SOCIALIST APPEAL SEPTEMBER 14, 1940 If fight we must, then let us have a show down fight that should be the guiding thought of the auto workers of Flint and Detroit.
SOCIALIST APPEAL VOL. IV No. 37 Saturday, September 14, 1940 PubMehed Wookly by the SOCIALIST APPEAL PUBLISHING ASSN.
at 116 University Place, New York, NY.
Telephone: Algonquin 3547 Stalin New Labor Laws More Messages On the Death Of Leon Trotsky Hershel Grynzspan Editorial Board: FELIX MORROW ALBERT GOLDMAN General Manager: RUTH JEFFREY Subscriptions: 00 per year: 00 for alx months Foreign. 00 per year, 50 for six months. Bundle orders: cents per eppy in the United States: cents per copy in all foreign countries. Single copies: conts.
In addition to those messages received by the Socialist Workers Party and Natalia Trotsky on the death of Trotsky which were previously published, the following are among those that have been received Meeting under auspices Edinburgh Workers Revolutionary Socialist Party sends warmest sympa.
thies pledges continued struggle for world socialism in which Leon Trotsky died. AIT EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND Reentered as second clas matter December Act of March let. New York, under the Fight with the Socialist Workers Party for. Despite political differences we had had with Comrade Trotsky we express our profound condolences on the murder of this outstanding revolutionist and condemn the Stalinist assassin machine. Be as.
sured of our full cooperation in class struggle activity, against bourgeois and Stalinist terror. HUGO OEHLER REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS LEAGUE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JOB AND DECENT LIVING FOR EVERY WORKER OPEN THE IDLE FACTORIES. OPERATE THEM UNDER WORKERS CONTROL. TWENTY. BILLION DOLLAR FEDERAL PUBLIC WORKS AND HOUSING PROGRAM. THIRTY THIRTY 80. WEEKLY MINIMUM WAGE 30 HOUR WEEKLY MAXIMUM FOR ALL WORKERS ON ALL JOBS. 30 WEEKLY OLD. AGE AND DISABILITY PENSION EXPROPRIATE THE SIXTY FAMILIES ALL WAR FUNDS TO THE UNEMPLOYED. A PEOPLE REFERENDUM ON ANY AND ALL WARS NO SECRET DIPLOMACY.
10. AN INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY.
11. WORKERS DEFENSE GUARDS AGAINST VIGILANTE AND FASCIST ATTACKS.
12. FULL SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY FOR THE NEGRO PEOPLE.
The greater tragedy of the war, itself shrouds from the public consciousness the smaller tragedies that follow in war wake. Yet sometimes the fate of these lesser individual victims illuminates the whole broad canvas of human agony.
Such is the case of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish youth who two years ago shot a German diplomat in Paris and touched off the bestial pogroms against the Jews in Germany.
Grynszpan, caught by the tide of war in a rotten French prison, has been handed by the Vichy rulers over to the mercies of the Nazi conquerors for their final vengeance.
The hapless Jewish boy, driven to his act by the blind desperation of his persecuted race, was freely given the friendly sympathy of civilized people throughout a world horrified by the Nazi pogroms. But democratic rulers of France kept Grynszpan in their dungeons, unwilling to mar the harmony of the post Munich honeymoon by bringing him to trial.
He was still there when the German tide reached Paris. Together with other prisoners, he was taken to the south. The Nazi conquerors demanded his flesh and the French rulers the democrats of yesterday, the guardians of the hallowed principle of political asylum dutifully handed him over to the Gestapo at Toulouse. Nothing. adds the news dispatch. has been heard of Grynszpan since.
And nothing will be heard of him living any more. For the name of Grynszpan is thus added to the endless list of the millions handed over by the democratic leaders of democratic France to the iron grasp of the Fascist conquerors. And soon, indeed, French Jews are themselves to feel the weight of the new regime set up by the democrats of yesterday. Like the Italians, the men of Vichy will before long follow in the footsteps of the Nazi masters in this as in other things.
The final fate of Grynszpan also helps re evaluate the attitude taken at the time of his deed by the Stalinists. While the whole world rang with sympathy for the young Jew, the Stalinists tried to smear him as a Trotskyist tool of the Gestapo.
Since then the Stalin Hitler pact has provided the reason. Even then, in the days just after Munich the Stalinists were more interested in turning the wrath from the Germans by muddying the pitiful Grynszpan than in denouncing the Nazis for their brutality.
It was a short road for Grynszpan. His way was not ours but we could sympathize with the desperation that led him to seek in direct action some means of breaking through the iron ring he felt around him. We ll break that ring, but only through uniting in struggle the workers and oppressed people of all countries against the makers of war, against the Fascists and the democratic liars and hypocrites. We share with you your immense sorrow at this irreparable loss, Courageous and worthy companion of Trotsky, we assure you of our invincible determination to continue and to carry to the end the work of his life. IKD (INTERNATIONALIST COMMUNISTS OF GERMANY. Profoundest sympathies. Deeply shocked by Stalinist perfidy. Blow felt internationally tremendous historic loss. Trotsky will never die. FOURTH INTERNATIONALISTS CAPETOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Crisis in Auto Plants Deeply shocked by hideous crime and terrible loss, We shall go forward. GOODLATE WPSA (Workers Party of South Africa. CAPETOWN, SOUTH AFRICA South African friends and sympathizers deeply regret passing of great and inspiring leader thinker writer heroic fighter for rights of man in all countries, His name will live in our memories. KLENERMAN JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICAN Longer Work Week, Direct Wage Cuts, Chaining the Workers To the Factories Like Industrial Serfs; But the Younger Generation Leads Bitter Resistance to the New Laws By JOHN WRIGHT in the name of the People Commissays and On June 27, 1940. simultaneously with the countersigned by Molotov, establishing drastic news that Rumania ceded Bessarabia and North wage cuts.
ern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, Stalin tersely As Shvernik explained: In order to further informed the world, through his official news strengthen the defensive power of their fatheragency, the TASS, that new labor laws were in land the working class of the USSR must go foreffect in the USSR.
ward to necessary sacrifices.
TASS confined itself to the statement that the The lengthening of the working day is most hour day had been replaced by an hour day, closely bound up with the question of wages, and that industry had shifted from a day week continued Shvernik. An objection may be raised (5 working days, one day off) to a day week that the proportionate increase of the working (six working days, one day off. day must be accompanied, if you please, by a The hour day was one of Stalin trump similar increase in wages. It would be absolutely boasts, served up as irrefutable proof of the vic incorrect to pose the question in this way. Were tory of socialism in one country and the tran we to permit an increase of wages proportionate sition to communism. Stalin himself used to dis to the increase of the working day, then there course at great length upon it.
could not even be talk of any necessary sacrifices.
As a matter of fact, the hour day did not at But we are precisely talking about this, that the all flow from the successes of industrialization. working class and the entire intelligentsia must It was originally introduced fby Stalin as a poli make those sacrifices which are indispensable for tical measure, serving as a weapon in the early the defense of our fatherland. Bolshevik, No.
days of Stalin struggle against Trotsky and the 11 12, June 1940. Left Opposition.
The section of the ukase pertaining to pieceNow comes official admission by Stalin that work wages reads: another of his world publicized achievements was That the norms of output be raised and nothing but a fraud.
piece work rates be lowered in proportion to the increased working day.
STALIN LABOR LAWS OF 1938 It might appear at first glance that this imBut the abolition of the hour day and the plies only an indirect wage cut, that is, a worker hour week is only one item in a new body of may now work longer hours and be paid less per anti labor legislation.
piece but his wages remain the same as before.
The goal Stalin pursues by his new laws is not Not so. In reality, a direct wage cut is involved.
a new one. It is identical with the goal envisioned by him in his legislation of December, 1938: turn 14 AGE CUT!
ing Russian workers into a species of industrial The increased working day includes not only serfs, binding them to the factories, making it the extra hour each day but also an extra impossible for them to leave their jobs, and in hour day in the week. worker now receives this way extricating his regime from the convul the same wages for six days of work and one day sions of its economic life, the inability to fulfill off as he did for five days work and one day off.
plans, the chronic shortage of goods etc. In other words, if the meager wage formerly had The 1938 laws were the bureaucratic solution to cover six days of existence, it must now be to the economic impasse in which Stalin regime stretched over days. wage cut of one seventh.
found itself on the eve of the second world war. Workers on monthly or weekly salaries are These laws depended for their effectiveness on similarly situated. Let us take a period of 42 days the exercise of the bureaucracy economic power, which best illustrates the difference between the e. firing, threat of unemployment. But the op two systems. If hitherto there were in this interposition of the masses frustrated the bureaucra val weeks and paydays (on a day week tie calculations. The acute scarcity of labor, the basis. now there are only weeks and pay case with which employment could be obtained, days. But on each pay day the wage received is made it actually possible for the mass of work the same as before, otherwise, according to ers to utilize Stalin own legislation against Shvernik, there would be no sacrifice. ThereStalin own aims.
fore each worker must now sacrifice one week His official press is now compelled to admit wages in every seven.
that the Soviet workers, prohibited by the 1938 Thus, in one and the same operation, the Rusukase from leaving their jobs voluntarily, en sian workers must not only labor 48 hours in gaged in the practice of deliberately violating the place of the previous 35 hours, but they also find 1988 laws and then isting that the administra their already miserable standard of living sharption enforce these I, e. fire them from the ly lowered. And this, on Stalin threshold to jobs, thereby freeing them to seek employment Communism. elsewhere, not infrequently in a different depart That Stalin own press, under the ten fold ment of the very same plant!
censorship that has prevailed since the signing of the Stalin Hitler Pact, is forced to speak out YOUTH FIGHT AGAINST STALIN so openly is in itself incontestable proof of the The guarded statistical data of Stalin press ynfolding struggle of the Soviet workers against indicate beyond any doubt that the labor turn Stalin regime.
over reached its peak precisely in the months following the 1938 decrees; that productive levels FIRST RESULTS OF NEW LAWS have fallen sharply, and that most important of The first consequence of the new legislation all, the leading part in this muted struggle was the cutting down of the labor force in every against Stalin regime is being played by the enterprise in the Soviet Union. With the increased productivity per worker, less workers youngest generation of workers, e. those who passed through the Stalinist school, who know are now required. In the reports published in the nothing of the period of the Civil War and of the Pravda 40 and 50 per cent cuts in the labor force October days, and who have just entered industry.
are not uncommon. This is done, in part, in order The alarm and fury of the bureaucracy is exto overcome the acute shortage of labor from pressed in brimstone editorials against a certain which Soviet industry is chronically suffering; at the same time, the bureaucracy no doubt hopes section, namely of young workers and employes who have recently entered industry: who thereby to accumulate a labor reserve from which are seeking to profit from the absence of unemto draw in order to replace those workers who ployment which has been destroyed by the Soviet are jailed, and as an added pressure on the recalpower; who are abusing the patience of the Sovcitrants already employed.
iet government by running from factory to facAs Trotsky predicted, under the blows of the tory, undermining discipline, refusing to toil war crisis, facing its first real test, the bureauhonestly, disrespectfully deporting themselves tocracy is compelled to strip off its veil and reveal ward the observation of regulations established its true self to the masses.
by law and approved by the people (Shvernik How are the Russian workers reacting to the report to the Ninth Plenum of the Central Counnew legislation? Here too the Stalinist press incil of the Russian Trade Unions. voluntarily supplies us with facts that disclose The June, 1940, laws are Stalin solution to the deepening crisis.
the economic impasse, further aggravated by the The ritualistie paeans in the press glorifying the new laws and promising miraculous results demands of war time economy, the vast losses (there was even an attempt to raise the slogan during the Finnish campaign, not to mention the The Third Stalin Five Year Plan in Four economic commitments to Hitler. The aggravated situation demands an intensification of bureauYears. were almost immediately followed by fulminations against rotten liberals who hesicratic pressure, the only remedy the bureaucracy tate to enforce the new laws and who patronize knows or can apply. The need now is for new penalties. For these, Stalin has to dig deep into floaters and laggards. This attack is aimed against the public prosecutors and the directors his police armament.
of plants and heads of departments who have SAVAGE PENALTIES IN NEW LAWS teen invested with undivided authority and The new laws make it a crime against the sole responsibility. The Pravda for July already carries reports of severe jail sentences meted state for any worker to leave his job, come late to work, skip a single work day, fail to produce out to prosecutors and to directors of industry who failed to exercise their new authority. The his daily quota or norm.
real explanation for this hesitancy lies obAny attempt to leave one place of employment, even a mere request to be allowed to seek viously in the pressure from below which is beemployment elsewhere, is a crime punishable by ing counteracted from above by increased lashimprisonment for a term of 4 months.
ing of the apparatus.
The penalty for arriving late to work, skipThe Komsomol (Russian an organizaping a work day, or otherwise dawdling on the tion now reportedly comprising 10 million Rusjob is equally unprecedented in the history of lasinn youth, is under fire and is being held responbor legislation. Any one charged with these sible for the misbehavior of the young genera crimes is subject to a sentence of months tion of workers. Its apparatus is being purged.
It is the dread of this development that inpenal labor at the place of his or her employment, the fuctory, mill, mine or office. In addition, pelled Stalin to hasten at all costs his long up to 25 of the criminal regular wages are planned assassination of Leon Trotsky. The withheld. The exact period of time over which Fourth International, founded and led by Leon these wages are to be withheld is not specified in Trotsky, alone has the political program for the the ukase. It is to be assumed that these sums Russian workers, and their brothers the world will be withheld for at least the duration of the over. By assassinating Trotsky, Stalin hopes that he has now decapitated the world movement, and sentence. Thus Stalin has turned every enterprise in the Soviet Union into a forced labor especially the politicalization of the opposition in camp, or work jail. The ukase decreeing all this Russia which has now assumed mass proportions, was published in all the Russian papers on June which is developing a young leading cadre but 26. It went into effect on June 27. Kalinin counwhich is still groping for a political program.
tersigned it, issuing it in the name of the ExecuToday, however, the waves of the rising deluge tive Committee of the Supreme Council of the are lapping at Stalin feet; tomorrow the tide of Soviet Union.
the resurgent workers of the Soviet Union and the whole world will engulf him, It was accompanied by a supplementury ukase. On behalf of our many English friends express deepest sympathy and mourn with you loss of dear comrade and leader. Revolutionary greetings. HUGO DEWAR LONDON, ENGLAND Browder Alibi. Regret loss. Will go forward. ROPER AUSTRALIAN FRIENDS SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Condolences and solidarity in your sorrow that is shared by people in every land. LEO MALGRECKI BERN, SWITZERLAND The lid is off in Flint. The immediate incident which blew the lid off a company provocation at Fisher Plant No. 1, brazenly trying to resurrect Homer Martin corpse of an AFL union. followed by firing seventeen UAW militants is but a minor incident. By itself it would scarcely have aroused the masses of this auto worker center to the point where they are ready to close down every plant in the industry. The latest incident is but the culmination of a basic collision between the auto workers and the corporations over fundamental issues.
Wages, working conditions, the union right to limit speed of production (ie the speed up of the workers. the union right to real collective bargaining. not in the empty formality of signing a contract, but in enforcing the contract in the plant. all these fundamental issues are involved in the present crisis between the UAW CIO and General Motors in Flint.
If the deadline of one week set by a Flint auto workers membership meeting Tuesday night for settlement of the immediate grievance is not met by the company, and a strike results, it will spread far beyond the plants immediately involved, and it will from the first day be fought for far more than reinstatement of the seventeen men fired.
If the strike comes now, the very logic of the situation will demand that the auto workers should not narrowly limit their strike demands to the immediate incident which provoked it, but should fight the strike out for all the many grievances which have accumulated.
The corporation strategy is to wear down the resistance of the workers with bitter fights over minor issues. Each time it provokes the men, rousing them to a pitch of struggle; then the corporation has the invaluable aid of the Reuther Thomas leadership of the UAW, which steps in and makes a rotten compromise, one which undermines the union a little further, which lets the men down with a feeling of defeat, and simply paves the way for the next corporation move against the workers.
If this process is permitted to continue for any length of time, the back of the workers resistance will be broken, and the corporation will be victorious over the men if they try a last desperate stand at the end of this process.
That is why every decent militant in the UAW wants a show down NOW, Put an end to the corporation offensive! Put an end to the accumulation of grievances! Get rid of the rotten grievance procedure which gets no settlement of any grievances, and in its place establish a method whereby every grievance arising is quickly settled to the satisfaction of the union membership.
By now it has become clear to the naked eye that the Reuther Thomas leadership neither wishes nor is it able to lead the auto workers to defend their rights against the corporations. The ReutherThomas clique does not take its orders from the men whom they are supposed to represent. They take their orders from Sidney Hillman. And he takes his orders from the National Defense Council of which he is a member. And that Council is in the hands of Knudsen. the head of General Motors! If Knudsen and Hillman have their way, the UAW CIO will be reduced to the level of a company union.
Fortunately for the auto workers, Knudsen and Hillman have a long way to go before they even begin to achieve their aim. That is demonstrated by the splendid militant spirit of the Flint auto workers during these weeks. They have shown that the spirit of 37 is not dead.
No faith whatsoever in Knudsen Hillman office boys. Reuther and Thomas! That is the beginning of all straight thinking today for the auto workers.
In Mexico, where the facts about Stalinist responsibility for the murder of Trotsky are wellknown, the Stalinist organization and its stooges can only whine pleadingly in answer to President Cardenas statement pointing at them as the murderers.
In the United States where the capitalist press has seen fit to report practically nothing about the Stalinist band arrested for the May 24 attempt on Trotsky, and the facts uncovered during the last few weeks about the GPU connections of the assassin, the Stalinists are a little bolder. Thus Earl Browder answers President Cardenas in the Sunday Worker, September In this critical moment in Mexico history, President Cardenas chooses to make nderous public statements against the USSR, in connection with the death of Trotsky at the hands of one of his own intimates. What motive could induce Cardenas to adopt this obvious and cheap Trotskyite slander? Clearly, it is a gesture of appeasement toward Wall Street and the Mexican reactionary Spanish emigrants of Coatzacoalcos, affiliated to the and Republican parties protest the GPU assassination of Leon Trotsky. We are with you in the sorrow of your friends and the International proletariate. BY THE DELEGATION ALCON AUGILAR COSTA GIROMELLA MARIANO COATZACOALCOS, VER. MEXICO Deeply deplore dastardly assassination of Leon Trotsky. His life work constitutes mighty historical achievement. We salute his memory NATIONAL COUNCIL INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY LONDON, ENGLAND Camp. condemn with utter indignation and hatred this greatest crime of Stalinism, a crime perpetrated through foreign agents and Mexicans to our shame. remain with the firm conviction, which is con.
firmed by the great personality of Trotsky, who will be recognized and justified by all coming historythat the stature of humanity will rise majestically out of this heap of ruins and treason which today, dominate the world. CONCHA MICHEL MEXICO This pseudo radical attack on Cardenas by Browder is an implicit threat of withdrawal of Stalinist support from the Mexican government in its struggle against the semi fascist Almazan movement. No one can be surprised at such a change. If Stalin can become Hitler satellite, the Stalinist organizations would consider it a small price to help the Almazan group take over Mexico, if in exchange they could be assured that the Mexican government investigation of the murder of Trotsky would be erased.
But as an answer to Cardenas, Browder attack is worthless. It does not even hint at the facts on which Cardenas based his statement. These facts have never been published in the Stalinist press in this country.
Among these facts are: The confession of their complicity of nine Stalinists arrested for the May 24 attempt. The fact that David Serrano, member of the Political Buro of the Communist Party of Mexico, has been in jail since June, awaiting trial as an organizer of the May 24 attack; and that another Stalinist, Mateos Martinez, has confessed that Serrano commissioned him to buy the police uniforms used by the attackers. The fact that David Alfaro Siqueiros, fugitive from justice as the actual and admitted leader of that attack, is a Stalinist, head of the Mexican equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, from which he recruited the gunmen he used.:We ll stop with these facts for the moment. Let Browder explain them. The depth and bitterness of what we feel makes it all the more incumbent upon us to express our.
selves in a practical way, and to let nothing interfere with that, as he would have wished. Please associate us with any message of loyalty and sympathy to his wife and to his closest friends. The wording of which we can leave, as we must entirely you, since in all our ideas as well as our personal feelings, we are at one with you. It is no mere phrase to say that we write with broken hearts. Any one of his true friends would rather have lost his own life. But it would show a lack of real appreciation to indulge in mourning and tears, or in bitterness alone. Lacking the power (a reference to censorship) to use such concrete phrases as you might use. can only refer to the legend of the Phoe.
nix which in and through our labors will take on a new meaning. PADDY DUBLINEIRE (FOR THE IRISH SECTION OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL