris Coffin, explains that this took place after Martin had tried, and failed, to get his state delegation to commit itself indefinitely to his own nomination, a move which would strongly have increased his bargaining power: “The spurned and burning Ed Martin went down the street to Gov. Dewey panting with bitterness. In the closed door conferences, Sen. Martin got the idea he could be Secretary of National Defense in a Dewey cabinet. That sounded elegant to the ex-general. He put his arm around his friend, and they called the photographers.”
Two days later, Dewey accepted the nomination and announced with a straight face: “I come to you unfettered by a single obligation or promise to any living person.” Or, as Mother used to tell us, the moon is made of green cheese. The only difference being that we couldn’t prove what the moon is made of, while every man, woman and child inside and outside of Philadelphia knew that the Martin switch was just one of the scores of deals, trades and bargains by which Dewey got the nomination. It couldn’t be flatly denied by even his closest sympathizers, like Arthur Krock of the N.Y. Times, a conservative with the subtlety of a brick.
Krock chides Dewey’s rivals, by whom “‘deals’ have been steadily charged and denounced, with intimations that they are of the kind that cannot withstand the light of day.” Apparently Krock wants people to think they can withstand the light of day, although neither Dewey, Krock nor any of the other Times correspondents revealed any of the details. But rhe pay-off comes on Krock’s reasons for pooh-poohing the charges: “the so-called ‘deals’ were routine professional politics (all the contenders tried to make the same kind).”
In other words, there’s nothing wrong in the Republican candidate having the morals of a wardheeler just so long as all the other Republican (and Democratic) bigwigs have the same morals. That’s like a stick-up man asking to be acquitted because all his friends are stick-up men too.
The above remarks are not prompted by the indignation that swells in liberals at the thought of sordid deals in smoke-filled rooms. In our opinion it wouldn’t make any difference if there were no deals at all among the various contenders for the Republican and Democratic nominations. They would still be the candidates of Big Business, with the morals of a shark crossed with a vulture.
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<h1>Breitman Minority Caucus Statement</h1>
<p>I am speaking in place of Comrade Steve Bloom who had to leave the convention because of a medical emergency in his family.</p>
<p>I am speaking on behalf of the steering committee of our caucus, which consisted of the five regular convention delegates elected on this basis, and the two members of the National Committee who supported the amendments [“Amendments to the Political Resolution,” by George Breitman, SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 12]. Four of these seven comrades are no longer here at the convention, two of them having had to go back to work, and one other having had to leave because of the air controllers' strike. But all seven of them participated in the decision of the steering committee, which was a unanimous one, to dissolve the caucus as of this convention.</p>
<p>A meeting of our supporters last night expressed overwhelming, even enthusiastic, support for this decision. Our caucus came on the scene late, only two weeks before the convention. It came on the scene because of the majority's decision on how to vote, which led us towards creating a caucus that I, for one, had had no intention of helping to organize.</p>
<p>Anyhow, as a result of coming on the scene late, we did some things late, and we omitted other things altogether that we should have done. According to the law of uneven and combined development, there are benefits and advantages in being latecomers as classes, nations, or as technologies in the economy. I have tried to detect such advantages or benefits in our latecoming as a caucus, but I haven't been able to find any yet. So, if I am ever asked how or when to start a caucus, now that I have had my first experience in this field, I will have to advise them to start early.</p>
<p>The steering committee decided, and a meeting of the supporters last Saturday concurred in this, that our main aim at the convention was to clarify the differences and show why we thought the new line of the majority on Cuba presented serious dangers to the future of the SWP. This required that we try to break through the misrepresentation and exaggerations that created so much confusion over our real positions. It also required, at the same time, that we present our views clearly and unambiguously and that we should try to improve the tone of the discussion, which had become excessively sharp and unrestrained in the final weeks before the convention.</p>
<p>In our opinion, we registered progress in all these areas. Many comrades of the majority thanked us for helping to clarify the issues. The number of our supporters at the convention increased—not vastly, but in sufficient numbers to encourage us—as comrades who had abstained or not voted said that they now agree with the general line of our amendments. And a few said they had changed their minds.</p>
<p>Exaggeration was lessened, we think, as the convention proceeded. And some of the preconvention excesses were not repeated here, as it became clear it was a case of differences among comrades in the revolutionary party, not class enemies. So we see definitely positive aspects in the convention discussion and how it developed. And we feel confirmed in our conviction, expressed by Comrade Bloom in his report, that the majority and the party as a whole will, as a result of further experience and new events in the international class struggle, be able to rethink and reassess our new line and reduce or eliminate the dangers we see in it.</p>
<p>Our steering committee also had to decide on whether or not to dissolve as a caucus, or continue as a tendency. All minorities since Adam and Eve have felt that, if only a little more discussion could take place, the result would or might be different. But the convention not only decided the line, it also closed the debate for the time being. And usually when that happens, it is best to proceed with our common work and leave further discussion to the future when debated questions can be reopened.</p>
<p>It was all the easier for us to decide to do the usual thing because of the coincidence that the international discussion will be opening in a few months on the very questions we were debating here. Our caucus was confident that supporters of our amendments would want to, and be able to, participate in that discussion the same way as all the other supporters of the Fourth International. And that in the meantime, until the International Executive Committee resolutions and counterresolutions have been read and studied, it would be better for all concerned to discontinue the intense discussion that we have had on the Cuban and related issues, and pitch in to make up for lost time on our various campaigns.</p>
<p>Whether tendencies will emerge from the international discussion, we didn't know, we don't know, and we won't try to predict. Anyhow, all that is minor when compared to the opportunities we will have to continue to debate the issues during the next year or more.</p>
<p>Another thing our steering committee did was to nominate four comrades representing our point of view for the National Committee and to present to the Nominating Commission our own reasons why they should be elected. The four were: Frank Lovell, a member of the National Committee for thirtynine years whom his branch did not nominate; and Steve Bloom, also not nominated by his branch (both of whom we nominated for regular National Committee membership); and Joanna Misnik and George Saunders, whom our caucus nominated as National Committee alternates. We hope they have been nominated by the Nominating Commission and will be elected by the delegates tomorrow.</p>
<p>If I may close with a few personal words about the decision of the Weinstein/ Henderson group to maintain their tendency after the convention. I think this is a mistake politically, not warranted by the present conditions in the party. And I hope these comrades will reconsider this decision in the months to come.</p>
<p>Despite our disagreements with them about this, I will defend their right to remain an ideological tendency, while abiding by party discipline and party norms. And I am sure that is the case also not only with the members of our former caucus, but also with the members of the majority and the party's leadership as a whole.</p>
<p>Despite the heat of the discussion, the democratic rights of the minorities were recognized and respected by the party leadership. And I see no reason to expect any change in this respect in the future, least of all in the international discussion which is about to open up relatively soon. Our confidence in this was one of the reasons why we found it so easy to make our decision to dissolve our caucus.</p>
<p>George Breitman</p>
<p>August 7, 1981</p>
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Breitman Minority Caucus Statement
I am speaking in place of Comrade Steve Bloom who had to leave the convention because of a medical emergency in his family.
I am speaking on behalf of the steering committee of our caucus, which consisted of the five regular convention delegates elected on this basis, and the two members of the National Committee who supported the amendments [“Amendments to the Political Resolution,” by George Breitman, SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 12]. Four of these seven comrades are no longer here at the convention, two of them having had to go back to work, and one other having had to leave because of the air controllers' strike. But all seven of them participated in the decision of the steering committee, which was a unanimous one, to dissolve the caucus as of this convention.
A meeting of our supporters last night expressed overwhelming, even enthusiastic, support for this decision. Our caucus came on the scene late, only two weeks before the convention. It came on the scene because of the majority's decision on how to vote, which led us towards creating a caucus that I, for one, had had no intention of helping to organize.
Anyhow, as a result of coming on the scene late, we did some things late, and we omitted other things altogether that we should have done. According to the law of uneven and combined development, there are benefits and advantages in being latecomers as classes, nations, or as technologies in the economy. I have tried to detect such advantages or benefits in our latecoming as a caucus, but I haven't been able to find any yet. So, if I am ever asked how or when to start a caucus, now that I have had my first experience in this field, I will have to advise them to start early.
The steering committee decided, and a meeting of the supporters last Saturday concurred in this, that our main aim at the convention was to clarify the differences and show why we thought the new line of the majority on Cuba presented serious dangers to the future of the SWP. This required that we try to break through the misrepresentation and exaggerations that created so much confusion over our real positions. It also required, at the same time, that we present our views clearly and unambiguously and that we should try to improve the tone of the discussion, which had become excessively sharp and unrestrained in the final weeks before the convention.
In our opinion, we registered progress in all these areas. Many comrades of the majority thanked us for helping to clarify the issues. The number of our supporters at the convention increased—not vastly, but in sufficient numbers to encourage us—as comrades who had abstained or not voted said that they now agree with the general line of our amendments. And a few said they had changed their minds.
Exaggeration was lessened, we think, as the convention proceeded. And some of the preconvention excesses were not repeated here, as it became clear it was a case of differences among comrades in the revolutionary party, not class enemies. So we see definitely positive aspects in the convention discussion and how it developed. And we feel confirmed in our conviction, expressed by Comrade Bloom in his report, that the majority and the party as a whole will, as a result of further experience and new events in the international class struggle, be able to rethink and reassess our new line and reduce or eliminate the dangers we see in it.
Our steering committee also had to decide on whether or not to dissolve as a caucus, or continue as a tendency. All minorities since Adam and Eve have felt that, if only a little more discussion could take place, the result would or might be different. But the convention not only decided the line, it also closed the debate for the time being. And usually when that happens, it is best to proceed with our common work and leave further discussion to the future when debated questions can be reopened.
It was all the easier for us to decide to do the usual thing because of the coincidence that the international discussion will be opening in a few months on the very questions we were debating here. Our caucus was confident that supporters of our amendments would want to, and be able to, participate in that discussion the same way as all the other supporters of the Fourth International. And that in the meantime, until the International Executive Committee resolutions and counterresolutions have been read and studied, it would be better for all concerned to discontinue the intense discussion that we have had on the Cuban and related issues, and pitch in to make up for lost time on our various campaigns.
Whether tendencies will emerge from the international discussion, we didn't know, we don't know, and we won't try to predict. Anyhow, all that is minor when compared to the opportunities we will have to continue to debate the issues during the next year or more.
Another thing our steering committee did was to nominate four comrades representing our point of view for the National Committee and to present to the Nominating Commission our own reasons why they should be elected. The four were: Frank Lovell, a member of the National Committee for thirtynine years whom his branch did not nominate; and Steve Bloom, also not nominated by his branch (both of whom we nominated for regular National Committee membership); and Joanna Misnik and George Saunders, whom our caucus nominated as National Committee alternates. We hope they have been nominated by the Nominating Commission and will be elected by the delegates tomorrow.
If I may close with a few personal words about the decision of the Weinstein/ Henderson group to maintain their tendency after the convention. I think this is a mistake politically, not warranted by the present conditions in the party. And I hope these comrades will reconsider this decision in the months to come.
Despite our disagreements with them about this, I will defend their right to remain an ideological tendency, while abiding by party discipline and party norms. And I am sure that is the case also not only with the members of our former caucus, but also with the members of the majority and the party's leadership as a whole.
Despite the heat of the discussion, the democratic rights of the minorities were recognized and respected by the party leadership. And I see no reason to expect any change in this respect in the future, least of all in the international discussion which is about to open up relatively soon. Our confidence in this was one of the reasons why we found it so easy to make our decision to dissolve our caucus.
George Breitman
August 7, 1981
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>A Letter</h1>
<h3>(July 1943)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi43_07" target="new">Vol.4 No.7</a>, July 1943, p.208.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">EDITOR, <strong>Fourth International</strong>:</p>
<p class="fst">I am sure that when E.R. Frank referred to the Secretary of Labor as “Ma Perkins” (June <strong>Fourth International</strong>, Page 170), he did so in the same way that thousands of trade unionists do – without thinking.</p>
<p>But the origin of this term is to be found in the fact that Mrs. Perkins was the first woman to be selected as a member of the White House Cabinet. One need not in any way alter his opposition to the reactionary policies carried out by the Secretary of Labor to understand that this “Ma” is an expression of “male superiority,” which is no less objectionable and has no more place in the press of the Trotskyist movement than expressions of national or racial “superiority.”</p>
<p>In the interests of educating your readers and writers, I hope that the next issue of <strong>Fourth International</strong>, which firmly opposes discrimination against women and believes in full equality for all sexes, races and nationalities, will contain some reference to this question.</p>
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<p class="fst"><em>Albert Parker</em><br>
New York, N.Y.</p>
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Albert Parker
A Letter
(July 1943)
From Fourth International, Vol.4 No.7, July 1943, p.208.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
EDITOR, Fourth International:
I am sure that when E.R. Frank referred to the Secretary of Labor as “Ma Perkins” (June Fourth International, Page 170), he did so in the same way that thousands of trade unionists do – without thinking.
But the origin of this term is to be found in the fact that Mrs. Perkins was the first woman to be selected as a member of the White House Cabinet. One need not in any way alter his opposition to the reactionary policies carried out by the Secretary of Labor to understand that this “Ma” is an expression of “male superiority,” which is no less objectionable and has no more place in the press of the Trotskyist movement than expressions of national or racial “superiority.”
In the interests of educating your readers and writers, I hope that the next issue of Fourth International, which firmly opposes discrimination against women and believes in full equality for all sexes, races and nationalities, will contain some reference to this question.
Albert Parker
New York, N.Y.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h4>New Dangers and New Tasks Facing the Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>The Bomb-Murder of Harry T. Moore</h1>
<h3>(January 1952)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi52_01" target="new">Vol.13 No.1</a>, January-February 1952, pp.3-11.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Two days before Christmas, <strong>Parade</strong>, the
Sunday picture magazine, devoted an entire page to a report from Key
West, Fla., where President Truman had just completed another of his
many vacations. It was the story of a 12-year old boy named Johnny
Lawler, who had been encouraged by his parents to hang around for a
chance to see Truman, and who finally succeeded and even shook Truman’s
hand and then was so thrilled that he did not wash his own hand for
several days. Johnny was quoted as asking his father, “Say, how did Mr.
Truman get to be President?” By working hard, his father replied, and
then Johnny said, “I’ll do the same because some day I want to be
President.”</p>
<p>There is something horrible in the thought that people are actually
educating their children to emulate a man like Truman, the biggest
strikebreaker in US history, the one who ruthlessly gave the order to
murder hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians with the atom bomb;
the hypocrite who advocated civil rights laws to get elected and then
dropped them like a hot potato; the initiator of a witch hunt that is
destroying our civil liberties.</p>
<p>Truman worked hard, all right — he worked hard obeying the orders of
a crooked machine politician named Pendergast, and he has been working
hard since then obeying the orders of the capitalist class, up to and
including the order to intervene in a so-called police action that has
already cost the US over 100,000 admitted casualties in Korea.</p>
<p>Johnny Lawler would be far better off if he hitched his wagon to
another star. And what a star there was in his own state — a Negro,
unknown to almost everyone until his death, a man who never committed
any crimes but who also became great by working hard. That was Harry T.
Moore, a hard worker, but one who worked on the side of the people and
not against them.<br>
</p>
<h4>Harry Moore: A Truly Noble Man</h4>
<p class="fst">It seems a shame that we never heard of Harry T. Moore
until after Christmas night, when his life and his wife’s life were
ended by a bomb that blew up their home in Mims, Florida. Because he
was a truly great and noble human being, the kind of man we should look
up to for guidance in how to live our lives, a man whose memory we
should keep forever fresh and green.</p>
<p>He was a school principal, and better off than most Negroes in the
South. But he was not content to think only of himself. He joined the
fight to win equal salaries for Negro teachers, and for doing that was
fired from his job. That would have silenced some people, as it has
intimidated many teachers of liberal or radical views and others
menaced or victimized by the witch hunt. But it did not frighten Harry
T. Moore.</p>
<p>On the contrary, it increased his determination to fight for
justice. He became more active than ever in the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People and in struggles to win and
protect the right to vote for Negroes in his state. And when he was
confronted with the Groveland “rape” frameup, he became a thorn in the
flesh of the white supremacists and Ku Kluxers and their protectors in
high office. He went around organizing and speaking at scores of
meetings, fearlessly defending the Groveland victims and boldly
demanding that McCall, the lyncher with a sheriff’s badge, should be
tried for the murder of Samuel Shepherd.<br>
</p>
<h4>Knew What He Faced</h4>
<p class="fst">We know now that he was taking his life into his hands
when he did these things. He must have known it too. But it did not
stop him. His mother says that when she cautioned him to be more
careful not long ago, he replied,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice, and if
I sacrifice my life or my health I still think it is my duty for my
race.”</p>
<p class="fst">That is why it is correct to call Harry T. Moore a
martyr of the Negro struggle and of the general struggle of the working
people for a better world, he saw his duty and he did it, despite the
costs it entailed. He wanted to live too and to be happy, but he could
not be happy unless he offered his resistance to the misery and
injustice around him. In other words, he was a really moral man,
setting an example that should shine brightly for all time for the
youth of all races. He was a true son of great predecessors — of people
like Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and John Brown and others who were
ready to risk their lives in the fight against oppression. We would be
ingrates, unworthy of the sacrifice he made, if we were content to
merely mourn his passing and then forget about him instead of devoting
ourselves to avenge his death and to complete the struggle he led so
well.<br>
</p>
<h4>Misleading Figures on Lynching</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>The Nation</strong> (Jan. 5) was absolutely
correct when it insisted that such crimes as the murder of Harry T.
Moore “cannot be understood as senseless acts of depraved or prejudiced
individuals. On the contrary, they were essentially political crimes,
crimes deliberately committed for a purpose.” And the purpose cannot be
completely understood without examinatiort of a new trend that has
appeared in the last few years.</p>
<p>At the end of 1951 the Tuskegee Institute, a Negro institution which
issues annual lynching figures, announced that the total of lynchings
last year was — one. This report was widely publicized here and abroad
by the propagandists of capitalism; for them this constituted proof
that lynchings are diminishing year by year, that America is more and
more becoming the land of freedom and equality for the Negro people,
and that one of these days we will wake up and find that they are
treated just like other people.</p>
<p>They would be very happy if they could got the 15 million American
Negroes and the colored people who form a majority of the earth’s
population to believe in this picture of progress that goes ever onward
and upward until the arrival of the millenium. Because if what they
said was true, it might not be necessary to <em>fight</em> to end the
Jim Crow system — maybe people could just afford to sit back and wait
for it to die a natural death.</p>
<p>But it is a lie. The reason the capitalists and their political en
and boys in Washington go to the trouble of peddling this lie is that
they have set themselves the objective of dominating the whole world.
Part of their program for achieving this depends on force — economic
force through the dollars they are pumping into the dying capitalist
system all over the world, military force through armament that they
are trying to impose on unwilling countries in Europe, Asia and the
Middle East. But part also depends on propaganda — the propaganda that
the US is the champion and paragon of democracy.</p>
<p>The colored people abroad find that hard to swallow.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If you are such lovers of democracy,” they ask,
“then how is it that you have become the partner of so many lifelong
bitter enemies of democracy like Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Franco,
the Nazi and Japanese generals and most of the other dictators who are
not behind the iron curtain?”</p>
<p class="fst">Along with that question goes another:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If you love democracy so much, why do you treat
Negroes as second-class citizens, deny most of them the right to vote,
discriminate against them at the hiring gate or bar them from the
better jobs when you do hire them, subject them to humility and
brutality, segregate them in the armed forces and in so many parts of
your educational system, deny them the protection of anti-lynching and
anti-poll tax laws — why, if you love democracy so much and talk to us
about it so much, don’t you practice what you preach?”</p>
<p class="fst">This makes the US ruling class, its politicians,
diplomats and Voice of America squirm like fish on a hook.</p>
<p>And needless to say, the representatives of the bureaucrats in the
Kremlin never miss a chance, inside the United Nations and outside, to
make them squirm some more. Many people, including some “radicals” who
expect capitalism to end Jim Crow, wonder why the US government does
not rid itself of this embarrassment, disarm foreign suspicions and
deprive the Kremlin of one of its most effective propaganda themes. All
they would have to do is quit discriminating against Negroes and begin
treating them the same way as other citizens. But they don’t do it, for
reasons to be discussed later. Instead, they seek to get around their
embarrassment by juggling figures to show that lynching is diminishing
and conditions are improving, etc.</p>
<p>When we say this is a lie, we do not mean to challenge the official
lynching figures compiled every year. It is true that they have
declined temporarily. What we mean is that lynching has assumed new
forms. Everyone knows that lynchings are violence resulting in death
committed by a mob, by more than a few people — if only one person does
the killing, it is listed by the Tuskegee Institute as a murder and not
a lynching. (Harry T. Moore was not officially listed as a lynch
victim, presumably because it has not been proved that more than one
person killed him.) But there is another and more crucial aspect to
lynching — its purpose. The purpose is not so much to take a life —
that can just as easily be done by so-called legal procedure, in a Jim
Crow court, that is, by “legal lynching.” The purpose of a lynching is
not so much to take a life as it is to frighten, terrorize, silence,
demoralize other people who are permitted to go on living, but who arc
expected to cringe as long as they live and not dare to organize or
vote or go to court — just to live and work like a mule for the benefit
of others. That is the real aim of a lynching, and if it does not have
that effect it is not considered a success.<br>
</p>
<h4>New Trend in Anti-Negro Terror</h4>
<p class="fst">The point can be illustrated by the Groveland case. In
Groveland, Lake County, Fla., a large number of Negroes were working
and living under conditions of virtual peonage, a system about half-way
between slave labor and wage labor. After the war the Negro workers
began to complain about their conditions and talk about doing something
to improve them. When their employers heard about this, they decided to
do something drastic to throw the fear of god into their employees.
That was the background of the Groveland case in 1949, and when a white
woman yelled rape the employers had just what they wanted. They
unloosed a reign of terror that lasted over a week; Negro homes were
burned, Negroes were shot at if they ventured out of doors, and finally
400 Negro families had to flee out of the county. One Negro was shot
dead by a posse, three others were almost lynched and later were
convicted; one was given life imprisonment, two were sentenced to
death; when the Supreme Court ordered a new trial for the latter, a
sheriff shot them in cold blood, murdering one and leaving the other
for dead. But it was not these victims the ruling class was most
concerned about — they wanted blood and some bodies burning in the
electric chair so that they could point to them and remind the
remaining, living Negroes of what they could expect if they tried to
alter the wonderful American way of life as it is practiced in the
South.<br>
</p>
<h4>Real Aim: To Frighten the Living</h4>
<p class="fst">To frighten the living — that is the real aim of
lynching. When that is understood, we can see that there may be less of
the old-style type of lynchings, where mobs are used, but that
lynchings have continued as much as before, only in new forms. Today,
when they want to achieve the purpose of lynchings, they send out only
two or three men to shoot down a Negro who will serve as an example to
others, or they may even send out only one man, armed with a bomb,
which he can throw under a house where people are sleeping at night.
And in some cases they use the police instead. Because these people who
are so brave about murdering sleeping men and women don’t like to take
any risks, and even small vigilante committees face a risk that their
victim may resist. But with the police taking over the function of the
lynch mob there is practically no risk. The police have always been
noted for their brutality toward Negroes. Now, in addition, in
ever-increasing numbers, they are killing Negroes too, in the North and
the South.</p>
<p>It is estimated that in the city of Birmingham alone almost 100
Negroes have been shot or beaten to death on the streets or in the
police stations during the last 2½ years alone. Nobody knows
what the national total is, but it surely equals any annual total of
“official” lynchings recorded in the US since the early days of the Ku
Klux Klan. It is not a matter of punishing individual Negroes or of
letting the police work off their sadistic frustrations — the main aim
is to paralyze the members of the Negro community with fright, to make
them shudder every time they see a cop, to keep the memory of broken
and bloody bodies on their minds so that they will be afraid to talk
back or stand up for their rights. In other words, the same aim as the
old-style lynchings, only now committed under guise of law, now
protected by the police badge and uniform, now masked as “resisting an
officer” or “trying to escape.”</p>
<p>That is one of the new trends in the struggle for Negro equality.
The Negro people have been pressing forward — it is estimated that two
million of them will go to the polls in the South this year as compared
with about one million in 1948. Unable to sweet-talk them into
accepting second-class citizenship, the ruling class and its political
agents have decided to beat them into submission. It is impossible to
exaggerate the dangers presented by the new forms of lynching. If they
are not stopped where they are already being committed, then they will
spread into every state and city where the ruling class wants to keep
the Negro people down — that is, every state and city where Negroes
live.<br>
</p>
<h4>Danger Evident Not Only to Radicals</h4>
<p class="fst">Revolutionary socialists are not the only ones who
understand what is happening. The Psychology Department of the City
College of New York, 20 educators, sent a wire to Truman last November
after the sheriff of Lake County took the two handcuffed Groveland
defendants for a ride and shot them. They noted that the pattern for
denying Negroes their constitutional rights has shifted from mob
violence “to the more subtle forms of quasi-legal executions or
violence at the hands of ‘law enforcement’ officers.” The new pattern,
they said, would give “the aura of official sanction to racial murders”
and would expose all the people to “the dangers of a capricious,
jungle-like state.” (This is an acute observation, because once the
cops get such powers of life and death in their hands they will not
confine their use to Negroes but will employ them against whites as
well.) And they warned that “only the most immediate and strongest
action of the federal government can prevent the legal murder of a
great many more Negroes in the near future.” Events have already begun
to confirm this warning.</p>
<p>Another conservative source, Walter White, in his annual report for
the NAACP, declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“At times during the year justice and human rights in
America seemed to be standing still or even moving backward ... we saw
in our country a resurgence of violence — rioting, home burning,
bombings, police brutality and mockery of the revered American concept
of ‘equal justice under law.’ Cicero, Martinsville, Groveland,
Birmingham, Miami and Mims, the horror names of 1951, drove home more
strongly than ever the continuing and increasing need for the NAACP.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Why No Action from Washington?</h4>
<p class="fst">The International Executive Board of the CIO Auto
Workers — not one radical among them — protested the Groveland killing,
the murder of an NAACP member who had filed suit for the right to vote
in Louisiana and was shot down by a deputy sheriff, and the murder of a
Negro steward at sea by a white captain. These crimes were designated
as signs of “an intensification of terroristic aggression against
Negroes by officers charged with upholding and enforcement of the law.”
Urging Attorney General McGrath to arrest, indict and try the killers
for murder, the UAW Board wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Failure to take such action subverts all of our
lofty professions of democratic principles. The hour is late. Action
now is imperative.”</p>
<p class="fst">The hour certainly is late, but no action has been
forthcoming, despite thousands of appeals to Truman for the government
to step into the picture and do something to stop the terrorism. Not
one legal or semi-legal lyncher has been punished. Not one cop has been
fired. Not one bomb-thrower has been apprehended. The strongest
government in the world seems to be. helpless, or else tries to give
that impression. The mighty FBI has found nothing. The Department of
Justice can’t seem to get the wheels of justice moving. Are they really
so inefficient?</p>
<p>The answer is that it all depends on whom they are hunting. When
they want to catch a radical, nothing seems to stop them. The whole
machinery of the government is thrown into high gear, thousands of cops
and FBI agents labor ceaselessly, no financial expense is too high,
they lap wires and open mail, they set up a stoolpigeon system
extending across the whole country. And they get results — when they
really want them. So when they don’t get results we have good reason to
believe they don’t want them.</p>
<p>They arrest radicals and prosecute them and send them to jail, not
for employing force and violence — there has not been a single case of
this kind — but for allegedly conspiring to advocate force and
violence, a frameup assault on the Bill of Rights. But when it comes to
those who do not advocate but clearly commit force and violence, the
government seems paralyzed, bumbling, impotent. They are great at
hounding people whose only crime is that they express their opinions
but a complete dud when it comes to catching and punishing fascistic
elements who commit crimes in violation of all the federal, state and
local laws. Liberals think this is accidental, but it is not. The truth
is that the government is not really disturbed by fascist elements
while it is afraid of ideas and free speech and free press. This gives
a better and sharper insight into the true character of the government
and the capitalist ruling class than can be gotten in almost any other
way.<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Warnings Confirmed</h4>
<p class="fst">What is the government doing about the murder of Mr. and
Mrs. Harry T. Moore? Look first of all at Truman, the so-called great
civil libertarian and humanitarian. Not one word. He can’t be bothered
by such trifles. When US airmen fly over Hungarian territory in
violation of international law — you can imagine what would happen if a
Soviet or Hungarian plane flew over US territory without permission —
and then are arrested and fined, there is a great hubbub, Truman
demands restitution and firm action, and even after they are released
he vindictively demands that the case be taken before the UN. But when
people are murdered in his own country, in the state where he takes his
vacations, Truman is silent (and no newspaper reporter questions him
about it at his press conferences). Not that it would mean anything if
he did say something about the Moore case because he has proved that
his promises cannot be trusted anyhow. Action speaks louder than words.
And the inaction of the Truman administration also speaks louder than
words.</p>
<p>Attorney General McGrath promises “the full facilities of the FBI.”
Eventually he sends down two (2) FBI agents, who, when added to those
already stationed in Florida, make a grand total of nine (9). Which is
less than one-tenth as many as he set into action like bloodhounds when
four Stalinists convicted under the Smith Act jumped bail last summer.
Evidently expressing opinions that Truman and McGrath do not like is a
more heinous crime than murder. The FBI agents in Florida have achieved
exactly nothing. The whole thing is a farce. Because even if they
should arrest someone for “violating the federal civil rights” of Mr.
and Mrs. Moore, the penalty — the maximum penalty — would be one year
in prison and a few thousand dollars in fine! (Provided a Southern jury
could be found to convict the defendant.) That is the way the
government acts, that is the way it intends to keep acting — unless and
until it is compelled to do otherwise by the mass pressure of the
American people.</p>
<p>When Harry T. Moore was murdered, the Socialist Workers Party
immediately sounded the alarm. It warned that if his killers were not
punished, they would feel free to spread their violence to maintain
white supremacy and to extend their attacks to white workers and the
labor movement. This warning was confirmed almost as soon as it was
uttered. Recent issues of <strong>The Militant</strong>, by printing a
number of small news items that are lost in the back pages of most
papers, have shown that the bomb is joining TV and comic books as
symbols of American capitalist culture (which is ironical when we
recall that the favorite cartoon stereotype of a revolutionist used to
be a man with a bomb in his hand).</p>
<p>A white evangelist in Florida is warned that he will get the “Mims
treatment” if he does not stop preaching against sin so vigorously
(Moore’s home was in Mims). A crusader against vice in Alabama comes
home to find his house in smoke and his son blown 30 feet through the
air by a bomb, and he decides to move his family out of the state (why
he sent them to Florida for protection from bombs is a mystery). The
white sheriff of a North Carolina county complains that his deputies
cannot do their job at night in the rural areas because the Klan has
been flogging so many people that the residents have become jittery and
start firing their shotguns as soon as they hear a noise outside; the
sheriff says if this kind of thing goes on, why, it will not be
possible for his deputies to preserve law and order much longer. The
United Press reports a dynamite explosion near a Negro night club in
Dallas, Tex., and calls it the third such “apparently pointless”
bombing in less than a month. And now the scene shifts North, to
Chicago, where a black-powder bomb is exploded outside the new
headquarters of the AFL Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen’s
Union, shattering 40 windows and rocking the whole area; the police
began an investigation, of course — not of the labor haters, not of the
anti-union racists or the White Circle League, but of the CIO United
Packinghouse Workers Union!<br>
</p>
<h4>What Is Being Done?</h4>
<p class="fst">What is being done by the groups that are directly
affected by this new wave of terrorism? The NAACP, which is most
vitally involved, denounced the outrage, offered a reward for the
killers of Mr. and Mrs. Moore, held memorial meetings for them, and
urged McGrath to appoint a special prosecutor and grand jury (which he
refused to do). And then, two weeks after the bombing, it voted to
consult the labor leaders for a nationwide work stoppage, something it
had never done before and something which it did almost on the spur of
the moment under the pressure of the mass indignation over the Moore
case. All these measures were justified and progressive — but
inadequate.</p>
<p>The leaders of the labor movement too know they are involved, and
knew it before the bombing of the Chicago AFL union. They know that
union organizers and members will be next on the death list, that the
forces behind lynch terror are the same ones that seek to smash unions.
But beyond sending a few telegrams of protest, they do nothing. An
editorial in the Jan. 9 <strong>AFL News-Reporter</strong> concludes
by “wondering” if maybe “reactionaries everywhere won’t stop to think
whether stirring up race hatred in order to win an election is worth
the damage it helps to cause.” This is not a summons for the people to
fight the reactionaries but an appeal to the reactionaries to think
over what they are doing and decide if the terrorism really benefits
them — as if the reactionaries do not know what they are doing.</p>
<p>The Socialist Workers Party takes an altogether different approach.
Farrell Dobbs, National Chairman and presidential candidate of the SWP,
wrote a letter to the NAACP, AFL and CIO and 22 other powerful national
organizations scheduled to meet in Washington on Feb. 17-18 to lobby
for a change in Senate rules that make it possible to filibuster all
civil rights legislation to death. Speaking on behalf of the SWP, Dobbs
urged them to revise the plans for their conference — to turn it into a
broader affair, to summon a mass march on Washington by tens of
thousands instead of staging a lobby with a few hundred polite
representatives; to call mass meetings and demonstrations in cities all
over the country at the same time; to endorse the proposal for a
nationwide work stoppage; and to support the idea of forming defense
guards to protect lives and homes and liberties which the authorities
have failed to protect.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Need for Defense Guards</h4>
<p class="fst">The proposal for defense guards originated in Florida,
and not with the SWP. For several months in Miami bombs have been
thrown or planted in Negro housing projects, Jewish synagogues, and a
Catholic church. When the police failed to stop this, here is what
happened, according to the Jan. 2 <strong>New York Times</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Members of the Jewish War Veterans recently
suggested that 325 of their members be deputized to guard synagogues,
but this was turned down after several rabbis had issued a statement
declaring that to resort to ‘vigilante action at this time is to
succumb to hysteria and panic’.”</p>
<p class="fst">The subsequent killing of Mr. and Mrs. Moore,
undoubtedly encouraged when the racists saw they could act with
impunity in Miami, proves how blind those rabbis were to put their
confidence in the police. In the first place, defense guards need not
be deputized; when needed, they can and should be, formed without
getting the recognition or approval of the police, who usually act in
connivance with the lynchers anyhow. In the second place, formation of
defense guards is not “vigilante action” but its very opposite —
protection against vigilante action. And in the third place it is not
panic or hysteria to protect your life when the police fail to do so —
but good sense.</p>
<p>The bombers respect only those who can oppose them effectively; they
will think twice about going out to take another life when they see
Negroes and Jews and workers banding together and promising to resist.
Even the police will think it over before clubbing a helpless victim if
they know he has friends who will come to his aid. Without ever having
heard of the Socialist Workers Party, the Jewish veterans in Miami
sensed this; so did 18 whites who stood armed guard around the church
of the preacher threatened with the Mims treatment in Jacksonville; and
so did the Negroes who formed a guard around the home of a Negro farmer
in North Carolina after a bomb had been exploded there.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Impedes the Leaders?</h4>
<p class="fst">Farrell Dobbs’ proposals were not answered by the labor,
Negro, liberal and civic organizations. But they made it clear that
they rejected them by changing the name of their lobbying conference in
February to the “Leadership Conference on Civil Rights” — an obvious
refusal to call for mass action. But what about the proposal for a
nationwide work stoppage, which was made first by the NAACP itself? The
NAACP authorized the setting up of a committee to consult the labor
leaders. What happened? Was it set up, and if it was set up, why isn’t
it functioning? If it is functioning, why is the NAACP so silent about
the whole thing, which was their idea and not ours? If the labor
leaders refuse to go along with the proposal, why doesn’t the NAACP
announce this so that the people can do something about it? Why, if
they say this is a situation of crisis, don’t they act accordingly?
What are they waiting for?</p>
<p>The answer can be found by examining the new form of propaganda that
both Negro and labor leaders have become very fond of in recent years.
This has already been done in <strong>The Militant</strong>, but it
bears repetition and amplification. Today this propaganda is being
applied to just about every public issue that can be thought of. When
Truman asks for another five billions in new taxes, he seeks to justify
this unpopular demand by its necessity for the struggle against
communism. But his Republican opponents say hew taxes are out of the
question for the same reason — they would hurt the economy and weaken
the struggle against communism. When Philip Murray asks for a steel
wage increase, he explains it is needed so the steel workers can
contribute their maximum effort to the fight against Stalin. Fairless
of US Steel retorts that a wage increase would undermine the steel
industry, which would please no one so much as Stalin. Of course the
class struggle continues just the same. The steel workers are not
impressed with Fairless’ arguments, nor he with theirs. This shows that
propaganda has certain limits, and while it can mix things up it cannot
change the realities of social life and struggle.<br>
</p>
<h4>False Propaganda Paralyzes Action</h4>
<p class="fst">But it can mix things up, which is why it must be paid
some attention when it is applied to the Negro question, where the
argument runs like this: Jim Crow, discrimination, segregation,
bombings are all crimes because they help Stalin, and should be ended
so that Negroes will be able and willing to go all-out in the crusade
against communism. This was the theme sounded over and over by Philip
Murray and Walter Reuther at the last CIO convention, and given a
timely application by Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, when he
said the murder of Harry T. Moore was “one of the greatest services
that could have been performed for Joe Stalin.”</p>
<p>The duty of leaders, labor or Negro, is to educate the people, teach
them to know causes and effects — otherwise, no lasting progress is
possible. Specifically, it is their job to teach the masses what causes
Jim Crow oppression, who benefits from it, how all workers are harmed
by it, why they should fight it, and how to fight it effectively. The
basic cause is the profit system, and the beneficiaries are the
capitalists who do everything they can to keep the workers divided
along any lines possible — racial, geographic, religious, sexual, etc.
Because the more the workers are divided, the easier it is for the
employers to exploit them and squeeze the maximum profit out of their
labor. The workers have to be shown that Jim Crow benefits the ruling
class, and that anything that perpetuates Jim Crow is harmful to their
own interests. It must be made plain that Jim Crow is not the product
of Stalin. This is not said in defense of Stalin, but of a historically
incontrovertible fact. Jim Crow is the product of capitalism, American
capitalism; its seat is in Washington, not Moscow. Any propaganda that
obscures this fact is harmful and not helpful to the Negroes and their
white allies.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Roots of Jim Crow</h4>
<p class="fst">The workers must be encouraged and taught to figure out
their problems from the standpoint of how their problems affect the
class and individual conditions and liberties of the masses themselves.
When the question of a strike comes up, workers should be conditioned
to ask: “Will this strike help me and the other workers, or will it
help the capitalists, who benefit from our losses and lose from our
gains?” They should not be bamboozled into introducing extraneous
questions, like: “Will this strike help Stalin, or hurt him?” Trying to
figure out what is going on in Stalin’s mind (something the masterminds
in Washington have not done with perceptible success) can result only
in confusion, lack of determination, demoralization and inactivity —
which are of benefit only to the capitalists and the white supremacists.</p>
<p>The argument is not altogether new; only the form is. In World War
II it had a slightly different wording, namely, will this or that
action help Hitler? For some groups this became the sole and supreme
criterion for everything. The Communist Party was most guilty of this.
If workers wanted to resist speedup, or if Negroes wanted to march on
Washington to protest Jim Crow, the Stalinists opposed and fought them
on the grounds that such action was disruptive of “national unity” and
therefore helpful to Hitler. The Stalinists became the most vicious and
virulent opponents of labor and Negro struggles because their policy of
considering everything from the viewpoint of how it allegedly affected
Miller led them to shut their eyes to how these things affected the
workers and Negroes, and to subordinate and oppose every progressive
struggle under the guise of fighting Hitler. Those who use this method
in its new form will do the same and will play into the hands of the
reactionary ruling class, which is already stressing the idea that
there must be no more conflicts in this country because Stalin wants us
to be fighting one another instead of him.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who Really Benefits from Terrorism?</h4>
<p class="fst">But even if it is conceded for the sake of argument that
the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Moore is a service for Stalin (in the sense
that he makes use of it, not that he committed it) — so what? Is that
all it is? On the contrary, it is also a service for the American
ruling class — in fact, a much bigger service for them than for him.
The purpose of Jim Crow terrorism, as we noted earlier, is to keep the
Negro “in his place.” That is where American capitalism has tried to
keep him since 1876 when they made a deal with the Southern landlords,
businessmen and Ku Kluxers at the expense of the Bill of Rights and the
Negro people, and that is where they are trying to keep him today.
Stalin may reap certain indirect propaganda benefits from Jim Crow
terrorism, but American capitalism benefits from it directly,
politically and economically, and in a big way. That is why they do
nothing to stop it.</p>
<p>The Moore murders embarrass them in the United Nations. But not
enough so that they want to end Jim Crow at home. For them it is
cheaper to pay the price of being embarrassed than of having anything
done to overthrow the Jim Crow system. So Walter White is telling only
half the truth. The murder of Harry T. Moore is a service for Truman as
well as for Stalin.</p>
<p>White, Murray and Reuther make a great deal of noise about how
embarrassing Jim Crow is to American capitalism. The Truman
administration, which would not be in power without the support of the
South, knows all about this embarrassment, even better than its labor
and Negro supporters. But that does not stop them from maintaining the
Jim Crow system. Why this is so, why the ruling class retains the
“embarrassment” of Jim Crow and desperately resists all efforts to end
it — that is the question which White, Murray and Reuther never even
think of asking. But it is the decisive question and must be answered.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why Washington Prefers “Embarrassment”</h4>
<p class="fst">Abolishing Jim Crow is no easy thing. Even if they
decided in Washington to do it, it would still not be easy. Because the
ruling class in the South would not like the idea. That is putting it
very mildly. They know that Truman’s only interest is in getting Negro
votes and not in threatening the South’s sacred way of life, but they
go wild with rage every time he utters a few innocuous words about poll
taxes or FEPC. And if the government actually tried to end Jim Crow in
the South, we would be confronted with the threat of another civil war.</p>
<p>In other words, the only way to abolish Jim Crow in this country is
by making a revolution in the South, which is the powerhouse and
breeding ground of the Jim Crow system. The present Southern ruling
class would have to be thrown out of power, and that would be a
revolution, a political revolution. But no matter how started, such a
political revolution would inevitably tend to develop into a social and
economic overturn, which in turn would upset the whole national
structure. And that is why the capitalists who are running things will
never consent to the abolition of the Jim Crow system. And nothing will
shake them in this. They would much rather risk alienating the whole
world than risk a revolution threatening their own profits and
privileges at home.</p>
<p>The final note in the White-Murray propaganda is a plea to the
ruling class to end their great “inconsistency.”</p>
<p>How, they ask, can you get ready to fight a war for democracy in
Europe and Asia and continue to treat the Negro at home in the most
undemocratic fashion? Can’t you see that to be consistent you must give
the Negro democracy <em>in</em> America too?</p>
<p>But since the capitalists know that they are not preparing for a war
for democracy in any respect, this alleged inconsistency does not
bother them at all. Their foreign policy and their domestic policy,
despite what the labor and Negro leaders say, are cut from the same
cloth. They are not getting ready to bring the blessings of democracy
to the people of Asia or Europe any more than they are getting ready to
extend them to American Negroes. On the contrary, they intend to
enslave the people both at home and abroad, and are proceeding to
destroy civil liberties at home precisely so that nobody here will be
able to interfere with their reactionary program abroad.<br>
</p>
<h4>Where There Is a Contradiction</h4>
<p class="fst">Walter White and Philip Murray regard the war in Korea
as a crusade for democracy, but millions of American Negroes, when they
heard Truman give the order for US intervention, which he called a
“police action,” must have thought to themselves: “I sure feel sorry
for the Koreans if they get the same kind of ‘police action’ we’ve been
getting.” And they do — the police action against colonial masses in
Korea is qualitatively the same thing as police action against
minorities here at home, although on a bigger scale and with bigger
weapons.</p>
<p>So there is a great contradiction, but it is with the labor and
liberal leaders who act as apologists for the imperialists. They have
got to make a choice themselves. If they keep on supporting capitalism
and its foreign policy and its wars then they will have to subordinate
labor and Negro struggles, shove them into the background the way the
Stalinists did in World War II (and as the liberals are already
half-doing by their timorous policy on the Moore case). Or else they
will have to increase their opposition to Jim Crow, the wage freeze,
high prices, big profits and the witch hunt, and break with the
imperialist foreign policy that conflicts with every progressive
movement and struggle in the world today.</p>
<p>That is their problem, and they will have to meet it. Revolutionary
socialists have made their choice, and nothing will swerve them from
it. They are and will remain implacable opponents of capitalism and its
Jim Crow, and nothing will persuade them to moderate or abandon that
struggle for a single day, rain or shine, war or peace, Murray or
White, Truman, Taft or Eisenhower. Because they understand that if the
struggle is stopped, if the fight is weakened, then things will become
even worse than they are now.<br>
</p>
<h4>An Instructive Lesson from Jewish History</h4>
<p class="fst">Nothing could be more deadly for the Negro people than a
fatalistic belief in progress — automatic, self-moving progress, the
chief staple of liberalism and reformism. This is borne out by what
happened to the Jews. Before the first world war, when he was still a
Marxist, Karl Kautsky wrote a book which was revised after the war and
translated into English under the title, <strong>Are the Jews A Race?</strong>
This book is still worth reading as an example of the conceptions of
the socialist movement about the Jewish question at that time. It
contains some historical and anthropological material, an analysis of
economic causes of anti-Semitism, etc. But its most interesting chapter
is the one on the assimilation of the Jews, containing a number of
tables of statistics showing that gradually the Jews were intermingling
more and more with Christians and intermarrying with them at a really
remarkable rate — in some European countries during the early part of
the century, one out of every three or four Jews was marrying non-Jews
and great numbers of them were being converted to Christianity.</p>
<p>All in all, there seemed good ground to accept the prevailing
belief, shared even by the socialists, that the Jewish question was
solving itself through the assimilation of the Jews. An appealing
notion — but how appallingly false! It proves that history, and
especially the history of oppressed groups, does not move forward in a
straight line but that it zigs and zags, that conditions can arise
which will wipe out in a single decade all the gains that have been
painfully accumulated in a century of strenuous effort. How empty and
remote the statistics in Kautsky’s book appear alongside of the single,
lone statistic we became acquainted with after World War II — six
million Jews exterminated under Hitler in a few brief years.</p>
<p>And so the Negro people must be warned: Remember what happened to
the Jews. They too were told in assuring tones about how things were
getting better day by day and all they had to do was wait and be
patient with the “gradual” method and then the happy day of equality
would dawn by itself. Remember what happened to the Jews in Europe and
do not let anybody lull you with consoling statistics! The day may come
in this country too when the ruling class, determined to conquer the
whole world, will try to drown the Negro people in blood as an example
and scapegoat for the other victims of capitalism.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Century of Experience in Negro Struggle</h4>
<p class="fst">The idea that the Negro question would solve itself, so
to speak, seemed to have validity once upon a time. This capitalist
system we live under was progressive in its youth. Less than a hundred
years ago the capitalists united, although reluctantly at first, with
Negroes and workers and farmers to wage a bloody civil war that ended
in the smashing of the chattel slave system. There was reason then to
think that under capitalism Negroes could eventually prosper or at
least breathe the free air of equality. Then, after the Civil War, came
the period of Reconstruction, whose first stages were the brightest
chapter in the book of American history, when the capitalist government
did not hesitate to suppress the former slaveholders and to keep them
suppressed and to use federal troops and guns in support of the
Negroes’ struggle for freedom.</p>
<p>But that was when capitalism was young and thriving and moving
ahead. Today this profit system is old and decrepit, attacked by
incurable diseases, demented by illusions of grandeur and vain hopes
that it can succeed in the program of world conquest that Hitler failed
to achieve. It’s a different animal now. Since the betrayal of
Reconstruction, which gave the reins of power in the South back to the
former slaveowners, there has been no reason whatever to expect
anything progressive from the capitalists Besides, why should the Negro
people expect that their capitalist oppressors are going to grant them
more rights at a time when the capitalists are busily engaged in
withdrawing rights from the white workers, staging a witch hunt to
destroy freedom of speech and press and association for the white
workers? Preparations for an imperialist world war do not portend the
flowering of democracy for the Negro people — they signify an attempt
[illegible in original] way, to wipe out the democratic rights of all
the masses. Even without the evidence of new and spreading forms of
lynching and terrorism, it does not take much vision to see that the
prospects for things getting better by themselves are very slim, and
are going to get slimmer unless they are resisted vigorously,
militantly, in the spirit of Harry T. Moore.<br>
</p>
<h4>Moore Pointed to the Road</h4>
<p class="fst">The solution is not easy, and anyone who thinks it is,
is fooling himself. These are not easy times in which to make progress.
Many people who know that the answer lies in struggle have been
frightened by the witch hunt and have retired to the sidelines. But
struggle is still the only answer, and no slick or cheap substitutes
will do. Sending petitions to Truman will not bear any better results
now than in the past. Proposals for a boycott of Florida citrus fruits
and vacation centers are not harmful as such — unless the idea is
created that they are the answer. By themselves they do no harm, but
they cannot do much good either. Struggle, backed up by the readiness
to sacrifice that Harry T. Moore exhibited, remains the only answer.</p>
<p>The nature of the struggle is primarily political. If the government
wants to, it can put an end to terrorism in the South, which is itself
a political thing. Because the government does not really want to, the
government must be changed. Not changed by shifting from control by one
capitalist party to control by another capitalist party, but changed
from a government representing the interests of the capitalist class to
one representing the interests of the workers, Negroes, working
farmers, housewives and youth — representing them, controlled by them,
responsible to them and replaceable by them. If the government wants
to, it can end discrimination in industry. Because it does not want to,
it must be changed. And so it goes with all the other problems facing
the labor and Negro movements — they are political problems, which can
be solved only through political action and struggle.</p>
<p>We revolutionary socialists are hot able by ourselves alone to set
into motion our program for combatting terrorism. That is because we
are still a small minority. But even a small minority, armed with a
correct program, can exert a tremendous influence. The Abolitionists
also started out small, a persecuted minority whose leaders were tarred
and feathered and jailed and lynched, but within a few decades they
ended up by seeing two-thirds of the nation take up arms to defend the
anti-slavery principles they had stuck to so persistently during dark
and troubled times.<br>
</p>
<h4>Future Belongs to Revolutionary Socialism</h4>
<p class="fst">And revolutionary socialism will not remain a minority;
because our ideas conform to reality and are right, they will attract
the majority of the people, and they will triumph. Some have been
scared off by the witch hunt, and others have been corrupted into
compliance and apathy by “prosperity” — but the ruling class cannot
stop ideas or their spread because it cannot do away with the
reactionary conditions of life that produce those ideas and it cannot
prevent the rise of new generations [illegible in original] whom the
future rests and who will not want the future to be like the past. Our
confidence in the future is not the result of wishful thinking or of an
ability to hop ourselves up, but the product of scientific study and
understanding of society and history and the class struggle.</p>
<p>Some people think that it is visionary, hopelessly impractical and
idealistic to continue a struggle to end capitalism against, such
seemingly great odds. The same view was held by most people 100 years
ago when a minority suggested that it was advisable, necessary and
possible to end the system of slavery. “The slave system is here to
stay,” they were told, “and only crazy fanatics will refuse to try to
live with it, and maybe fix it up, patch it or reform it here or
there.” But from their own experience with the slave system, the
majority of the American people were forced to the conclusion that
slavery had to go, and they had to accept the program of the
revolutionists whom they had derided as crackpots.</p>
<p>Experience with capitalism, especially with capitalism in its death
agony, is going to have the same consequences in our own time. It is
going to teach the people that if they want to live, capitalism must
die, and that if they want peace and dignity they will first have to
employ militancy in taking power away from the capitalists. It is not
the revolutionary socialists, primarily, who will teach these things,
but capitalism itself. The Harlem paper, the <strong>New York Age</strong>,
says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The blast (that blew up Harry T. Moore’s home)
exploded all hopes that the fight for equality in politics, education,
the courts and other spheres of life in the South could be won with
little or no bloodshed.”</p>
<p class="fst">We have said that too, but events say it better. We’re
educating all whom we can reach to the best of our ability — but
capitalism is educating them too and in a way that will have deeper,
more lasting, profound and revolutionary effects than any words we can
speak or write.</p>
<p>The enemies of Jim Crow, war and thought control are still on the
defensive. But that is no reason for despair. <strong>The Nation</strong>
is correct when it observes that the Moore bombing “is likely to bring
about an imponderable change in the political thinking of American
Negroes” and when it notes that pressure for militant action is coming
from “rank-and-file Negroes whose patience is utterly exhausted not
only with Dixiecrat provocation but with the relaxed middle-class
attitude of some of their leaders, who have been quite willing to issue
further political bills of credit to Mr. Truman on the basis of his
stale civil rights speeches of 1948 and the lesser evil premise.” A
similar process is certain to develop among the white workers. Whether
it likes it or not, capitalism is forced to continue to produce all
kinds of opportunities for awakening the masses and driving them into
struggle against conditions as they are. If the politically advanced
workers know how to stick to their guns and grab hold of all the
opportunities offered them, then they will win to their side all the
other workers whose needs are satisfied by the program of revolutionary
socialism, and then it will be goodbye forever to capitalism, and all
of its products like Jim Crow terrorism.</p>
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George Breitman
New Dangers and New Tasks Facing the Negro Struggle
The Bomb-Murder of Harry T. Moore
(January 1952)
From Fourth International, Vol.13 No.1, January-February 1952, pp.3-11.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Two days before Christmas, Parade, the
Sunday picture magazine, devoted an entire page to a report from Key
West, Fla., where President Truman had just completed another of his
many vacations. It was the story of a 12-year old boy named Johnny
Lawler, who had been encouraged by his parents to hang around for a
chance to see Truman, and who finally succeeded and even shook Truman’s
hand and then was so thrilled that he did not wash his own hand for
several days. Johnny was quoted as asking his father, “Say, how did Mr.
Truman get to be President?” By working hard, his father replied, and
then Johnny said, “I’ll do the same because some day I want to be
President.”
There is something horrible in the thought that people are actually
educating their children to emulate a man like Truman, the biggest
strikebreaker in US history, the one who ruthlessly gave the order to
murder hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians with the atom bomb;
the hypocrite who advocated civil rights laws to get elected and then
dropped them like a hot potato; the initiator of a witch hunt that is
destroying our civil liberties.
Truman worked hard, all right — he worked hard obeying the orders of
a crooked machine politician named Pendergast, and he has been working
hard since then obeying the orders of the capitalist class, up to and
including the order to intervene in a so-called police action that has
already cost the US over 100,000 admitted casualties in Korea.
Johnny Lawler would be far better off if he hitched his wagon to
another star. And what a star there was in his own state — a Negro,
unknown to almost everyone until his death, a man who never committed
any crimes but who also became great by working hard. That was Harry T.
Moore, a hard worker, but one who worked on the side of the people and
not against them.
Harry Moore: A Truly Noble Man
It seems a shame that we never heard of Harry T. Moore
until after Christmas night, when his life and his wife’s life were
ended by a bomb that blew up their home in Mims, Florida. Because he
was a truly great and noble human being, the kind of man we should look
up to for guidance in how to live our lives, a man whose memory we
should keep forever fresh and green.
He was a school principal, and better off than most Negroes in the
South. But he was not content to think only of himself. He joined the
fight to win equal salaries for Negro teachers, and for doing that was
fired from his job. That would have silenced some people, as it has
intimidated many teachers of liberal or radical views and others
menaced or victimized by the witch hunt. But it did not frighten Harry
T. Moore.
On the contrary, it increased his determination to fight for
justice. He became more active than ever in the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People and in struggles to win and
protect the right to vote for Negroes in his state. And when he was
confronted with the Groveland “rape” frameup, he became a thorn in the
flesh of the white supremacists and Ku Kluxers and their protectors in
high office. He went around organizing and speaking at scores of
meetings, fearlessly defending the Groveland victims and boldly
demanding that McCall, the lyncher with a sheriff’s badge, should be
tried for the murder of Samuel Shepherd.
Knew What He Faced
We know now that he was taking his life into his hands
when he did these things. He must have known it too. But it did not
stop him. His mother says that when she cautioned him to be more
careful not long ago, he replied,
“Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice, and if
I sacrifice my life or my health I still think it is my duty for my
race.”
That is why it is correct to call Harry T. Moore a
martyr of the Negro struggle and of the general struggle of the working
people for a better world, he saw his duty and he did it, despite the
costs it entailed. He wanted to live too and to be happy, but he could
not be happy unless he offered his resistance to the misery and
injustice around him. In other words, he was a really moral man,
setting an example that should shine brightly for all time for the
youth of all races. He was a true son of great predecessors — of people
like Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and John Brown and others who were
ready to risk their lives in the fight against oppression. We would be
ingrates, unworthy of the sacrifice he made, if we were content to
merely mourn his passing and then forget about him instead of devoting
ourselves to avenge his death and to complete the struggle he led so
well.
Misleading Figures on Lynching
The Nation (Jan. 5) was absolutely
correct when it insisted that such crimes as the murder of Harry T.
Moore “cannot be understood as senseless acts of depraved or prejudiced
individuals. On the contrary, they were essentially political crimes,
crimes deliberately committed for a purpose.” And the purpose cannot be
completely understood without examinatiort of a new trend that has
appeared in the last few years.
At the end of 1951 the Tuskegee Institute, a Negro institution which
issues annual lynching figures, announced that the total of lynchings
last year was — one. This report was widely publicized here and abroad
by the propagandists of capitalism; for them this constituted proof
that lynchings are diminishing year by year, that America is more and
more becoming the land of freedom and equality for the Negro people,
and that one of these days we will wake up and find that they are
treated just like other people.
They would be very happy if they could got the 15 million American
Negroes and the colored people who form a majority of the earth’s
population to believe in this picture of progress that goes ever onward
and upward until the arrival of the millenium. Because if what they
said was true, it might not be necessary to fight to end the
Jim Crow system — maybe people could just afford to sit back and wait
for it to die a natural death.
But it is a lie. The reason the capitalists and their political en
and boys in Washington go to the trouble of peddling this lie is that
they have set themselves the objective of dominating the whole world.
Part of their program for achieving this depends on force — economic
force through the dollars they are pumping into the dying capitalist
system all over the world, military force through armament that they
are trying to impose on unwilling countries in Europe, Asia and the
Middle East. But part also depends on propaganda — the propaganda that
the US is the champion and paragon of democracy.
The colored people abroad find that hard to swallow.
“If you are such lovers of democracy,” they ask,
“then how is it that you have become the partner of so many lifelong
bitter enemies of democracy like Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Franco,
the Nazi and Japanese generals and most of the other dictators who are
not behind the iron curtain?”
Along with that question goes another:
“If you love democracy so much, why do you treat
Negroes as second-class citizens, deny most of them the right to vote,
discriminate against them at the hiring gate or bar them from the
better jobs when you do hire them, subject them to humility and
brutality, segregate them in the armed forces and in so many parts of
your educational system, deny them the protection of anti-lynching and
anti-poll tax laws — why, if you love democracy so much and talk to us
about it so much, don’t you practice what you preach?”
This makes the US ruling class, its politicians,
diplomats and Voice of America squirm like fish on a hook.
And needless to say, the representatives of the bureaucrats in the
Kremlin never miss a chance, inside the United Nations and outside, to
make them squirm some more. Many people, including some “radicals” who
expect capitalism to end Jim Crow, wonder why the US government does
not rid itself of this embarrassment, disarm foreign suspicions and
deprive the Kremlin of one of its most effective propaganda themes. All
they would have to do is quit discriminating against Negroes and begin
treating them the same way as other citizens. But they don’t do it, for
reasons to be discussed later. Instead, they seek to get around their
embarrassment by juggling figures to show that lynching is diminishing
and conditions are improving, etc.
When we say this is a lie, we do not mean to challenge the official
lynching figures compiled every year. It is true that they have
declined temporarily. What we mean is that lynching has assumed new
forms. Everyone knows that lynchings are violence resulting in death
committed by a mob, by more than a few people — if only one person does
the killing, it is listed by the Tuskegee Institute as a murder and not
a lynching. (Harry T. Moore was not officially listed as a lynch
victim, presumably because it has not been proved that more than one
person killed him.) But there is another and more crucial aspect to
lynching — its purpose. The purpose is not so much to take a life —
that can just as easily be done by so-called legal procedure, in a Jim
Crow court, that is, by “legal lynching.” The purpose of a lynching is
not so much to take a life as it is to frighten, terrorize, silence,
demoralize other people who are permitted to go on living, but who arc
expected to cringe as long as they live and not dare to organize or
vote or go to court — just to live and work like a mule for the benefit
of others. That is the real aim of a lynching, and if it does not have
that effect it is not considered a success.
New Trend in Anti-Negro Terror
The point can be illustrated by the Groveland case. In
Groveland, Lake County, Fla., a large number of Negroes were working
and living under conditions of virtual peonage, a system about half-way
between slave labor and wage labor. After the war the Negro workers
began to complain about their conditions and talk about doing something
to improve them. When their employers heard about this, they decided to
do something drastic to throw the fear of god into their employees.
That was the background of the Groveland case in 1949, and when a white
woman yelled rape the employers had just what they wanted. They
unloosed a reign of terror that lasted over a week; Negro homes were
burned, Negroes were shot at if they ventured out of doors, and finally
400 Negro families had to flee out of the county. One Negro was shot
dead by a posse, three others were almost lynched and later were
convicted; one was given life imprisonment, two were sentenced to
death; when the Supreme Court ordered a new trial for the latter, a
sheriff shot them in cold blood, murdering one and leaving the other
for dead. But it was not these victims the ruling class was most
concerned about — they wanted blood and some bodies burning in the
electric chair so that they could point to them and remind the
remaining, living Negroes of what they could expect if they tried to
alter the wonderful American way of life as it is practiced in the
South.
Real Aim: To Frighten the Living
To frighten the living — that is the real aim of
lynching. When that is understood, we can see that there may be less of
the old-style type of lynchings, where mobs are used, but that
lynchings have continued as much as before, only in new forms. Today,
when they want to achieve the purpose of lynchings, they send out only
two or three men to shoot down a Negro who will serve as an example to
others, or they may even send out only one man, armed with a bomb,
which he can throw under a house where people are sleeping at night.
And in some cases they use the police instead. Because these people who
are so brave about murdering sleeping men and women don’t like to take
any risks, and even small vigilante committees face a risk that their
victim may resist. But with the police taking over the function of the
lynch mob there is practically no risk. The police have always been
noted for their brutality toward Negroes. Now, in addition, in
ever-increasing numbers, they are killing Negroes too, in the North and
the South.
It is estimated that in the city of Birmingham alone almost 100
Negroes have been shot or beaten to death on the streets or in the
police stations during the last 2½ years alone. Nobody knows
what the national total is, but it surely equals any annual total of
“official” lynchings recorded in the US since the early days of the Ku
Klux Klan. It is not a matter of punishing individual Negroes or of
letting the police work off their sadistic frustrations — the main aim
is to paralyze the members of the Negro community with fright, to make
them shudder every time they see a cop, to keep the memory of broken
and bloody bodies on their minds so that they will be afraid to talk
back or stand up for their rights. In other words, the same aim as the
old-style lynchings, only now committed under guise of law, now
protected by the police badge and uniform, now masked as “resisting an
officer” or “trying to escape.”
That is one of the new trends in the struggle for Negro equality.
The Negro people have been pressing forward — it is estimated that two
million of them will go to the polls in the South this year as compared
with about one million in 1948. Unable to sweet-talk them into
accepting second-class citizenship, the ruling class and its political
agents have decided to beat them into submission. It is impossible to
exaggerate the dangers presented by the new forms of lynching. If they
are not stopped where they are already being committed, then they will
spread into every state and city where the ruling class wants to keep
the Negro people down — that is, every state and city where Negroes
live.
Danger Evident Not Only to Radicals
Revolutionary socialists are not the only ones who
understand what is happening. The Psychology Department of the City
College of New York, 20 educators, sent a wire to Truman last November
after the sheriff of Lake County took the two handcuffed Groveland
defendants for a ride and shot them. They noted that the pattern for
denying Negroes their constitutional rights has shifted from mob
violence “to the more subtle forms of quasi-legal executions or
violence at the hands of ‘law enforcement’ officers.” The new pattern,
they said, would give “the aura of official sanction to racial murders”
and would expose all the people to “the dangers of a capricious,
jungle-like state.” (This is an acute observation, because once the
cops get such powers of life and death in their hands they will not
confine their use to Negroes but will employ them against whites as
well.) And they warned that “only the most immediate and strongest
action of the federal government can prevent the legal murder of a
great many more Negroes in the near future.” Events have already begun
to confirm this warning.
Another conservative source, Walter White, in his annual report for
the NAACP, declared:
“At times during the year justice and human rights in
America seemed to be standing still or even moving backward ... we saw
in our country a resurgence of violence — rioting, home burning,
bombings, police brutality and mockery of the revered American concept
of ‘equal justice under law.’ Cicero, Martinsville, Groveland,
Birmingham, Miami and Mims, the horror names of 1951, drove home more
strongly than ever the continuing and increasing need for the NAACP.”
Why No Action from Washington?
The International Executive Board of the CIO Auto
Workers — not one radical among them — protested the Groveland killing,
the murder of an NAACP member who had filed suit for the right to vote
in Louisiana and was shot down by a deputy sheriff, and the murder of a
Negro steward at sea by a white captain. These crimes were designated
as signs of “an intensification of terroristic aggression against
Negroes by officers charged with upholding and enforcement of the law.”
Urging Attorney General McGrath to arrest, indict and try the killers
for murder, the UAW Board wrote:
“Failure to take such action subverts all of our
lofty professions of democratic principles. The hour is late. Action
now is imperative.”
The hour certainly is late, but no action has been
forthcoming, despite thousands of appeals to Truman for the government
to step into the picture and do something to stop the terrorism. Not
one legal or semi-legal lyncher has been punished. Not one cop has been
fired. Not one bomb-thrower has been apprehended. The strongest
government in the world seems to be. helpless, or else tries to give
that impression. The mighty FBI has found nothing. The Department of
Justice can’t seem to get the wheels of justice moving. Are they really
so inefficient?
The answer is that it all depends on whom they are hunting. When
they want to catch a radical, nothing seems to stop them. The whole
machinery of the government is thrown into high gear, thousands of cops
and FBI agents labor ceaselessly, no financial expense is too high,
they lap wires and open mail, they set up a stoolpigeon system
extending across the whole country. And they get results — when they
really want them. So when they don’t get results we have good reason to
believe they don’t want them.
They arrest radicals and prosecute them and send them to jail, not
for employing force and violence — there has not been a single case of
this kind — but for allegedly conspiring to advocate force and
violence, a frameup assault on the Bill of Rights. But when it comes to
those who do not advocate but clearly commit force and violence, the
government seems paralyzed, bumbling, impotent. They are great at
hounding people whose only crime is that they express their opinions
but a complete dud when it comes to catching and punishing fascistic
elements who commit crimes in violation of all the federal, state and
local laws. Liberals think this is accidental, but it is not. The truth
is that the government is not really disturbed by fascist elements
while it is afraid of ideas and free speech and free press. This gives
a better and sharper insight into the true character of the government
and the capitalist ruling class than can be gotten in almost any other
way.
Our Warnings Confirmed
What is the government doing about the murder of Mr. and
Mrs. Harry T. Moore? Look first of all at Truman, the so-called great
civil libertarian and humanitarian. Not one word. He can’t be bothered
by such trifles. When US airmen fly over Hungarian territory in
violation of international law — you can imagine what would happen if a
Soviet or Hungarian plane flew over US territory without permission —
and then are arrested and fined, there is a great hubbub, Truman
demands restitution and firm action, and even after they are released
he vindictively demands that the case be taken before the UN. But when
people are murdered in his own country, in the state where he takes his
vacations, Truman is silent (and no newspaper reporter questions him
about it at his press conferences). Not that it would mean anything if
he did say something about the Moore case because he has proved that
his promises cannot be trusted anyhow. Action speaks louder than words.
And the inaction of the Truman administration also speaks louder than
words.
Attorney General McGrath promises “the full facilities of the FBI.”
Eventually he sends down two (2) FBI agents, who, when added to those
already stationed in Florida, make a grand total of nine (9). Which is
less than one-tenth as many as he set into action like bloodhounds when
four Stalinists convicted under the Smith Act jumped bail last summer.
Evidently expressing opinions that Truman and McGrath do not like is a
more heinous crime than murder. The FBI agents in Florida have achieved
exactly nothing. The whole thing is a farce. Because even if they
should arrest someone for “violating the federal civil rights” of Mr.
and Mrs. Moore, the penalty — the maximum penalty — would be one year
in prison and a few thousand dollars in fine! (Provided a Southern jury
could be found to convict the defendant.) That is the way the
government acts, that is the way it intends to keep acting — unless and
until it is compelled to do otherwise by the mass pressure of the
American people.
When Harry T. Moore was murdered, the Socialist Workers Party
immediately sounded the alarm. It warned that if his killers were not
punished, they would feel free to spread their violence to maintain
white supremacy and to extend their attacks to white workers and the
labor movement. This warning was confirmed almost as soon as it was
uttered. Recent issues of The Militant, by printing a
number of small news items that are lost in the back pages of most
papers, have shown that the bomb is joining TV and comic books as
symbols of American capitalist culture (which is ironical when we
recall that the favorite cartoon stereotype of a revolutionist used to
be a man with a bomb in his hand).
A white evangelist in Florida is warned that he will get the “Mims
treatment” if he does not stop preaching against sin so vigorously
(Moore’s home was in Mims). A crusader against vice in Alabama comes
home to find his house in smoke and his son blown 30 feet through the
air by a bomb, and he decides to move his family out of the state (why
he sent them to Florida for protection from bombs is a mystery). The
white sheriff of a North Carolina county complains that his deputies
cannot do their job at night in the rural areas because the Klan has
been flogging so many people that the residents have become jittery and
start firing their shotguns as soon as they hear a noise outside; the
sheriff says if this kind of thing goes on, why, it will not be
possible for his deputies to preserve law and order much longer. The
United Press reports a dynamite explosion near a Negro night club in
Dallas, Tex., and calls it the third such “apparently pointless”
bombing in less than a month. And now the scene shifts North, to
Chicago, where a black-powder bomb is exploded outside the new
headquarters of the AFL Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen’s
Union, shattering 40 windows and rocking the whole area; the police
began an investigation, of course — not of the labor haters, not of the
anti-union racists or the White Circle League, but of the CIO United
Packinghouse Workers Union!
What Is Being Done?
What is being done by the groups that are directly
affected by this new wave of terrorism? The NAACP, which is most
vitally involved, denounced the outrage, offered a reward for the
killers of Mr. and Mrs. Moore, held memorial meetings for them, and
urged McGrath to appoint a special prosecutor and grand jury (which he
refused to do). And then, two weeks after the bombing, it voted to
consult the labor leaders for a nationwide work stoppage, something it
had never done before and something which it did almost on the spur of
the moment under the pressure of the mass indignation over the Moore
case. All these measures were justified and progressive — but
inadequate.
The leaders of the labor movement too know they are involved, and
knew it before the bombing of the Chicago AFL union. They know that
union organizers and members will be next on the death list, that the
forces behind lynch terror are the same ones that seek to smash unions.
But beyond sending a few telegrams of protest, they do nothing. An
editorial in the Jan. 9 AFL News-Reporter concludes
by “wondering” if maybe “reactionaries everywhere won’t stop to think
whether stirring up race hatred in order to win an election is worth
the damage it helps to cause.” This is not a summons for the people to
fight the reactionaries but an appeal to the reactionaries to think
over what they are doing and decide if the terrorism really benefits
them — as if the reactionaries do not know what they are doing.
The Socialist Workers Party takes an altogether different approach.
Farrell Dobbs, National Chairman and presidential candidate of the SWP,
wrote a letter to the NAACP, AFL and CIO and 22 other powerful national
organizations scheduled to meet in Washington on Feb. 17-18 to lobby
for a change in Senate rules that make it possible to filibuster all
civil rights legislation to death. Speaking on behalf of the SWP, Dobbs
urged them to revise the plans for their conference — to turn it into a
broader affair, to summon a mass march on Washington by tens of
thousands instead of staging a lobby with a few hundred polite
representatives; to call mass meetings and demonstrations in cities all
over the country at the same time; to endorse the proposal for a
nationwide work stoppage; and to support the idea of forming defense
guards to protect lives and homes and liberties which the authorities
have failed to protect.
The Need for Defense Guards
The proposal for defense guards originated in Florida,
and not with the SWP. For several months in Miami bombs have been
thrown or planted in Negro housing projects, Jewish synagogues, and a
Catholic church. When the police failed to stop this, here is what
happened, according to the Jan. 2 New York Times:
“Members of the Jewish War Veterans recently
suggested that 325 of their members be deputized to guard synagogues,
but this was turned down after several rabbis had issued a statement
declaring that to resort to ‘vigilante action at this time is to
succumb to hysteria and panic’.”
The subsequent killing of Mr. and Mrs. Moore,
undoubtedly encouraged when the racists saw they could act with
impunity in Miami, proves how blind those rabbis were to put their
confidence in the police. In the first place, defense guards need not
be deputized; when needed, they can and should be, formed without
getting the recognition or approval of the police, who usually act in
connivance with the lynchers anyhow. In the second place, formation of
defense guards is not “vigilante action” but its very opposite —
protection against vigilante action. And in the third place it is not
panic or hysteria to protect your life when the police fail to do so —
but good sense.
The bombers respect only those who can oppose them effectively; they
will think twice about going out to take another life when they see
Negroes and Jews and workers banding together and promising to resist.
Even the police will think it over before clubbing a helpless victim if
they know he has friends who will come to his aid. Without ever having
heard of the Socialist Workers Party, the Jewish veterans in Miami
sensed this; so did 18 whites who stood armed guard around the church
of the preacher threatened with the Mims treatment in Jacksonville; and
so did the Negroes who formed a guard around the home of a Negro farmer
in North Carolina after a bomb had been exploded there.
What Impedes the Leaders?
Farrell Dobbs’ proposals were not answered by the labor,
Negro, liberal and civic organizations. But they made it clear that
they rejected them by changing the name of their lobbying conference in
February to the “Leadership Conference on Civil Rights” — an obvious
refusal to call for mass action. But what about the proposal for a
nationwide work stoppage, which was made first by the NAACP itself? The
NAACP authorized the setting up of a committee to consult the labor
leaders. What happened? Was it set up, and if it was set up, why isn’t
it functioning? If it is functioning, why is the NAACP so silent about
the whole thing, which was their idea and not ours? If the labor
leaders refuse to go along with the proposal, why doesn’t the NAACP
announce this so that the people can do something about it? Why, if
they say this is a situation of crisis, don’t they act accordingly?
What are they waiting for?
The answer can be found by examining the new form of propaganda that
both Negro and labor leaders have become very fond of in recent years.
This has already been done in The Militant, but it
bears repetition and amplification. Today this propaganda is being
applied to just about every public issue that can be thought of. When
Truman asks for another five billions in new taxes, he seeks to justify
this unpopular demand by its necessity for the struggle against
communism. But his Republican opponents say hew taxes are out of the
question for the same reason — they would hurt the economy and weaken
the struggle against communism. When Philip Murray asks for a steel
wage increase, he explains it is needed so the steel workers can
contribute their maximum effort to the fight against Stalin. Fairless
of US Steel retorts that a wage increase would undermine the steel
industry, which would please no one so much as Stalin. Of course the
class struggle continues just the same. The steel workers are not
impressed with Fairless’ arguments, nor he with theirs. This shows that
propaganda has certain limits, and while it can mix things up it cannot
change the realities of social life and struggle.
False Propaganda Paralyzes Action
But it can mix things up, which is why it must be paid
some attention when it is applied to the Negro question, where the
argument runs like this: Jim Crow, discrimination, segregation,
bombings are all crimes because they help Stalin, and should be ended
so that Negroes will be able and willing to go all-out in the crusade
against communism. This was the theme sounded over and over by Philip
Murray and Walter Reuther at the last CIO convention, and given a
timely application by Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, when he
said the murder of Harry T. Moore was “one of the greatest services
that could have been performed for Joe Stalin.”
The duty of leaders, labor or Negro, is to educate the people, teach
them to know causes and effects — otherwise, no lasting progress is
possible. Specifically, it is their job to teach the masses what causes
Jim Crow oppression, who benefits from it, how all workers are harmed
by it, why they should fight it, and how to fight it effectively. The
basic cause is the profit system, and the beneficiaries are the
capitalists who do everything they can to keep the workers divided
along any lines possible — racial, geographic, religious, sexual, etc.
Because the more the workers are divided, the easier it is for the
employers to exploit them and squeeze the maximum profit out of their
labor. The workers have to be shown that Jim Crow benefits the ruling
class, and that anything that perpetuates Jim Crow is harmful to their
own interests. It must be made plain that Jim Crow is not the product
of Stalin. This is not said in defense of Stalin, but of a historically
incontrovertible fact. Jim Crow is the product of capitalism, American
capitalism; its seat is in Washington, not Moscow. Any propaganda that
obscures this fact is harmful and not helpful to the Negroes and their
white allies.
The Roots of Jim Crow
The workers must be encouraged and taught to figure out
their problems from the standpoint of how their problems affect the
class and individual conditions and liberties of the masses themselves.
When the question of a strike comes up, workers should be conditioned
to ask: “Will this strike help me and the other workers, or will it
help the capitalists, who benefit from our losses and lose from our
gains?” They should not be bamboozled into introducing extraneous
questions, like: “Will this strike help Stalin, or hurt him?” Trying to
figure out what is going on in Stalin’s mind (something the masterminds
in Washington have not done with perceptible success) can result only
in confusion, lack of determination, demoralization and inactivity —
which are of benefit only to the capitalists and the white supremacists.
The argument is not altogether new; only the form is. In World War
II it had a slightly different wording, namely, will this or that
action help Hitler? For some groups this became the sole and supreme
criterion for everything. The Communist Party was most guilty of this.
If workers wanted to resist speedup, or if Negroes wanted to march on
Washington to protest Jim Crow, the Stalinists opposed and fought them
on the grounds that such action was disruptive of “national unity” and
therefore helpful to Hitler. The Stalinists became the most vicious and
virulent opponents of labor and Negro struggles because their policy of
considering everything from the viewpoint of how it allegedly affected
Miller led them to shut their eyes to how these things affected the
workers and Negroes, and to subordinate and oppose every progressive
struggle under the guise of fighting Hitler. Those who use this method
in its new form will do the same and will play into the hands of the
reactionary ruling class, which is already stressing the idea that
there must be no more conflicts in this country because Stalin wants us
to be fighting one another instead of him.
Who Really Benefits from Terrorism?
But even if it is conceded for the sake of argument that
the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Moore is a service for Stalin (in the sense
that he makes use of it, not that he committed it) — so what? Is that
all it is? On the contrary, it is also a service for the American
ruling class — in fact, a much bigger service for them than for him.
The purpose of Jim Crow terrorism, as we noted earlier, is to keep the
Negro “in his place.” That is where American capitalism has tried to
keep him since 1876 when they made a deal with the Southern landlords,
businessmen and Ku Kluxers at the expense of the Bill of Rights and the
Negro people, and that is where they are trying to keep him today.
Stalin may reap certain indirect propaganda benefits from Jim Crow
terrorism, but American capitalism benefits from it directly,
politically and economically, and in a big way. That is why they do
nothing to stop it.
The Moore murders embarrass them in the United Nations. But not
enough so that they want to end Jim Crow at home. For them it is
cheaper to pay the price of being embarrassed than of having anything
done to overthrow the Jim Crow system. So Walter White is telling only
half the truth. The murder of Harry T. Moore is a service for Truman as
well as for Stalin.
White, Murray and Reuther make a great deal of noise about how
embarrassing Jim Crow is to American capitalism. The Truman
administration, which would not be in power without the support of the
South, knows all about this embarrassment, even better than its labor
and Negro supporters. But that does not stop them from maintaining the
Jim Crow system. Why this is so, why the ruling class retains the
“embarrassment” of Jim Crow and desperately resists all efforts to end
it — that is the question which White, Murray and Reuther never even
think of asking. But it is the decisive question and must be answered.
Why Washington Prefers “Embarrassment”
Abolishing Jim Crow is no easy thing. Even if they
decided in Washington to do it, it would still not be easy. Because the
ruling class in the South would not like the idea. That is putting it
very mildly. They know that Truman’s only interest is in getting Negro
votes and not in threatening the South’s sacred way of life, but they
go wild with rage every time he utters a few innocuous words about poll
taxes or FEPC. And if the government actually tried to end Jim Crow in
the South, we would be confronted with the threat of another civil war.
In other words, the only way to abolish Jim Crow in this country is
by making a revolution in the South, which is the powerhouse and
breeding ground of the Jim Crow system. The present Southern ruling
class would have to be thrown out of power, and that would be a
revolution, a political revolution. But no matter how started, such a
political revolution would inevitably tend to develop into a social and
economic overturn, which in turn would upset the whole national
structure. And that is why the capitalists who are running things will
never consent to the abolition of the Jim Crow system. And nothing will
shake them in this. They would much rather risk alienating the whole
world than risk a revolution threatening their own profits and
privileges at home.
The final note in the White-Murray propaganda is a plea to the
ruling class to end their great “inconsistency.”
How, they ask, can you get ready to fight a war for democracy in
Europe and Asia and continue to treat the Negro at home in the most
undemocratic fashion? Can’t you see that to be consistent you must give
the Negro democracy in America too?
But since the capitalists know that they are not preparing for a war
for democracy in any respect, this alleged inconsistency does not
bother them at all. Their foreign policy and their domestic policy,
despite what the labor and Negro leaders say, are cut from the same
cloth. They are not getting ready to bring the blessings of democracy
to the people of Asia or Europe any more than they are getting ready to
extend them to American Negroes. On the contrary, they intend to
enslave the people both at home and abroad, and are proceeding to
destroy civil liberties at home precisely so that nobody here will be
able to interfere with their reactionary program abroad.
Where There Is a Contradiction
Walter White and Philip Murray regard the war in Korea
as a crusade for democracy, but millions of American Negroes, when they
heard Truman give the order for US intervention, which he called a
“police action,” must have thought to themselves: “I sure feel sorry
for the Koreans if they get the same kind of ‘police action’ we’ve been
getting.” And they do — the police action against colonial masses in
Korea is qualitatively the same thing as police action against
minorities here at home, although on a bigger scale and with bigger
weapons.
So there is a great contradiction, but it is with the labor and
liberal leaders who act as apologists for the imperialists. They have
got to make a choice themselves. If they keep on supporting capitalism
and its foreign policy and its wars then they will have to subordinate
labor and Negro struggles, shove them into the background the way the
Stalinists did in World War II (and as the liberals are already
half-doing by their timorous policy on the Moore case). Or else they
will have to increase their opposition to Jim Crow, the wage freeze,
high prices, big profits and the witch hunt, and break with the
imperialist foreign policy that conflicts with every progressive
movement and struggle in the world today.
That is their problem, and they will have to meet it. Revolutionary
socialists have made their choice, and nothing will swerve them from
it. They are and will remain implacable opponents of capitalism and its
Jim Crow, and nothing will persuade them to moderate or abandon that
struggle for a single day, rain or shine, war or peace, Murray or
White, Truman, Taft or Eisenhower. Because they understand that if the
struggle is stopped, if the fight is weakened, then things will become
even worse than they are now.
An Instructive Lesson from Jewish History
Nothing could be more deadly for the Negro people than a
fatalistic belief in progress — automatic, self-moving progress, the
chief staple of liberalism and reformism. This is borne out by what
happened to the Jews. Before the first world war, when he was still a
Marxist, Karl Kautsky wrote a book which was revised after the war and
translated into English under the title, Are the Jews A Race?
This book is still worth reading as an example of the conceptions of
the socialist movement about the Jewish question at that time. It
contains some historical and anthropological material, an analysis of
economic causes of anti-Semitism, etc. But its most interesting chapter
is the one on the assimilation of the Jews, containing a number of
tables of statistics showing that gradually the Jews were intermingling
more and more with Christians and intermarrying with them at a really
remarkable rate — in some European countries during the early part of
the century, one out of every three or four Jews was marrying non-Jews
and great numbers of them were being converted to Christianity.
All in all, there seemed good ground to accept the prevailing
belief, shared even by the socialists, that the Jewish question was
solving itself through the assimilation of the Jews. An appealing
notion — but how appallingly false! It proves that history, and
especially the history of oppressed groups, does not move forward in a
straight line but that it zigs and zags, that conditions can arise
which will wipe out in a single decade all the gains that have been
painfully accumulated in a century of strenuous effort. How empty and
remote the statistics in Kautsky’s book appear alongside of the single,
lone statistic we became acquainted with after World War II — six
million Jews exterminated under Hitler in a few brief years.
And so the Negro people must be warned: Remember what happened to
the Jews. They too were told in assuring tones about how things were
getting better day by day and all they had to do was wait and be
patient with the “gradual” method and then the happy day of equality
would dawn by itself. Remember what happened to the Jews in Europe and
do not let anybody lull you with consoling statistics! The day may come
in this country too when the ruling class, determined to conquer the
whole world, will try to drown the Negro people in blood as an example
and scapegoat for the other victims of capitalism.
A Century of Experience in Negro Struggle
The idea that the Negro question would solve itself, so
to speak, seemed to have validity once upon a time. This capitalist
system we live under was progressive in its youth. Less than a hundred
years ago the capitalists united, although reluctantly at first, with
Negroes and workers and farmers to wage a bloody civil war that ended
in the smashing of the chattel slave system. There was reason then to
think that under capitalism Negroes could eventually prosper or at
least breathe the free air of equality. Then, after the Civil War, came
the period of Reconstruction, whose first stages were the brightest
chapter in the book of American history, when the capitalist government
did not hesitate to suppress the former slaveholders and to keep them
suppressed and to use federal troops and guns in support of the
Negroes’ struggle for freedom.
But that was when capitalism was young and thriving and moving
ahead. Today this profit system is old and decrepit, attacked by
incurable diseases, demented by illusions of grandeur and vain hopes
that it can succeed in the program of world conquest that Hitler failed
to achieve. It’s a different animal now. Since the betrayal of
Reconstruction, which gave the reins of power in the South back to the
former slaveowners, there has been no reason whatever to expect
anything progressive from the capitalists Besides, why should the Negro
people expect that their capitalist oppressors are going to grant them
more rights at a time when the capitalists are busily engaged in
withdrawing rights from the white workers, staging a witch hunt to
destroy freedom of speech and press and association for the white
workers? Preparations for an imperialist world war do not portend the
flowering of democracy for the Negro people — they signify an attempt
[illegible in original] way, to wipe out the democratic rights of all
the masses. Even without the evidence of new and spreading forms of
lynching and terrorism, it does not take much vision to see that the
prospects for things getting better by themselves are very slim, and
are going to get slimmer unless they are resisted vigorously,
militantly, in the spirit of Harry T. Moore.
Moore Pointed to the Road
The solution is not easy, and anyone who thinks it is,
is fooling himself. These are not easy times in which to make progress.
Many people who know that the answer lies in struggle have been
frightened by the witch hunt and have retired to the sidelines. But
struggle is still the only answer, and no slick or cheap substitutes
will do. Sending petitions to Truman will not bear any better results
now than in the past. Proposals for a boycott of Florida citrus fruits
and vacation centers are not harmful as such — unless the idea is
created that they are the answer. By themselves they do no harm, but
they cannot do much good either. Struggle, backed up by the readiness
to sacrifice that Harry T. Moore exhibited, remains the only answer.
The nature of the struggle is primarily political. If the government
wants to, it can put an end to terrorism in the South, which is itself
a political thing. Because the government does not really want to, the
government must be changed. Not changed by shifting from control by one
capitalist party to control by another capitalist party, but changed
from a government representing the interests of the capitalist class to
one representing the interests of the workers, Negroes, working
farmers, housewives and youth — representing them, controlled by them,
responsible to them and replaceable by them. If the government wants
to, it can end discrimination in industry. Because it does not want to,
it must be changed. And so it goes with all the other problems facing
the labor and Negro movements — they are political problems, which can
be solved only through political action and struggle.
We revolutionary socialists are hot able by ourselves alone to set
into motion our program for combatting terrorism. That is because we
are still a small minority. But even a small minority, armed with a
correct program, can exert a tremendous influence. The Abolitionists
also started out small, a persecuted minority whose leaders were tarred
and feathered and jailed and lynched, but within a few decades they
ended up by seeing two-thirds of the nation take up arms to defend the
anti-slavery principles they had stuck to so persistently during dark
and troubled times.
Future Belongs to Revolutionary Socialism
And revolutionary socialism will not remain a minority;
because our ideas conform to reality and are right, they will attract
the majority of the people, and they will triumph. Some have been
scared off by the witch hunt, and others have been corrupted into
compliance and apathy by “prosperity” — but the ruling class cannot
stop ideas or their spread because it cannot do away with the
reactionary conditions of life that produce those ideas and it cannot
prevent the rise of new generations [illegible in original] whom the
future rests and who will not want the future to be like the past. Our
confidence in the future is not the result of wishful thinking or of an
ability to hop ourselves up, but the product of scientific study and
understanding of society and history and the class struggle.
Some people think that it is visionary, hopelessly impractical and
idealistic to continue a struggle to end capitalism against, such
seemingly great odds. The same view was held by most people 100 years
ago when a minority suggested that it was advisable, necessary and
possible to end the system of slavery. “The slave system is here to
stay,” they were told, “and only crazy fanatics will refuse to try to
live with it, and maybe fix it up, patch it or reform it here or
there.” But from their own experience with the slave system, the
majority of the American people were forced to the conclusion that
slavery had to go, and they had to accept the program of the
revolutionists whom they had derided as crackpots.
Experience with capitalism, especially with capitalism in its death
agony, is going to have the same consequences in our own time. It is
going to teach the people that if they want to live, capitalism must
die, and that if they want peace and dignity they will first have to
employ militancy in taking power away from the capitalists. It is not
the revolutionary socialists, primarily, who will teach these things,
but capitalism itself. The Harlem paper, the New York Age,
says:
“The blast (that blew up Harry T. Moore’s home)
exploded all hopes that the fight for equality in politics, education,
the courts and other spheres of life in the South could be won with
little or no bloodshed.”
We have said that too, but events say it better. We’re
educating all whom we can reach to the best of our ability — but
capitalism is educating them too and in a way that will have deeper,
more lasting, profound and revolutionary effects than any words we can
speak or write.
The enemies of Jim Crow, war and thought control are still on the
defensive. But that is no reason for despair. The Nation
is correct when it observes that the Moore bombing “is likely to bring
about an imponderable change in the political thinking of American
Negroes” and when it notes that pressure for militant action is coming
from “rank-and-file Negroes whose patience is utterly exhausted not
only with Dixiecrat provocation but with the relaxed middle-class
attitude of some of their leaders, who have been quite willing to issue
further political bills of credit to Mr. Truman on the basis of his
stale civil rights speeches of 1948 and the lesser evil premise.” A
similar process is certain to develop among the white workers. Whether
it likes it or not, capitalism is forced to continue to produce all
kinds of opportunities for awakening the masses and driving them into
struggle against conditions as they are. If the politically advanced
workers know how to stick to their guns and grab hold of all the
opportunities offered them, then they will win to their side all the
other workers whose needs are satisfied by the program of revolutionary
socialism, and then it will be goodbye forever to capitalism, and all
of its products like Jim Crow terrorism.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(19 July 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_29" target="new">Vol. V No. 29</a>, 19 July 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>The <em>Courier</em> and the Negro March</h4>
<p class="fst">Without any question the biggest news of the first week of the month, so far as the struggle for Negro rights is concerned, was the bureaucratic cancellation of the March on Washington at the time that the eyes and hopes of all advanced Negro workers were turned in the direction of the scheduled March.</p>
<p>And still the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> found room on its front page for only a couple of inches of reading matter on the March. And its lead – and it really splashed and splurged on it – was a long denunciation of Walter White and the N.A.A.C.P. for being responsible for the postponement of a hearing to be held by a Senate Committee on discrimination against Negroes in the war industries.</p>
<p><em>The <strong>Courier</strong>’s handling of these questions was neither accidental nor the result of slovenly journalism. Rather, it was a brazen attempt on the part of the editors to cover up the shabby role they had played against the March. By attracting attention to a secondary matter of extremely little importance, they hoped we’d forget how they behaved about the March. It was an attempt by a paper with a “militant” reputation to hide its own bankruptcy. Negroes must understand this if they are to avoid mistakes in the future. They must understand not only Randolph’s treachery in calling off the March, but also the treachery of the only paper which had dared to oppose the March.</em></p>
<p>The reason that the <strong>Courier</strong> did not attack Randolph was that in calling off the March Randolph had only done what the <strong>Courier</strong> had urged and advised from the beginning. The <strong>Courier</strong> therefore could not expose Randolph’s miserable policies without at the same time exposing its own.<br>
</p>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>The <em>Courier</em>’s Substitute for the March</h4>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Courier</strong> had opposed “the crack-pot proposal,” as it called the March, because “Led by the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> ... colored people have so flooded their Congressmen, Senators and the President with protests that not a single official in Washington is unaware of the evil. Can a parade tell them anything they do not already know?” It had its own methods for defeating Jim Crowism, claimed the <strong>Courier</strong>. “The most effective way of influencing Congress and the Administration is by personal letters and telegrams from individuals, societies, church congregations, clubs and fraternities; by memorials and resolutions sent to both Houses, and by intelligent personal representations.”</p>
<p>The few weeks before the scheduled date of the March blew all this sky high.</p>
<p><em>The mere threat of a March did more than the thousands of telegrams, letters, postcards, memorials, resolutions, phone-calls, intelligent personal representations, wishful thinking, prayer and even the “political pressure” on Roosevelt practiced last year when the <strong>Courier</strong> supported Willkie.</em></p>
<p>For the first time Roosevelt began to show some interest in the question. Of course that interest was not based on a desire to do anything concrete and fundamental about Jim Crowism. It took the threat of the March to get him to admit that there was a problem. He did not do more than pay lip-service to it, and he was helped in getting away with this by the willingness of the leaders of the March to avoid him any embarrassment. Even so, still far more was accomplished by the March threat than by the <strong>Courier</strong>’s “most effective way.”</p>
<p>Now let us consider the subterfuge resorted to by the <strong>Courier</strong> to cover up its tracks.</p>
<p>The NAACP, the <strong>Courier</strong>, and many other Negro groups have for some time been demanding a Congressional investigation of discrimination. Congress avoided adoption of Resolution 75 setting up a special committee for the purpose and instead turned the matter over to the Truman Committee, which was busy investigating other matters and which would have little time for study of Negro discrimination. Truman announced that it would be a long time before his committee would even get around to the matter.</p>
<p><em>But suddenly, as part of Roosevelt’s moves to call off the March, the Truman Committee announced that it would open a three-day session on the matter on June 30, the day before the March was to take place. The purpose for this hurried move was undoubtedly correctly explained by the NAACP, namely, so that when the March took place, it could be said, “What are you Negroes kicking about? We are holding hearings right now!”</em></p>
<p>The NAACP then asked for a postponement of 30 days, citing many reasons, some correct, some very weak. Immediately a number of other big shot Negroes, like the publicity-loving demagogue Edgar Brown, who were very eager to get their names in the paper, by one way or another, got very excited at this “betrayal.”</p>
<p>The <strong>Courier</strong> felt that it had an issue and it blew the balloon as big as it could. Let us show how easy it is to prick it.</p>
<p>Let us remind the <strong>Courier</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Led by <strong>The Pittsburgh Courier</strong> ... colored people have so flooded their Congressmen, Senators and the President with protests that not a single official in Washington is unaware of the evil. Can a parade tell them anything they do not already know?”</p>
<p class="fst">If a parade cannot tell them anything they do not already know, what can another futile, three day Senate committee gab fest tell them? No, the <strong>Courier</strong> cannot escape the consequences of its vacillating policies. It cannot conceal the fact that for its own selfish, craven reasons it gave aid and comfort to Jim Crow at a time that the Negro masses were preparing to strike it a powerful blow.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(19 July 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 29, 19 July 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Courier and the Negro March
Without any question the biggest news of the first week of the month, so far as the struggle for Negro rights is concerned, was the bureaucratic cancellation of the March on Washington at the time that the eyes and hopes of all advanced Negro workers were turned in the direction of the scheduled March.
And still the Pittsburgh Courier found room on its front page for only a couple of inches of reading matter on the March. And its lead – and it really splashed and splurged on it – was a long denunciation of Walter White and the N.A.A.C.P. for being responsible for the postponement of a hearing to be held by a Senate Committee on discrimination against Negroes in the war industries.
The Courier’s handling of these questions was neither accidental nor the result of slovenly journalism. Rather, it was a brazen attempt on the part of the editors to cover up the shabby role they had played against the March. By attracting attention to a secondary matter of extremely little importance, they hoped we’d forget how they behaved about the March. It was an attempt by a paper with a “militant” reputation to hide its own bankruptcy. Negroes must understand this if they are to avoid mistakes in the future. They must understand not only Randolph’s treachery in calling off the March, but also the treachery of the only paper which had dared to oppose the March.
The reason that the Courier did not attack Randolph was that in calling off the March Randolph had only done what the Courier had urged and advised from the beginning. The Courier therefore could not expose Randolph’s miserable policies without at the same time exposing its own.
The Courier’s Substitute for the March
The Courier had opposed “the crack-pot proposal,” as it called the March, because “Led by the Pittsburgh Courier ... colored people have so flooded their Congressmen, Senators and the President with protests that not a single official in Washington is unaware of the evil. Can a parade tell them anything they do not already know?” It had its own methods for defeating Jim Crowism, claimed the Courier. “The most effective way of influencing Congress and the Administration is by personal letters and telegrams from individuals, societies, church congregations, clubs and fraternities; by memorials and resolutions sent to both Houses, and by intelligent personal representations.”
The few weeks before the scheduled date of the March blew all this sky high.
The mere threat of a March did more than the thousands of telegrams, letters, postcards, memorials, resolutions, phone-calls, intelligent personal representations, wishful thinking, prayer and even the “political pressure” on Roosevelt practiced last year when the Courier supported Willkie.
For the first time Roosevelt began to show some interest in the question. Of course that interest was not based on a desire to do anything concrete and fundamental about Jim Crowism. It took the threat of the March to get him to admit that there was a problem. He did not do more than pay lip-service to it, and he was helped in getting away with this by the willingness of the leaders of the March to avoid him any embarrassment. Even so, still far more was accomplished by the March threat than by the Courier’s “most effective way.”
Now let us consider the subterfuge resorted to by the Courier to cover up its tracks.
The NAACP, the Courier, and many other Negro groups have for some time been demanding a Congressional investigation of discrimination. Congress avoided adoption of Resolution 75 setting up a special committee for the purpose and instead turned the matter over to the Truman Committee, which was busy investigating other matters and which would have little time for study of Negro discrimination. Truman announced that it would be a long time before his committee would even get around to the matter.
But suddenly, as part of Roosevelt’s moves to call off the March, the Truman Committee announced that it would open a three-day session on the matter on June 30, the day before the March was to take place. The purpose for this hurried move was undoubtedly correctly explained by the NAACP, namely, so that when the March took place, it could be said, “What are you Negroes kicking about? We are holding hearings right now!”
The NAACP then asked for a postponement of 30 days, citing many reasons, some correct, some very weak. Immediately a number of other big shot Negroes, like the publicity-loving demagogue Edgar Brown, who were very eager to get their names in the paper, by one way or another, got very excited at this “betrayal.”
The Courier felt that it had an issue and it blew the balloon as big as it could. Let us show how easy it is to prick it.
Let us remind the Courier:
“Led by The Pittsburgh Courier ... colored people have so flooded their Congressmen, Senators and the President with protests that not a single official in Washington is unaware of the evil. Can a parade tell them anything they do not already know?”
If a parade cannot tell them anything they do not already know, what can another futile, three day Senate committee gab fest tell them? No, the Courier cannot escape the consequences of its vacillating policies. It cannot conceal the fact that for its own selfish, craven reasons it gave aid and comfort to Jim Crow at a time that the Negro masses were preparing to strike it a powerful blow.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(30 November 1940)</h3>
<p> </p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_48" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 48</a>, 30 November 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="pt1"></a>
<h4>Hillman Ignores Jim Crow</h4>
<p class="fst">It is not only on the question of awards to corporations guilty of refusing to recognize the rights of trade unions that Sidney Hillman is being attacked nowadays. It is also because he has taken no steps to do anything about the war production industries’ almost universal policy to refuse to hire colored workers at all, or to hire them only as porters, etc.</p>
<p>One instance after another has been widely publicized in the Negro press, giving names of scores of the largest corporations receiving contracts from the federal government, that openly announce their Jim Crow hiring policies.</p>
<p>Hillman has not done a thing about it to date, any more than he has done anything else generally for the working class in his post of Labor Commissioner of the National Defense Council.</p>
<p>His announced intention of resigning as vice-president of the CIO in order to devote himself fully to protecting the bosses’ interests in the labor field should produce no tears from workers, Negro and white, for whose interests he has shown by his actions he has no intention of fighting.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2"></a>
<h4>Harrison Appointment Protested</h4>
<p class="fst">Vigorous protests were entered this week against the rumored appointment of George M. Harrison as next Secretary of Labor by both the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Harrison is the grand president of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and his policies and record in the labor movement with regard to Negro workers were offered as more than adequate reasons why he should not be permitted to receive a post where he would have wider jurisdiction for his Jim Crow policies.</p>
<p>Harrison, according to the Urban League, has as head of this union concurred in its membership policies which shunt colored railway clerks off into “auxiliary locals” where they pay the same dues as the white workers but have no voice in the determination of union policy and no representation on the policy-making bodies, or conventions.</p>
<p>It was also pointed out that Harrison had played a prominent smelly role in the fight against colored freight-handlers (reported in the article below.) The NAACP telegram to Roosevelt said, “Negro Americans and their white fellow workers who are seeking full democracy in the labor movement view with justified alarm possibility of having as Secretary of Labor a man who believes that Negroes are not entitled to full membership in organized unions.</p>
<p>Both organizations also objected to the “trade union segregationist” who is already in the Department of Labor, Dan Tracy, head of the AFL Electrical Workers Union.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt3"></a>
<h4>Seek Showdown at AFL Convention</h4>
<p class="fst">Efforts were being made this week to bring to the floor of the AFL convention the story of a fight being conducted by the colored National Council of Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees, representing about 50 federal union locals and 2,000 workers throughout the country, to protect their rights as union members.</p>
<p>After six years of struggle to establish these federal locals, during which they received no help whatever from the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and during which, they obtained contracts from a number of important railroads, they were ordered last September by William Green to comply with the order of Harrison, head of the BRC, to turn in their charters and their treasuries and join powerless, Jim Crow auxiliaries.</p>
<p>Meeting in Cincinnati at that time, delegates from these locals voted not to abide by Green’s order. They demanded either a separate international charter from the AFL or the right to join the BRC with the same rights that other members enjoyed. In the meantime they decided to continue their work under the National Council plan.</p>
<p>Harrison has indicated that “we will not surrender jurisdiction over these workers” in his letter to Arthur Williams, head of the Council. Green is backing him, of course, in spite of the fact that the AFL’s official position, as written down on paper at several conventions, condemns all forms of discrimination on account of race or color.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt4"></a>
<h4>Jim Crow Women Too</h4>
<p class="fst">It’s not only men who get Jim-Crowed by the Army. Women are eligible for this treatment too. An example will show that women can be hurt pretty hard by this kind of treatment too.</p>
<p>Mrs. Burmeda Coleman and Miss Hattie Combre, employed by the Louisiana Industrial Insurance Company in New Orleans, took a civil service examination for tabulating machine operators at Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La.</p>
<p>On November 7 they received telegrams from the Camp to report for work. They then quit their jobs, which were relatively quite good ones, and spent a bit of money travelling from New Orleans to Alexandria.</p>
<p>When they got there on November 11, however, they were met by Major Dupont, commanding officer in charge of the camp, who told them that it was not known that they were Negroes, and that Negroes could not be used in that capacity at the camp.</p>
<p>So there they were, Jim Crowed as hard as any private in a separate regiment, without any reimbursement for the expenses they had incurred, and no jobs. It’s a great country!/p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(30 November 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 48, 30 November 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Hillman Ignores Jim Crow
It is not only on the question of awards to corporations guilty of refusing to recognize the rights of trade unions that Sidney Hillman is being attacked nowadays. It is also because he has taken no steps to do anything about the war production industries’ almost universal policy to refuse to hire colored workers at all, or to hire them only as porters, etc.
One instance after another has been widely publicized in the Negro press, giving names of scores of the largest corporations receiving contracts from the federal government, that openly announce their Jim Crow hiring policies.
Hillman has not done a thing about it to date, any more than he has done anything else generally for the working class in his post of Labor Commissioner of the National Defense Council.
His announced intention of resigning as vice-president of the CIO in order to devote himself fully to protecting the bosses’ interests in the labor field should produce no tears from workers, Negro and white, for whose interests he has shown by his actions he has no intention of fighting.
Harrison Appointment Protested
Vigorous protests were entered this week against the rumored appointment of George M. Harrison as next Secretary of Labor by both the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Harrison is the grand president of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and his policies and record in the labor movement with regard to Negro workers were offered as more than adequate reasons why he should not be permitted to receive a post where he would have wider jurisdiction for his Jim Crow policies.
Harrison, according to the Urban League, has as head of this union concurred in its membership policies which shunt colored railway clerks off into “auxiliary locals” where they pay the same dues as the white workers but have no voice in the determination of union policy and no representation on the policy-making bodies, or conventions.
It was also pointed out that Harrison had played a prominent smelly role in the fight against colored freight-handlers (reported in the article below.) The NAACP telegram to Roosevelt said, “Negro Americans and their white fellow workers who are seeking full democracy in the labor movement view with justified alarm possibility of having as Secretary of Labor a man who believes that Negroes are not entitled to full membership in organized unions.
Both organizations also objected to the “trade union segregationist” who is already in the Department of Labor, Dan Tracy, head of the AFL Electrical Workers Union.
Seek Showdown at AFL Convention
Efforts were being made this week to bring to the floor of the AFL convention the story of a fight being conducted by the colored National Council of Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees, representing about 50 federal union locals and 2,000 workers throughout the country, to protect their rights as union members.
After six years of struggle to establish these federal locals, during which they received no help whatever from the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and during which, they obtained contracts from a number of important railroads, they were ordered last September by William Green to comply with the order of Harrison, head of the BRC, to turn in their charters and their treasuries and join powerless, Jim Crow auxiliaries.
Meeting in Cincinnati at that time, delegates from these locals voted not to abide by Green’s order. They demanded either a separate international charter from the AFL or the right to join the BRC with the same rights that other members enjoyed. In the meantime they decided to continue their work under the National Council plan.
Harrison has indicated that “we will not surrender jurisdiction over these workers” in his letter to Arthur Williams, head of the Council. Green is backing him, of course, in spite of the fact that the AFL’s official position, as written down on paper at several conventions, condemns all forms of discrimination on account of race or color.
Jim Crow Women Too
It’s not only men who get Jim-Crowed by the Army. Women are eligible for this treatment too. An example will show that women can be hurt pretty hard by this kind of treatment too.
Mrs. Burmeda Coleman and Miss Hattie Combre, employed by the Louisiana Industrial Insurance Company in New Orleans, took a civil service examination for tabulating machine operators at Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La.
On November 7 they received telegrams from the Camp to report for work. They then quit their jobs, which were relatively quite good ones, and spent a bit of money travelling from New Orleans to Alexandria.
When they got there on November 11, however, they were met by Major Dupont, commanding officer in charge of the camp, who told them that it was not known that they were Negroes, and that Negroes could not be used in that capacity at the camp.
So there they were, Jim Crowed as hard as any private in a separate regiment, without any reimbursement for the expenses they had incurred, and no jobs. It’s a great country!/p>
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<h2>Anthony Massini</h2>
<h1>CP Joins Government in Hiding Truth<br>
About the Browder Case</h1>
<h4>Wants Masses to Forget Who Railroaded<br>
Browder to Jail and Keeps Him There</h4>
<h3>(28 March 1942)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/index.htm#m42_13" target="new">Vol. VI No. 13</a>, 28 March 1942, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">A National Free Browder Congress is being held in New York this week. It is expected that the Congress will be well attended, with representatives from many trade unions. Its purpose is to dramatize the case of the secretary of the Communist Party, who has already served a full year of a four-year sentence.</p>
<p>The issues in the Browder case are very simple. He Was given a severe sentence for a trifling technical irregularity in a passport case; everyone knows that the only reason he was ever brought to court on it at all was because of his political views This is the reason why many organizations and people who have little or no sympathy for Browder’s politics have denounced the prosecution and endorsed the demand for a pardon by Roosevelt, the only one with the power to grant it.</p>
<p>But while the issues are so simple, they are not presented in this manner by the official defense movement, the, Citizens’ Committee to Free Earl Browder, controlled by the Stalinists, which has conducted a defense campaign unique in the history of the American labor movement. For since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union last summer, the defense committee has systematically and deliberately distorted and suppressed the truth about the Browder ease, misrepresented the motive for the trial and done everything in its power to conceal the identity of the forces which instigated and carried through the frame-up.<br>
</p>
<h4>Current C.P. Version</h4>
<p class="fst">The current Stalinist version of the ease is that Browder was imprisoned because he was “a consistent opponent of fascism” (<b>The Case of Earl Browder</b>, issued by the Citizens’ Committee, March 1942). To prove this, they quote at length from many of his articles and speeches advocating action against German? and Japan and an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>This is all cock-and-bull, intended to cover up the true facts and to make people forget the role of the Communist Party during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Browder was not convicted because he wanted to fight fascism, or because he advocated support of Britain and France in the war, but because he and the Stalinist movement as a whole expressed opposition to the Roosevelt war preparation program.</p>
<p>During the four years before the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the Communist Party agitated for “collective security” and a holy war for democracy against Hitler During the period of the Pact and during the first stage of the second World War, they dropped that line, ceased all their denunciations of Hitlerism and sharply attacked Churchill, Roosevelt and the “democracies.” Anyone who goes back to their literature of that period will see at a glance how false are the Stalinist stories of today.</p>
<p>In fact, Browder himself discussed this very question on the day on which he was sentenced. In the courtroom on Jan. 22, 1940, just before he was sentenced, he tried during his summation to explain to the jury why he was being framed up. As he said later, “What was it that the judge wanted above all to prevent me from speaking about in that court? The one thing above all that was prohibited from even being whispered there was the motive of the prosecution.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Browder’s Explanation</h4>
<p class="fst">That same night, at a Lenin Memorial Meeting of the Communist Party in Madison Square Garden, he was finally able to discuss the real motive for the trial. He said: “We must warn the people that this verdict of this case is only one incident in the drive of the American ruling class toward war ... The motive of this prosecution lies in the general campaign of our ruling class to prepare our country for war ...”</p>
<p>This was not his personal view, it was the position of the Communist Party at that time. The Madison Square Garden speech was issued in a pamphlet, <b>Earl Browder Takes His Case to the People</b>, and distributed by the Defense Committee for Civil Rights for Communists, predecessor of the present Citizens’ Committee. The Defense Committee stated on the last page of the pamphlet: “It is the first Step in the drive of Wall Street and the Roosevelt Administration to outlaw the Communist Party – the most determined fighter against imperialist slaughter – and to plunge the United States into war.”</p>
<p>Thus, by their own words of two years ago, the current Stalinist version of the Browder case is shown to be false. The interesting thing is not of course thai they spit in the face of what they said yesterday – they have done this too often for it to be news – but that they have joined with the prosecution in suppressing the truth about the reason for the trial.<br>
</p>
<h4>FDR or the “Appeasers”?</h4>
<p class="fst">The Stalinists are also trying to make people forget what they had to say about the responsibility of the Roosevelt administration for the prosecution; according to their present story, it is the “appeasers” who want to keep Browder in jail. “The Cliveden Set is the only group in the country whose purposes are served by keeping Browder i jail; the appeasers and the friends of Hitler fear him ant move heaven and earth to prevent his liberation.” (<b>The Case of Earl Browder</b>)</p>
<p>Actually, of course, it was Roosevelt who had Browder pu! in jail, and it is Roosevelt who keeps him there. It is not necessary for the “appeasers” to move heaven and earth – Roosevelt doesn’t show the slightest inclination to release Browder.</p>
<p>Why do the Stalinists lie about their own case this way? Because they no longer criticize any of Roosevelt’s policies, and they would find it most embarrassing to admit that the administration they support so wholeheartedly in its “war for democracy” is an enemy of civil liberties.<br>
</p>
<h4>C.P. and Civil Liberties</h4>
<p class="fst">The Stalinist appeal to the public for support of the Browder defense movement is on the basis of the need for defending civil liberties. Their appeal to Roosevelt is that Browder, free, would “strengthen the war effort,” that he would have something to add to the successful prosecution of the war.</p>
<p>It is easy to understand what they mean by both these appeals when you analyze their record oh the most important civil liberties case in many years. Last summer the government indicted and brought to trial 29 members of the Socialist Workers Party; the prosecution was denounced by many of the same organizations which have denounced the Browder trial. But the Stalinists, who plead for civil liberties for themselves, refused to support the defendants; their only complaint was that the government had indicted the Trotskyists as revolutionists instead of trying to frame them up as “Nazi agents.”</p>
<p>Since Pearl Harbor they have attempted to launch lynch campaigns against all their working class opponents, denouncing as supporters of Hitlerism all those who oppose Stalinism – and who opposed Hitlerism even during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The chief thing Browder will add to the war effort would be to act as finger-man and lynch inciter against working class militants in all kinds of slanderous campaigns which the government is not at this time prepared to undertake on its own.</p>
<p>But the Stalinist violations of the most elementary principles in the defense of civil liberties must not blind the workers to the necessity for defending these rights even for those with whom they sharply disagree. Despite the reactionary role of Stalinism, Browder was convicted only because of his views and his prosecution was an attack on civil liberties It is the duty of the workers to clearly recognize the real issues in this case and Without associating themselves for a moment with the lies and confusion spread by the Communist Party – to demand that Browder be freed.</p>
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Anthony Massini
CP Joins Government in Hiding Truth
About the Browder Case
Wants Masses to Forget Who Railroaded
Browder to Jail and Keeps Him There
(28 March 1942)
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 13, 28 March 1942, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A National Free Browder Congress is being held in New York this week. It is expected that the Congress will be well attended, with representatives from many trade unions. Its purpose is to dramatize the case of the secretary of the Communist Party, who has already served a full year of a four-year sentence.
The issues in the Browder case are very simple. He Was given a severe sentence for a trifling technical irregularity in a passport case; everyone knows that the only reason he was ever brought to court on it at all was because of his political views This is the reason why many organizations and people who have little or no sympathy for Browder’s politics have denounced the prosecution and endorsed the demand for a pardon by Roosevelt, the only one with the power to grant it.
But while the issues are so simple, they are not presented in this manner by the official defense movement, the, Citizens’ Committee to Free Earl Browder, controlled by the Stalinists, which has conducted a defense campaign unique in the history of the American labor movement. For since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union last summer, the defense committee has systematically and deliberately distorted and suppressed the truth about the Browder ease, misrepresented the motive for the trial and done everything in its power to conceal the identity of the forces which instigated and carried through the frame-up.
Current C.P. Version
The current Stalinist version of the ease is that Browder was imprisoned because he was “a consistent opponent of fascism” (The Case of Earl Browder, issued by the Citizens’ Committee, March 1942). To prove this, they quote at length from many of his articles and speeches advocating action against German? and Japan and an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
This is all cock-and-bull, intended to cover up the true facts and to make people forget the role of the Communist Party during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Browder was not convicted because he wanted to fight fascism, or because he advocated support of Britain and France in the war, but because he and the Stalinist movement as a whole expressed opposition to the Roosevelt war preparation program.
During the four years before the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the Communist Party agitated for “collective security” and a holy war for democracy against Hitler During the period of the Pact and during the first stage of the second World War, they dropped that line, ceased all their denunciations of Hitlerism and sharply attacked Churchill, Roosevelt and the “democracies.” Anyone who goes back to their literature of that period will see at a glance how false are the Stalinist stories of today.
In fact, Browder himself discussed this very question on the day on which he was sentenced. In the courtroom on Jan. 22, 1940, just before he was sentenced, he tried during his summation to explain to the jury why he was being framed up. As he said later, “What was it that the judge wanted above all to prevent me from speaking about in that court? The one thing above all that was prohibited from even being whispered there was the motive of the prosecution.”
Browder’s Explanation
That same night, at a Lenin Memorial Meeting of the Communist Party in Madison Square Garden, he was finally able to discuss the real motive for the trial. He said: “We must warn the people that this verdict of this case is only one incident in the drive of the American ruling class toward war ... The motive of this prosecution lies in the general campaign of our ruling class to prepare our country for war ...”
This was not his personal view, it was the position of the Communist Party at that time. The Madison Square Garden speech was issued in a pamphlet, Earl Browder Takes His Case to the People, and distributed by the Defense Committee for Civil Rights for Communists, predecessor of the present Citizens’ Committee. The Defense Committee stated on the last page of the pamphlet: “It is the first Step in the drive of Wall Street and the Roosevelt Administration to outlaw the Communist Party – the most determined fighter against imperialist slaughter – and to plunge the United States into war.”
Thus, by their own words of two years ago, the current Stalinist version of the Browder case is shown to be false. The interesting thing is not of course thai they spit in the face of what they said yesterday – they have done this too often for it to be news – but that they have joined with the prosecution in suppressing the truth about the reason for the trial.
FDR or the “Appeasers”?
The Stalinists are also trying to make people forget what they had to say about the responsibility of the Roosevelt administration for the prosecution; according to their present story, it is the “appeasers” who want to keep Browder in jail. “The Cliveden Set is the only group in the country whose purposes are served by keeping Browder i jail; the appeasers and the friends of Hitler fear him ant move heaven and earth to prevent his liberation.” (The Case of Earl Browder)
Actually, of course, it was Roosevelt who had Browder pu! in jail, and it is Roosevelt who keeps him there. It is not necessary for the “appeasers” to move heaven and earth – Roosevelt doesn’t show the slightest inclination to release Browder.
Why do the Stalinists lie about their own case this way? Because they no longer criticize any of Roosevelt’s policies, and they would find it most embarrassing to admit that the administration they support so wholeheartedly in its “war for democracy” is an enemy of civil liberties.
C.P. and Civil Liberties
The Stalinist appeal to the public for support of the Browder defense movement is on the basis of the need for defending civil liberties. Their appeal to Roosevelt is that Browder, free, would “strengthen the war effort,” that he would have something to add to the successful prosecution of the war.
It is easy to understand what they mean by both these appeals when you analyze their record oh the most important civil liberties case in many years. Last summer the government indicted and brought to trial 29 members of the Socialist Workers Party; the prosecution was denounced by many of the same organizations which have denounced the Browder trial. But the Stalinists, who plead for civil liberties for themselves, refused to support the defendants; their only complaint was that the government had indicted the Trotskyists as revolutionists instead of trying to frame them up as “Nazi agents.”
Since Pearl Harbor they have attempted to launch lynch campaigns against all their working class opponents, denouncing as supporters of Hitlerism all those who oppose Stalinism – and who opposed Hitlerism even during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The chief thing Browder will add to the war effort would be to act as finger-man and lynch inciter against working class militants in all kinds of slanderous campaigns which the government is not at this time prepared to undertake on its own.
But the Stalinist violations of the most elementary principles in the defense of civil liberties must not blind the workers to the necessity for defending these rights even for those with whom they sharply disagree. Despite the reactionary role of Stalinism, Browder was convicted only because of his views and his prosecution was an attack on civil liberties It is the duty of the workers to clearly recognize the real issues in this case and Without associating themselves for a moment with the lies and confusion spread by the Communist Party – to demand that Browder be freed.
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<h2>George Breitman</h2>
<h1>Labor’s Capacity and the Russian Revolution</h1>
<h3>(3 May 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_18" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 18</a>, 3 May 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Do the workers have the political capacity to overthrow capitalism? From the very beginning the Marxists answered in the affirmative. Since 1917, however, it is no longer necessary to rely on theoretical arguments alone, for the Russian revolution conclusively demonstrated that the workers can take power under certain favorable conditions prepared by capitalism itself.</p>
<p>Why was the revolution successful in Russia and not in Germany a year later? Those who restricted their approach to this problem to an examination of the respective “political capacity” of the working classes in these countries would have had a hard time explaining. Russia was a far more backward country than Germany; its working class was relatively much smaller; and its workers did not have the benefit of the long political and organizational experience and traditions that the German workers had. In all these respects the German workers were at least as. well prepared to take power as their Russian brothers.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Bolshevik Party</h4>
<p class="fst">But Russia had one advantage that served to more than compensate for these shortcomings. It had a party, the Bolsheviks, representing the revolutionary vanguard elements in the working class. This vanguard, a tiny minority of its class, had been isolated from the workers during the long years of reaction preceding 1917. But during this difficult period, when the Bolsheviks were deserted by many weaklings and waverers, they stood firm in their principles, they swam against the stream, they based their calculations on (1) the workers’ capacity to take power in a revolutionary situation and on (2) their own ability to defeat the influence of the reformist and reactionary currents among the workers and win the leadership of the class.</p>
<p><em>The political capacity of the German workers as a class was not inferior to that of the Russian workers. They were defeated where the Russian Workers were victorious primarily because the German revolutionary vanguard took a longer time than the Bolsheviks to realize the need for an independent party to combat the treachery of the Social Democrats. As a consequence the German vanguard elements were not prepared to take full advantage of the first revolutionary outbreak at the end of the war in 1918 and were beheaded before the appearance of the second big opportunity in 1923.</em></p>
<p>The lesson to be drawn from this is that it is the duty of the revolutionary vanguard to prepare itself in time, especially in periods of reaction, for the role it must play in leading the workers to the fulfillment of their great historic mission in periods of revolution. <em>Those who try to obscure this lesson by talk about the workers’ congenital incapacity Remonstrate thereby only their own incapacity to be of any use to the working class at a time when the future of the revolution depends on the vanguard’s tenacity and ability to resist capitalist pressure.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>A Source of Optimism</h4>
<p class="fst">The Russian revolution, constituting the most important event in political history, has naturally been a source of revolutionary optimism to the workers of all countries, because “if they could do it in backward Russia, we can do it anywhere else.” For the same reason, it has been a source of deep embarrassment to the back-sliders and refugees from Marxism of all varieties.</p>
<p>Now the peddlers of skepticism about the possibility of socialism can no longer hawk their shoddy wares (patented by Big Business) under the slogan – the workers can’t make a revolution. They have to make a slight amendment, as Jean Vannier does in the March <strong>Partisan Review</strong>, and say – the workers can’t “seize <em>and hold</em> power.”</p>
<p>The very manner in which Vannier is forced to pose the question is a tacit admission that the workers can make the revolution. He never admits it explicitly but he cannot logically deny it on the basis of his own formulation – which, incidentally, immediately negates three-quarters of his article. Once that is recognized, the question of whether the workers can hold power after winning it becomes a legitimate one for discussion.</p>
<p><em>We should begin by noting that Vannier’s sweeping conclusion about the workers’ incapacity to hold power is based on a mighty skimpy foundation. The workers have been successful in taking political power only once, and they have lost it only once. Vannier’s hard and fast law, based on a single test and supposedly good for all time, is hardly in keeping with the “rational and methodical scrutiny” which he professes to advocate. Such a method would certainly not pass muster in any reputable scientific laboratory.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>A Worthless Method</h4>
<p class="fst">This method is even more worthless in the field of history, to which we must look for the trends enabling us to understand contemporary developments. The history of the rising capitalist class, for instance, illustrates how hard it is for a revolutionary class to take power and keep it uninterruptedly. And it furnishes us with many examples of the capitalists being forced to give up political power for a period after they had won it in bitter struggle.</p>
<p>The one that comes most quickly to mind is the “great rebellion” of the 1640’s, when the British capitalist class, led by Cromwell, overthrew the feudal regime of Charles I. In 1660 the Stuart monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II. The counter-revolution was unsuccessful in its attempt to undo <em>everything</em> the revolution had done, but it did succeed in wiping out the political rule of the, capitalists. It wasn’t until the “glorious revolution” of 1688 that the British capitalist class put an end to the absolutism of the monarchy.</p>
<p>And in our own country the capitalist class had the power, in alliance with the Southern planters, after the revolution against Britain, only to see it fall into the hands of the slaveholders. It took another span of many decades, and a hard-fought civil war, before the capitalists regained national political rule.</p>
<p>“One strike – you’re-out!” Any umpire who made such a ruling would surely be booed, pelted with pop bottles and denounced as a dirty robber, if he could get away that easily. Vannier’s one-strike decision against the working class is just as raw and merits even stronger condemnation.</p>
<p>But why did the Russian workers lose power after winning it, and what conclusions is it valid to draw from that fact? Trotsky wrote many books analyzing this question, and the Trotskyist explanation was concisely summarized as follows in James P. Cannon’s pamphlet, <strong>American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism</strong> (whose last chapter definitively answers the croakings of the renegades on the very question we are discussing here):<br>
</p>
<h4>The Real Reasons</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Russia was the most backward of the big capitalist countries. The proletariat, although highly concentrated, was numerically weak in relation to the population as a whole. Its industrial development and technique lagged far behind. On top of all that, the victorious workers’ revolution inherited from Czarism and the destruction of war and civil war, a devastated, ruined, poverty-stricken country and a frightful scarcity of the most elementary necessities. The disrupted productive apparatus taken over by the revolution was incapable of turning out a volume of goods sufficient to overcome the scarcity in a short period of time.</p>
<p class="quote">“The Russian Revolution was not an end of itself and could not build ‘socialism’ by itself, in one backward country. It was only a beginning, which required the supplementary support of a revolution In more advanced Europe and a union of the European productive apparatus and technology with the vast natural resources of Russia. The delay of the European revolution isolated the Soviet Union, and on the basis of the universal scarcity a privileged bureaucracy arose which eventually usurped power in the state and destroyed the workers’ organizations – Soviets, trade unions and even the revolutionary party which had organized and led the revolution. A horrible degeneration has taken place, but for all that, the great revolution has not yet been destroyed, and its ultimate fate has not yet been decided.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>In other words, the workers lost political power to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy because of the temporary defeat of the European revolution combined with several factors peculiar to Russia alone. If the European workers had taken power after the First World War, Russian productive levels would have been raised considerably, the population’s fear about a capitalist war of intervention would have been eased, and the conditions for the rise of counter-revolutionary Stalinism would never have existed. Without those conditions, it obviously wouldn’t have required much additional “capacity” for the Russian workers who had won power by a successful revolution to hang onto it.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The Decisive Issue</h4>
<p class="fst">The decisive issue then was not the capacity of the Russian workers, isolated in a hostile capitalist world, to hold the power – Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks never thought they could. The issue was really the capacity of the European workers to take power in the years following the Russian revolution. A concrete examination of the Russian development therefore brings us back to the fundamental question – can the worker <em>take</em> power – and here Vannier has already been compelled to admit tacitly that they can.</p>
<p>Properly analyzed, therefore, the Russian experience proves not the congenital incapacity of the workers to hold power, but that the workers cannot for long hold power in a single country and that the socialist revolution is by its very nature an international revolution.</p>
<p>To this it need only be added here that the extension of the revolution to other countries – even now, 25 years after the beginning of the Soviet state’s degeneration – would lead quickly to the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the restoration of the Russian workers’ political rule. Stalin, another disbeliever in the workers’ political capacities, understands this fact so well that he has shown himself ready to go to any extreme to strangle the workers’ revolution in any part of the world where it arises.</p>
<p class="c"><strong><a href="prospects.htm">(Next week: The Prospects for Revolution)</a></strong></p>
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George Breitman
Labor’s Capacity and the Russian Revolution
(3 May 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 18, 3 May 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Do the workers have the political capacity to overthrow capitalism? From the very beginning the Marxists answered in the affirmative. Since 1917, however, it is no longer necessary to rely on theoretical arguments alone, for the Russian revolution conclusively demonstrated that the workers can take power under certain favorable conditions prepared by capitalism itself.
Why was the revolution successful in Russia and not in Germany a year later? Those who restricted their approach to this problem to an examination of the respective “political capacity” of the working classes in these countries would have had a hard time explaining. Russia was a far more backward country than Germany; its working class was relatively much smaller; and its workers did not have the benefit of the long political and organizational experience and traditions that the German workers had. In all these respects the German workers were at least as. well prepared to take power as their Russian brothers.
The Bolshevik Party
But Russia had one advantage that served to more than compensate for these shortcomings. It had a party, the Bolsheviks, representing the revolutionary vanguard elements in the working class. This vanguard, a tiny minority of its class, had been isolated from the workers during the long years of reaction preceding 1917. But during this difficult period, when the Bolsheviks were deserted by many weaklings and waverers, they stood firm in their principles, they swam against the stream, they based their calculations on (1) the workers’ capacity to take power in a revolutionary situation and on (2) their own ability to defeat the influence of the reformist and reactionary currents among the workers and win the leadership of the class.
The political capacity of the German workers as a class was not inferior to that of the Russian workers. They were defeated where the Russian Workers were victorious primarily because the German revolutionary vanguard took a longer time than the Bolsheviks to realize the need for an independent party to combat the treachery of the Social Democrats. As a consequence the German vanguard elements were not prepared to take full advantage of the first revolutionary outbreak at the end of the war in 1918 and were beheaded before the appearance of the second big opportunity in 1923.
The lesson to be drawn from this is that it is the duty of the revolutionary vanguard to prepare itself in time, especially in periods of reaction, for the role it must play in leading the workers to the fulfillment of their great historic mission in periods of revolution. Those who try to obscure this lesson by talk about the workers’ congenital incapacity Remonstrate thereby only their own incapacity to be of any use to the working class at a time when the future of the revolution depends on the vanguard’s tenacity and ability to resist capitalist pressure.
A Source of Optimism
The Russian revolution, constituting the most important event in political history, has naturally been a source of revolutionary optimism to the workers of all countries, because “if they could do it in backward Russia, we can do it anywhere else.” For the same reason, it has been a source of deep embarrassment to the back-sliders and refugees from Marxism of all varieties.
Now the peddlers of skepticism about the possibility of socialism can no longer hawk their shoddy wares (patented by Big Business) under the slogan – the workers can’t make a revolution. They have to make a slight amendment, as Jean Vannier does in the March Partisan Review, and say – the workers can’t “seize and hold power.”
The very manner in which Vannier is forced to pose the question is a tacit admission that the workers can make the revolution. He never admits it explicitly but he cannot logically deny it on the basis of his own formulation – which, incidentally, immediately negates three-quarters of his article. Once that is recognized, the question of whether the workers can hold power after winning it becomes a legitimate one for discussion.
We should begin by noting that Vannier’s sweeping conclusion about the workers’ incapacity to hold power is based on a mighty skimpy foundation. The workers have been successful in taking political power only once, and they have lost it only once. Vannier’s hard and fast law, based on a single test and supposedly good for all time, is hardly in keeping with the “rational and methodical scrutiny” which he professes to advocate. Such a method would certainly not pass muster in any reputable scientific laboratory.
A Worthless Method
This method is even more worthless in the field of history, to which we must look for the trends enabling us to understand contemporary developments. The history of the rising capitalist class, for instance, illustrates how hard it is for a revolutionary class to take power and keep it uninterruptedly. And it furnishes us with many examples of the capitalists being forced to give up political power for a period after they had won it in bitter struggle.
The one that comes most quickly to mind is the “great rebellion” of the 1640’s, when the British capitalist class, led by Cromwell, overthrew the feudal regime of Charles I. In 1660 the Stuart monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II. The counter-revolution was unsuccessful in its attempt to undo everything the revolution had done, but it did succeed in wiping out the political rule of the, capitalists. It wasn’t until the “glorious revolution” of 1688 that the British capitalist class put an end to the absolutism of the monarchy.
And in our own country the capitalist class had the power, in alliance with the Southern planters, after the revolution against Britain, only to see it fall into the hands of the slaveholders. It took another span of many decades, and a hard-fought civil war, before the capitalists regained national political rule.
“One strike – you’re-out!” Any umpire who made such a ruling would surely be booed, pelted with pop bottles and denounced as a dirty robber, if he could get away that easily. Vannier’s one-strike decision against the working class is just as raw and merits even stronger condemnation.
But why did the Russian workers lose power after winning it, and what conclusions is it valid to draw from that fact? Trotsky wrote many books analyzing this question, and the Trotskyist explanation was concisely summarized as follows in James P. Cannon’s pamphlet, American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism (whose last chapter definitively answers the croakings of the renegades on the very question we are discussing here):
The Real Reasons
“Russia was the most backward of the big capitalist countries. The proletariat, although highly concentrated, was numerically weak in relation to the population as a whole. Its industrial development and technique lagged far behind. On top of all that, the victorious workers’ revolution inherited from Czarism and the destruction of war and civil war, a devastated, ruined, poverty-stricken country and a frightful scarcity of the most elementary necessities. The disrupted productive apparatus taken over by the revolution was incapable of turning out a volume of goods sufficient to overcome the scarcity in a short period of time.
“The Russian Revolution was not an end of itself and could not build ‘socialism’ by itself, in one backward country. It was only a beginning, which required the supplementary support of a revolution In more advanced Europe and a union of the European productive apparatus and technology with the vast natural resources of Russia. The delay of the European revolution isolated the Soviet Union, and on the basis of the universal scarcity a privileged bureaucracy arose which eventually usurped power in the state and destroyed the workers’ organizations – Soviets, trade unions and even the revolutionary party which had organized and led the revolution. A horrible degeneration has taken place, but for all that, the great revolution has not yet been destroyed, and its ultimate fate has not yet been decided.”
In other words, the workers lost political power to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy because of the temporary defeat of the European revolution combined with several factors peculiar to Russia alone. If the European workers had taken power after the First World War, Russian productive levels would have been raised considerably, the population’s fear about a capitalist war of intervention would have been eased, and the conditions for the rise of counter-revolutionary Stalinism would never have existed. Without those conditions, it obviously wouldn’t have required much additional “capacity” for the Russian workers who had won power by a successful revolution to hang onto it.
The Decisive Issue
The decisive issue then was not the capacity of the Russian workers, isolated in a hostile capitalist world, to hold the power – Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks never thought they could. The issue was really the capacity of the European workers to take power in the years following the Russian revolution. A concrete examination of the Russian development therefore brings us back to the fundamental question – can the worker take power – and here Vannier has already been compelled to admit tacitly that they can.
Properly analyzed, therefore, the Russian experience proves not the congenital incapacity of the workers to hold power, but that the workers cannot for long hold power in a single country and that the socialist revolution is by its very nature an international revolution.
To this it need only be added here that the extension of the revolution to other countries – even now, 25 years after the beginning of the Soviet state’s degeneration – would lead quickly to the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the restoration of the Russian workers’ political rule. Stalin, another disbeliever in the workers’ political capacities, understands this fact so well that he has shown himself ready to go to any extreme to strangle the workers’ revolution in any part of the world where it arises.
(Next week: The Prospects for Revolution)
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2>
<h1>The Negro Struggle</h1>
<table width="50%" border="6" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4 class="motto">“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(21 June 1941)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_25" target="new">Vol. V No. 25</a>, 21 June 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h4>[Supreme Court]</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>Many of the same people who are today asking Roosevelt to please, please, issue an executive order abolishing racial discrimination in all governmental spheres, are the same people who were appealing to him only a few months ago to please, please, not appoint Senator James F. Byrnes, South Carolina Democrat and open enemy of the Negro people, to the Supreme Court. Please, please, doesn’t get very far.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h4>The Aviation Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">J.H. Kindelberger, president and general manager of North American Aviation, Inc., who last week said of the strikers in his plant: “I don’t have to pay any more to my workers because most of them are young kids who spend their money on a flivver and a gal,” is the same man who recently stated about the North American plant being built in Kansas City: “Under no circumstances will Negroes be employed as aircraft workers or mechanics” – and that they would be hired only as janitors “regardless of their training as aircraft workers.”</p>
<p>This is also the man of whom Secretary of War Stimson declared last week: “There are not enough like him. We do not want to do injury to such a man.”</p>
<p><em>There were no Negroes employed by North American Aviation before the strike, when Kindelberger and the bosses were running the place. Now, when the government’s army is runnimg it, there are still no Negroes there and there is little likelihood that Roosevelt’s army will permit Negroes to get jobs there during the period that they remain in control. It won’t be until the workers themselves control the plants through democratically elected committees from the ranks of labor that Negroes will be able to secure employment in industry on a truly equal basis!</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">In last week’s <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, columnist Marjorie McKenzie complains that the present Administration has sidestepped the question of the Negro, and “we have been beguiled by some beautiful words and phrases” from Roosevelt. She also points out’ that under his present “emergency” powers Roosevelt could issue an executive order banning discrimination.</p>
<p>Then follow many sentences such as these:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Our President is a man in whom the imagination leaps and dares beyond the puny dreams of those who follow his star. There is a course open to him as the Defender of Democracy which would commit him safely to the immortal company of men like Jefferson and Lincoln ... What surging, thrilling feeling would come to his heart and mind, should he pause to realize that with a simple, everyday gesture like signing an executive order, he could free thirteen million American men and women from slavery. Lincoln freed only three and a half million! ...” etc. etc.</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Evidently Miss McKenzie thinks that she can “beguile” Roosevelt “by some beautiful words and phrases.”</em><br>
</p>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h4>William Pickens on His New Job</h4>
<p class="fst">William Pickens is on the job! He is determined to keep that $500 a month job he has with the Treasury Department selling “Defense Bonds” to Negroes. From his first broadside, one would think that he has now solved all the problems of the Negro people. For he promises them everything – if only they will buy his bonds.</p>
<p>Why, if they spend the few dollars Jim Crow permits them to get, they will not only eat their cake, but they can have it too, he promises.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Say, you are of small means, and you want to buy a $25 Bond. You have not the $25 to spare, you only earn $25 in a third of a month or half a month. But, you can always spare a dime, maybe a quarter. Therefore you begin by Saving Stamps for 10c or 25c. When you have bought enough to total $18.75, you buy a U.S. Government security worth $25 in a few years – and you, don’t have to keep it any longer than 60 days, in case you come to need the money badly. But every year you keep that $18.75 investment, the bigger it becomes.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Thus, here is the economic answer to the Negroes. Why get all excited about jobs and equality in industry? Why hold picket-lines and demonstrations against Jim Crowism? Just buy Pickens’ “defense bonds,” and live off the fat of the land.</em></p>
<p>Pickens goes on:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“And that is not all: You are helping to defend your money and your OTHER property, and all your precious liberties, when you put that money into the U.S. Treasury. You, as a colored citizen, strike a blow at Hitler, who says that you are but a half ape ... You would be helping to give Mussolini the final kick out of Ethiopia, and to restore that country to its own black people. You. would be strengthening the position of your race in American citizenship ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Giving money to the Jim Crow government that treats you as though you are a half-ape, is that fighting Hitler? Fight Mussolini by giving money to a Jim Crow government that suppresses the American Negroes? Strengthen the position of your race in American citizenship by supporting the bosses’ government that treats you as a second-class citizen ? Pickens knows better. But that’s his job.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">Dean Gordon Hancock, author of the column <em>Between The Lines</em> in the <strong>Chicago Sunday Bee</strong>, has a faculty for standing things on their head. In one of his latest outbursts, he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Hitler has already served notice to the world what the Negro need expect. In the persecution of the Jews the Negro has been given a pattern of his estate under Hitlerism.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>But Hitler only applied to the Jews of Europe the treatment he observed applied in this democracy to the several million Negroes in the South.</em></p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded.” – Karl Marx.
(21 June 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 25, 21 June 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
[Supreme Court]
Many of the same people who are today asking Roosevelt to please, please, issue an executive order abolishing racial discrimination in all governmental spheres, are the same people who were appealing to him only a few months ago to please, please, not appoint Senator James F. Byrnes, South Carolina Democrat and open enemy of the Negro people, to the Supreme Court. Please, please, doesn’t get very far.
* * *
The Aviation Strike
J.H. Kindelberger, president and general manager of North American Aviation, Inc., who last week said of the strikers in his plant: “I don’t have to pay any more to my workers because most of them are young kids who spend their money on a flivver and a gal,” is the same man who recently stated about the North American plant being built in Kansas City: “Under no circumstances will Negroes be employed as aircraft workers or mechanics” – and that they would be hired only as janitors “regardless of their training as aircraft workers.”
This is also the man of whom Secretary of War Stimson declared last week: “There are not enough like him. We do not want to do injury to such a man.”
There were no Negroes employed by North American Aviation before the strike, when Kindelberger and the bosses were running the place. Now, when the government’s army is runnimg it, there are still no Negroes there and there is little likelihood that Roosevelt’s army will permit Negroes to get jobs there during the period that they remain in control. It won’t be until the workers themselves control the plants through democratically elected committees from the ranks of labor that Negroes will be able to secure employment in industry on a truly equal basis!
* * *
In last week’s Pittsburgh Courier, columnist Marjorie McKenzie complains that the present Administration has sidestepped the question of the Negro, and “we have been beguiled by some beautiful words and phrases” from Roosevelt. She also points out’ that under his present “emergency” powers Roosevelt could issue an executive order banning discrimination.
Then follow many sentences such as these:
“Our President is a man in whom the imagination leaps and dares beyond the puny dreams of those who follow his star. There is a course open to him as the Defender of Democracy which would commit him safely to the immortal company of men like Jefferson and Lincoln ... What surging, thrilling feeling would come to his heart and mind, should he pause to realize that with a simple, everyday gesture like signing an executive order, he could free thirteen million American men and women from slavery. Lincoln freed only three and a half million! ...” etc. etc.
Evidently Miss McKenzie thinks that she can “beguile” Roosevelt “by some beautiful words and phrases.”
William Pickens on His New Job
William Pickens is on the job! He is determined to keep that $500 a month job he has with the Treasury Department selling “Defense Bonds” to Negroes. From his first broadside, one would think that he has now solved all the problems of the Negro people. For he promises them everything – if only they will buy his bonds.
Why, if they spend the few dollars Jim Crow permits them to get, they will not only eat their cake, but they can have it too, he promises.
“Say, you are of small means, and you want to buy a $25 Bond. You have not the $25 to spare, you only earn $25 in a third of a month or half a month. But, you can always spare a dime, maybe a quarter. Therefore you begin by Saving Stamps for 10c or 25c. When you have bought enough to total $18.75, you buy a U.S. Government security worth $25 in a few years – and you, don’t have to keep it any longer than 60 days, in case you come to need the money badly. But every year you keep that $18.75 investment, the bigger it becomes.”
Thus, here is the economic answer to the Negroes. Why get all excited about jobs and equality in industry? Why hold picket-lines and demonstrations against Jim Crowism? Just buy Pickens’ “defense bonds,” and live off the fat of the land.
Pickens goes on:
“And that is not all: You are helping to defend your money and your OTHER property, and all your precious liberties, when you put that money into the U.S. Treasury. You, as a colored citizen, strike a blow at Hitler, who says that you are but a half ape ... You would be helping to give Mussolini the final kick out of Ethiopia, and to restore that country to its own black people. You. would be strengthening the position of your race in American citizenship ...”
Giving money to the Jim Crow government that treats you as though you are a half-ape, is that fighting Hitler? Fight Mussolini by giving money to a Jim Crow government that suppresses the American Negroes? Strengthen the position of your race in American citizenship by supporting the bosses’ government that treats you as a second-class citizen ? Pickens knows better. But that’s his job.
* * *
Dean Gordon Hancock, author of the column Between The Lines in the Chicago Sunday Bee, has a faculty for standing things on their head. In one of his latest outbursts, he says:
“Hitler has already served notice to the world what the Negro need expect. In the persecution of the Jews the Negro has been given a pattern of his estate under Hitlerism.”
But Hitler only applied to the Jews of Europe the treatment he observed applied in this democracy to the several million Negroes in the South.
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<h2>Albert Parker</h2><h2>
</h2><h4>The Negro Struggle</h4>
<h1>The Sky’s the Limit</h1>
<h3>(9 February 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_06" target="new">Vol. XII No. 6</a>, 9 February 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Listening to the speeches, messages, resolutions, documents and platform planks pouring out of the various campaign headquarters nowadays, you might get the impression that nothing is too good for the Negro people and other minorities. In that case, you will be surprised next December, when all the shouting is finished and the votes are counted, to find the minorities in pretty much the same position as before.</p>
<p>Of course, the battle of the demagogues is just getting started and you haven’t seen anything yet. But already it is plain that in 1948 the sky will be the limit in campaign promises to the important Negro vote. Taft promises he will fight against segregation in the proposed peacetime conscription program. Wallace calls for the complete abolition of Jim Crow. Truman rushes off his civil rights message to Congress with a list of points long advocated by the Negro and labor movements.</p>
<p>There is an old saying: By their fruits ye shall know them. Taft never lifted a finger against segregation in the armed forces either in peace or war. Wallace never abolished Jim Crow in the cabinet departments he headed. And Truman’s fruits are just as rotten.</p>
<p>To prove that, we call attention to just one aspect of his Feb. 3 message to Congress.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“During the recent war and in the years since its close we have made much progress toward equality of opportunity in our armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin,” he said. “I have instructed the Secretary of Defense to take steps to have the remaining instances of discrimination in the armed services eliminated as rapidly as possible.”</p>
<p class="fst">We won’t go into a lengthy argument here about the falsity of Truman’s remark about “progress toward equality” in the armed forces; every Negro who ever had anything to do with the armed forces knows that segregation (the foundation of discrimination) is the most rigidly enforced policy in the armed forces, and that instead of getting better, it is getting worse all the time.</p>
<p>But here is the main point: Truman tells Congress to act on the poll tax, lynching, FEPC, etc., because they are in its department. Correct – but what about the issues that are in his own department? As commander-in-chief of’ the armed forces, Truman has the power to issue an executive order outlawing segregation in the Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. He doesn’t need the permission of Congress or anyone else to do this, and he could do it this very day <em>if he wanted to</em>. Instead, he makes a vague reference about instructing the Secretary of Defense to do something about discrimination – while he completely skirts around the crucial issue of segregation.</p>
<p>Some Negro leaders are going around saying that this is fine. Let the candidates keep on bidding against each other, they say, and then let the Negro people vote for the one who promises the most. But if the Negroes deliver their votes on this basis, it will be worse than selling their birthright for a mess of pottage, If worse comes to worst, you can always eat pottage, but you can’t get any nourishment at all out of campaign demagogy and claptrap.</p>
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Albert Parker
The Negro Struggle
The Sky’s the Limit
(9 February 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 6, 9 February 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Listening to the speeches, messages, resolutions, documents and platform planks pouring out of the various campaign headquarters nowadays, you might get the impression that nothing is too good for the Negro people and other minorities. In that case, you will be surprised next December, when all the shouting is finished and the votes are counted, to find the minorities in pretty much the same position as before.
Of course, the battle of the demagogues is just getting started and you haven’t seen anything yet. But already it is plain that in 1948 the sky will be the limit in campaign promises to the important Negro vote. Taft promises he will fight against segregation in the proposed peacetime conscription program. Wallace calls for the complete abolition of Jim Crow. Truman rushes off his civil rights message to Congress with a list of points long advocated by the Negro and labor movements.
There is an old saying: By their fruits ye shall know them. Taft never lifted a finger against segregation in the armed forces either in peace or war. Wallace never abolished Jim Crow in the cabinet departments he headed. And Truman’s fruits are just as rotten.
To prove that, we call attention to just one aspect of his Feb. 3 message to Congress.
“During the recent war and in the years since its close we have made much progress toward equality of opportunity in our armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin,” he said. “I have instructed the Secretary of Defense to take steps to have the remaining instances of discrimination in the armed services eliminated as rapidly as possible.”
We won’t go into a lengthy argument here about the falsity of Truman’s remark about “progress toward equality” in the armed forces; every Negro who ever had anything to do with the armed forces knows that segregation (the foundation of discrimination) is the most rigidly enforced policy in the armed forces, and that instead of getting better, it is getting worse all the time.
But here is the main point: Truman tells Congress to act on the poll tax, lynching, FEPC, etc., because they are in its department. Correct – but what about the issues that are in his own department? As commander-in-chief of’ the armed forces, Truman has the power to issue an executive order outlawing segregation in the Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. He doesn’t need the permission of Congress or anyone else to do this, and he could do it this very day if he wanted to. Instead, he makes a vague reference about instructing the Secretary of Defense to do something about discrimination – while he completely skirts around the crucial issue of segregation.
Some Negro leaders are going around saying that this is fine. Let the candidates keep on bidding against each other, they say, and then let the Negro people vote for the one who promises the most. But if the Negroes deliver their votes on this basis, it will be worse than selling their birthright for a mess of pottage, If worse comes to worst, you can always eat pottage, but you can’t get any nourishment at all out of campaign demagogy and claptrap.
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<p class="title">
Randolph Bourne Archive
</p>
<hr class="base" size="1">
<h3>
What is Exploitation?
</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Written:</span> 1916
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> The New Republic, November 4, 1916. 12–14.
<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> Andy Carloff
<br>
<span class="info">Online Source:</span> <a href="http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1263">RevoltLib.com</a>; 2021
</p>
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<p>My western friend who runs a prosperous stove-factory has been finding fault with my insistent use of the word <q>exploitation.</q> My outlook on life is not sufficiently cheerful, and I am inclined to see malevolence where everything is, as they say at college, healthy, hearty, and happy. Our quarrel rose over the Mesaba strike, and my acceptance of an <a><abbr>I. W. W.</abbr></a> pamphlet as a plausible account of what was going on there. The accounts of the insecurity of pay, the petty robberies, the reeking houses, the bigoted opposition to labor organization, seemed to me to smell of truth, because I had read the maddening tales of Colorado and West Virginia, and seen with my own eyes in Scranton and Gary and Pittsburgh the way workers live, not in crises of industrial war but in brimming times of peace.</p>
<p>My friend, however, is more robust. He would make no such hasty impassioned judgments. He would judge nothing without <q>going to the mines, working in them for a year or two, being one of the men, getting their free confidence, then working for a couple of years as a confidential auditor for the company.</q> Such Olympian judiciality fills me with envy and dismay. I feel that his serenity is the normal mood of healthy activity, facing the modern world. Could he find anything but scorn for those of us who go around with the vestiges of what it is now priggish to call a <q>social conscience</q>? To him an industrial strike is like an exciting political contest or the recriminations between <q>two kid baseball teams.</q> Both sides, he says, <q>squawk a good deal about the raw stuff the other side is trying to pull off,</q> but deep down, his experience convinces him, <q>they are very uniformly a pretty human bunch.</q> He hasn't been to Mesaba, but his friend the Duluth bread-dealer assures him that agitators were the cause of all the trouble. They always are. Trouble, to my friend, is a personal matter. He sees individuals, laboring as happily as they can expect to labor on this far from perfumed earth. He sees their contentment disturbed by <q>outsiders,</q> individuals, bitter envious mischievous men who make a business of setting workmen against their employers. He sees the <q>outsiders</q> deluding, persuading, intimidating honest workers into stopping work and engaging in careers of lawlessness. He sees the individual employer in natural self-defense fighting for his rights, defending his property, ousting the agitators, carrying the war into his laborer's camp. From the busy office of his stove-factory, it all looks like a personal quarrel between free and equal individuals. When the state interferes with its militia and its injunctions, it is not flouting individuality, but merely doing its business of maintaining order and defending private property.</p>
<p>Our argument really hinges on whether to the workman all the excitement and deprivation and delusion is not part of the daily business of living. I am too tender-minded. What is at the back of my confused hints that there is <q>something shameful, something consciously brutal</q> about industrial relations? My friend admits that he has in his shop men who work in places that are noisy and dusty, in hot places, in rooms where paint is being sprayed. He is sorry. He wishes these things did not have to be, and he is remedying them as fast as he can. What he will not admit is that any one is <q>specifically to blame.</q> He does not imprison his men. They come freely to him and ask for employment. He <q>gives them such compensation as makes the jobs attractive to them, in competition with all other jobs in city and country.</q> He is fair and scrupulous. His company is in business to produce goods at such cost that people can afford to buy them. He cannot make his plant a sanatorium--and when he says this the faintest note of irony steals into his robust voice--for his wage-earners. The stockholders have built a factory and not a philanthropic institution. If the workers did not like his factory, would they send for their brothers and cousins from the old country across the sea? If these <q>hunkies</q> in stove-factory and iron mine were being <q>exploited,</q> would they not drift speedily away to jobs where they were content? My friend cannot imagine a man being willingly exploited. There are, no doubt, heartless employers; workmen here and there are perhaps subject to oppression. But systematic, prevalent industrial exploitation--and he has worked in all parts of the country and at every level of skill--my stove-factory friend has never seen. And he turns aside from my abstract philosophy to the daily manipulation of stoves and men.</p>
<p>What then do I mean by exploitation? And I have to remind my friend that my very first industrial experience was one of those rudimentary patterns of life which, if they are imprinted on your mind early enough, remain to fix the terms in which you interpret the world. The experience was leaving school to work for a musician who had an ingenious little machine on which he cut perforated music-rolls for the players which were just then becoming popular. His control of the means of production consisted in having the machine in his house, to which I went every morning at eight and stayed till five. He provided the paper and the music and the electric power. I worked as a wage-earner, serving his skill and enterprise. I was on piece-work, and everything suggested to my youthful self that it depended only upon my skill and industry how prosperous I should become. But what startled me was my employer's lack of care to conceal from me the fact that for every foot of paper which I made he received fifteen cents from the manufacturer with whom he had his contract. He paid me five, and while I worked, spent his time composing symphonies in the next room. As long as I was learning the craft, I had no more feeling about our relation than that there was a vague injustice in the air. But when I began to be dangerously clever and my weekly earnings mounted beyond the sum proper for a young person of eighteen who was living at home, I felt the hand of economic power. My piece-rate was reduced to four and a half cents. My innocence blazed forth in rebellion. If I was worth five cents a foot while I was learning, I was worth more, not less, after I had learned. My master folded his arms. I did not have to work for him. There were neighbors who would. I could stay or go. I was perfectly free. And then fear smote me. This was my only skill, and my timorous inexperience filled the outside world with horrors. I returned cravenly to my bench, and when my employer, flushed with his capitalistic ardor, built another machine and looked about for a young musician to work it, I weakly suggested to an old playmate of mine that he apply for the position.</p>
<p>Enlarge my musician into the employing class of owners and managers and shareholders of factory and mine and railroad, and myself into the class of wage-earners in all these enterprises, and you have the picture of the industrial system which the <abbr>I. W. W.</abbr> agitator has in his mind when he writes the Mesaba pamphlet to which my friend took such exception. With my five cents making that huge differential of profit for my employer, and with my four and a half cents giving his enterprise a productiveness which, if he had incorporated himself, he could have turned into additional capitalization, I was a crude symbol of the industrial system as my mind gradually took in the fact that there was an industrial system. This was my first experience in <q>exploitation.</q> If there had been fewer musicians available I should have gotten more pay, and if there had been more available I should probably have gotten even less. But there would always have been a surplus, and I should have always felt the power of my employer to skim it, to pull it towards himself. As long as I continued at work, nothing could have removed my sense of helplessness. Any struggle I might have made would have been only towards weakening his pull, and lessening the amount he was able to skim. He was not robbing me, and no person of sense would have said he was, but our very relation was an exploitation. There was no medium way between exploitation and philanthropy.</p>
<p>My stove-factory friend, however, will have none of this theory. If it is a question of power, he says, then <a>Mike Solomon</a> exploits the stove company when he is able to get three dollars a day, on account of the present demand for labor, when two dollars was wealth to him a year ago. Then I admit that local groups of workers are able--either through lack of competition or clever politics or display of force--to exercise temporarily a decisive pull on the surplus and divert more of it to themselves. It is all a question of power. But as long, I tell him, as the employer is entrenched in property rights with the armed state behind him, the power will be his, and the class that does the diverting will not be labor. My friend, however, does not like these <a>Nietzschean</a> terms. He is sure that his workmen have just as much power to exploit him as he has of exploiting them. This is where we differ, and this is why thought will buzz in an angry murky haze over eight-hour bills and individual contracts and collective bargaining as long as millions agree with him. He trusts rights, I trust power. He recognizes only individuals, I recognize classes.</p>
<p>That is why I can never make him understand what I mean by <q>exploitation.</q> He thinks of it as something personally brutal. He does not see it inherent in a system, for which no one is <q>specifically to blame</q> only because all are equally guilty of short vision and flimsy analysis. And yet as I read his letters and clippings, I wonder if he is not the realist and I the mystic. He punctures my phrases of power and class with a coarse satisfied hunky to whom work and disease and riot are all in the day's work and who would despise the philosophy which I am so anxiously waving at him. It seems a long way from my dainty music-bench to the iron range, or the stove-factory. One has to feel exploitation perhaps before one understands it. I console myself with the thought that power is itself mystic, and that my friend will have to get hit with some invisible threat of class-force, as some of his frightened friends are now getting hit, before he will analyze any deeper that industrial system of which he is so efficient and loyal an officer.</p>
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Randolph Bourne Archive
What is Exploitation?
Written: 1916
Source: The New Republic, November 4, 1916. 12–14.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
My western friend who runs a prosperous stove-factory has been finding fault with my insistent use of the word exploitation. My outlook on life is not sufficiently cheerful, and I am inclined to see malevolence where everything is, as they say at college, healthy, hearty, and happy. Our quarrel rose over the Mesaba strike, and my acceptance of an I. W. W. pamphlet as a plausible account of what was going on there. The accounts of the insecurity of pay, the petty robberies, the reeking houses, the bigoted opposition to labor organization, seemed to me to smell of truth, because I had read the maddening tales of Colorado and West Virginia, and seen with my own eyes in Scranton and Gary and Pittsburgh the way workers live, not in crises of industrial war but in brimming times of peace.
My friend, however, is more robust. He would make no such hasty impassioned judgments. He would judge nothing without going to the mines, working in them for a year or two, being one of the men, getting their free confidence, then working for a couple of years as a confidential auditor for the company. Such Olympian judiciality fills me with envy and dismay. I feel that his serenity is the normal mood of healthy activity, facing the modern world. Could he find anything but scorn for those of us who go around with the vestiges of what it is now priggish to call a social conscience? To him an industrial strike is like an exciting political contest or the recriminations between two kid baseball teams. Both sides, he says, squawk a good deal about the raw stuff the other side is trying to pull off, but deep down, his experience convinces him, they are very uniformly a pretty human bunch. He hasn't been to Mesaba, but his friend the Duluth bread-dealer assures him that agitators were the cause of all the trouble. They always are. Trouble, to my friend, is a personal matter. He sees individuals, laboring as happily as they can expect to labor on this far from perfumed earth. He sees their contentment disturbed by outsiders, individuals, bitter envious mischievous men who make a business of setting workmen against their employers. He sees the outsiders deluding, persuading, intimidating honest workers into stopping work and engaging in careers of lawlessness. He sees the individual employer in natural self-defense fighting for his rights, defending his property, ousting the agitators, carrying the war into his laborer's camp. From the busy office of his stove-factory, it all looks like a personal quarrel between free and equal individuals. When the state interferes with its militia and its injunctions, it is not flouting individuality, but merely doing its business of maintaining order and defending private property.
Our argument really hinges on whether to the workman all the excitement and deprivation and delusion is not part of the daily business of living. I am too tender-minded. What is at the back of my confused hints that there is something shameful, something consciously brutal about industrial relations? My friend admits that he has in his shop men who work in places that are noisy and dusty, in hot places, in rooms where paint is being sprayed. He is sorry. He wishes these things did not have to be, and he is remedying them as fast as he can. What he will not admit is that any one is specifically to blame. He does not imprison his men. They come freely to him and ask for employment. He gives them such compensation as makes the jobs attractive to them, in competition with all other jobs in city and country. He is fair and scrupulous. His company is in business to produce goods at such cost that people can afford to buy them. He cannot make his plant a sanatorium--and when he says this the faintest note of irony steals into his robust voice--for his wage-earners. The stockholders have built a factory and not a philanthropic institution. If the workers did not like his factory, would they send for their brothers and cousins from the old country across the sea? If these hunkies in stove-factory and iron mine were being exploited, would they not drift speedily away to jobs where they were content? My friend cannot imagine a man being willingly exploited. There are, no doubt, heartless employers; workmen here and there are perhaps subject to oppression. But systematic, prevalent industrial exploitation--and he has worked in all parts of the country and at every level of skill--my stove-factory friend has never seen. And he turns aside from my abstract philosophy to the daily manipulation of stoves and men.
What then do I mean by exploitation? And I have to remind my friend that my very first industrial experience was one of those rudimentary patterns of life which, if they are imprinted on your mind early enough, remain to fix the terms in which you interpret the world. The experience was leaving school to work for a musician who had an ingenious little machine on which he cut perforated music-rolls for the players which were just then becoming popular. His control of the means of production consisted in having the machine in his house, to which I went every morning at eight and stayed till five. He provided the paper and the music and the electric power. I worked as a wage-earner, serving his skill and enterprise. I was on piece-work, and everything suggested to my youthful self that it depended only upon my skill and industry how prosperous I should become. But what startled me was my employer's lack of care to conceal from me the fact that for every foot of paper which I made he received fifteen cents from the manufacturer with whom he had his contract. He paid me five, and while I worked, spent his time composing symphonies in the next room. As long as I was learning the craft, I had no more feeling about our relation than that there was a vague injustice in the air. But when I began to be dangerously clever and my weekly earnings mounted beyond the sum proper for a young person of eighteen who was living at home, I felt the hand of economic power. My piece-rate was reduced to four and a half cents. My innocence blazed forth in rebellion. If I was worth five cents a foot while I was learning, I was worth more, not less, after I had learned. My master folded his arms. I did not have to work for him. There were neighbors who would. I could stay or go. I was perfectly free. And then fear smote me. This was my only skill, and my timorous inexperience filled the outside world with horrors. I returned cravenly to my bench, and when my employer, flushed with his capitalistic ardor, built another machine and looked about for a young musician to work it, I weakly suggested to an old playmate of mine that he apply for the position.
Enlarge my musician into the employing class of owners and managers and shareholders of factory and mine and railroad, and myself into the class of wage-earners in all these enterprises, and you have the picture of the industrial system which the I. W. W. agitator has in his mind when he writes the Mesaba pamphlet to which my friend took such exception. With my five cents making that huge differential of profit for my employer, and with my four and a half cents giving his enterprise a productiveness which, if he had incorporated himself, he could have turned into additional capitalization, I was a crude symbol of the industrial system as my mind gradually took in the fact that there was an industrial system. This was my first experience in exploitation. If there had been fewer musicians available I should have gotten more pay, and if there had been more available I should probably have gotten even less. But there would always have been a surplus, and I should have always felt the power of my employer to skim it, to pull it towards himself. As long as I continued at work, nothing could have removed my sense of helplessness. Any struggle I might have made would have been only towards weakening his pull, and lessening the amount he was able to skim. He was not robbing me, and no person of sense would have said he was, but our very relation was an exploitation. There was no medium way between exploitation and philanthropy.
My stove-factory friend, however, will have none of this theory. If it is a question of power, he says, then Mike Solomon exploits the stove company when he is able to get three dollars a day, on account of the present demand for labor, when two dollars was wealth to him a year ago. Then I admit that local groups of workers are able--either through lack of competition or clever politics or display of force--to exercise temporarily a decisive pull on the surplus and divert more of it to themselves. It is all a question of power. But as long, I tell him, as the employer is entrenched in property rights with the armed state behind him, the power will be his, and the class that does the diverting will not be labor. My friend, however, does not like these Nietzschean terms. He is sure that his workmen have just as much power to exploit him as he has of exploiting them. This is where we differ, and this is why thought will buzz in an angry murky haze over eight-hour bills and individual contracts and collective bargaining as long as millions agree with him. He trusts rights, I trust power. He recognizes only individuals, I recognize classes.
That is why I can never make him understand what I mean by exploitation. He thinks of it as something personally brutal. He does not see it inherent in a system, for which no one is specifically to blame only because all are equally guilty of short vision and flimsy analysis. And yet as I read his letters and clippings, I wonder if he is not the realist and I the mystic. He punctures my phrases of power and class with a coarse satisfied hunky to whom work and disease and riot are all in the day's work and who would despise the philosophy which I am so anxiously waving at him. It seems a long way from my dainty music-bench to the iron range, or the stove-factory. One has to feel exploitation perhaps before one understands it. I console myself with the thought that power is itself mystic, and that my friend will have to get hit with some invisible threat of class-force, as some of his frightened friends are now getting hit, before he will analyze any deeper that industrial system of which he is so efficient and loyal an officer.
Randolph Bourne Archive
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The Price of Radicalism
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<span class="info">Written:</span> 1916
<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> The New Republic, March 11, 1916
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<span class="info">Transcription/Markup:</span> Andy Carloff
<br>
<span class="info">Online Source:</span> <a href="http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1262">RevoltLib.com</a>; 2021
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<p>Mr. Seymour Deming follows his eloquent <cite>Message to the Middle Class</cite> with an assault upon the colleges. His book he calls <q>a profane baccalaureate,</q> and it rips along as from one who is overturning the altars of Baal. No one has a style quite like this, with its mixture of Greek classicism and Broadway slang, with its cheap sardonic kicks and its sudden flashes of insight. Mr. Deming moves you, but he leaves you in the end more entertained than persuaded. His prophetic fire is so much fire and so little light. The first part of the book is devoted to picturesque denunciation of the colleges for not training a man to make a living. The second glorified the radical as the man who scorns success, and has turned from everything which the world thinks of value. Such logic dims the force of his blast.</p>
<p>I quite agree with Mr. Deming that the object of an education is to know a revolution when you see one. Colorado, Calumet, and West Virginia should make the college sky much more lurid than they do. But something more is needed for this <q>class unconscious of class-consciousness</q> than clarion calls summoning it to be radical. Mr. Deming has too much of the martyr-complex. He talks as if the radical of today occupied the position of social outlawry that the Abolitionist of 1850 occupied. To be radical, he says, is to be thrust out of the society of cultivated men, and to seek one's companionship among the meek and lowly. He speaks too always as if this little group of early Christians living in catacombs were all of the saintliest breed, the foolish who have confounded the sayings of the wise. Most of us used to believe both of these things. But most of us have given up looking on ourselves as heroes and martyrs because we blaspheme the <q>property-god of Things-As-They-Are.</q> We have climbed out of the catacombs, and we find many radicals disillusioning. We have either grown up or the world has moved on.</p>
<p>The real trouble with middle-class radicalism in this country today is that it is too easy. It is becoming too popular. It is not the heroic abnegation which Mr. Deming pictures, but something which almost anybody can encompass. The ranks are full of the unfocused and the unthinking. Let the college man or girl who listens to Mr. Deming's sermon join the Intercollegiate Socialist Society or some similar institution, and discover how discouragingly respectable they are. The only way by which middle-class radicalism can serve is by being fiercely and concentratedly intellectual. This is something which these organizations have so far failed to do. The labor movement in this country needs a philosophy, a literature, a constructive socialist analysis and criticism of industrial relations. How very far even the most intelligent accredited representatives of labor are still from such a goal is shown by the <a>Manly report</a>. Labor will scarcely do this thinking for itself. Unless middle-class radicalism threshes out its categories and interpretations and undertakes this constructive thought it will not be done. Mr. Deming must add to his message of fire the clear cold determination to be intolerably intellectual.</p>
<p>Given the prophetic fire, the young middle-class radical to whom Mr. Deming appeals should be able to find himself in an intellectual movement which is struggling to clarify its ideas and use them as tools for turning up the layers and interpreting the changes in the social world about them. Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating stale dogmas of Marxism. It should not mean <q>the study of socialism.</q> It had better mean a restless, controversial criticism of current ideas, and a hammering out of some clear-sighted philosophy that shall be this pillar of fire. The young radical today is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader. So far as the official radicals deprecate such an enterprise they make their movement sterile. Yet how often when attempts are made to group radicals on an intellectual basis does not some orthodox elder of the socialist church arise and solemnly denounce such intellectual snobbishness. Let these young men and women, he will say, go down into the labor unions and the socialist locals and learn of the workingman. Let them touch the great heart of the people. Let them put aside their university knowledge and hear that which is revealed unto babes. Only by humbly working up through the actual labor movement will the young radical learn his job. His intellectualism he must disguise. The epithet <q>intellectual</q> must make him turn pale and run.</p>
<p>And so this middle-class radicalism tends to drift, destitute of intellectual light. The pugnacious thinkers who want to thrash things out find themselves labeled heterodox and esoteric. There is little controversy because nobody will quarrel about ideas. The workers must not be offended and the movement must not be split. The young radical soon learns to be ashamed of his intellectual bias, and after an ineffectual effort to squeeze himself into the mind of the workingman drifts away disillusioned from his timid collegiate radicals. His energy evaporates, because intellectual radicalism was afraid to be itself.</p>
<p>Mr. Deming ignores this practical postlude to his challenges. The pillar of fire was not an exciting alarm but a guide which led the way toward the Promised Land. A cloud by day, its mission by night was to give forth not heat but light. Just so far as such messages as Mr. Deming's are real pillars of fire they are the needfullest we could have.</p>
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Randolph Bourne Archive
The Price of Radicalism
Written: 1916
Source: The New Republic, March 11, 1916
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Mr. Seymour Deming follows his eloquent Message to the Middle Class with an assault upon the colleges. His book he calls a profane baccalaureate, and it rips along as from one who is overturning the altars of Baal. No one has a style quite like this, with its mixture of Greek classicism and Broadway slang, with its cheap sardonic kicks and its sudden flashes of insight. Mr. Deming moves you, but he leaves you in the end more entertained than persuaded. His prophetic fire is so much fire and so little light. The first part of the book is devoted to picturesque denunciation of the colleges for not training a man to make a living. The second glorified the radical as the man who scorns success, and has turned from everything which the world thinks of value. Such logic dims the force of his blast.
I quite agree with Mr. Deming that the object of an education is to know a revolution when you see one. Colorado, Calumet, and West Virginia should make the college sky much more lurid than they do. But something more is needed for this class unconscious of class-consciousness than clarion calls summoning it to be radical. Mr. Deming has too much of the martyr-complex. He talks as if the radical of today occupied the position of social outlawry that the Abolitionist of 1850 occupied. To be radical, he says, is to be thrust out of the society of cultivated men, and to seek one's companionship among the meek and lowly. He speaks too always as if this little group of early Christians living in catacombs were all of the saintliest breed, the foolish who have confounded the sayings of the wise. Most of us used to believe both of these things. But most of us have given up looking on ourselves as heroes and martyrs because we blaspheme the property-god of Things-As-They-Are. We have climbed out of the catacombs, and we find many radicals disillusioning. We have either grown up or the world has moved on.
The real trouble with middle-class radicalism in this country today is that it is too easy. It is becoming too popular. It is not the heroic abnegation which Mr. Deming pictures, but something which almost anybody can encompass. The ranks are full of the unfocused and the unthinking. Let the college man or girl who listens to Mr. Deming's sermon join the Intercollegiate Socialist Society or some similar institution, and discover how discouragingly respectable they are. The only way by which middle-class radicalism can serve is by being fiercely and concentratedly intellectual. This is something which these organizations have so far failed to do. The labor movement in this country needs a philosophy, a literature, a constructive socialist analysis and criticism of industrial relations. How very far even the most intelligent accredited representatives of labor are still from such a goal is shown by the Manly report. Labor will scarcely do this thinking for itself. Unless middle-class radicalism threshes out its categories and interpretations and undertakes this constructive thought it will not be done. Mr. Deming must add to his message of fire the clear cold determination to be intolerably intellectual.
Given the prophetic fire, the young middle-class radical to whom Mr. Deming appeals should be able to find himself in an intellectual movement which is struggling to clarify its ideas and use them as tools for turning up the layers and interpreting the changes in the social world about them. Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating stale dogmas of Marxism. It should not mean the study of socialism. It had better mean a restless, controversial criticism of current ideas, and a hammering out of some clear-sighted philosophy that shall be this pillar of fire. The young radical today is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader. So far as the official radicals deprecate such an enterprise they make their movement sterile. Yet how often when attempts are made to group radicals on an intellectual basis does not some orthodox elder of the socialist church arise and solemnly denounce such intellectual snobbishness. Let these young men and women, he will say, go down into the labor unions and the socialist locals and learn of the workingman. Let them touch the great heart of the people. Let them put aside their university knowledge and hear that which is revealed unto babes. Only by humbly working up through the actual labor movement will the young radical learn his job. His intellectualism he must disguise. The epithet intellectual must make him turn pale and run.
And so this middle-class radicalism tends to drift, destitute of intellectual light. The pugnacious thinkers who want to thrash things out find themselves labeled heterodox and esoteric. There is little controversy because nobody will quarrel about ideas. The workers must not be offended and the movement must not be split. The young radical soon learns to be ashamed of his intellectual bias, and after an ineffectual effort to squeeze himself into the mind of the workingman drifts away disillusioned from his timid collegiate radicals. His energy evaporates, because intellectual radicalism was afraid to be itself.
Mr. Deming ignores this practical postlude to his challenges. The pillar of fire was not an exciting alarm but a guide which led the way toward the Promised Land. A cloud by day, its mission by night was to give forth not heat but light. Just so far as such messages as Mr. Deming's are real pillars of fire they are the needfullest we could have.
Randolph Bourne Archive
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