SOCIALIST APPEAL SEPTEMBER 21, 1940 SOCIALIST APPE AL VOL. IV No. 38 Saturday, September 21, 1940 Published Weekly by the SOCIALIST APPEAL PUBLISHING A98 at 116 Algonquin 8647 STALIN NEW PURGE Draft Wealth Item in Draft Law Is a Fraud Telephone, Place, New York, Editorial Board: FELIX MORROW ALBERT GOLDMAN General Manager: RUTH JEFFREY Subacriptions: 00 per year: 00 for six months.
Foreign. 93. 00 per year. 50 for six months. Bundle orders: cents per copy in the United States: centa per copy in all foreign countries. Single coples: cents. Reentered a second cla matter December We of the cost once at New York, under the minds in a progressive direction. In a word, they would have understood and accepted the workers instinctive feeling and a good instinct, too, in this epoch of militarization of the necessity for military training, and would have given it a working class content: For Military Training Under Workers Control We do have that faith. We KNOW that only the workers can put an end to this bloody cycle of war and hunger of the capitalist world. Naturally, they can do it with bare hands not in these days! Hence they must learn to be adept at the military arts. Therefore, we say YES to the proposal for compulsory military training. But we say NO to the bosses control of that training, The fight from now on must be, therefore, one which is NOT directed against compulsory military training. NOT directed against the abstract principle of conscription, but is entirely directed against the control of conscription by the capitalists and their lackeys. Conscription? Yes. But under the control of the trade unions.
While this fight is organized and carried on, many workers will be conscripted under the BurkeWadsworth Law. Let them go, and let them learn whatever they can. What they learn will serve the working class at one stage or another of the coming period. And not the least of the reasons they should go is that their fellow workers are going; he who will not share the fate of his fellow workers is not one of them and will have no voice among them now or in the future. Revolutionary workers cannot be conscientious objectors who ask for special, individual exemption from the fate which the entire working class must share.
FOR COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING UNDER CONTROL OF THE TRADE UNIONS that is the only serious slogan for the working class in this epoch of militarism and reaction.
Fight with the Socialist Workers Party for: 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. 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. Continued from page 1)
Central Committees of the various Trade Unions as well as by several hundred Moscow trade union activists (read: the JGW. Shvernik in the Confessional The reporter to the Plenum was Shvernik, Tomsky successor as Chairman of the The account in Pravda gives only the high lights from his speech.
Following the line laid down by Pravda, he began by pointing out the achievements and importance of the Trade Unions, especially on the threshold of Communism. The main source of trade union strength, said Shvernik, consists of ties with the masses. But unfortunately, he had to report that the Soviet Trade Unions have still very weak ties with the masses. Why? Because of the swollen apparatus of the trade union organizations. The paid apparatus devours the major part of the membership dues which should provide the means for carrying on cultural mass work and rendering material aid to union members and which are used instead by the trade union organs to maintain not few DARMOYEDNIKI and BEZDELNIKI (PRAVDA, July 28. Who should know if not Shvernik?
At this point, however, Shvernik digressed to make it clear that this deficiency was discovered not by him, nor by the nor by the various trade union organizations, not even by Pravda but only by the Central Committee of the Party (i. e. Stalin. The Scope of the Purge After a proper pause, Shvernik announced to the assembled audience that it was now crystal clear that the paid staff could easily be cut onehalf, even two thirds. As a matter of fact, a Commission which had already studied the problem found it possible to drop 108, 000 paid workers from 169 trade union bodies. After their staffs are reduced. predicted Shvernik, the Trade Unions will have the untrammelled opportunity of carrying on their work on the income derived from membership dues, and our state will obtain several hundred million roubles to use for further strengthening the economic power of our socialist fatherland.
In closing he promised a new regime. It is necessary to call general membership meetings of the trade unions regularly.
The discussion which ensued was summed up by Pravda as follows: The speakers cited a great number of instances which illustrate the urgent need of liquidating the deficiencies in trade union work, paring down the swollen staffs and attracting the activists.
Moisseyev, Chaitman of the Central Committee of the Central Construction Workers Union, announced to the Plenam that the paid personnel of his union had already been cut 70 per cent, a saving of about 11 million roubles.
Meshakin, Chairman of the Flour Mill and Grain Elevator Workers Union, was able to announce a reduction of 59. per cent.
But the speakers Teally warmed up to their task only during the next day discussion, which Pravda summed up with satisfaction as follows. Every one who took the floor spoke of the excessively swollen apparatus which devours hundreds of millions of roubles and obstructs the advancement of trade union activists (Pravda, July 30. Levine, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ural and West Siberian Industrial Construction Workers Union confessed that: We reduced our staff 15 18 per cent last February.
But it became immediately clear to us that this was not enough. We have now dropped 876 out of 1, 401 on our staff.
funds assigned to industrial organs. If so much is admitted, what must be the whole truth?
In his book The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky refers to a scandal which broke in 1980 when it was revealed that out of the budget of the trade unions, amounting to 400, 000, 000 roubles 80, 000, 000 go for the support of the personnel.
That was 20 per cent of the dues.
In 1940, admissions are blithely made of 100 to 134 per cent of the dues expended for the support of darmoyed niki and bezdelniki. Here is a slight measure of the degeneration of the bureaucracy since 1930.
The Income of the Bureaucracy Vladimirov, with the preservation of his own skin and salary uppermost in his mind, blurted out that at the beginning of 1940 the FrozenMeat Workers Union carried 1, 354 officials whose salaries totaled more than million roubles.
The personnel was now cut 70 per cent, saving many millions. The average annual wage of the bureaucrats in this union, therefore, was in excess of 4, 400 roubles. This sum does not include, of course, the special privileges enjoyed by the darmoyedniki and bezdelniki, namely, choice city apartments, country homes, vacation tours, sanatoria, private use of cars, etc. The aver age annual wage in the Soviet Union was officially put at 3, 467 roubles (1938. For the mass of Soviet workers 1, 800 roubles a year is a high wage. For the first time, we have an official gauge of the portion of the national income devoured by these self admitted sloths and idlers.
But the most revealing data was cited by Nikolayeva, another of the Secretaries of the who in her anxiety not to be outdone.
became overzealous and said the following. The swelling of the apparatus was noticed neither by the leaders of the Central Committees of the Trade Unions nor even. by us, the members of the Presidium of the We were under the impression that our paid staff was a trifle over 150, 000 and now it turns out that in 1939 there were 194, 434 paid workers in 179 trade unions, while in 1940 there were 203, 821. The sum spent on them amounted to 1, 025, 385, 600 roubles With the above figures as a basis, the average annual wage of a trade union bureaucrat rises above 5, 100 roubles.
And These Are the Smaller Leeches!
The total annual wage fund for the whole USSR was officially given as 34. 95 billion in 1933 and 96. billion roubles in 1938. If a single one of the feebler branches of the bureaucracy swallowed up 02 billion a year, then how much was devoured by the assassins of the GPU, the leeches in the government apparatus and other more powerful branches up to the Supreme Gang in the Kremlin itself?
The discussion closed with a rabid attack on Trud, the official organ of the Trade Unions.
The Trud is conducting a poor fight in the strug gle to eliminate deficiencies. Even the editors of Trud do not relish apparently the prospect of losing 70 per cent and more of their subscribers.
Naturally, there is an intimate connection between this purge in July and the resistance of the masses to the June anti labor legislation. The press has already been compelled to report thousands of violations.
Moscow Blackout On Conscription Conscription is now the law of the land, How did it get to be a law? What shall the workers do now to defend themselves against the abuses, both in the army and in the factories, which the law embodies?
It is first of all necessary to understand that it is not true that the conscription bill became law against the organized will of the masses of the people. The perfunctory opposition to the bill that was registered by the AFL, the CIO and the Railroad Brotherhoods was just thatperfunctory. Green, Lewis and the rest went through the motions of recording their opposition. and that all. And how could it be otherwise. Their sole argument against conscription was that the same army could be raised by volunteers e. by a vast jingo campaign to drum up enough unemployed who could be coaxed and pushed to go, urged on by their joblessness and hunger. It was easy enough for the army generals and the pro conscription forces in Congress to establish that the volunteer method was less democratic than the lottery system of the draft; and their trump card was that the volunteer method simply would not provide enough men in the same time as the conscription system.
Hence, it was without any inner conviction at all that Messrs. Green, Lewis and the others made the record against the Burke Wadsworth bill. They didn call any mass meetings against it. They didn call any demonstrations. They sent no instructions to the local unions to mobilize their forces ip meetings and demonstrations or any other form of activity against the bill, except for passage by the locals of routine resolutions addressed to their congressmen. And that was all.
Hence it was a foregone conclusion that, in the face of a passive labor movement, Congress and Roose velt could do as they pleased.
But this is not the whole story. It would be false to assume that Lewis, Green and the others were thus engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to thwart the will of their membership. Had that been true, there would have been significant instances of revolt by local unions here and there against such a conspiracy. No, the fact is that Lewis, Green Co. were able to stand passively by thanks to the fact that the CIO AFL membership had no firmlygrounded convictions against the conscription bill.
That is indicated by the Gallup polls which allowing for their bias and inaccuracy, nevertheless indicated that a substantial cross section of the workers felt that it was necessary to institute universal military training.
Yes, the workers wanted military training. But they were also extremely uneasy about the BurkeWadsworth bill. Quite apart from those provisions of the bill affecting the situation of workers who remain in the factories the weapons given to the bosses to break unions by pushing key union men into the army while keeping finks in the factories, etc. the workers felt troubled about putting millions of their fellows into the hands of anti labor army officers. This sentiment is attested to by the warm welcome which our leaflets receive, from workers who have never heard of us, but who immediately agree with our slogan of Compulsory Military Training? Yes But Under the Control of the Trade Unions!
The real crime of John Lewis, William Green and their fellow bureaucrats is that they took advantage of the present state of mind of the workers of their lack of clarity, and utilized that to help passage of the Burke Wadsworth bill. Were Lewis Green really leaders of the working class, instead of brakes on the working class, they would have analyzed the confused sentiments of the workers and then moved to clarify the workers John Wright account of Stalin new purge.
which we publish in this issue, is the first time that this story has been told outside the Soviet Union.
Likewise Comrade Wright account, which we published last week, of Stalin new anti labor legislation, was the first time the story has been told.
This fact gives us a new insight into the extraordinary stringency of the Kremlin censorship.
Gedye, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, having left there when it became obvious that it was absolutely impossible to get any news past the censors, reports one particularly astonishing detail. When the Kremlin ukases (this Czarist term for decrees came back into use in this last period) establishing the new labor laws were published in Pravda, Gedye filed with the censor a cable transmitting the news. The censor snipped out of the cable the PROVISIONS OF THE LAW. such as six months terms of imprisonment to be worked out at the factory at a 25 cut in wages, etc. which Gedye quoted directly from the law!
To our knowledge this is the first time that the censor has had authority to keep from the outside world the texts of Kremlin legislation. What a commentary on the regime, that it must try as long as possible to prevent the outside world from knowing what laws it is imposing on the people!
The only remaining public source of knowledge about the Soviet Union is, therefore, the Soviet press. But here, too, strange things take place.
Without any formal notice, individual subscriptions to Pravda and other Soviet papers have been in effect cancelled; ie, the papers simply do not arrive here. The only papers that have been arriving at all that we know of are some small bundles through Soviet institutions in this country for.
after all, the GPU and its friends must still be kept informed. Even these, however which the ordinary person may buy if any are left do not come, sometimes for months. For example, we know of no source for copies of Pravda from January 1, 1940 until May 21 of this year! Yes, we believe there is one exception the Pravda issues received by the State Department in diplomatic pouches Having secured some copies of Pravda, the ordinary reader of Russian will find himself no better off than without them. The one direct source of information he will find in them is the Kremlin legislation, the texts of which are published. But what they relate to, what prior ukases they displace, why the new legislation is needed all this remains largely incomprehensible to the ordinary reader.
The real situation explains, of course, the reason for all these extraordinary in actuality, desperate methods of censorship. The real situation is, and we choose our words carefully, cataclysmic chaos. Last week we described the Draconian legislation which chains the workers to the factories. This week we describe the latest purge arising out of this bitter struggle between the bureaucracy and the workers. Next week we will describe the crisis in agriculture, and ensuing articles will give the terrible picture as it is. The censorship is but one measure of Stalin desperation.
Another measure of his desperation was his assassination of Leon Trotsky. With all the contradictions of his regime convulsively deepening under the test of a world at war, Stalin program, the sixteen years of his regime, are provenly bankrupt.
The Soviet masses are stirring and need only leadership to save themselves from the fatal policies imposed by the Kremlin. Stalin remembers just enough Marxism to remember that such a moment is the moment for the revolutionary leadership of a Trotsky to link itself to the masses.
Hence he murdered Trotsky.
But the contradictions of Stalin regime pile up. And Trotsky left behind him his ideas, his program, his banner, his party, the World Party of Socialist Revolution. Stalin cannot assassinate that!
On the contrary, our world party will carry out Trotsky historic task.
By SAM MARCY About a month after the Burke Wadsworth bill was introduced, a proposal made its way on the floor of Congress, whose alleged aim was to draft wealth into the service of National defense. Just as labor is carrying its share of the burden of National Defense, said its spokesman, so industry must also do its share. Labor pays its price in supplying the manpower for the coming war, in curtailing its demands upon the bosses, in refraining from strikes and in putting up with the ever mounting cost of living.
Industry would do its share by subordinating the rapacious appetites of the bosses for profits, and submit to the impartial control of the government. The government would take over the munition industry, at least in war time. Before then it would at least commandeer the important munition producing plants.
So all through the summer ths ham battle, between the liberals. New Dealers and their labor lackeys on the one side, and the arrogant, archreactionary conservative section of the capitalist class on the other side, resounded in radio and in the pages of the capitalist press.
To be sure, Roosevelt was on the side of drafting wealth. He who once fought the economie Royalists would not now at such a grave moment in the history of the country, allow the economic Royalists to push the entire program of the coming war on the shoulders of the workers. At least not during an election campaign.
When the bill was first introduced in the Senate die hard Republican politicians branded it as a scheme for socializing industry. The apparent seriousness with which the big capitalists regarded the bill could lead one to believe that it was something more than a mere scheme to divert the attention of the masses from the Burke Wadsworth Bill and to dampen their opposition to it. But now that the bill has finally passed both houses of Congress and been signed by Roosevelt it can easily be seen that it is a sham and a fraud.
Just a Lot of Hokum All that the draft wealth provisions of the Draf!
Law boil down to are a number of innocuous provisions caleulated to be held as a threat to the smaller war producing plants in the remote event that a man.
ufacturer refuses to execute an order placed by the War Department. Thus, if and when a manufacturer refuses to execute order, the government may take over the plant and operate it. But the owner of the seized property will nevertheless get the full value of his property under the law during the time the government operates it and then returns it to the original owner.
So socialistic are the provisions of this bill that even the rapidly reactionary Hearst Press approves of them and calls the plan fairly good.
That the draft wealth provisions will apply to only small manufacturers and not at all to the real munition magnates and capitalists is made plain by the fact that the big munition makers, the Du Ponts, the Morgans, and Fords, as a matter of fact do not refuse to sign the war contracts with the government.
That is because they have succeeded in imposing their own terms upon the government. It was exactly with this purpose in mind, that the capitalists refused any cooperation to Roosevelt in his war program until he appointed a so called National Defense Commis.
sion, composed of the biggest industrialists, motor magnates and steel kings who are directly tied up with the munition industries.
Good Fellows Get Together It is the National Defense Commission, which ne.
gotiates the contracts with the big armament makers.
Only last week so called defense contracts reached 3, 956, 000, 000. The terms and conditions were those of the armament maker The big armor plate and ship building companies, the aviation and automobile magnates refused to budge an inch until they had way. The members of the National Defense Commission, who are the blood brothers of these armament kings, are certainly not the men to stand in the way of profits. Hence the signing of so called defense contracts totalling almost four billion dollars. Hence the breaking of the so called log jam in the defense program But these four billion dollars are only the first, of a long series of billions whose end is not even in sight, which will be spent by the government and the expense of which will be borne by the masses.
Not enough that the worker offer their lives, they must also bear the brunt of the expense of the war No wonder Roosevelt and his administration have need of a fraudulent scheme to draft wealth. No wonder that he must incorporate this fraudulent scheme right in the heart of the Burke Wadsworth Conscription Law. He must do this so that his political cohorts and Labor bureaucrats may dazzle it before the eyes of the workers, and shout See, Roosevelt conscripts men, and wealth. too.
For Workers Control of the Munitioneers But even if the Roosevelt Government had serious.
ly contemplated conscripting industry that effort ought to get no support from the workers. munition industry, or any other industry under the control of the government or the army or navy would be an industry under the control of the capital.
ist government, a control exercised exclusively on behalf the capitalists. Under the capitalist system it cannot be otherwise.
There is however another choice left open to the workers. That choice, however, does not lie between the fraudulent draft wealth provision or any other scheme by which the capitalist government exercises control over the munitions industries.
It is the choice of Workers Control of all Muni.
tions Plants! Only by the exercise of workers control by Labor independent organizations can a minimum of safety and security be accorded to the workers.
An Astounding Admission Moskatov, one of the Secretaries of the displayed exemplary zeal: Suffice it to state that 25 Central Committees of the Trade Unions spent from 100 to 134 per cent of the total membership dues collected in order to maintain their apparatus. He also singled out one Central Committee which contrived to expend on its apparatus 1, 820, 000 roubles while receiving dues to the sum of 1, 350, 000. Not so much as a kopek of the membership dues was spent on cultural work. More than that, the salaries of the trade union workers swallowed up in addition Why Stalin New Scapegoats Stalin must have new scapegoats; once again he has to resort to preventive measures. The familiar pattern of the purge reappear s, but this time with significant alterations.
The preventive character of the purge finds its expression in the fact that the fire is levelled first against those sections the bureaucracy which are most directly subject to mass pressure.
The Youth and the Trade Unions must be discredited, and above all rendered immune to pressure from below. At the same time, as a sop to the masses, a section of the bureaucracy is sacrificed. Stalin undoubtedly aims to limit the purge.
But like all its predecessors, this purge has a logic of its own and must penetrate every nook and cranny of the regime. The masses will respond warmly and in their own way to such slogans as. Down With All DARMOYEDNIKI and BEZDELNIKI, With Stalin At Their Head!
Chicago Mass Meeting TO GREET THE PLENUM OF THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE AND THE DELEGATES TO THE ACTIVE WORKERS CONFERENCE SPEAKERS: James Cannon, National Secretary; Farrell Dobbs, Labor Secretary; Dunne, Minnesota Organizer; Murry Weiss, Organizer, Local New York; Grace Carlson, Candidate for Senator from Minnesota.
22nd Floor Medical and Dental Arts Building 185 Wabasb Avenue, Chicago Friday, September 27 P.